Why We Fight by Shane Burley: A Response, Part 2
In “The Fall of the Alt Right Came from Antifascism,” Burley gives antifascists the credit for destroying the Alt Right movement through effective organizing. To anyone who lived through the four years of the Trump regime as an antifascist, this is a welcome recognition of what we know to be true: when we confronted the Alt Right, we were able to defeat them.
Demonstrator holding a flag of Kekistan (2017). Modified from original picture by Alec Perkins. CC BY 2.0.
Why We Fight Essays on Fascism, Resistance, and Surviving the Apocalypse
Shane Burley (Author); Natasha Lennard (Foreword)
Publisher: AK Press
ISBN-13: 9781849354066
Opposing Prophecies
As discussed in Part 1, I’m reading Shane Burley’s Why We Fight: Essays on Fascism, Resistance, and Surviving the Apocalypse, and responding in a series of essays here at Gods and Radicals. In the opening essay, I discussed Burley’s analysis of the threats we currently face in apocalyptic terms, and of fascism as a movement that seeks to use this ongoing apocalypse to its own advantage. Burley suggests that we can only defeat them by embracing the leftist tradition of apocalyptic prophecy – a myth that calls on us to build a better world.
The Fall of the Alt Right
In “The Fall of the Alt Right Came from Antifascism,” Burley gives antifascists the credit for destroying the Alt Right movement through effective organizing. To anyone who lived through the four years of the Trump regime as an antifascist, this is a welcome recognition of what we know to be true: when we confronted the Alt Right, we were able to defeat them. In the words of Alt Right leader Matt Parrott:
[A]ntifa has pretty much succeeded in achieving what the progressive left cannot, which is fully and finally de-platforming the hard right… They demoralized and disabled the majority of the ‘alt-right,’ driving most of them off the streets and public square.
25 Theses on Fascism
Despite this victory, the overall struggle with fascism is far from over. The Proud Boys – an organization of the “Alt Lite” rather than the true Alt Right – allied with the Oathkeepers and other militia organizations to attempt to overthrow the US government on January 6. The pathetic nature of this particular coup attempt doesn’t change how dangerous it would have been if they had actually succeeded, as that would surely have resulted in a full-scale civil war. The ideas behind this insurrection are now mainstream ideas in the Republican Party, something the Alt Right was never able to achieve.
As fascist ideas highjack the mainstream, it’s important for us to be able to recognize what fascism really is. Various attempts have been made to define it: Robert O. Paxton’s “Five Stages of Fascism,” Umberto Eco’s “Ur-Fascism,” the Marxist interpretation of fascism as a built-in self-defense strategy of capitalist society when threatened by potential revolution – but Burley’s “25 Theses on Fascism” is especially relevant to today’s fascist movements.
As Burley says, fascist movements are those in which “inequality is sanctified, identities made to be fixed and essential, and a mythic past is demanded in a distinctly post-industrial, modern world.” We’ve seen the dangerous appeal of these ideas in our own pagan religious community and understanding them as central to fascism is vital to defeating them.
The Kult of Kek
One of the strangest sights at any antifascist action in 2016 to 2018 was the presence of self-identified Kek cultists – Alt Right internet trolls who claimed to worship the ancient Egyptian god Kek, identifying him with the “Pepe the Frog” internet meme, a popular symbol used on the Alt Right to spread fascist ideas under the guise of irony. In his essay on “The Kult of Kek,” Burley examines this strangest of all fascist movements, analyzing it as evidence of a “willingness to build politics on unstable ground.” In Burley’s analysis, Kek emerges as a god of chaos, who undermined and destroyed that which his own followers were attempting to build. Unfortunately, the far right’s love of the bizarre would reemerge in the cult of QAnon.
I’ll continue to respond to Why We Fight in further essays for Gods and Radicals. Coming up next month: “Contested Space,” Burley’s essay on public spaces that are currently contested between fascists and antifascists – one of which is pagan religion.
Christopher Scott Thompson
Photo by Tam Hutchison.
is an anarchist, martial arts instructor, and devotee of Brighid and Macha.
