anti-semitism, Entryism, Holocaust Denial, Re-Posted

The Gilad Atzmon and David Rovics Antisemitism Controversy, Explained

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Editors’ note: Ideological hatred of Jews is centered in the far right, yet too many leftists continue to tolerate and even promote antisemitic themes when they’re packaged to look and sound radical. For decades, supporters of the Israeli state have falsely claimed that any critique of Zionism is anti-Jewish. Mirroring this lie, many antisemites falsely claim that any criticism of their anti-Jewish beliefs aids Israeli oppression of Palestinians. For both of these reasons, it’s critically important that we learn to delineate between anti-Zionism that embodies liberatory principles and anti-Zionism that embodies anti-Jewish scapegoating, such as the false claims that Jews control U.S. foreign policy or that Judaism is inherently oppressive and violent.

In this guest post, anti-fascist writer Shane Burley analyzes the antisemitic views of Israeli-born musician and writer Gilad Atzmon, and the support Atzmon has received from leftist musician David Rovics despite criticism from Burley and others. Three Way Fight first addressed Atzmon’s poisonous role in the anti-Zionist movement in 2012, when we helped to organize a campaign urging leftist organizations to deny Atzmon a platform to promote his work. 130 leftists in several countries signed a statement in support of this campaign, and 22 Palestinian activists signed a separate statement that denounced Atzmon in similar terms.

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David Rovics has been having a problem. “You don’t have to be Mossad to do Mossad’s job,” wrote Rovics in one of the many numerous Twitter screeds, directed at Jewish antifascist writers.[1] This public meltdown came after many, many people raised questions about his conversations with, and public support for, some people widely known as racists and antisemites.[2]

Rovics has been a staple of many radical communities for a couple of decades. Known for his acoustic protest songs, he often plays at demonstrations, writes tracks related to contemporary political issues, and tours internationally and has self-published dozens of albums.

In 2021 Rovics had a YouTube video and podcast interviewing the neo-Nazi Matthew Heimbach. The interview is a softball, where Rovics agrees with many of Heimbach’s critiques of the left and challenges virtually nothing Heimbach says, essentially giving him an open forum to state his views. Heimbach has argued that he has reformed, that he is no longer a white nationalist, but both by listening to his views and listening to experts, journalists, and antifascists who know him and his work well, this is an easy lie to dispel.[3]

Then Rovics hosted the antisemite Gilad Atzmon on his YouTube/podcast, where they talked at length about “Jewish tribal politics” and “Jewish identity politics.” Rovics knows well that there has been a great deal of evidence amassed about Atzmon and when he was confronted with it, both recently and historically, he has doubled down, refusing to deny Atzmon his support. Third, he appeared on the conspiracy podcast hosted by Kevin Barrett, who denied the Holocaust while Rovics was on his show; again, Rovics seemed to give him a pass.[4] Barrett is a known antisemite and conspiracy theorist, who describes himself as a “Holocaust agnostic” and who describes the antisemitic forgery The Protocols of the Elders of Zion as a witty piece of “satire.”[5]

Rovics has apologized for the Heimbach interview and taken it down. But that is not the issue at the heart of the ongoing controversy. People make mistakes, and Rovics believed Heimbach when he shouldn’t have. I, and all journalists and antifascists, quote white nationalists in stories, sometimes from direct interviews, because we have to prove they are what we allege they are. That is necessary for reliable journalism and the safety of the community. But when I do this I analyze and re-analyze the choices, I get a huge number of eyes to ensure it is being done ethically, and I never give them an open platform to speak up without being directly countered. So, this could be considered an understandable mistake, one which stems from his own arrogance to think that he does not need any expertise or accountability when doing this type of work.

When it comes to Gilad Atzmon, no such apology has been forthcoming, and instead Rovics defended Atzmon’s views and, at times, even reproduced them. While saying he doesn’t “endorse” Atzmon, he has actually done just that and has even published open defenses of him.[6]

Atzmon is a Jewish Israeli who left his country traumatized by his time in the Israeli Defense Forces; he now lives in Britain and makes his living as a well-known jazz performer. He also has a long history as a writer and activist in the pro-Palestinian space, but he was pushed out of the movement for his open antisemitism. For Atzmon, the issue with Zionism is not imperialism (he specifically says that Zionism is not colonialism)[7], but the ideology’s supposed uniquely Jewish roots and nature: it’s not just nationalism applied to Jews, but something distinctly corrosive that emerges from Jewish ideology and Judaism itself. “The never-ending robbery of Palestine by Israel in the name of the Jewish people establishes a devastating spiritual, ideological, cultural and, obviously, practical continuum between the Judaic Bible and the Zionist project. The crux of the matter is simple yet disturbing: Israel and Zionism are both successful political systems that put into devastating practice the plunder promised by the Judaic God in the Judaic holy scriptures,” says Atzmon.[8]

Instead of seeing Zionism as a political ideology that he finds objectionable, or Israel a country engaging in a military occupation of an indigenous people, he sees them specifically as an outgrowth of what he says is a “Jewish tribal identity.” “I do not consider the Jews to be a race, and yet it is obvious that ‘Jewishness’ clearly involves an ethnocentric and racially supremacist, exclusivist point of view that is based on a sense of Jewish ‘chosen-ness,’” says Atzmon, in a distortion of the Jewish religious concept of chosenness.[9] Keith Khan-Harris writes that “[the] problem is that for Atzmon, one form of identity is the ur-identity: Jewish identity. While he does take swipes at other forms of political identity – LGBT identity politics is a particular bugbear – really, his argument is that Jewish identity forms the basis for the poisonous practice of identity itself. It is not just that Jewishness is, and has always been, a form of exclusionary ‘ethnic supremacism’; for Atzmon, Jewishness is the ultimate source of everything that divides and rules us.”[10]

The heart of Atzmon’s antisemitism here is revulsion at the Jews’ stubborn refusal to assimilate and give up their Jewishness. “At the most, Israel has managed to mimic some of the appearances of a Western civilisation, but it has clearly failed to internalize the meaning of tolerance and freedom. This should not take us by surprise: Israel defines itself as a Jewish state, and Jewishness is, sadly enough, inherently intolerant; indeed, it may be argued that Jewish intolerance is as old as the Jews themselves,” says Atzmon.[11] Historically, antisemitism was directed at the religion of Judaism and Jewish cultural distinctiveness rather than a bigotry directed as Jews as a race or ethnic group. Jews were forced to de-Judaize themselves at the point of mass slaughter and torture, and so antisemitism has, for most of its history, been about compulsive Jewish conversion and assimilation.[12] This, of course, was itself a falsehood, even when Jews did convert they were generally unaccepted, such as the Spanish “conversos” who converted in Spain during the Inquisition yet continued to be the target of suspicion and violence. In this model of anti-Judaism, Jews can stay alive as long as they rid themselves of literally anything that differentiates them as Jews.

Atzmon claims that he does not hold someone’s Jewish ethnicity against them (something I will dispute in a moment), but instead it is their Jewish identity. As scholars like Bernard Harrison have pointed out, the Jewish ability to maintain a cultural distinctiveness has been a challenge to many who want to destroy social pluralism when they see it as destructive to their homogeneous vision: Atzmon thinks Jews should simply cease to be different, cease to be themselves.[13] As scholars like Ibram Kendi point out, “assimilationist ideas are racist ideas” because they force the minority group to conform only to the dominant system, which in this case is largely non-Jewish.[14] A truly tolerant, multicultural, cosmopolitan, and internationalist view allows people to remain themselves with other people, doing so without borders, walls, or national lines. Jewishness is an identity with a rich history, one that brings joy and perseverance to millions, and yet Atzmon and his defenders demand it simply disappear if its adherents are to “join the human family.”[15]

Atzmon argues that Jews hold a near monopoly of power in the world, that they control the West, and they do this through political movements that are secretly Jewish (neocons) or by controlling the media, banks, and governments. “Why are Jews so overwhelmingly over-represented in Parliament, in British and American political pressure groups, in political fundraising and in the media?” asks Atzmon.[16] This is functionally identical to white nationalist antisemitic theories rooted in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. “The current mess in Iraq is the direct outcome of Jewish political domination of the West for the last two decades,” says Atzmon, which he obsessively connects to what he says is the Jewish character of the neoconservatives, such as figures like Paul Wolfowitz.[17] To discuss this he talks heavily about John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt’s book The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy, which is often too simplistic and can be prone to some problematic assumptions[18], but he goes much further: it is not just Israeli lobbying organizations, it is the entirety of Jewish civic life.

Jews have historically been forced outside the auspices of state protection and social services, and since they had many of their own social and legal systems, there is a long history of Jewish nonprofits and organizations that support the Jewish community (such as Jewish federations and various aid organizations). By misrepresenting the history of these groups, and having little understanding of how civic organizations work, these groups are presented as a kind of shadow government, advocating for a supposed homogeneous political position of Jews. More than this, they are all-powerful: Zionism, not simply being a political ideology related to the State of Israel, is a worldwide totalitarian force that has its hands on the trigger of the imperialist war machine. It doesn’t matter if a social problem has no connection to Israel or Jews, the Zionists (whatever the conspiracy theorist means by that) are likely still in the driver’s seat. This does not mean that there are not Israeli organizations and supporters in powerful places, but we cannot lend them outsized, conspiratorial level importance.

“Zionism was supposed to solve the Jewish Question, and it practically just moved it to a different place,” Atzmon told Greg Johnson, editor-in-chief of Counter-Currents.[19] Atzmon has been a longtime favorite with white nationalists and participates in their work. This includes Counter-Currents, one of the largest white nationalist publishers in the United States, which publishes neo-Nazis, alt-right writers, and Holocaust Deniers. Atzmon publishes a blog at the white nationalist Unz Review, known for publishing work on race and IQ.[20] In conversation with white nationalists, who believe the “Jewish question” is a racial one, Atzmon drops his tribal/ethnic distinction and engages in pseudo-scientific discussions about Jewish psychology. “The issue of biology is very interesting, and I think that Kevin MacDonald himself understands it,” Atzmon says, citing a white nationalist psychologist known for arguing that Judaism was a “group evolutionary strategy” for Jews to eugenically improve themselves and outcompete Gentiles for resources.[21] “How much of it is biology, race, culture? These questions should be discussed openly. I don’t see Jews as a race. There is no Jewish racial continuum, but there is definitely a cultural pattern that has some biological implications,” says Atzmon. “I use The Bell Curve models to show how Jews’ cognitive ability distribution was in the Jewish society. There is something that people don’t know a lot about. Kevin MacDonald definitely knows about it. He wrote about it. Jews, for as long as 1,500 years, European Jews married intelligence – the sage, the rabbi, the young boy that is destined to become the rabbi – with the merchant’s daughter. For 1,500 years, in the ghetto, rabbinical Jews married scholarship with money, and they have managed to create a very unique elite that specialized in scholarship and money.”[22] Atzmon accuses Jews of pushing Critical Race Theory, of manipulating non-whites for their own agenda, running the Atlantic slave trade, and other tropes found mostly in white nationalist literature.[23]

Atzmon’s best known book, and the one that Rovics has recommended multiple times and called “fantastic”[24], is The Wandering Who?, published by Zer0 Books in 2011. It caused controversy immediately since it was published by an ostensibly left-leaning publisher and contains neo-Nazi level canards about Jewishness.

Atzmon suggests in the book that the Holocaust may have been the fault of the Jews, who should ask themselves why they have so been disliked – something that perfectly echoes the questions that Holocaust Deniers like David Irving have asked.

“65 years after the liberation of Auschwitz we should be able to ask – why? Why were the Jews hated? Why did European people stand up against their neighbours? Why are the Jews hated in the Middle East, surely they had a chance to open a new page in their troubled history? If they genuinely planned to do so, as the early Zionists claimed, why did they fail? Why did America tighten its immigration laws amid the growing danger to European Jews? We should also ask what purpose Holocaust denial laws serve? What is the Holocaust religion there to conceal? As long as we fail to ask questions, we are subjected to Zionist lobbies and their plots. We will continue killing in the name of Jewish suffering. We will maintain our complicity in Western imperialist crimes.”[25]

This traces into the kind of Holocaust Denial that Atzmon is accused of, including his support of Irving and other Denial materials. “It took me many years to understand that the Holocaust, the core belief of the contemporary Jewish faith, was not an historical narrative, for historical narratives do not need the protection of law and politicians,” says Atzmon. “[The Holocaust’s] ‘factuality’ was sealed with draconian laws, and its reasoning secured by social and political institutions.”[26]

Atzmon said, at an event for Richard Falk, that the “Jews were expelled from Germany for misbehaving” and that “Jews are always expelled for a reason.”[27] “At another meeting, Atzmon said, “I’m not going to say whether it is right or not to burn down a synagogue, I can see that it is a rational act.”[28]

The Wandering Who? uses the antisemitic racial slur “Zios,” which was created by David Duke, putting it in the title for Chapter 2. “Yes, I read controversial texts, and when I read David Duke I just couldn’t believe how much this goy knows about Jewishness,” said Atzmon in a conversation with white nationalist Greg Johnson. “I read David Duke, who can think about racial matters in an open manner, and he understands exactly what is happening in the Jewish society or the Jewish national project.”[29]

Later in the book, Atzmon takes on what is often called the “Khazar Hypothesis,” which generally says that modern day Ashkenazi Jews are not the descendants of the Ancient Israelites (a position Rovics takes[30]) and are the results of a “mass conversion” of members of the now dispersed Khazar people of Eastern Europe. This argument has been used by a lot of white nationalist, Christian Identity, and antisemitic authors (but by no means exclusively by them) as a way of presenting Jews as frauds: if they are not people from the Levant, what claim do they have to Israel?[31] Atzmon cites Shlomo Sand, a Israeli who has published widely about how he “stopped being a Jew.” Sand, while controversial to some, is certainly not an antisemite, but Atzmon takes further steps from Sand and prefers to use the fine edge of anti-Zionism to build up a more caustic version. “Though most contemporary Jews are utterly convinced that their ancestors are the Biblical Israelites…the Roman exile is just another Jewish myth,” writes Atzmon.[32] The historic roots of Ashkenazim is fair game for debate, but Jews should be seen as much a distinct people as any ethnic group, and the issue with the oppression of Palestinians is not because Jews are not really a nation therefore without claims to land. Even if Jews were all directly descended from Ancient Israelites, they would not have the right to expel and oppress indigenous Palestinians, and even if they had no relationship to the Middle East they still experienced life as a distinct people who lacked political autonomy and protection. “People are entitled to invent themselves, as so many national movements have done in their moment of inception,” writes Ilan Pappe, discussing the question of historic Jewish nationhood and the Sand argument. “But the problem becomes acute if the genesis narrative leads to political projects such as genocide, ethnic cleansing, and oppression.”[33]

Atzmon places the cause for all of this Jewish perfidy on “Jewish power,” echoing Kevin MacDonald, and suggests that Jewish documents, like the Book of Esther, are responsible for this. He brings back classical antisemitic accusations, saying that he wonders whether “these accusations of Jews making Matza out of young Goyim’s blood were indeed empty or groundless.”[34] The book goes on like this, citing other antisemitic authors, tracing a huge range of modern problems directly to Jewishness: Israel is just another result of Jewishness, and we have to take on this identity. Jews are even guilty of deicide, the killing of Jesus, according to Atzmon, reviving the same kind of accusation that was used as an excuse to target Jews for centuries.[35]

All of these comments and others have pushed the Palestinian solidarity movement to roundly reject Atzmon. A huge denunciation, signed by two-dozen Palestinian leaders and published at The Electronic Intifada says “We reaffirm that there is no room in this historic and foundational analysis of our struggle for any attacks on our Jewish allies, Jews, or Judaism; nor denying the Holocaust; nor allying in any way shape or form with any conspiracy theories, far-right, orientalist, and racist arguments, associations and entities.”[36] Another letter denouncing Atzmon was signed by dozens of activists, including major critics of Zionism like Max Blumenthal, saying, “In our struggle against Zionism, racism, and all forms of colonialism and imperialism, there is no place for antisemitism or the vilification of Jews.”[37] Organizations that track the far-right have been open in their denunciation of Atzmon, as have many Jewish writers, and his work is generally understood as an extension of antisemitic discourses.

When David Rovics was asked about this, and his relationships with people like Heimbach and Barrett, he flew into a rage at the idea that he should apologize for it and withdraw his support for Atzmon. He spent the next couple of months lashing out on social media, accusing various writers, particularly those of Jewish descent, of organizing some type of wild conspiracy and acting like the Israeli intelligence organization Mossad. These writers have spoken up about this issue, which owes to the fact that typically it is people of Jewish descent that have to speak up about antisemitism that appears on the left.

Rovics has himself had a soft spot for conspiracy theories, such as 9/11 Truth, which itself often takes on an antisemitic edge.[38] Rovics says that he disagrees with the antifascist idea that the far-right, racists, and antisemites should be “no platformed” and denied access to their ability to speak and organize.[39] Rovics has said that his critics’ “version of ‘antifascism’ involves viciously attacking anyone who is a critic of Israeli apartheid, and using lies and innuendo to do so.”[40] This is what is called the Livingstone Formulation: if someone criticizes you for antisemitism, just say it’s because you’re a critic of Israel even if the issue had nothing to do with Israel.[41]

Seeing as Rovics honed in on me and I have been public about my time with Students for Justice in Palestine and my support for BDS, there is no reason to believe that I am an enthusiastic supporter of Israel. (That is, unless, you think my Jewish family background and religious affiliation counts as a reason.) It is my opinion that nationalism of any kind is a poor way to solve oppression and instead reproduces the conditions of identity-based dispossession. I want to see the eradication of all borders, including in Israel, and want it to be a bi-national autonomous region where Jews, Palestinians, and other peoples share complete democratic, secular, and political self-determination. This includes the Palestinian “right of return” and protection for all residents, including shared access to holy sites and the preservation of cultures, religions, and community traditions. This is why Atzmon’s suspicion of Jewish anti-Zionists and supporters of Palestinians is so troubling: it disallows them to continue being Jews and still support Palestinians. If you attend any Palestinian solidarity rally, besides people of Palestinian descent, Jews are likely to be amongst the most represented demographics. There is a long and rich tradition of Jewish criticism of Israel, ranging from liberal Zionist to anti-Zionist and a whole range of positions in between. Atzmon’s positions essentially erase these Jews and suggests that they are simply denying the natural affinities of their identity, which is inherently exclusive, nationalistic, and supremacist.

Shaul Magid wrote recently in an article about the BDS movement and the settlements in the West Bank that “[what] BDS and the settlers both do is undermine the liberal Zionist narrative, which rests on the dual notion that the state is legitimate but the occupation is not.”[42] Atzmon essentially makes an argument that the Israeli National Religious community makes: that Jewish identity is correctly understood as nationalistic, and that anti-Zionist Jews are simply denying the reality of their identitarian ideology. This undermines both movements to confront Israel’s crimes and Jewish abilities to form an identity separate from the Occupation, which forces the only option to be Jewish disappearance. 

Many early Zionist narratives saw Jews as a necessarily pathetic people, hopping from one pogrom to the other, de-militarized, without the gumption to fight back. Zionism would create a “New Jew” who would engage in the contest of military strength just like any other nation. This had implicit antisemitic overtones to it, sometimes explicit, suggesting that the diaspora was like a disease that had to be cured. In Atzmon’s vision, the Jewish anti-Zionist world is subsequently erased, from the Pittsburgh Platform to Jewish Voice for Peace, as themselves simply playing in the same problematic world that Zionists do, only with nominally different branding.

As mentioned, Atzmon has just as much of a problem with Jewish anti-Zionists as he does with Jewish Zionists because they maintain their “tribal identity” and refuse to disaffiliate with Jewishness. “Don’t they love themselves for being enlightened, progressive socialists, while at the same time sinking into neurosis upon realizing that being Jewish tribal petit bourgeois, they have never managed to join the human family, let alone the working class,” says Atzmon about Jewish anti-Zionists.[43]

“If we redefine Zionism as a modern form of Jewish activism that aims to halt assimilation, we can then reassess all Jewish tribal activity as an internal debate within the diverse Zionist political movement – colonizing of Palestine can then be considered as just another one of the faces of Zionism. Jewish socialism and Jewish progressive activism fits very nicely into the Zionist project. As integral parts of the Zionist network, they are there to collect the lost souls amongst the humanist Jews, to bring them home for Hanukkah. The Israel Lobby and Alan Dershowitzes of the world are the voices of Zionism; the third-category socialists are there to stop proud, self-hating Jews from blowing the whistle.”[44]

What Atzmon says here is that it is the maintenance of the Jewish identity that’s the heart of Zionism (which he alleges is to “confront assimilation and the disintegration of Jewish identity[45]), not simply its extensions of colonialism and nationalism. If you fight against the Occupation or apartheid in Israel and yet do so as a Jew, you are a part of the problem since the project of being Jewish is inherently monstrous. He provides what he says are three “escape routes” for Zionists, the third one is what he says is “Departing from Jewish-ness, Jerusalem and any other form of Judaic tribalism, and leaving ‘Chosen-ness’ behind. This is probably the only form of genuine secular Jewish resistance to Zionism one can take seriously.”[46]

These conversations, both about the Jewishness of Zionism and of the power of Jewish lobbies, miss another key factor: Christian Zionism. The evangelical focus on Israel as the locus of resolved prophecy has given Christian Zionism much longer history than Jewish Zionism. The dispensationalist ideology sees the creation of a Jewish Israeli state as the fulfillment of eschatological prophecies by returning the Biblical people to their homeland, ushering in the rapture, the anti-Christ, and the subsequent second coming. This, of course, turns out poorly for the Jews who are largely wiped out or pushed to Christian conversion in this story.[47] Christian Zionism has become a massive force in pro-Israel politics, with groups like Christians United for Israel and dozens of others making up a significant portion of the lobbying efforts, funding of the West Bank settlements, and political infrastructure required for generous military support of Israel. As I’ve written before, the Israel Lobby could just as easily, and more accurately, be named the Christian Zionist Lobby, one which does not represent Jews.[48] This complication does not play into the simplistic notion that Jews run global politics and that Israel is the embodiment of Jewish identity, and therefore it is largely ignored. “Israel is the Jewish state and Jewish-ness is an ethno-centric ideology driven by exclusiveness, exceptionalism, racial supremacy and a deep inherent inclination towards segregation,” says Atzmon, clarifying that Jews must rid themselves of this ideology to “become people like other people.”[49] With that, are they people at all?

Rovics suggests criticisms of those engaging in antisemitism are illegitimate, mentioning Alison Weir. Rovics signed a letter in support of Weir,[50] the founder of If Americans Knew and a person who pushes classic antisemitic conspiracy theories like the Blood Libel and wildly outsized accusations of the “Zionist lobby.” Weir has likewise been pushed out of the Palestine solidarity movement for her antisemitism, something there is consensus on amongst people who know this issue.[51] Weir, along with Atzmon and Israel Shamir (a Holocaust Denier and conspiracy theorist), make up their own identifiable wing of anti-Zionism, dubbed the ‘Weir-Shamir-Atzmon Axis.’ It locates the issues with Zionism with Jews themselves, not simply the issues involved in the oppression of Palestinians.[52]

That is also why the Heimbach interview cannot simply be reduced to a mistake. Heimbach has pushed himself as a “Strasserite,” the “left” wing of the Nazi party, and his use of left-leaning economic arguments and anti-imperialism has led some people without political knowledge to believe his grift.[53] Rovics went along with the interview, where he added that “the number of billionaires in the US of Jewish lineage is clearly disproportionate according to their population.”[54]

While antifascists have discussed how corrosive antisemitism is, and how it can seep into the left, it often goes unaddressed. Antisemitic ideas creep into left political spaces attached to conspiracy thinking, which often suggests that a secretive cabal is at the center of world affairs. “Modern conspiracy narratives are so steeped in antisemitic imagery that tropes about villainous Jews can thrive even in populations with literally no Jews,” says Kelly Weill, a reporter who tracks white nationalists.[55] As antifascist writer David Renton says, antisemitism on the left is a sign that someone lacks political sophistication.[56] Antisemitic ideas can creep in as a form of distorted anticapitalism, whereby certain types of professions or cultural associations are deemed parasitical and then stereotyped along with Jews.[57] Because Jews were, at times, historically pushed into money lending by widespread antisemitism, when capitalism developed there were many who believed that the entire culture had been “Judaized.” This secularized religious antisemitism and pushed the belief that Jews were responsible for the alienations of modernity and the growing financialization of the economy.[58] There is a kind of vulgar anticapitalism and anti-imperialism that does not understand what those issues are, and instead wants to target other marginalized people, such as Jews, as agents of capitalism – thereby taking very real class anger and diverting it onto an opportunistic target.[59]

Today, when it comes to Israel, any rejection of Zionism is often seen as preferable, even when it comes from a place of bigotry. Our resistance to Israeli apartheid must come from support of Palestinian freedom and a global desire to end empires and borders, and that does not mean having a “my enemy’s enemy is my friend” mentality about racists in the movement against Israeli violence. Rovics’ own lack of political sophistication seems to have led to his inability to parse antisemitic discourses, and to assume that any accusation is necessarily disingenuous.[60] This negates the very real threats that Jews around the world are facing in the midst of rising antisemitism. It is not unnecessarily divisive to confront antisemitism, it is divisive to respond to any criticism of oppressive behavior with a conspiratorial stream of venom.

Antisemitism is the canary in the coal mine on the left, revealing where analysis is straying into places of bigotry and far-right influence. We should hold people to account for allowing antisemitism to enter into leftist and antiracist social movements, and we do not owe access to movement platforms to every single person who demands it. While Rovics has screamed “cancel culture” from the rooftops, and an “anti-antifa” perspective, you can just look at his associations and his support for open antisemites and decide whether or not you find that acceptable. Rovics published an “exposé” of antifascists on February 21 where he reproduced much of this questionable rhetoric, such as singling out authors of Jewish descent, accusing them of conspiracies, complaining about “cabals,” and suggesting that they are coordinating some kind of attack using crypsis.[61] On March 3rd, he released an “antifascism survey” where he included a plurality of questions related to Jews, such as suggesting, by context, that it would be wrong to root out antisemitism, that people suggesting antisemitism is an issue are just defenders of Israeli apartheid, as well as questions about “Jewish billionaires.”[62] At best, this shows that David cares so little about the reproduction of antisemitic motifs (“conspiratorial Jews”) that he thinks nothing of letting that be the center of his argument. These are just more examples of assuming Jewish concerns are disingenuous, that people disassociating with Rovics must be the result of some organized prodding from Jewish activists, and straw man accusations about their intentions. These show even less willingness to address his behavior or take antisemitism seriously, and even the willingness to reproduce it. While Rovics accuses all of his critics of being “puritans,” they are confronting very real antisemitic rhetoric that can have deadly consequences. Jews deserve to feel welcome in social movements, and deserve to have comrades who demand their safety as well.

If you are interested in reading more about antisemitism from a radical, antifascist, or left perspective, click here and check out the reading list!

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Shane Burley is a writer, filmmaker, and union organizer based in Portland, Oregon. He is the author of Why We Fight: Essays on Fascism, Resistance, and Surviving the Apocalypse (AK Press, 2021) and Fascism Today: What It Is and How to End It (AK Press, 2017), and the editor of the forthcoming anthology ¡No pasarán!: Antifascist Dispatches from a World in Crisis. His work is featured at places such as NBC News, The Daily Beast, The Independent, Jacobin, Al Jazeera, Haaretz, Tikkun, The Baffler, Bandcamp Daily, Truthout, and the Oregon Historical Quarterly. He is also the editor of a special issue of the Journal of Social Justice on “Antisemitism in the 21st Century.” He is currently working on two books, one on radical approaches to antisemitism and another on the history of antifascism and popular struggle.

Photo credits

1. Gilad Atzmon, by Bryan Ledgard, 20 October 2007 (CC-BY-2.0), via Wikimedia Commons.
2. David Rovics, by Christian Hufgard, 24 September 2013 (CC-BY-SA-3.0), via Wikimedia Commons.

Notes

1. Twitter, @drovics, February 19, 2022, https://twitter.com/drovics/status/1494939249560506370
2. This was covered earlier in this article: “‘No, It Is The Children Who Are Wrong’: A Response To David Rovics,” It’s Going Down, August 11, 2021.
3. Mark Greenblatt, “Extremist Heimbach To Relaunch Hate Group, Says He Supports Violence,” Newsy, July 20th, 2021. 
4. Kevin Barrett, “David Rovics on Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Social Media Dystopia…and Solutions,” Kevin Barrett YouTube Channel, February 3, 2021, youtube.com/watch?v=PQf53uxPgbc
5. Cloee Cooper, “Kevin Barrett: Repackaging Antisemitism,” Political Research Associates, October 23, 2017; Kevin Barrett, “Kevin Barrett asks Spencer Sunshine why he wants to censor the Left Forum,” Kevin Barrett YouTube Channel, May 11, 2017.
6. David Rovics, “Disavowing Disavowal – In Defense of Gilad Atzmon,” Salem News, March 28, 2012.
7. “Greg Johnson Interviews Gilad Atzmon,” Counter-Currents, October 5, 2016.
8. Gilad Atzmon, The Wandering Who? A Study of Jewish Identity Politics (Winchester and Washington: Zer0, 2011), 121.
9. Gilad Atzmon, “An Interesting Exchange With A Jewish Anti Zionist,” Gilad Atzmon, August 17, 2011.
10. Keith Khan-Harris, “Cloaked In Pretensions, Gilad Atzmon’s Anti-Semitism Soldiers On,” Forward, December 10, 2017.
11. Gilad Atzmon, “The Herem Law in the context of Jewish Past and Present,” Gilad Atzmon, July 16, 2011.
12. For more on this, read: Phyllis Goldstein, A Convenient Hatred: The History of Antisemitism (Brookline, MA: Facing History and Ourselves, 2012); Magda Teter, Blood Libel: On the Trail of an Antisemitic Myth (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2020); Joshua Trachtenberg, The Devil and the Jews: The Medieval Conception of the Jew and Its Relation to Modern Anti-Semitism (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1983).
13. Bernard Harrison, Blaming the Jews: Politics and Delusion (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2021).
14. Ibrahim X. Kendi, How to Be an Antiracist (New York: One World, 2019), 29.
15. Atzmon, The Wandering Who?, 86.
16. Ibid, 169.
17. Gilad Atzmon, “Iraq, America and The Lobby,” Veterans Today, June 15th, 2014.
18. The issue with the Mearsheimer and Walt thesis is that it often places blame for U.S. governmental behavior onto lobbying groups when it should be placed squarely on the shoulders of the U.S. and transnational institutions of capital. Christian Zionism is not presented as influential as it should be, it places an accusation of undo influence on the Jewish populations that make up the constituencies of the lobby, and it ropes in most of Jewish civic life into the lobby. That said, groups like AIPAC are powerful and allegations of the authors’ antisemitism are dramatically exaggerated and have been used disingenuously. Read more on this: Joseph Massad, “Blaming the Israel Lobby,” Counterpunch, March 25th, 2006; David Renton, Labour’s Antisemitism Crisis: What the Left Got Wrong and How to Learn From It (London: Routledge, 2021) 111-114; Natan Aridan, “Israel Lobby,” Israel Studies 24, no. 2 (2019): 128–43.
19. “Greg Johnson Interviews Gilad Atzmon.”
20. “Gilad Atzmon Archive,” Unz Review, no date.
21. Kevin MacDonald, A People That Shall Dwell Alone, Judaism as a Group Evolutionary Strategy, with Diaspora Peoples (New York: Writer’s Club Press, 2002).
22. “Greg Johnson Interviews Gilad Atzmon.”
23. Gilad Atzmon, “Critical Race Theory and the Jewish Project,” Unz Review, August 20, 2021.
24. David Rovics, “Discussion With Gilad Atzmon,” David Rovics YouTube Channel, October 7, 2020, youtube.com/watch?v=8NP1ewzFP0c.
25. Atzmon, The Wandering Who?, 175.
26. Ibid, 149.
27. Quoted in “Jewish students told ‘don’t study at LSE’ by Board president,” Jewish News, May 23, 2017,
28. Quoted in Polly Curtis, “Soas faces action of alleged antisemitism,” Guardian, May 12, 2005.
29. “Greg Johnson Interviews Gilad Atzmon.”
30. David Rovics, “Israel/Palestine FAQ,” Songwriter’s Notebook, August 2nd, 2014.
31. Michael Barkun, Religion and the Racist Right: The Origins of the Christian Identity Movement (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1996).
32. Atzmon, The Wandering Who?, 142.
33. Ilan Pappe, Ten Myths About Israel (London and New York: Verso, 2017), 21.
34. Ibid, 185.
35. David Hirsh, “Openly embracing prejudice,” Guardian, November 30, 2016.
36. Ali Abunimah, “Palestinian writers, activists disavow racism, anti-Semitism of Gilad Atzmon,” Electronic Intifada, March 13, 2012.
37. “Not Quite ‘Ordinary Human Beings’—Anti-imperialism and the anti-humanist rhetoric of Gilad Atzmon,” Three Way Fight, [February 2012].
38. David Rovics, “The Truth About the 9/11 ‘Truth Movement’,” Common Dreams, April 7, 2008.
39. David Rovics, “Platforming Fascists,” PM Press, January 24, 2021.
40. David Rovics, “Portland ‘Antifascist’ Troll Farm EXPOSED” DavidRovics.com, February 18, 2022.
41. David Hirsh, Contemporary Left Antisemitism (London and New York: Routledge, 2018), 11-12.
42. Shaul Magid, “The Grand Collaboration,” Tablet, January 5th, 2021.
43. Atzmon, The Wandering Who?, 86.
44. Ibid, 76.
45. Ibid, 75.
46. Ibid, 87. His other two solutions are to double down on Zionism or become Orthodox, because he says those are the more authentic expressions of Jewish identity.
47. Sean Durbin, Righteous Gentiles: Religion, Identity, and Myth in John Hagee’s Christians United for Israel (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2014), 28-36.
48. Shane Burley, “Liberation Itself is Sacred,” Protean Magazine, May 25th, 2021.
49. Atzmon, The Wandering Who?, 188.
50. “An open letter to the U.S. Campaign and other Activists for Justice in Palestine,” circa 2015.
51. Spencer Sunshine, “Campus Profile – Alison Weir: If Americans Knew,” Political Research Associates, May 15th, 2014.
52. Spencer Sunshine, “Looking Left at Antisemitism,” Journal for Social Justice, Vol. 9 (2019), 11-12.
53. Molly Shah, “Matthew Heimbach and the Left’s Vulnerability to Fascist Infiltration,” The Real News Network, August 24, 2021; Vegas Tenold, Everything You Love Will Burn: Inside the Rebirth of White Nationalism in America (New York City: Bold Type Books, 2018).
54. David Rovics, “Platforming Fascists.”
55. Kelly Weill, Off the Edge: Flat Earthers, Conspiracy Culture, and Why People Will Believe Anything (New York: Workman Publishing, 2022), 178.
56. Shane Burley, “Britains’s Labour Antisemitism Controversy, Revisited,” Jewish Currents, August 27, 2021.
57. Moishe Postone, “Anti-Semitism and National Socialism: Notes on the German Reaction to ‘Holocaust.’” New German Critique, no. 19 (1980).
58. Explained in detail in Michele Battini, The Socialism of Fools: Capitalism & Modern Anti-Semitism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018).
59. Werner Bonefield, “Antisemitism and the Power of Abstraction: From Political Economy to Critical Theory,” in Antisemitism and the Constitution of Sociology, edited by Marcel Stoetzler (Lincoln and London: Nebraska University Press, 2014), 321-25.
60. Moishe Postone, “History and Helplessness: Mass Mobilization and Contemporary Forms of Anticapitalism,” Public Culture 18:1 (2006), 93-110.
61. David Rovics, “Portland ‘Antifascist’ Troll Farm EXPOSED.”
62. David Rovics, “Antifascism Survey,” DavidRovics.com, March 3rd, 2022.

Anti-Fascism, Colonialism, Interview

Colonialism, Green Resistance, and Fighting Eco-Fascism: An Interview With Eco-Anarchist Kevin Tucker

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In an effort to start to broaden the voices of antifascists, we are doing interview across the radical spectrum to open up space to expanding what we understand as resistance. Kevin Tucker is a “Primal Anarchist” who takes inspiration from hunter-gatherer societies and looks to take on many of the inequities inherent in settler colonialism and industrial capitalism.

His new book is called The Cull of Personality: Ayahuasca, Colonialism, and the Death of a Healer, where he unpacks the extractive history of “Ayahuasca Inc.” that many in the liberal-left are selling as a solution to our mass alienation and trauma. As a vocal antifascist, Tucker has a unique perspective in the fight against fascism, both in its relationship to Western colonialism and to the trends of eco-fascism that permeate.

We talk about both of these with him, where he dives deep into his research into how these forms of intersecting oppression manifest.

Why did you choose to focus on Ayahuasca for your last book?

Really the story felt like it presented itself in a lot of ways. 

The Cull of Personality centers on the killing of the Shipibo-Conibo plant healer, Olivia Arévalo, in April 2018 by a Canadian man, Sebastian Woodroffe. Woodroffe was just one of many thousands of people out there riding the wave of thinking that ayahuasca—a hallucinogenic brew made from a vine and additional plants—was going to transform mental health approaches for the West. Essentially this kind of superfood fad approach to thinking that there was going to be some kind of consumption-based answer to the existential crisis that modernity has created. 

The reality of it is that ayahuasca becomes exalted, but entirely out of context—the same way that colonizers have always approached extractable “resources” along the colonial frontier. Regardless of the meaning and spin that gets put on ayahuasca, it becomes another globalized commodity. To paraphrase the historian Daniel Immerwahr, the history of colonialism is really this search for obscure forest products. 

Here, you have the history of ayahuasca falling in the traces of empire between guano, yerbamate, shrunken heads, rubber, and oil. I had already been working on different projects that drew out those links, but then when I heard about the killing of Arévalo, I anticipated it to be the story of colonialism and cultural appropriation. The more I dug into it; the more it became this far more intertwined narrative that gave a more insidious picture about how colonialism functions and continues to perpetuate itself. 

Ayahuasca, in other words, became more of a character in this larger story, but the deeper it goes, the more entrenched the realities and nuances of civilization become apparent. What does it mean to have regions where the goal was more based in extraction over settlements? What impact does that have upon Indigenous societies? How far do the ripples of contact spread and why? 

The defenders of ayahuasca—and any similar plant-based medicinal or hallucinogen—will start at the end: we are here to uphold and validate Indigenous knowledge. As though eco-tourism will save the soul of the colonizer and their progeny. That allows us to create this kind of a savior complex whereby we are here to save and salvage a “dying culture” or some threatened cultural memory and preserve it, which innately disempowers the peoples who lived within it. 

In the case of eco-tourism, that’s even truer. 

It’s white washing colonialism and putting this smiling face on this industry where there are hundreds to thousands of these predatory retreat centers and a genuine industry built around this plant and a faux-imagining of an Indigenous society—one that is exclusionary and often dancing upon graves not yet filled. 

So the story is really about colonialism and civilization, ayahuasca became the primary character. It’s important to draw it out, because we forgive the good intentions of someone like Woodroffe since we don’t want to see what they really say about us. And what they say about the way we interact with the world and its consequences. We can draw clearer lines around a brutal colonizer like Francisco Pizarro, but Woodroffe remains less clear. 

The truth is that both of them, like all of us, share in the same legacy.

 

How does the West’s appropriation of Ayahuasca exist in the history of colonialism?

This is a trickier question; the long answer is the book. The quicker answer is that the problem here is two-fold: cultural appropriation and also the creation of cultural memory. To understand one, we have to understand the other. 

So let’s start at the end: cultural appropriation. 

In this case, ayahuasca has taken on this mystical element due to pro-psychedelic counter-cultural writers creating this mythic past for a substance they encountered. Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs wrote The Yage Letters, which is based around ayahuasca. More recent books like The Cosmic Serpent carry on the work of people like Terence McKenna, who wrote The Food of the Gods. 

What happened is that drop out culture was searching all across the world for some kind of legitimacy. Often they found it in these hyper-idealized and reductionist views of Indigenous societies, which they boiled down to a single substance or a single ritual. 

That’s reductionist because we’re talking about enmeshed cultures—ones that are typically divided up by anthropologists and administrators or missionaries. That’s really this process of extrapolating our own divisions and crises upon societies that we, as a civilization, encounter. The world for most societies just isn’t capable of being divided into neat categories and broken apart. 

So along come the back-to-the-land hippies and psychedelic drop outs, mixed with really uncritical pop anthropology and pharmacology, and then all of the sudden they think that they are upholding cultures by trying to cram the entirety of who they are and what they feel into a single plant or ritual or item, something of that nature. 

Clearly, that isn’t an accurate reflection of anything other than a commodified culture trying to distill a rooted one.

At best, it’s paternalistic: we’re here to validate and save a piece of your culture from us, by turning it into something we find value in. Often something that is here to save us from ourselves. It’s a pit of irony that is just literally disgusting. 

The colonial reality of this process is that we don’t have to encounter or realize the harsh realities behind any degree of cultural memory or tradition of the cultures that colonizers encounter. We’re talking about militaries and missionaries here who have directly targeted, killed, tortured, and dismembered any agent of spiritual practice within Indigenous societies. 

Missionaries and administers have always been after ethnocide—the destruction of culture—when the practices of genocide don’t yield a complete reduction of a people to unmarked graves. Any spiritual or religious practice becomes a target, first and foremost, alongside the act of removing the ability for autonomy and subsistence for a people. 

That is something that we have done and that we continue to do. Every single thing about cultural traditions and memories amongst Indigenous societies is here because they fought for it, not because some Westerner discovered it like an arcane treasure hidden in early explorer accounts. Indigenous societies struggle to maintain their cultures, often that might mean hiding or even lying to outsiders about practices that we are going to leech in any predatory manner.

In every single one of these cases, it has been the avenues and positions of cultural memory that have been under direct attack by colonizers in all forms. Be it the execution of healers, shamans, two spirits, elders, and medicine people within these societies, or the targeting of cultural vestiges from language to ritual to practices. Indigenous societies have and continue to struggle against this, so when a Westerner comes along and acts like they’ve resurrected a giant that no one in this culture had prior knowledge of or had supposedly forgotten, it’s hard not to see the colonial legacies on full display. 

It’s a hubristic refusal to acknowledge the realities of privilege we have when facing Indigenous societies from the perspective of the Westerner and to believe we have discovered something. These societies know what they have and it exists in a context. When you go to an ayahuasca retreat or buy white sage at the grocery store, you are encountering an object with a massive lineage and not having to confront that or see what it entailed to get that item to you. 

So the first and easiest path to cross here is that ayahuasca is nothing new in terms of cultural appropriation. McKenna’s wife had given talks about being spoken to by ayahuasca and talked about “liberating” it from the forest. That’s a pretty awful position to put yourself in, but there you have it. It’s just another iteration of this white savior complex, but imposed upon plants over people. That leads to this divorce between realities where we can just find ourselves as casual observers of a flattened world without context. 

So that leads to the other part of the equation: cultural memory. 

Cultural memory, especially for oral cultures, is constantly shifting and evolving. When the hype around ayahuasca spread, it came from people who already believed psychedelics helped make us human and they could easily presume that any psychoactive plant in use currently had always been in use. The same set of books mentioned above had peddled this false notion that ayahuasca use is thousands of years old—also that it would have played into notions about psychoactive substances helping form our humanness. 

Ayahuasca here is particularly relevant because it becomes a part of the cultural memory for a lot of societies in the Amazon, though tellingly absent from others. It doesn’t make it less of an issue surrounding cultural appropriation to point out that the use and spread of ayahuasca came largely as a result of civilization, not that it is a vestige of life beyond it. 

This was kind of shocking to me in researching the book. There are a number of psychoactive plants being employed in the Amazon prior to Western contact. Ayahuasca does end up showing up on the landscape here, but not until much later. 

The earliest accounts of anything similar arise in encomiendas—plantations for enslaved natives in the colonial era. Here, natives from all kinds of societies were captured and thrown in with each other by missionaries, military, and administrators. So you had this mix of cultures—peoples who don’t share languages or customs—that might have resulted in the creation, use and spread of this particular brew. However, there’s no evidence to really support that strongly. Ayahuasca, typically tied with Indigenous peoples in the Amazon, really only seemed to come into the fold more recently. 

Nearly all of the ayahuasca ritual that we are going to hear about comes from Mestizo religious views and all in the wake of the rubber boom. You see it more in the rubber bubble cities like Iquitos, but then the mystique of Indigenous origins really nailed the tourists. It became more “exotic” and more attention was put on it as a forest-based product and ritual in and of itself.

So the ayahuasca rituals and ideas that most tourists and enthusiasts come in with is one that has less to do with long standing cultural traditions and more to do with the way that cultural memories must incorporate and adapt to modernized society. That doesn’t make it less of a part of the culture, but shows how those memories evolve in light of colonialism. 

And in this case, that’s where all of this ties back together: ayahuasca arrives on the scene, in part, to help heal the traumas of colonialism and extraction. It is a cultural response and evolving cultural memory. But the problem is that when it becomes exalted as this separate sacred ritual, it’s easy for Westerners to think that ayahuasca carries some kind of innate truth, one that can exist outside of any cultural context and history. 

We then do what we’ve always done: we destroy the forests to try and create some kind of center or retreat for it. We try to embody an imposed sense of oneness and act like these cultures have answers to questions we just haven’t accessed yet. As though each society has access to some innate truth and that this or that plant must be the entryway into that exaltation. 

There is that paternalism again. We act like these societies have it all figured out, so we can just borrow their more recently arisen support structure and own that too. You have to be so far removed from even the concept of history to think the world is really this simple or that you can make changes without accommodating for transitions. 

It just shows how aloof we are to what colonialism looks like on the ground: a cultural embraces a coping mechanism and then we look at them like they can and should personally save us with this forest magic. It’s ridiculous. But worse than that, it’s just as extractionist as any other resource torn from the Amazon.

 

Why is it so critical to focus on the history of settler colonialism when discussing the rise of the far-right?

The entirety of the far-right is built upon the Manifest Destiny that drove settler colonialism in the first place. 

We can’t act like this is something new or we risk misunderstanding it entirely. That’s the problem with history and it’s something that the revisionists that run rampant in the right particularly love: focus on the warfare aspects and battlefront nostalgia and you can pretend like there was a fair and just war at the heart of colonialism. 

Obviously, that isn’t the case. The presentation of history and embodiment of it within statues and museums permits this cognitive dissonance between present and past, events and trajectories. It isolates the world into moments, which ensures that we don’t see the larger and overarching patterns. That’s why it’s so important to keep looking back further to understand civilization at large and even the processes of domestication. If we aren’t looking to fundamentally understand where power originates, then it ensures we only treat a wound instead of deal with a particular pathology. 

The core of far-right narratives, especially with the alt-right, has reignited the Manifest Destiny subtext of narratives of conquest. The Proud Boys call themselves “Western chauvinists” unflinchingly. They get this far because tilting those narratives really never took much work. The point of the narratives was always to hide the empire of America into the story of nation building. The ends justify the means, which also serves to erase the persistence of colonizer-settler systems and practices. 

When you look at the expansion of empires and civilizations, you see these patterns repeat constantly. It’s only increasingly crucial to dig deeper into history of the Americas in particular. 

The principles of freedom, that sacred core of individualism, that underlie the American identity in general, but far-right ideologies in particular, are a historical creation. One made possible by the confluences of technology and expansionism. In a very real sense, technology made it possible for might to equal right. 

So you see the history of European expansionism really flourishing in the isolation of Americanism. The “right to” became weaponized on the frontier, all concepts of freedom included the right to enslave and eradicate and dispossess entire populations. This was new land, clear for the taking and granted for conquest by divine right. There are all these layers to it, but they build on each other. 

There are some great books coming out on the subject these days, Greg Grandin’s End of the Myth and Daniel Immerwahr’s How to Hide an Empire are two very recent ones. But the relationship between colonialism and imperialism with technology and the organization of state power is absolutely crucial. The basis of settler-colonialism is entitlement. Grandin, in particular, really draws out how that entitlement was used to embolden people who were effectively cannon fodder. To take this degree of dispossession that they had and infuse it into the settler mindset: if you win here, you will earn your freedom in land. 

Really that’s the core of the far-right narratives: frontier ideology imposed on an expanding world. The alt-right takes it a step further, amplifying the nativist drum pounding online—a world where boundaries and borders are virtually meaningless. It’s a way of staking an identity in an era of flux. That, to me, is an important thing to realize, but if you don’t see the lineage there, then you can act like this is a new problem instead of what it really is: a modernized variant of an old and fatal one. 

 

What role do anarchists have in fighting fascism?

We ought to have a massive role in fighting fascism in general, but the problem is that the far-right has also latched onto the term anarchism too. Libertarians have drifted into this very individualistic undercurrent of anarchist theory and so you’re seeing this validation and expansion of once extremely fringe beliefs, things like anarcho-capitalism and national anarchism. 

So I think the anarchist milieu ought to have a bit of a reckoning with itself, sort out some of these hyper-individualistic and egoist perspectives to see how they could lead towards fascistic ideologies themselves under the same banner. 

But that also emphasizes that these fascistic ideas are freakishly easy to slide into. We’ve seen that fascist creep in far more places than I’d like to admit and it’s both frightening and pathetic that this can be true. 

That said, you would think that anarchists should be at the forefront of fighting fascism. If you see that the unifying bond between fascists is, as you’ve said, fundamentally in the idea of upholding inequality as a driving force, then egalitarianism is clearly its opposite. If you uphold anarchism as a principle of egalitarianism rather than just the absence of a governing body, then clearly fascists need attacked. 

I would hope that is a universal amongst anarchists, but it unquestionably is not the case. 

At the end of the day, they are preaching inequality as a virtue and embodying that frontier ideology. Those are things that anarchists ought to be opposed to, but particular anyone who is against civilization ought to be thoroughly aware of. And I think with the long-overdue prevalence that Indigenous struggles are starting to finally see, the link between the realities of colonialism, extraction, and civilization are only becoming more apparent. 

It should be a given that anarchists, particularly anti-civ anarchists, are anti-fascist and it has pained me to see this isn’t case. It needs to be said, it needs to be solid, re-affirmed grounding. 

It also cannot end there. You have said that “fascism is the unanswered question of late capitalism” or something to that degree, and I think that’s absolutely true. So the problem is that all of these fascist narratives exist in this vacuum of ungrounded theory and knee jerk reactionism to our crumbling day-to-day reality. This is why I think it’s so vital to be asking bigger questions about where power originates from and understanding how it morphs. These things didn’t start with capitalism and certainly they didn’t start with Trump. Those are all just propellants on a dumpster fire. If we want to really root out fascism, which we need to be definitively doing, then we need to keep out of this shallow cesspool where fascist narratives can so easily take root and keep drawing out the questions of origins and seeing these larger patterns of power and domination. 

The denigration of anarchism relies on leaning into the individualistic spirit of the colonizer. We need to understand that. This is where the fascist creep comes in: isolationism. In both time and space. If we limit our world so narrowly, then everything is an assault or, more importantly, perceived as an assault. 

 

What is eco-fascism and what is its significance today?

Eco-fascism is the epitome of half-truths and short sightedness. Sadly, it’s also not far from the surface in a lot of shallow ecological critique.

It boils down to the principle that unsustainable populations and habits threaten the Earth, so the way to reduce or remove that threat is totalitarian states. It should sound a bit off-putting because it really is. The problem that I’ve seen is that a lot of environmental and ecological critique or ethos do really emphasize the catastrophic realities of life within civilization, but they are just looking at what is and not how it got here. 

I came to my own perspectives on ecology by way of deep ecology, which is also the foundation for groups like Earth First! The entire spectrum of deep ecology’s adherents runs the gamut within EF! You have these older redneck patriarchs and then younger rowdy anarchists with a big focus on politics and identity. 

Deep ecology is just another form of a biocentric—or Earth-focused—perspective, that can mean a lot of things. For those founding redneck types, that lent itself towards bioregionalism, which could easily backslide into eco-nationalism. All this nonsense about strict borders and a border wall? Ed Abbey and Dave Foreman blazed the trail on a lot of that from a supposed ecological perspective. Not that they were effective, but their views were foreboding. 

The reality of the situation is that a response to fascism everywhere requires deeper questions. From a deep ecology perspective, you can easily get sucked down this rabbit hole of thinking that problems of our world come down on the reducible problem of human population. 

In some ways, the question is kind of a chicken and egg thing for deep ecology and primal anarchy or anarcho-primitivism, but it’s a really significant one. Clearly human populations shot up with agriculture and have continued to grow exponentially. Are the problems that civilizations have created because of humans or because of systems? A primal anarchist or anarcho-primitivist critique lands squarely on systems, eco-fascism lurks in a shallower reply and saying that population itself is the issue. If you think that’s all it is, then reducing or controlling the population is a freakishly clear answer. But that’s such a shallow mess. There’s literally no way to control populations en masse without fascistic practice. 

This is becoming an issue because there is genuine ecological crisis unfolding in the world and at alarming rates. So long as there is this insane back-and-forth about whether it is happening or not, and who is ultimately responsible, then the door is open for this kind of reaction. There have been people who have used the rise and persistence of eco-fascism as a reason to deny ecological perspectives or critiques, but that’s also just feeding into the frenzied world that we currently face: one that seems to easily slide into fascistic thoughts and normalize them. 

The reality of fighting fascism, on all fronts and in all forms, is don’t give a platform to these lunatics. Don’t let them control debate or discussion about any of this, because they’re simply trying to take a shallow reactionary realization and unfold it into nativist drum pounding rituals where the state or ethnostate is the answer. It’s a grotesque form of tribalism, but if you let them initiate the discussion, then they’ve already set the table. 

The significance of eco-fascism, then, is just that literally anything right now seems like a potential entry point for these really grotesque forms. If you keep everything surface level, then there’s that opening. So my response to all of it is to go deeper, but also don’t let fascists and fascist sympathizers control the discussion.

 

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Anti-Fascism

Nationalism is No Alternative: An Interview With German Antifascists

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This discussion is with Linda and Miro, German comrades who did a speaking tour in the US in the fall of 2018. They have been antifascist activists for over 10 years and are part of the …ums Ganze! alliance. Both are involved in the campaign “Nationalism is No Alternative” that tries to finds answers to the new tactics of the extreme Right. This interview was conducted via email following discussions during their time in the US. Their organization, …ums Ganze!, is an anti-capitalist, antiauthoritarian alliance currently consisting of eleven groups based in Germany and Austria. It was founded in 2006 in order to organize radical Left critiques and analysis in both theory and practice. The term “…ums Ganze!” can be roughly translated as “…to the whole (thing)!” and means that the alliance’s focus lies in an antiauthoritarian analysis and critiques which cover the whole complexity of the state, nation, and capital. …ums Ganze! made its first appearance during the anti-G8 protests in Heiligendamm, Germany in 2007. 

The interview was conducted by the Perspectives on Anarchist Theory journal collective, a project of the Institute for Anarchist Studies (IAS).

 

Tell us about your organization(s). What are their roots in different political groups and movements of the past? What is their political orientation?

We are part of …ums Ganze!, which was founded in 2006 and is basically an alliance of anti-authoritarian communist groups. …ums Ganze! is part of different struggles such as the feminist women‘s strike, confronting the housing crisis, and antifascism. We think that the very principles of capitalist society are the roots of these crises, so we do not advocate for reform or aim for a greener and more social capitalist society, but rather try to push for a social revolution. Therefore, we talk, fight together, and organize with people outside of leftist scenes and bubbles – at least we try to. Our aim is to actually win (there a some texts in English that can be found here: https://umsganze.org/other-languages/).

We have our roots in the German antifa movement. In the early 1990s, the radical Left collapsed and the fascist movement grew exponentially, especially in the former East Germany (GDR). Many within the strong subculture of autonomous anarchists thought antifascism was the most important struggle and joined antifa groups. But the autonomous antifascist movement was heavily divided between traditional anarchists who did not want to work together with unions, Social Democrats, or the media, and a more pragmatic wing who built large autonomous groups and tried to leave the subculture by strategically working with non-radical leftists. The latter groups sought to influence public opinion through media campaigns and push popular youth culture to the Left through youth organizing. These large antifa groups and their strategic concept to be openly radical, anticapitalist, and anti-state, but also to be accepted by normal people and able to actually build power in your town or city through self-organized but very committed groups, are the roots we are coming from. uG! is also part of a European network of antiauthoritarian groups called Beyond Europe (https://beyondeurope.net/).

 

Discuss the idea of being “post-antifa.” Can you put this idea into historical context? How has the German antifascist movement developed after struggling so long against neo-Nazis? What lessons do you have from this struggle that you bring into your work today?

In the early 2000s, the antifascist movement was entrenched in bitter discussions and split up along various lines. For example, the Left leaning government started to mobilize society, and sometimes even the police, against fascists, sometimes the state even supported antifascist education programs with money, so the antifascist movement had to reevaluate what they thought of the state. Also, they discussed what to think about 9/11. Some thought the Islamist jihadists were allies in the fight against the imperialist United States, while others thought it was another form of fascism that needed to be fought against. Some of those antifascists were even in favor of the “global war on terror” and the invasion of Iraq. (We think that neither is correct). 

Some in the antifascist movement and in the broader radical Left discussed how to be successful outside of antifascist struggles and rebuild the radical Left, since antifascism often did not have the answers for many urgent problems. For example, in 2005, the government composed of the Social Democrats and the Greens slashed unemployment benefits and introduced a benefit system that pushed a lot of people into poverty and consisted of degrading procedures. Antifascists criticized the movement against these cuts for its reformism and tried to push fascists, anti-Semitic conspiracy theorists, and other enemies of emancipation out of the movement, which is a very important job. But they were unable to present a credible way forward that would lead to improving living conditions.

In order to build a radical Left that is part of social movements and able to radicalize and win, two new organizations were formed: the interventionistische Linke (Interventionist Left) and …ums Ganze! Both are called “post-autonomous” and “post-antifa” since we are trying to use the experiences of the autonomous and antifa movement but use them in different social struggles, as well as to organize outside of autonomous subcultures without repeating the mistakes the orthodox communists usually make when they build their hierarchical party structures.  

 

How has the movement and its various organizations responded to the rise of the Alternative for Germany (Alternative für Deutschland (AfD))? How have you adapted and changed tactics in response? Is this party continuing to grow, or have they reached their peak and are starting to decline?

The AfD, even though it is now controlled by fascists, is not a traditional neo-Nazi party. They employed tactics that you probably know from Donald Trump‘s campaign. They present themselves as rebels against an imagined leftist elite that has nothing but contempt for the average working man(!). They disguise their racism as concerns for cultural preservation, they make use of conspiracy theories, and they appeal to older men by marking feminism and feminists as enemies. They don’t give a fuck about the truth and are happily contradicting themselves. They are kind of clever in using social media and the traditional media.

In the last national election in 2017, the AfD won 13% percent of the vote and therefore now has 94 members of parliament and all the infrastructure and money that comes with that. In some parts of Eastern Germany, the AfD passed the conservative party and is the leading party, polling at 25%. The next local elections in these states this fall can yield significant gains for the AfD. The European elections this spring showed that, in many areas, the AfD stabilized their outcome somewhere between 8% and 15% of the vote. So, except for several large regions in Eastern Germany, they are neither growing nor declining.

With the help of some billionaires’ money and support from the media, the AfD was and is able to push their narrative. The established parties (mostly the social democrats and the conservatives) reacted by condemning the AfD as an organization but moved themselves to the right, and incorporating the AfD‘s politics into their own programs and rhetoric. 

In part, the antifascist movement had to adapt its tactics to the new threat. Traditional neo-Nazi skinheads can be doxxed, and most people are unhappy when they learn about the neo-Nazi background of their neighbor or co-worker. But antifascists experienced that doxxing an AfD party official, in a country where at least 15% support the party, is not causing any problems for the party official; it is, rather, free publicity. When antifascists show that the party official is an anti-refugee racist and bigot, many people do not have a problem with that. They voted for him becausehe publicly stands for that. Another problem is that the AfD‘s organizing today is, to a large degree, done online, and we have not yet found a way to deplatform their Whatsapp chatgroups and Facebook pages. The rallies of the fascist movement are a mere spectacle to provide content for fascist YouTube channels. So, antifascists may be able to stop people from going to those rallies, but that does not help because they are able to listen to the speeches on their computers.

To be fair, some of the old militant antifascist tactics are still working fine. In some urban areas where the movement is strong, militants are able to put so much pressure on AfD members that the party is unable to build local structures, because it is just no fun to be the face of the AfD in some cities. Also, all over the country, antifascists were able get a lot of party meetings canceled by putting pressure on venues. For example, the campaign “Kein Raum der Afd” (No Space for AfD) researched the pubs in Berlin where the AfD would hold their meetings and put pressure on them. Right now, it is impossible to find any restaurant or bar within Berlin that is still willing to host AfD events. 

Right now, we learn from the success of the AfD that just doing antifa work, meaning following the fascists around and trying to counter each of their moves, is important but not enough. We have to think about how to build a strong radical left that has answers for the problems of our time. So, we are trying to update our own movement. We came up with a campaign called Nationalism is No Alternative (NIKA). NIKA is not trying to convince AfD voters to not be fascist anymore, but rather tries to organize all those young people who are outraged by the AfD rhetoric. In order to do that, we have stepped up our social media presence, updated our style, and held easily accessible, open meetings that everybody who is willing can attend. But we did not disguise our politics; we are still openly anti-capitalist and anti-state.

(Antifascists having a cup of coffee in front of the home of a fascist organizer. They knew he would not be home, since he was leading a demonstration at the time, but they wanted him to know they knew where he lived and that they were not afraid of him.)
 

What is the overall political situation in Germany now? What are the prospects for fundamental social change there? What are the reasons for despair? What are the reasons for hope?

In the years directly following 2015, the right was able to mobilize tens of thousands in the streets. It was a proper movement. Right now, the dynamic phase is (temporarily) over, even though they still have the groups and networks to restart mobilizing masses if the occasion arises. We saw that in late August, 2018 in Chemnitz. Following the murder committed by a refugee, a local rightwing party, the AfD, and fascist football hooligans organized huge demos and attacks on perceived migrants and leftists.  

The right is now settling and establishing themselves. They are building structures that are here to stay, which is very dangerous. So now we have a situation where the right is still very motivated from their earlier successes, and that is also dangerous. In the last two years, there have been several cases of right wing terrorism committed either by people that were part of the new right wing movement or have been neo-Nazis for a long time and felt that now is the time to act. In June, 2019 a neo-Nazi murdered a conservative politician on his porch because he was pro-refugee in 2015. Also, the fascists within the state have seemingly woken up: leftist media uncovered a network of police and military special forces who built their own terrorist infrastructure and trained for civil war. One chapter of this group already ordered 200 body bags and kept a list of 25,000 people they wanted to kill (https://taz.de/taz-Recherche-auf-Englisch/!5558072/).

But society is not just moving to the right; rather, it is polarizing. The Left is still pretty small and the organizations are weak, but we are more able to intervene in debates. There is a huge new movement to stop climate change that is openly confronting the fossil fuel industry, in many major cities there are big leftist movement against the rent increases, and in Berlin, there is a large movement pushing to expropriate every business that owns more than 3,000 apartments in the city. While the AfD dominated the talk show debates in 2015, now they aren’t even invited anymore, and that is not because the TV stations suddenly learned about the importance of deplatforming fascists, but because they don’t have any answers apart from “close the borders” or “deport refugees.” Being able to dominate the public discourse around key topics such as housing or climate change is important antifascist work.

(500 people spontaneously demonstrated against the deportation of forty-nine refugees to Afghanistan at the Frankfurt airport.) 

 

Looking at what is going on in the US from Germany now, what are your observations? How would you compare what you see happening here to what you are experiencing in Germany?

A lot of things are quite similar: we both live in a society where a lot of people feel that there are hard times coming and that the standard of living might decline. They think, therefore, it is a good idea to keep competition out by building border fences, etc. The countries are heavily divided, and the right is established or even hegemonic in parts of the country. In both countries, the antifascist left seems to be able to confront the fascists in the streets, but in my opinion needs to think more about the fascists within the established institutions, such as the secret service, the police, the military, official politics, and important think tanks. The fascists seek to transform society very subtly, and there is little to be done about that with small demos and small scale affinity groups. 

When we went to the US, we got a feeling of how much more the police and the fascists are militarized. Also life seemed harder with the horrible healthcare system. We felt so much respect for all the comrades who get up and fight and risk getting injured or imprisoned. 

(While their comrades tried to block an important AFD assembly, antifascists of “Nationalism is No Alternative” intervened into a liberal antifascist event with a banner that reads, “If You Organize Deportations Then You Had Better Keep Quiet about Fascism,” which paraphrases Max Horkheimer who said “If you don’t want to talk about capitalism then you had better keep quiet about fascism.”)

 

What lessons can you share from your experience fighting fascism, sexism, racism and nationalism in Germany to those of us struggling against these things here in the US?

The main things we are thinking about right now are to not just think about how your activity helps to push back the enemy, but to always aim to build your own movement, as well. Does this activity help to convince and organize my target audience? Who is my target audience? And maybe, how do we break through our isolation and start talking to people who are not yet convinced?

 

If you liked this interview please support the work that made it possible. You can make a one-time donation – or become a monthly sustainer – to the Institute for Anarchist Studies (IAS), the organization that produces Perspectives on Anarchist Theory (who did this interview) by clicking Here! 

This interview originally appeared on the Institute for Anarchist Studies website here.

 

(40,000 people marched in Dresden against fascism on August 24th, 2019.)

 

Re-Posted, Uncategorized

Support “No Pasaran,” a New Patreon to Research and Report on Fascism and Build Resistance

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There is a new Patreon project from antifascist researcher and journalist Shane Burley (who we have interviewed before) that is going to be the central place to research and report on what is going on with the global far-right. Independent journalism in the support of antifascist organizing is of critical importance, and as the mainstream media fails us and independent outlets are being closed one after the other, it is up to us to defend free journalists.

Become a Patron!

The new No Pasaran Patreon will have exclusive essays, articles, interviews, as well as podcasts talking with antifascists from around the world. This is a great way to help support antifascist voices while people like Ted Cruz and Donald Trump are looking to silence us.

Become a Patron!

We will continue sharing different projects that we think are worthy to raise up, and we may even do a Patreon of our own to help us produce more high quality writing in support of antifascists!

canada, International

Community Action: Anti-Trans Speaker with Ties to Soldiers of Odin and Proud Boys Set to Speak in Vancouver on June 23

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By Jeff Shantz

The University of British Columbia appears to be at it again. Mere months after hosting far-right speaker Ben Shapiro, and agreeing to host far-right figures Stefan Molyneux and Lauren Southern—an event that was eventually cancelled after community mobilization and outcry—the elite Vancouver university is going ahead with a talk by an anti-trans activist, Jenn Smith, with various ties to far-right groups like the Soldiers of Odin, Proud Boys, and Culture Guard. He event is scheduled for the evening of June 23, 2019. Smith has even used Soldiers of Odin as “bodyguards” at preceding events.

Smith’s talk is directed against the British Columbia educational system’s LGBTQ2-inclusive and supportive program SOGI 123 (Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity). Smith, “a 54 year-old transgender identified male” who uses his identity to target the trans communities is slated to speak as well against “transgender ideology” and “transgender politics.” Smith has stated “that men cannot be women (and vice versa), no matter how much they pretty themselves up.” Transphobic, anti-trans politics, have been long connected to contemporary far Right movements and viewpoints.

In response, UBC says it will rely on the RCMP (Royal Canadian Mounted Police, the colonial police force that was recently involved in the racial profiling of a Black graduate student at a major academic congress on UBC’s campus). The RCMP is itself a force of settler colonial domination and white supremacy. Many people are not made to fee safe by its presence. This is in addition to the threat posed by the far Right groups who have accompanied Smith previously. The perspectives being pushed by Smith make communities, schools, and workplaces more dangerous and threatening, especially for transgender students.

As was the case for the Shapiro and Molyneux and Southern events, Smith’s scheduled appearance is being opposed by UBC Students Against Bigotry and other community members. Community outrage managed to get other scheduled Smith talks cancelled at Douglas College in Metro Vancouver and Trinity Western University in Langley, British Columbia.

Anti-Fascism, immigration, International, Islamophobia, Uncategorized

PEGIDA Racists Rally Again in Toronto, Confronted by Antifascsists, May 4, 2019

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By Jeff Shantz

Anti-fascists in Toronto had to mobilize once more to oppose far Right racists PEGIDA (the “Patriotische Europäer gegen die Islamisierung des Abendlandes”) who organized an anti-Muslim, anti-refugee rally at University Avenue and Armoury Street in the city’s downtown. Fascists were present from a range of groups, including Wolves of Odin, Soldiers of Odin, Canadian Combat Coalition and Northern Guard.

Part of a larger international network, PEGIDA is one of the most publicly active of the new far Right groups mobilizing anti-Muslim hate in the Canadian context. They began organizing demonstrations in Quebec in 2015 and have been a regular presence in several cities in Canada since. They hold monthly rotating rallies in Toronto and London, Ontario. Their rallies have been a magnet for neo-fascist individuals and groups, including the Northern Guard, Proud Boys, and the armed anti-Muslim Three Percenter militia.

An estimated 80 antifascists showed up to confront the 20 or so fascists. Toronto police again operated to provide the fascists a space to spew their hate. And spew they did. Someone from the fascist crowd set off a smoke bomb. This is something that so-called yellow vests protesters have taken to doing at small demonstrations at highway overpasses near Toronto. Andre Ch (Canadian Nationalist Party), Derek Storie/Rick Boswick (Yellow Vests), and members of Wolves of Odin, Proud Boys, and other Nationalist Party members were also involved in burning a Quran.

The fascists also tried to attack antifascists using their flag poles as weapons to do so. Toronto police, unsurprisingly, did nothing to stop that. They did however deploy violence against the antifascists reportedly using their police bikes to strike at antifascists.

The antifascists did manage to keep the fascists from marching. They remained confined to the space provided by and protected by police.

Given the recurrence of PEGIDA rallies in Canada, and Ontario in particular, much organizing remains to keep them from mobilizing.

Alt Light, Anti-Fascism, Uncategorized

Three Strikes and Molyneux and Southern are Out of Vancouver (For Now)

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By Jeff Shantz

Earlier this week we reported that antifascist mobilizations had caused two Vancouver venues to cancel planned talks by far Rightists/white supremacists Stefan Molyneux and Lauren Southern hosted by the University of British Columbia “Free Speech Club” (FSC). We can now happily report that the FSC’s third attempt to host Molyneux and Southern in Vancouver has been thwarted despite their efforts to move it underground to a secret location.

Antifascist mobilization kept the focus and pressure up throughout, contacting venues and tracking down the final secret location. In this the UBC Students Against Bigotry played key parts (even as they maintained a unique position toward other antifascist organizing locally).

This final cancellation comes only hours after a fascist in Aotearoa (New Zealand) shot up two mosques in Christchurch killing at least 49 people and injuring dozens more in a targeted assault on Muslim people. Clearly even the fascists in Vancouver could figure out that holding an event with those particular speakers in this time frame was not a wise idea.

Especially given that the garbage spewed by Molyneux and Southern was taken up by the Christchurch shooter. Notably the fascist killer posted a “manifesto” online entitled “The Great Replacement,” the same title used by Southern for one of her videos, a reference to far Right fictions of “white genocide” peddled by many white supremacists.

Despite these cancellations we remain ever vigilant for any future far Right events in Metro Vancouver. Their hatred and brutality have no place here or anywhere and its should now be certain to people in Vancouver that any platform for these characters is a platform for brutal violence.

Alt Light, Uncategorized

Antifascist Mobilization Leads Two Venues to Cancel Molyneux and Southern Event in Vancouver (BC): “Free Speechers” Turn to “Secret Location” for March 15

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By Jeff Shantz

Anti-fascsists and anti-racists in Vancouver (Unceded Coast Salish territories) have successfully mobilized to get two venues to  cancel a planned speaking event by Canadian far Rightists Stefan Molyneux and Lauren Southern scheduled for Friday March 15.

The speaking event is being organized by the so-called “Free Speech Club” at the University of British Columbia, a Rightwing group that uses the cover of “free speech” to host far Right figures who oppose the “free speech” (and the very existence) of Muslims, feminists, Leftists, etc. while promoting white supremacy. The club has previously organized and hosted a speaking event by Ben Shapiro.

Molyneux, from Toronto, is the founder and host of the Freedomain Radio podcast and YouTube channel which has posted videos under titles like “The Death of Europe – European Migrant Crisis,” “Migratory Patterns of Predatory Immigrants,” and “The Female Evil” which espouse racist and anti-Semitic views. Southern, of Surrey, another YouTube favorite of altRightists has posted videos with titles such as “Asking Feminists: Women’s Rights or Islam” and “Why I Hate Pride Parades.”

This event was originally scheduled for March 16 at the Chan Center at UBC, where the Shapiro even was held, but was cancelled following mobilized community opposition, including a petition that gathered 450 signatures in a matter of days. The free speech club claims security costs were too high for the Molyneux/Southern event prompting a move to the Hellenic Community of Vancouver (HCV, 4500 Arbutus St, Vancouver).

This led to mobilizing to convince the HCV center to cancel. A demonstration was called for the 15th to oppose Molyneux and Southern. Right before midnight on March 12, ahead of the HCV general meeting of the 13th, the Free Speech Club put out a tweet saying the HCV was cancelling the event in response to the volume of community complaints.

Antifascists are still vigilant. The Free Speech club have said they will go ahead with the event in a “secret location.” Details to follow, when available.

For now it is satisfying to listen to the whine rising from the now twice disappointed “free speechers” as via their social media:

“ANNOUNCEMENT:

The Hellenic Centre must cancel our booking due to physical threats of harm towards their community, and church. Domestic Terrorist groups like ANTIFA have bullied this religious community into a crippling and life threatening situation. Please do not direct your hate towards this community. We are currently booking a new venue which will remain private and for ticket holders only.

– FSC Team”

Interview, labor

Militancy in the Workplace: Interview With IWW Organizer Doug Geisler Pt. 2

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Why is the labor movement such a central vehicle for revolutionary social change?  Why are they growing today?  Why did they go into decline?

We continue our interview with revolutionary union organizer Doug Geisler about how to build a revolutionary labor movement, and about his roleplaying game Beat the Boss, which teaches players how to organize their workplace.

What is a labor union? What really defines it?

A union is a group of workers that have the same employer that comes together to change what they hate and keep what they love at work.  A union is defined by the relationship between workers and bosses. It seems simplistic but history and law have laid so many complications on this relationship that people on the outside can be confused or afraid of the unknown. That complication is probably by design.

Why was there such a decline in labor unions in the U.S.?

To me, there are two reasons for the decline:

1) Labor was full of itself and turned inward. It ignored trends in business that eroded the edges of their domain. It ceased taking audacious steps to organize new industries in new ways.

2) A close coalition of business and social actors assessed, in the mid-60’s, that a vast pool of comfortable labor (high buying power baby boomers) and a growing labor pool of people of color would begin questioning the foundation of capital (and capital’s ties to American christianity) and took every opportunity to demolish a thinking, allied working class’s attempts to gain freedom.

Why do you think Millenials are turning back to organized labor?

My generation grew up on the very tail end, the bottom of the barrel of the class victories that the previous generation won and cemented in the Post-war detente. Millenials have found that the barrel is empty. The new paradigm for capital (gig work, monetizing fun, etc.) has stripped away all patriotic dressing from the debate. The cold war is over and communism is no longer grounds to invalidate someone’s argument.

What is Beat the Boss intending to accomplish?

Roleplaying games, especially thanks to talented improv-ers and the world’s most popular RPG, have become more accepted. Gaming offers the opportunity to experience new points of view. That builds empathy. I’m getting the game out there to encourage people to become comfortable with union organizing. After nearly 20 years of organizing there are patterns to this interaction. Pattern and experience builds comfort. There are best practices and lessons directly related to (and learned from) the field that are reinforced by the rules of the game. After creating a campaign or running one that the community produces players should see opportunities in their own work lives.    

Additionally, when more creative people put their minds to the problems of workers new, innovative ideas will come to light. The fight for justice can end up stodgy.
Do you think gaming can be a center of reigniting workplace organizing?

Gaming and workplace organizing have key elements in common: a core group of people come together to collaboratively solve problems; both talk out resolution; and it’s difficult to find time to schedule a meeting.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/346468029/beat-the-boss/widget/video.html

International, Uncategorized

TRUMP’S BETRAYAL OF SYRIA – PARIS COMMUNE FALLS AGAIN?

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By David Van Deusen

December 22, 2018, Vermont -As an American, as a Vermonter, and as a Labor leader I have marched many times against US lead wars.  However, I do not oppose wars and US military action because I assert war as always unjust and always unnecessary.  I am not philosophically a Kantian; this is not a moral imperative for me. I am also no liberal. If truth be told it was only through war and armed conflict that Vermont and the United States became republics free from the British Empire. And like the US, Ireland would still be an exploited outpost in the same empire if it were not for the force of arms demonstrated by the IRA. Cuba, today, without their victorious 1959 revolution, likewise would remain an economic colony of America.  And further, it was only through the Allied war effort that Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy & their murderous ideologies were crushed for generations. But since my birth, from the Vietnam War, to armed interventions against Latin America, up through the invasion of Iraq, I am hard pressed to find a US military intervention that, by purpose or accident, carried with it an intrinsic moral clarity; rather contemporary US military action time and again has been launched to serve the interests of corporations and a tiny minority of wealthy elite.

For these reasons I was proud to serve as a Vermont AFL-CIO officer when we were aligned with US Labor Against The War, and when our Unions called for the rapid withdrawal of all American troops from Iraq.  I was also proud to have helped write the Vermont AFL-CIO resolution stating our solidarity with the Longshoremen when they conducted a one day strike, shutting down West Coast ports as an act of resistance against the Iraq War. And even now I am supportive of calls coming to finally end the generation-long war in Afghanistan.  But again, I do not condemn such military actions because I am a pacifist or because I am rejecting the notion of war in and of itself. I do so because I judge the conflicts which the US engages in, much more often than not, as wrong and immoral based on the specific facts and specific interests being served by these imperialistic conflicts.

For some years now the United States has provided arms and limited Special Forces support (now 2000 boots on the ground) to the Kurdish lead YPG/YPJ in Syria.  The YPG/YPJ has used these arms to extend their control over most of northern Syria. They have effectively engaged ISIS, driving them out of the north. They have also held the dictatorship at bay (and they have brought a relative stability to this region of Syria).   But what deserves our respect is not simply their military prowess, but rather the type of society which they seek to create in liberated areas. They hold socialist tendencies, but what sets them apart is their desire to organize their world according to directly democratic means; something like a secular, decentralized, Town Meeting system where all the people have an actual voice and an unabstracted vote concerning the issues that face them as a people and as a community.  Here they take political influence from the Vermont anarchist sociologist Murray Bookchin. Their vision, similar to that espoused by the EZLN & the Zapatistas (Chiapas, Mexico), is as far reaching as that which was dreamed of on CNT/FAI barricades in Spain from 1936-1939. Their fight has parallels to Mahkno and his brigades in the Ukraine in 1919. They do not fight for an ethic Kurdish state, but rather for a new social formation whereby the individual and the community collectively control the world in which they live.  Their dreams, perhaps, are not dissimilar to those who manned the walls of the Paris in 1871. And to this very point in time, remarkably, they have been winning.

The historical significance of what they have been achieving in Rojava (northern Syria) has not been lost on those in other nations who also can imagine what a truly democratic and equitable society could look like.  Presently hundreds, if not thousands, of regular working people (Americans included) have made the difficult journey to Syria in order stand with them, rifle in hand, to fight for this common dream. And many have died defending this dream from ISIS, from Turkey, and from those who instead seek the domination and brutality of a misguided & twisted Islamic state or the repression which a dictatorship or new form of fascism brings in its wake.  And still they fight, and still they organize a direct democracy, composed of Kurds & Arabs, in the lands which they have freed.

And now, our own (so called) President Donald Trump has announced his intent to withdraw the 2000 brave American troops currently deployed in this region (and who by circumstance fight with honor alongside YPG/YPJ).  And even tonight, Turkey stands in wait, sharpening their swords…

But given the long history of the US imperialism and economic subjugation, why has the US supported them?  Some would argue that the very presence of US guns mark the YPG/YPJ as no more than pawns of a morally questionable US foreign policy.  Some would say they are dupes of the CIA. After all, why would the US elite support a revolution which seeks to topple the exploitive American capitalism which underpins the old world order (and which continues to sell out American and foreign workers alike)?  How can this be? The answer is simple… The United States has supported this revolution because YPG/YPJ are fiercely opposed to ISIS and are effective fighters. The US therefore has acted on the premise that the enemy of my enemy is my friend (at least for a time).  

No one should be under any illusion that the US ruling class has supported the YPG/YPJ because they approve of the cooperative democratic society which they seek to create.  The ruling elite of the US (Republican & Democrat) would be perfectly happy supporting an authoritarian dictator as long as such a strongman would support America’s perceived long term economic and strategic interests.  But as it turns out, few in northern Syria were or are willing to engage in a protracted fight just to see the deck chairs of authoritarian politics rearranged. But the people have been willing to fight (and die) for something much more far reaching.  And this has transformed the YPG/YPJ into something far more significant than a regional militia; it has made them into a multi-ethnic force capable of constantly beating back ISIS and other reactionary elements in Syria. And for America, the short term aim was always to diminish ISIS.   Here, as the YPG/YPJ was compelled to face existential enemies on all fronts, they were glad to accept guns and logistical support from wherever they would come. When a man’s house is on fire he does not stop to ask the politics of the one who hands him a bucket of water. If that bucket comes from a Republican, it does not make him a Republican. Thus the US support for the YPG/YPJ was nothing more than a temporary marriage of convenience, and the YPG/YPJ are not defined by the politics (and motivations) of those that offer them material aid.          

But now, after the YPG/YPJ has diminished ISIS and pushed them into more remote areas, Trump has grown tired of this marriage and his Administration’s true face has begun to look up to again reveal its twisted contours.  Trump would have American troops evacuate in order to turn their attention to other more sinister projects (such as those transpiring on our southern border). And no matter that the second largest army in NATO (the increasingly Islamic-Fascist Turks) have announced their desire to launch invasions of northern Syria with the sole aim of crushing this experiment in direct democracy, the United States of America is preparing to look the other way.  The reactionary government of Turkey, under President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, views the YPG/YPJ as a treat in that they represent an alternative not only for Syria but also for Turkey. Further driving Ankara’s genocidal ambitions, is the government’s view of the YPG/YPJ as having close links to the armed PKK (which operates within Kurdish-Turkey and which shares similar politics with their Syrian cousins). What gives Erdoğan & the Turks pause, for now, is the presence of American troops.  Once this deterrent is removed, it is hard to envision a chain of events which does not include a devastating invasion of this island of hope, this city on the hill overlooking the chaos that is the Middle East.  And no matter how America got there, once America leaves Trump will own the history that follows. If the Paris Commune must fall again let it be known that the invaders were enabled by a country which once called itself great.       

 

In Solidarity with the YPG/YPJ & The Struggle in Rojava,

David Van Deusen, District Vice President of the Vermont AFL-CIO

 

***

 

What follows is a link to the resolution passed by the Green Mountain Central Labor Council of the Vermont AFL-CIO in support of the YPG/YPJ and the struggle in Rojava.  This resolution was passed in February of 2018:

https://vt.aflcio.org/green-mountain-labor-council/news/solidarity-struggle-rojava

Taking on Fascism and Racism from the Ground Up.