Repression breeds resistance. A statement that carries with it a thousand caveats.
I say this not in the framework of liberal cowardice of do nothing rather a pleading of strategic realignment based off historical repression. While we can look to Gaza and Palestine as examples of this, the Palestinian resistance exists in a fundamentally different circumstance comparable to the US or historical examples within Europe, which characterizes that of the American circumstances moreso.
People, for obvious reasons, reference Spain, Germany, and Italy to describe the current political moment within the US. The problem is that this analysis is incredibly shallow, frequently a puddle not even worth jumping over. We can see examples of this as the American “resistance” celebrates a futuristic Hague in which magically, the forces of American terror (that is to say, the US as it is normally), and this celebration or drive or dream can only exist in absolute denial of a multitude of things.
- Nazi Germany, fascist Italy, and Francoist Spain did not collapse because of internal resistance networks. This is not to disparage them, I mourn them similarly to friends and family I have mourned, but it is reality. Nazi Germany and fascist Italy fell because of outside external errors they made; they invaded countries with alliances and groupings that could fight back. The Axis powers invaded countries who had allies that would actually back them up and were also capable of waging war 1:1. The United States has avoided this by being the constant subject to appeasement that would make Chamberlain blush by its own detractors. Even if the US loses, it wins. It lost the war in Vietnam and gained an incredibly strategic ally within the region… in the form of Vietnam.
- While Nazi Germany and fascist Italy collapsed because of overextending themselves in war, Spain simply returned to a capitalist democracy after Franco’s passing. This was no victory, as there is nothing to celebrate between the passing of hands between the two faces of capitalism.
- The United States, as of now, looks more of a step above Francoist Spain and a step below Nazi Germany.
- The repression within all three of these countries bred resistance, absolutely, but it was never a mass resistance the resistance hoped it would be.
Let us go further into point four. Within Germany, we saw Antifaschistische Aktion (AFA for practical reasons) from the Communist Party of Germany (KPD), the Iron Front (IF again for the above) of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD), and the White Rose, among a number of groups, but I’d like to illustrate some points among these three.
Both AFA and IF sucked. There is no way around it and I’m disappointed I had not interrogated this further when I first began identifying as an antifascist. AFA spent more time fighting SPD than fighting Nazis based on the, not entirely wrong articulation, of SPD also being fascist. The Iron Front also fought both. They had different goals, similar strategies, and both ultimately had the same material outcome.
IF, as the armed wing of the SPD, wanted to protect the democracy that gave birth to Nazism. The KPD collaborated with Nazis off and on while describing itself as the only anti-fascist party of Germany. Neither of them took the Nazis as seriously as they should’ve and neither of them really worked together. When Hitler was appointed Chancellor, KPD finally stepped up and tried to get a general strike going at the last minute, but the Iron Front actively encouraged people not to participate in the general strike. Being a paramilitary group doesn’t imply a group willing to go on the offensive or fight, they were primarily security groupings, and the Iron Front was too busy waiting on electoral motions before taking any action, and the Nazis outpaced them through legislation. The Iron Front was drastically weakened as a result and resulted to leaflets with the occasional sabotage for the remainder of its existence. Great.
The same thing happened to AFA. The problem here is that despite all the rhetoric, despite the bravado and the appearances, they were primarily beholden to parties with broader agendas. The KPD took its barking orders from the east, moving at a pace of molasses to meet the political moment, and was invested in proving itself against other left parties. Its critique was right, but that did not translate into useful strategy remotely and instead condemned themselves to irrelevance. The SPD was too invested in maintaining the state and when the Nazis became the state, they were ill-equipped to fight the organ they wanted to control. The fact we draw from both organizations to inspire American antifascism would suggest we are doomed from the start. It would be better to begin from nothing entirely.
Now, I mentioned the White Rose, whose grouping was entirely under different circumstances, and I lament the deaths of these children for their hearts were in the right place, but similar to both the KPD and the SPD, it was based on uncritical assumptions. The KPD had fever dreams of a worker’s revolt that would never manifest (especially in the wake of having been crushed not even two decades prior), the SPD obsessed over an electoral shift that would turn the tide and also never manifested, and the White Rose hoped to spark a mass revolt by exposing Nazi atrocities, that the average German, who they hoped was a decent person, would be incited to rebel. That was not true in Nazi Germany, as it was not true in fascist Italy, as it was not true in Francoist Spain. I’m certain it was not true in many other countries more broadly, but I would quickly find myself outside the scope of my familiarities.
Repression, for as much as people like to think it is, is never generalized. I mean the explicit forms, not the subconscious or capitalism or society or culture’s coerciveness rather than the forms of a government boot at your door. Repression is general, if we understand the threat of homelessness and being denied healthcare as a form of repression, dictating obedience to capital, but I am talking about what we commonly conceive as repression.
The average German did not experience that type of repression from Nazi Germany, neither did the average Italian or the average Spaniard. People who either did were within the targeted rhetoric, were proximity to said targets by either association or values, and maybe allies of theirs were the ones subject to repression. This doesn’t mean the average citizen wasn’t capable of being repressed or did not fall into it, but if you were a citizen in a fascist country and you were content with society, even if you had some non-threatening disagreements with the fascist overlord, you were fine.
If repression breeds resistance, it is only among those who experience repression and those whose politics would make them into allies. If we understand slavery as repression, for example, white colonialists that had no qualms with the colonial state never experienced repression in significant numbers until they actively took part in resisting it, and that is when they finally started experiencing not yet the direct forms of repression, but its peripheries, with the repression only increasing along with their own willing escalations into the fight.
Well, why then is this important? In this moment, if we are hoping the escalation of repression will breed the resistance necessary to not only combat fascism, but the capitalism that enables it, keeps it coming back, and will never let it die, we cannot assume this will lead to a mass of anything, whether it be in strike form or revolt form or what have you. We should assume that it may incite more like-minded people into action but not mistakenly factor that into how we approach these times.
We need to operate with the mindset that, even as repression enhances, we cannot rely on what we already do not have. We can only rely on what we have now or what we can anticipate in the immediate future (by immediate, I mean maybe tomorrow, and not the day after). We don’t know what will emerge from either coast, our worst and our best case scenario is a fleeting Paris Commune moment in a major city at this point, but if the crux of our theory, our strategies, and how we move materially means believing in an uncritical hope of others rising up, we are not submitting in advance, rather, we are priming ourselves for new guillotines, in whatever form they take, just as the White Rose before us.