Who Watches the Watchmen?
“These deaths were simultaneously brutal and surreal, horrific and childishly ridiculous. The modern face of fascism is a killer in a clownish Viking outfit, face painted and howling in mindless joy because he did something to get noticed.”
Photo by Tyler Merbler from USA - DSC09523-2. CC BY 2.0.
“There’s a Coup Going on in Washington…”
I was working when I heard about it. My girlfriend came in the room with her tablet in her hand, her brow furrowed. ‘There’s a coup going on in Washington. They’re storming the Capitol building.”
I looked up from my computer screen, where I’d been focused until a moment before. I was writing something for my employer, and that’s where my mind was at when she came in.
“This says the Proud Boys are storming the Capitol Building, they’re fighting the police right now.”
I couldn’t process what she’d said at first. I blinked a few times and said, “You’re joking, right?”
It’s not that I couldn’t imagine something like this happening, but that’s a different matter from actually accepting that it’s happening right now.
She shook her head. “I’m not joking, that’s what it says.”
My phone chimed, and I glanced down at it. It was a text from a friend: So, what do you think of the chaos in DC?
Hold on, I wrote back, just found out about it.
I went back on my computer and looked up The Guardian. Sure enough, it seemed that a mob of Proud Boys and assorted Trumpists had seized control of the Capitol building and were fist-fighting with the Capitol Police. The same Capitol Police that had kettled and mass-arrested the black bloc almost four years ago at Trump’s inauguration, firing flashbang grenades and tear gas to stop people from marching down a street and breaking a few windows. The same Proud Boys who had waved the Blue Lives Matter flag, no matter how many black people the cops killed or in what disgustingly cowardly circumstances.
The same Proud Boys who had repeatedly demonstrated that they depended on police protection to stand against Antifa. “I wonder what effect this will have on the street…” I muttered.
Tainted Watchmen
Then we started to hear about the fatalities. A woman shot as she tried to batter a door down to attack US House Representatives sheltering behind it. A woman trampled to death while carrying a “Don’t Tread on Me Flag,” a cop beaten to death with a fire extinguisher, a man who tasered himself to death while trying to steal a portrait of Tip O’Neill.
These deaths were simultaneously brutal and surreal, horrific and childishly ridiculous. The modern face of fascism is a killer in a clownish Viking outfit, face painted and howling in mindless joy because he did something to get noticed.
Almost as soon as the attempted coup began, friends on social media started posting their calls for a harsh response by law enforcement, completely ignoring the obvious: the whole bloody charade would never have been possible without the active complicity of law enforcement. How can you call for the police to crack down on the fascists when it was the police who let them in the building? How can you ask the FBI to arrest the “traitors” when the FBI has known about them for the past four years, and intentionally chose to investigate the people who were trying to stop them?
Who watches the watchmen?
All this talk about “treason” and “insurrection” against our sacred institutions is essentially meaningless, because it assumes that those institutions had anything about them that was worth saving in the first place. This is a three-way fight: fascists on one side, the state on another, anti-fascists on the third side. For anti-fascists to align with the state would be nothing but suicide, because any anti-terrorist legislation that is passed will be used against us much more often and much more enthusiastically than it is ever used against clowns with Viking horns – no matter how many cops they beat to death with fire extinguishers.
Christopher Scott Thompson
Photo by Tam Hutchison.
is an anarchist, martial arts instructor, and devotee of Brighid and Macha.
