The Fascist Solution

Thinking back, the debates over whether Trump was a fascist feel quaint. The whole world is now operating under the principles of fascist crisis management: industrial scale murder; war and genocide.

The situation in Gaza gets worse and worse, with Israel today claiming that Al-Shifa hospital, the largest and one of the last functioning hospitals in the strip, is the “Pentagon of Hamas”, the center of Hamas operations. The compound currently houses 50,000 refugees and thousands of patients and medical staff. Israel’s “evidence” is a 3D rendering of tunnels that they claim run under the hospital.

Armenian refugees continue to pour out of Nagorno-Karabakh, with the total reaching about 120,000 refugees overwhelmingly in Armenia, a country of only 2.8 million. And as they face the harsh winter, global support and attention has largely dried up. Azerbaijan’s fascist leaders loudly considers continuing into Armenian territory.

Turkish drone attacks in Rojava have killed over 60 people, as Erdogan’s tradition of murdering Kurds and destroying their infrastructure at the beggining of winter happens for a fourth year. The attacks have destroyed fuel and energy infrastructure for 2 million in the autonomous region, who like the refugees in Armenia face a cold, resourceless winter. And the resulting destabilization of Rojavan militia forces has lead to a severe uptick in ISIS action in the region, as fascist islamists use the chaos provided by their fascist ally in Istanbul to regain a foothold.

The stalemate in Ukraine has seen Russia more and more frequently attacking “soft” civilian targets in cities, and life during wartime bombardment has become the norm. Putin murders his internal enemies, and more and more weapons pour into the region. In a story that has been largely ignored in the west, which hopefully we wont come to see as an oversight, tensions grow in the South China Sea after a collision between Chinese and Filipino ships in contested shipping lanes. US and Australian leaders have voiced their unequivocal support for fascist fail-son Bongbong Marcos in a potential war against fascist CCP heads looking to distract from the collapse of their construction boom. US and Chinese fighter jets buzz each other, and both sides pound their chests.

A fascist landlord in Chicago killed a Palestinian child, a fascist mass murderer killed 16 in Lewiston ME and has much of the state in lockdown, and fascist attacks on border volunteers and migrants continue to escalate the “border crisis”. The crisis, which does not reflect an actual increase in migrant numbers, currently sees hundreds upon hundreds of refugees trapped in an open air holding cell/prison/concentration camp between border fences in San Diego/Tijuana, who are surviving thanks to the mutual aid delivery of objects small enough to fit through the chainlink. An election denier has taken the speakership of the house, as the slow moving Republican coup rolls on, looking to install Trump as dictator for life, while Biden’s genocide denial in Israel has not repaired his plummeting approval ratings, sowing the ground for a Trump electoral victory, which he might take from behind bars.

Somewhere in the background the stock market swings violently, week on week changing from solid gains to massive losses, indicating the possible generalization of the crisis that wiped out SVB, Silvergate, First Republic, Signature and Credit Suisse in March.

And through all of it a pandemic rages on, almost entirely unchecked now, which everyone agrees we should just shut up about. The grief and horror, unprocessed and unspoken, from the mass death and transformation wrought by the pandemic has created a popular base for fascist politics around the world, as the emergence of covid-denialist conspiracies symptomatically demonstrate. This response to COVID is also a clear sign of how this system will respond to climate change—with denial, death, and war.

History has woken up and chosen violence. The wars, coups and genocides of the last few years are inseparable from the destabilization of the pandemic, are ineluctably tied up in the politics of climate change denial and settler colonial apocalypse. When faced with a crisis it doesn’t know how to solve, the capitalist world resorts to its base political tactic, destruction, and while out-fascists like Modi, Orban, Netenyahu and Meloni are terrifying, liberal politicians like Biden, Amlo and Trudeau seem no less willing to go along with these politics of fascist acceleration.

But the 2010s were also a decade of mass resistance, of revolutionary upheaval, mass education, transformation and organization. From Arab Spring to the George Floyd uprising, we lived through and fought in a decade of the most significant global proletarian struggle in a long long time. And while we may not have many victories to show for it, we also have few of the devestating betrayals by our putative leaders that marked so much resistance in the 20th century.

In the midst of the most extreme violence of the decade—in the rubble of the Syrian Civil War, the shadow of the Iraqi Occupation and the meteoric emergence of ISIL, people in Kurdistan fought back against the fascist threat, and built an automous liberated space on the principles of feminist equality and confederalist self-governance. Much like the Zapatista struggle that emerged from within the chaos of NAFTA, Rojava persists today, despite the constant hostility of fascist neighbors.

These projects are not perfect models, they are not simply replicable nor is their replication desirable. They are no USSR, thank god, whose mode of revolution was exported on an industrial scale, creating a new bloc of states that served to prepare the third world for capitalist markets in the name of socialist development. But Rojava’s persistence shows that in the face of war, of fascism, of forces so large and beyond our control that they seem insuperable, normal people can get together, fight back, win, and build a better world.

We stand at the abyss of economic catastrophe, global war, climate collapse and fascist domination. Rather than stare down over the edge, look up, look at the people beside you, take their hands, count to three, turn around and pull.