It might make sense to open this conversation by looking at the remarks of a number of protesters who attempted to use civil disobedience tactics to oppose fascism and white supremacy during the recent events in Charlottesville. The first night of the fascist incursion into the city occurred on the campus of the University of Virginia in the form of a torchlight march. In opposition to that march, a small group of clergy and others decided to protest the fascists and the Confederate memorials that they were attempting to defend. The small group was very quickly surrounded by the fascists, and only the group of anti-fascists were willing to intervene to defend the group from the fascists. The police, who they were looking to be arrested by, simply looked on. The group found themselves in the position where they were defended by a group of activists that have a very different perspective on tactics and strategy.
The responses on the part of the group in a variety of formats are instructive. Most noted that the experience of facing the fascist mob was remarkably different than their what they previously experienced at demonstrations. They also noted that the training they went through did not prepare them for this situation. Most acknowledged the debt they owed to the group of anti-fascist activists. It's a remarkable set of documents as a whole. Some of these individuals had been involved in thousands of protests and some had only been involved in a few, but there is a consistent thread through the responses, an acknowledgement that the set of assumptions that they came in with did not correspond with the situation. The tactics that they set out to use, which I want to add are part of a time honored and powerful tradition within activism in the country and around the globe, did not make sense here. The group did something that we so often avoid; they acknowledged that they did not understand the conditions that they were entering into and that the tactics they used were not adequate to the situation because of that.
It's an intellectual honesty that we admire and all too often eschew in our own practices. However, for the purpose of this essay, I want to emphasize this quality of not knowing as one common among us who have not had significant experience confronting fascist groups.
My own experience began in that ignorance. I entered into the world of politics through the punk scene in the Twin Cities in the early 1990's. What I didn't know at the time is that a significant change had occurred in that scene before I entered it. In the late 1980's a group of skinheads calling themselves the Baldies had come together to drive out the white supremacists from the Twin Cities punk subculture. By the time I had entered the scene, this group, now reformed as the Anti-Racist Action network had driven the active white supremacist elements out of the scene and into the underground. This meant that I could enjoy going to shows without having to worry about the kind of violence that Nazis have brought to the punk subculture, and I could enjoy participating in that community without the worry that so many have had to take on. It's something that I took for granted at the time, but it's something that I'm profoundly grateful looking back at the situation.
My involvement with the punk scene gradually receded as I got involved in the Emma Center and other activist spaces, which led to me having different priorities. As that shift occurred, I became aware of the Anti-Racist Action network. I was initially made aware of the network when a professor passed on some information about an ARA activist who was being charged with assault because of a confrontation with a Nazi skinhead, and I gradually became aware about community debates about the situation. I eventually attended an ARA meeting with a friend, which translated into my initial aversion towards the group. At that meeting, a young man showed up to the meeting looking for support from the network. He had returned to his old neighborhood, looking to catch up with some friends, and found himself being recruited by the head of the National Socialist Movement, Jeff Schoep. In response, he had panicked and hit Schoep on the head and stole his car, along with all the literature in that car. The group understandably immediately set out to support the individual, who had responded to a dangerous situation as best he could.
But I had no understanding of the danger the individual was in that situation, and the reasons for his response, and I was appalled. Rather than trying to understand why the individual or the network responded in the way they did, I dismissed them and looked to other places to be involved in activism. I reasoned at the time that one should be opposed to such individuals but that the actions of the individual and the network were unacceptable in the face of free speech activity. I didn't understand that fascist organizing almost always involved violence as a means and an ends in that organizing and that allowing such activities to occur creates the conditions for those groups to take over those spaces. To put another way, fascist organizing isn't simply a matter of unpleasant speech acts but the active creation of violent and authoritarian social spaces. Perhaps, more significantly, I had no conception of the threat posed to the young man who was being recruited and the legitimacy of his fear and vulnerability in the face of this recruitment. The only reason I don't look back at this situation without much embarrassment is that I at least had the good sense to shut my yap and listen, rather than intervene.
From there, I got more and more involved in the activist projects of the Twin Cities. My involvement in the Progressive Student Organization led to my participation in the anti-sanctions campaign and the broader network of radical activists in the Twin Cities. The conflicts that eventually tore apart the PSO brought me in contact with the anarchist sections of that movement, which gradually drew me into the anti-globalization movement that was effectively brought to the attention of the world by the anti-WTO protests in Seattle. I didn't participate in that protest, but I was at later protests in Washington D.C. and Quebec City, along with a series of confrontational protests in the Twin Cities, from the Mayday protests to the ill-advise ISAAG protests. Those experiences drastically changed my world view and what kinds of activities should and could occur during protest. I went from viewing Black Bloc tactics as being ill advised and unpleasant to being involved in a number of Black Bloc formations, and embraced the increasingly confrontational ethos of the times. Perhaps more significantly, I experienced confrontation in a variety of ways that were only previously abstractions.
These experiences led to a small group of us deciding to organize a small militant response to the upcoming KKK rally that occurred shortly after the initial boom in anti-globalization protest. We managed to both organize a concert in opposition to the fascists and contributed a core of protesters to a small group that confronted the small group of Klan supporters within the larger opposition to the group. At the ground level, both our activities and the larger structures of the protest were deeply problematic in ways that I can't touch on within the aegis of this essay, but the experience itself was significant. One of the things you learn in the process of engaging in these conflicts is that the process is a lot messier than at least I initially expected. Most of it was a lot of yelling, but there were some kicks and shoves as well. Outsiders want conflict to be neat and easy, but never is. Conflicts with fascists are going to messy, and if you snap the picture at the right time, the detached image can tell a damning and misleading story. Just as significantly, we were far from the most militant group in the protest. We went as far as to kick a fascist in the butt as he crossed the police line, but a sizable group of the counter-protesters who didn't typically attend rallies greeted the Klan supporters with rocks and fists. The intensity of the response got to the point where anti-Klan organizers stepped in to protect the children of the supporters, although not the supporters themselves.
My experiences within that situation were fragmentary and short lived in contrast to many of the experiences of other, more serious anti-fascist protesters and I don't think they translate into any kind of expertise. Instead, my main understanding of these situations comes from the conversations I wound up having with committed anti-fascist activists, when I eventually joined the Anti-Racist Action in 2001 or 2002. The reasons I got involved in the network aren't terribly relevant to the discussion, but I got involved in the Minneapolis group for reasons that had more to do with my trust and affection for the members of the group and its commitment to a feminist politics than it had to do with anti-fascism. At the same time, my involvement put me in touch with a whole range of activists that had been involved in the fight for a lot longer, and I did something that I should have done earlier, I listened and asked questions. I heard a lot about the messy conflicts that occur within these situations, why people got involved, and the self-critical analysis of such activists. Perhaps, most significantly, I remember talking to a group of anti-fascist activists in a small city in what I think was Indiana. They talked about their vulnerability in the face of a town in which fascists were allowed to run free. They couldn't go to shows or go to a bar to get a drink without the very real threat of violence. It made me understand the conflict in a way that I previously didn't understand. There are very real criticisms that one can make of the network, but I learned a lot from it and it's unfortunate that it doesn't still exist.
As an end-note to that experience, I should perhaps pass on one last experience that I had while a participant in the group. We didn't have a lot of direct confrontations with the fascists, while I was in the group, but one exception was a labor organized, immigrants rights rally that the National Socialist Movement decided to protest. Involved in the protest was the same Jeff Schoep discussed above. Our engagement with the group was non-confrontational. We watched them and they watched us. It let the far more important event go on. However, at the beginning of the event, we were approached by Keith Ellison, who was at that point, a state legislator. Ellison had defended the young man discussed above as a lawyer and had gotten him off many if not all the charges laid against him. He had worked with a number of ARA activists over the years and was at that time, an ally. He had helped both Anti-Racist Action and the Arise! collective when they were bizarrely accused of terrorism by a cynical and opportunist sheriff's department after 9-11. Ellison's response on seeing the NSM was to suggest in a deadpan voice that perhaps he could hit them with a tire iron this time and that we could defend him. With a change in perspective through a long education, an incident that was so shocking and outside the boundaries of acceptable behavior at the time became something that was so easily understood it could be easily passed off as an amusing anecdote.
It's been a while since I've been within those circles, but they deeply shaped my views on the subject, and I've continued to listen to those involved in these fights, particularly in the recent moment, where I have been on the sidelines because of a combination of health and employment issues. I do still find myself in debates over the tactics though. When I find myself in debates over these tactics, I find myself confronting a set of assumptions held by my opponents that I frequently held many years ago, and like many converts, I find myself somewhat less than patient with the views that I once held. I suppose it's a common bad habit of the convert. One one hand, I should probably be more patient with people who I once resembled. On the other hand, its frustrating to hear argumentation that is so fraught with unwarranted assumptions and badly thought out premises. For instance, there is a tendency to collapse militant anti-fascism with Black Bloc tactics, transforming those transitory groupings put together in response to particular emergencies into a sort of homogeneous, organized group. Such tactics have been recently embraced by a lot of militant anti-fascist groups, but they weren't a dominant tactic within ARA organizing, and don't represent the sole militant strain of action against fascists in the present. Just as significantly, we can see in the case of the major protests that the groups that have embraced these tactics have taken different approaches in different situations. We're discussing networks and an umbrella of tactics, and critiques need to deal with that reality.
Much of this debate is driven by the representation of these protests by the dominant media. We frequently immediately link violence against fascists to those engaged in Black Bloc tactics or militant anti-fascists in opposition to a group of peaceful protesters, but a lot of people really don't like these groups and will throw down against them in ways that get erased in that sort of narrative. Certainly, this was the case in the way the dominant media talked about the confrontations at the protest against Milo Yiannopoulis in Berkeley. Most of the activists who were on the ground for that protest talked about the forms of cooperation that occurred between those participating in the Black Bloc and other protesters against fascist provocateurs, but this aspect of the protests was utterly effaced by the media who presented a far different story, one that transformed fascists looking for a fight into peaceful protesters assaulted by a mob that had infiltrated an otherwise peaceful protest. Images taken out of context created this narrative and there was no effort to put those images into any real context. Like myself several years previously, those reporters made no effort to understand the context of the situation or the nature of the groups that they were writing about. They assumed that they were a group of individuals engaged in unpleasant speech acts rather than what they were, an authoritarian mob seeking to create a racist and authoritarian society.
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