The War on Sharing: Pretending Is Not a Strategy

 

 

 

“We should never forget that everything Adolph Hitler did in Germany was “legal” – Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” 1963.

 

The War on Sharing: Pretending Is Not a Strategy

 

At this point I’m starting to suspect it won’t be necessary for our burgeoning police state to come and round me up when the time to purge the left comes. Why? Well, I assume by then I’ll have already choked to death on my own bile while watching the mainstream media try to cover the emergence of an explicitly fascist movement in American politics like conspiracy-driven, militant white nationalism is just a quirky hobby some isolated Republicans enjoy.

Whether it’s a question of complicity, complacency, or cowardice is ultimately irrelevant, the bottom line here is that so-called liberal antifascism has predictably failed to halt, or even slow down the rise of fascism in the Pig Empire, and indeed, has been a great boon to the now openly fascist Republican Party. Like, I’m not trying to hurt anyone’s feelings but are you reasonably comfortable, (mostly) white folks in the bourgeoisie really paying attention here? Y’all are kind of acting like Biden’s supposedly progressive agenda is the only thing on the chopping block here, but in reality, the GOP is using its dominance over state-level governments and obstruction in the Senate to install fascism.

This is quite frankly a lot bigger than passing an infrastructure bill, or even the Republican efforts to block the establishment of a bipartisan commission that likely would have whitewashed the fascist coup attempt Trump directed on January 6th, 2021. The Republican Party and the larger American right has become a reactionary, anti-democratic cult of personality driven by fascist conspiracy theories and homicidal animosity towards their political opponents. While some of the media has certainly caught on to these developments, the elite liberal establishment remains largely convinced that evoking Reagan, clucking about bipartisan cooperation, and lionizing a twisted hate goblin like Liz Cheney represents an actual solution here.

I mean let’s cut the crap here, okay? Just under seventy-five million Americans just voted for a fascist, knowing full well that he’s a fascist. The unofficial neo-nazi cult of the American right, Q-Anon, is now bigger than some religions. Literally a full fifty-three percent of polled Republicans believe that Donald Trump is still actually President; presumably, even more remain convinced that Joe Biden stole the 2020 election; an idea commonly referred to as “the big lie” in the media. We are well and truly past the point of pretending this is still politics; and yet, liberal leadership, particularly as represented by elected officials in the Democratic Party, continues to do just that.

While mainstream observers blithely debate the mental faculties of the so-called “Q-Anon Shaman,” various Republican-controlled governments have openly undertaken the necessary steps to install one-party fascist rule by the end of the next election cycle. Among other outrages, they’re literally in the process of criminalizing trans kids, making it illegal to teach that American chattel slavery was bad, abolishing abortion rights, and rigging elections on behalf of the cracker Volk; all with the help of a handful of cowardly Democrat Senators, and a federal judiciary stacked full of freak-job fascist Trump-appointees.

Please allow me to assure you that this behavior is neither random, nor isolated. You don’t go to all the trouble of tearing down our (admittedly shitty) democracy and demonizing your opposition as devil-worshipping pedophile cannibals simply to soothe the hurt feelings of one reality TV star President who happens to be a fascist manbaby. Having seen that the centrist establishment has no power or will to punish the perpetrators of a fascist coup attempt, the American right is now coming for the whole ballgame during this next election cycle; and pretty much everyone in the ruling classes knows it, even if they won’t say it.

The simple but unspoken truth here is that due to shifting demographics, it is no longer possible to maintain white supremacy, a necessary component for American capitalism and imperialism, through vaguely democratic means. That ultimately is what the crackers mean when they talk about the “white genocide” conspiracy theory; the reality that the numerical ability of reactionary white folks to overpower all other demographics combined at the ballot box, is on borrowed time. As places like apartheid-era South Africa, Nazi Germany, and modern day Israel demonstrate however, it is not necessary to maintain racial hierarchies through democratic means; brute force, the denial of democratic rights, and authoritarian state suppression work just as well.

In turn, the rise of Trump and the post-Trump presidency version of Republican fascism is clearly demonstrating that if democracy can’t give the Volk the cracker supremacy they’ve become accustomed to, then the American right no longer has any use for it; what liberals call “the big lie” is really just the excuse for that collective decision. Indeed, as I’ve written in the past, the fascists themselves don’t even really believe the conspiracy theories inspiring these actions in a literal sense; they believe the emotional ideas behind the conspiracies, and use them to justify doing fascism.

The conspiracies make breaking taboos in reality more palpable. It’s morally acceptable to exterminate the non-white other, if they were going to commit genocide against you first. It’s your patriot duty to rig elections, indeed, perhaps even remove democracy, if the other guy always cheats. There’s nothing wrong with frog marching your political opponents in front of a firing squad, they’re pedophiles who drink baby brain juice. All roads inside the Trump cult lead to the same place; Americanized fascism. Literally none of this is a secret, or particularly hard to figure out either; the reactionaries driving this movement have told us all in their own words what it is they’re trying to do.

The problem here is that nobody wants to accept it, so the entire ruling establishment in the Pig Empire is shoving its collective head in the sand and hoping the nazis will go away. They won’t, and if our leaders won’t fight fascism, then we’re going to have to do it ourselves. The alternative is simply not an acceptable option; no matter what Joe Manchin says about bipartisan compromise and the intentions of the cracker slavers who founded America on the backs of kidnapped Africans and the corpses of Indigenous people.

 

• nina illingworth