It was good to get all your responses to the Trump election, and to the message we sent out, first posted on revcom.us:
In the Name of Humanity, We REFUSE To Accept a Fascist America
As we all work intensely to organize resistance to the fascist direction this is going, we want to hear from you via email, phone, Facebook or Twitter. Your donations to World Can’t Wait will immediately be put to use.
There are those who argue for giving Trump some time in order to determine if this is really as bad as we think it is. This is wrong.
You cannot try to “wait things out” with fascists. Those who lived through Hitler’s Germany and sat on the sidelines, looking on as Hitler rounded up one group after another, became shameful collaborators with monstrous crimes against humanity. Trump and his regime must be resisted and defied, beginning now, in many different ways and in every corner of society.
Reconciliation and collaboration would be nothing less than criminal and deadly. Literally. Come together… resist… and let the whole world know that we will not allow this to stand!
Merriam-Webster reports that searches for “fascism” have spiked.
Here is some essential reading:
Bob Avakian, Chairman of the Revolutionary Communist Party in The Fascists and the Destruction of the ‘Weimar Republic’…And What Will Replace It:
“Going after the equivalent of the Weimar Republic in the U.S. today, the Democratic Party and the “Liberals,” and so on—attacking them as nothing less than traitors—is part of an overall program aimed at silencing and outright suppressing, including through the force of the state, any group or section of society, even within the ruling class, that would pose an obstacle to the implementation of the program that the Christian Fascists, and forces in the same general camp with them, are very seriously seeking to impose on the U.S. (and indeed throughout the world). There is, and for some time there has been, a very definite, conscious and concerted effort by the forces in that general fascist camp to systematically attack not just communists, or anarchists and other radicals, but liberals, mainstream ruling class liberal politicians—attacking them as having been nothing less than traitors, from the time of the cold war to the “war on terror.”
Zoe Williams, in the Guardian wrote in The dangerous fantasy behind Trump’s normalisation:
“This situation is not normal – or, if you prefer that in social media terms, #notnormal. When women are lining up for long-term contraception in a mournful, pragmatic farewell to their reproductive autonomy; when the chief strategist is accused of enabling racism and antisemitism; when the vice-president-elect signed legislation requiring women to hold and pay for funerals for miscarried foetuses; when the president-elect has vowed to deport three million immigrants; when he has at least 12 allegations of sexual misconduct outstanding against him; when he has announced a cabinet that includes his own three children: this looks nothing like a democracy. It looks nothing like reconciliation. It looks despotic, inflammatory, extreme and violent: it looks, in short, exactly as Trump promised it would look, as he campaigned on a pledge to imprison his opponent. His adversaries respond that he probably doesn’t mean what he says, a position for which there is precisely no evidence. Their desire to normalise has put them in the fantastical state of seeing the forthcoming presidency as they wish it, and not as it plainly is.“
(Emphasis mine)
The following is from the Prologue to The Nazi Conscience, by Claudia Koonz:
“Hitler, always an astute reader of his audiences’ desires, heard Germans’ hunger for a government they could trust and a national purpose they could believe in. From his earliest days as a political orator, he addressed that longing. In phrases his opponents ridiculed as empty and followers heard as inspirational, Hitler promised to rescue old-fashioned values of honor and dignity from the materialism, degeneracy, and cosmopolitanism of modern life. His supporters’ lists of grievances were long, and their anxieties ran deep. Bolsheviks threatened revolution; emancipated women abandoned their family responsibilities; capitalists amassed immense fortunes; and foreign states robbed Germany of its rightful status as a European power. Hitler transformed his followers’ anger at cultural and political disorder into moral outrage. In place of the Weimar Republic, which he ridiculed as weak and feminine, Hitler promised the dawn of a resolute masculine order. Where once religion had provided a steady moral purpose, Nazi culture offered an absolutist secular faith.
“Unlike liberal regimes, in which the moral calculus turns on the concept of universal human rights, the Third Reich extolled the well-being of the ethnic German community as the benchmark for moral reasoning. Nazi morality explicitly promoted racist and sexist assumptions at a time when ideals of equality had begun to make themselves felt throughout the Western world. German racial theorists, eager to be seen as modern and progressive, dignified age-old prejudices with the claims of science. They appealed not so much to malevolence as to ideas of health, hygiene, and progress in their campaign to elicit compliance with policies that might otherwise have been seen as cruel and violent. Mobilizing citizens in a modern and enlightened nation, Nazi rule relied not only on repression but also on an appeal to communal ideals of civic improvement. In a vibrant public culture founded on self-denial and collective revival, ethnic Germans were exhorted to expunge citizens deemed alien and to ally themselves only with people sanctioned as racially valuable. The road to Auschwitz was paved with righteousness.”
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