Memo to the “punch a Nazi” keyboard warriors and meatspace black-bandana folks.

Sarah Roark
Aug 28, 2017 · 5 min read

Black-clad antifa members attack peaceful right-wing demonstrators in Berkeley

Okay, so see, this is the kind of headline you DON’T want to generate.

I mean, I get it. It heartens many people to know that there are some willing to physically confront white supremacists. Because of COURSE it does. The more vulnerable one is, the more heartening that knowledge. And IF we were in a literal civil war, obviously the side of truth and light would then need folks wiling to strike the first blow in a battle. That’s war.

But. We’re not there yet. (If you think we’re there, you have no idea how much worse it can get even for the already-suffering.) And heaven forfend that we ever wind up there. (Ask anybody who’s been through a war. It’s not funsies. Makes for great heroic fiction. Sucks ass in real life. This isn’t a movie.) You get to decide when you die. That’s your business. But deciding when OTHER people die? Is a whoooole different ballgame.

You CAN still put your body on the line to protect others without ever striking the first blow. (In fact, you can do it without striking any blows at all, and that sends an even stronger message.) When done in enough numbers to catch the public eye, the world’s eyes, nonviolent resistance works extremely well. Google “velvet revolution” and “color revolution.” Or “Tahrir Square.” (Their revolutionary problems came AFTER the mass protests succeeded in forcing Mubarak out of power. :-( )

Look, I’m just not making this shit up because it happens to align with my beliefs. Here’s a link where the author of a study that found the chances of a revolution succeeding drop by 50% if it becomes violent clarifies her results, apparently in response to coverage that misrepresented them.

http://archive.boston.com/bostonglobe/editorial_opinion/letters/articles/2011/08/07/nonviolent_vs_violent_revolutions_studies_diverge/

By 50%, y’all. I dunno about you? But I’M not willing to ding our odds that much. The stakes are too high.

RefuseFascism.org​ is planning just such a nonviolent mass action on Nov 4, by the way. Check it out.

I do believe in refusing fascism to fascists’ faces. Which is why I went directly to Crissy Field this past weekend in SF. (The fascists canceled last-minute, so it turned out their nasty little faces never got in front of me to refuse, and I wound up marching to Civic Center from the Castro along with all the folks who had started out there in the first place. :-) But that’s sort of the point. Nonviolent victory achieved through sheer mass of protest. This made for way better headlines than we’re getting out of Berkeley.)

Now, it is true, and noted in the article, that the vast majority of the lefty protesters at the Berkeley rally were nonviolent. It’s mostly the Black Bloc anarchist types that keep showing up to pull this shit. And yet, because they were able to show up and successfully storm the barriers and then melt into the crowd so general chaos could ensue, now WE all get to fence once again with this narrative about how the violence is really the fault of those lefties — provoking and starting shit against these peaceful neo-Nazis who got all the proper little permits and stuff!

No, you’re never going to argue down the people that are actually on the side of the fascists. They’ll lie to others and themselves about what’s really going on regardless of facts on the ground. But you DO wanna sway the great masses of folk that aren’t super political and don’t really pay close attention. Unfortunately, if they can take a cursory glance at what’s going on and say to themselves, “well, we don’t really know for sure, it looks like both sides are violent,” that’s a plausible excuse for inaction. And humans do so like to find reasons to not do what they don’t feel like doing.

And we simply can’t afford to let them roll over and go back to sleep. Which means we need to make the clearest moral narrative and case possible, in what is already a confusing information environment. Our job is to cut through that confusion with undeniable truth — so that, as in Prague, smaller demonstrations turn into 200,000, and then the next day into 500,000.

And you keep doing that until the sheer weight of cognitive dissonance finally cracks the floor out from under bystanders’ denial. The whole world could SEE the massive crowds in Tahrir Square. That shit was legit visible from space, y’all (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-15546570). The authorities in Czechoslovakia simply could not hide a half-million people in the streets of Prague, or the chaos of a two-day general strike. At that point, there is literally no choice but for everybody — especially everybody with no personal axe to grind — to admit that hey, the People really do want those guys out of there.

But this? This is all too similar to what went on in Germany in the early 30’s. Part of the problem was that the Nazis weren’t the only party with a paramilitary, and some of those other paramilitaries also liked to brawl and kill each other in the street. Conflicts between the Nazis and the Communists were especially bloody.

So it was a lot harder to regular folks to sort out why the Nazis were a special kind of bad amid that all that confusing and disturbing noise. It was part of why the voting public was way more scared of Communists than of Nazis — in retrospect, of course, a terrible mistake. It was also why people cheered when Hitler promised to crack down on the Communists, and blamed the Reichstag fire on them, and proceeded to abolish the Communist party and slaughter and imprison its members. Then once the Communists were gone, Hitler was able to pick off the rest of the parties one by one, starting with the Social Democrats. Nobody liked Commies, so nobody stood up for them. Part of that was because of their philosophy, but part of it was because their rhetoric and behavior made them plausible villains. Nazi violence and murder, which was actually worse, was easily spun as “patriotism” and protecting Germany against those awful guys who wanted to burn everything down. …Who kinda SAID they wanted to burn shit down. And appeared to behave accordingly.

Don’t be that. I mean — hey, be Communist or anarchist or whatever if you want? But please don’t speak and behave violently on the assumption that the society will be able to tell your shit apart from the shit coming out of the true threat to America, that you’ll be held to anything like the same standard of behavior. They’re just not paying that much attention, trust me. And you might shrug and say “well they’ll always be like that, might as well get hung for a goat as for a sheep,” but the fact remains that in the end, you cannot — CANNOT — win this struggle without a healthy portion of their support. Sad but true.

And maybe that doesn’t matter to you, but it should. What happens to everybody should matter. If that doesn’t matter, what does?

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Sarah Roark

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