If you're a Nazi and you're fired, we did that on purpose

[bloodygranuaile]

It has been a hot minute since I read a book on anti-fascism, and so, rather than wait until I could convince my book club to do it, I decided to just get around myself to reading Shane Burley's Fascism Today: What It Is and How to End It, which I had picked up at the Lucy Parson's Center over the summer and which has been sitting around my apartment since August. 

 

First things first: This book was published in late 2017, and aaaaaaaaaaaaahahahaha good god will it never not be hilarious to read things that talk about Matthew Heimbach's Traditionalist Worker's Party from when it still existed and was an active threat. The Night of the Wrong Wives still remains, in my opinion, the funniest unforced error/dramatic implosion in the history of modern fascism, and yes, I am keeping up on my Cantwell News (I'm about halfway through the latest I Don't Speak German episode as I write this).

 

Anyway. The bulk of the book is taken up with a taxonomy of the modern far right, divided up more or less by ideological strain, and with a focus more on what the... uh... "thinking" is and how it works than on individual people and groups (although obviously these feature heavily). While race obviously features pretty heavily in American fascism, as it does in American politics generally, not all fash groups are primarily and explicitly white nationalists, and it's good to see chapters dedicated to things like religion and misogyny, which often get subsumed in popular discourse about what the fascist movement (as one thing) is. Burley points out that these various bigotries aren't always separable; fascists are pretty infamous for making lefty infighting look tame, but when it comes to violently hating on everyone "below" them in a hierarchy, they've got a frighteningly decent handle on this coalition-building intersectional thing. There's a chapter on the pseudoscientific theories of "race realism" and their influence on the far right; there's also a chapter on far-right paganism and mysticism and all that pseudo-medieval stuff. I think it does a pretty good job of laying out the landscape of the far right circa 2017 with a decent degree of thoroughness and in a way that's easy-to-follow enough that it makes a pretty good basis for following the next three years' worth of developments, for which I'd probably recommend staying away from books altogether and just listening to I Don't Speak German instead so you can stay relatively timely.

 

The last third or so of the book is the "How to End It" part, which gives some history of militant and popular antifascist action through the twentieth century, and discusses the sort of things that go into antifascist action these days--doxxing, pressure campaigns, mass mobilizations, no-platforming, etc. It is perhaps not so much of a how-to as some people would like, judging from some of the reaction I heard to Mark Bray's Antifa: The Antifascist Handbook, but it does give a good look at what kind of things there are to do and what different sorts of organizations can do them. (It is simply not realistic to go into a mainstream, respectable bookstore and get a manual on how to doxx Proud Boys, but a lot of people seem to expect to find one anyway.) There's solid explanations about why these things are done and what sort of results they have actually in fact gotten. (I particularly enjoyed the small cameo by my own city the weekend after the A11/A12 attacks, which was described thus: "The following weekend an Alt Right rally was planned in Boston, but its fifty participants were met by an estimated 40,000 anti-fascists who flooded the streets and crushed the event before it started." An annoying amount of local reporting/discussion on this event focuses on solely on the march route and avoids the bit about shutting the rally down, presumably because liberal reporters find that sort of thing distasteful.) There's discussion about what needs to be done going forward; although this runs a little bit theoretical compared to the rest of the book, the theory is sound. 

 

I learned a good amount from this book, especially where the author discusses subcultures I'm less familiar with (such as fascist creep in heathenism or folk music), although there's also plenty that I already knew, since I have been following the right-wing nutjob beat pretty closely since about Gamergate. The stuff I did already know is quite solid, including plenty of the sorts of details that tend to get left out of mainstream accounts of fascist and anti-fascist activity in order to build false equivalencies (such as Milo's doxx talks, which the mainstream press tended to report on like they were just screeds of abstract bad ideas that could theoretically be argued against). 

 

It probably says something about how much of this sort of content I consume already that I found this a pretty chill and easy read; almost any kind of reporting on this stuff is easier than actually looking at even the lite-est of Alt Lite meme pages with your own tender eyeballs. If you are more squeamish than me you should be aware that this book does discuss some really terrible people who do and believe really terrible things, and it doesn't slow-walk it for you. But if you're over that hurdle it's a good, solid primer on navigating what the fuck is actually going on with these people.