‘Zine: Fascism & Anti-Fascism: A Decolonial Perspective

By Ena͞emaehkiw Wākecānāpaew Kesīqnaeh
Originally published February 11, 2017 at www.onkwehonwerising.wordpress.com/2017/02/11/fascism-anti-fascism-a-decolonial-perspective/

Downloadable ‘zine format here. (PDF, 425kb)

Truly, there are stains that it is beyond the power of man to wipe out and that can never be fully expiated.

But let us speak about the colonized.

I see clearly what colonization has destroyed: the wonderful Indian civilizations—and neither Deterding nor Royal Dutch nor Standard Oil will ever console me for the Aztecs and the Incas.

Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism

In the wake of the election of Donald Trump to the south of the colonial border, there’s been a blooming of discussion on fascism and the necessity for anti-fascist organizing amongst various left-wing streams of thought (anarchists, Marxists, anti-racists etc.). This has only increased in the wake of his inauguration, the subsequent series of worrying (though unsurprising) executive orders that he has issued since taking the office, and the resistance that has flourished against them.

Whether or not Trump himself is a fascist is a question that’s up for debate (many who argue that he is no doubt point to claims by one of his ex-spouses that he sleeps/slept with a volume of Hitler’s speeches next to his bed). It is also arguable that several key political figures within his inner circle, such as Steve Bannon, are para-fascist. Undeniable though is that Trump and his closest advisers are right-wing national-populists, which in the context of north amerikan settler colonialism is, invariably, inseparable from white nationalism.

Likewise, it is undeniable that a number of explicitly white nationalist organizations have been highly motivated and emboldened by Trump and his broad popular support amongst amerikan settlers, across gender and class lines, who perceive amerika as having been betrayed and dirtied by immigrants, “minorities,” queers, feminists and a neoliberal capitalism that has sent industrial jobs overseas. Driven by these broad feelings of white ressentiment, and thirsting for a new frontier, these prophets of naked and proud white power, such as Richard Spencer, rallied to Trump’s campaign, and now presidency. Whether they will continue to stay in Trump’s corner though is yet to be seen.

Additionally, as I write this from kanada it would be foolhardy to believe that this country is hermetically sealed from what has been going on south of the border. Prominent figures in the race to replace Stephen Harper as the leader of the federal Conservative Party have sought to emulate Trump’s rhetoric, and have even openly called for bringing his message here. Do not forget that before Trump’s executive orders barring immigration from seven Muslim majority countries and authorizing the building of a wall on Mexican border, the late Harper administration passed the nakedly Islamophobic Zero Tolerance for Barbaric Cultural Practices Act, as well as the Anti-terrorism Act, 2015 (Bill C-51) and the Strengthening Canadian Citizenship Act (Bill C-24), two laws which have respectively strengthened the already existing kanadian police state and allowed for the stripping of kanadian citizenship from dual citizens and those with the ability to obtain dual citizenship. None of these are issues that been positively acted upon by the current Liberal Party government of Justin Trudeau.

Most strikingly, and tragically, of course, is the recent shooting at the Islamic Cultural Centre of Quebec City. This event, which cost six lives, was carried out by a French-speaking settler who openly espoused support for the right-wing national-populism and Islamophobic politics of Trump as well as Marine Le Pen in France. Many fear that acts such as this could be the tip of the iceberg, rather than some sort of isolated long-wolf type incident.

In general, while the emergence of the north amerikan far-right goes back further than Trump, and was certainly emboldened by the election of Barack Obama as the first non-white person to the office of the president, Trump’s campaign and subsequent electoral victory has undeniably led to a marked acceleration of the movement. For the time being, naked white nationalists feel that they now have one of their own in the White(st) House, or, at the very least, someone who will lend them their ear when they come calling and who’s movement they can springboard off of in order to further build their own.

I also know and want to recognize, that many people are scared as well of the current situation. As I noted in my commentary on the Trump election, my mother called me at nearly 3 in the morning to tell me that she felt like she was going to throw up in light of. Similarly, my brother, who is generally no liberal, told me that he felt as though he may have to leave his job because of the smothering atmosphere of Trumpian white nationalism in his workplace. Since the election I’ve read what seems like daily updates of the fear, depression and rage felt by many of my fellow Indigenous scholars, and many, many non-scholars, as Trump has re-activated pipeline deals, ordered the construction of a border wall to keep out our Indigenous family from south of the Rio Grande, and hung a painting of perhaps amerika’s most prolific Indian killing president, Andrew Jackson, in the Oval Office. The fears and worries being experienced and expressed by family, friends, colleagues and comrades across Turtle Islaare is palpable, and it would be cold, as well as disingenuous, for me to not give space and voice to those feelings.

Bracketing off some of these issues though, what I want to do here is to ask a basic question: what is fascism? And, more particular to what I want to say here, what does fascism mean to Indigenous people? Is it even a useful analytic category for us in light of existent settler colonialism? Also, what does anti-fascism mean to us in light of the struggle for decolonization?

Defining Fascism

So what is fascism? Open any left-wing tome and you are bound to come across one of two definitions. The first, and perhaps more common these days, views fascism as some form of particularly virulent authoritarian nationalism. Generally they attach fascism to manifestations of aggressive racism, reactionary and conservative traditionalism, anti-liberalism and anti-communism, as well as expansionist and revanchist approaches to foreign policy as part of a general movement towards the seizure of absolute political power, the elimination of opposition and the creation of a regulated economic structure to transform social relations within a modern, self-determined culture. Other essential features include a political aesthetic of romantic symbolism, mass mobilization, a positive view of violence, and promotion of masculinity, youth and charismatic leadership (Griffin and Feldman, 2004). The general historical examples of fascism, without paying much heed to unevenness between them, are the Italy of Mussolini and his Fascist Party and, of course, the National Socialist movement that seized political control of Germany in the early 1930s. Additionally they may look to Franco’s Spain, the clerical fascism of Romania under the Iron Guard and Ion Antonescu, or the various governments of Hungary in the 1930s and during the second inter-imperialist world war.

To the left of this essentially liberal-historical, though not entirely unhelpful, definition of fascism is that which is taken up by the majority of the revolutionary anti-capitalist movement, primarily by Marxists, though also by class-struggle anarchists as well. This particular definition traces itself back to the Bulgarian communist and General Secretary of the Communist International Georgi Dimitrov. Dimitrov’s famous description of fascism was of it as “the open terrorist dictatorship of the most reactionary, most chauvinistic and most imperialist elements of finance capital” (1935). While there is more that can be said about this particular formulation of fascism, its pithy nature most certainly does have a certain political appeal to it. However it also clearly lacks the degree of specificity that one might consider necessary to make it actually helpful. Additionally, though this particular definition of fascism in many ways still is the definitive, go-to, definition amongst the revolutionary anti-capitalist movement, it is not the only one.

In particular I would note Don Hammerquist’s Fascism & Anti-Fascism. In this work Hammerquist, himself an autonomist Marxist, rejects the traditional, primarily Marxist-Leninist, Dimitrov derived view of fascism as simply a tool for big business. Indeed Hammequist states that:

In opposition to this position [NB: the Dimitrov position], I think that fascism has the potential to become a mass movement with a substantial and genuine element of revolutionary anti-capitalism. Nothing but mistakes will result from treating it as “bad” capitalism—as, in the language of the Comintern (2002: 10).

Centrally Hammerquist sees the danger in a new fascism that is more independent than the classical “euro-fascism” of the 1920s, 30s and 40s, and, seemingly in contradiction with broad left opinion, more oppositional to capitalism. For Hammerquist fascism is not some blunt instrument to be used used as a prop for industrial capitalism but is, rather, a whole new form of barbarism, one that quite disconcertingly comes with mass support. Perhaps most importantly Hammerquist emphasizes the degree to which fascism has its own independent political life, and as such, while it can be influenced by the bourgeoisie, it is ultimately independent of it. For him, fascism is a form of populist right-wing revolution (Hammerquist, 2002).

Agreeing with Hammerquist in broad strokes, while also putting forth criticisms and contributions, J. Sakai calls “disastrous” the old “1920s European belief that fascism was just ‘a tool of the ruling class’” (2002: 33). Sakai also emphasizes the class composition of fascist movements, using as his primary case study the German national socialist movement, noting them as primarily formed by men of lower middle class and declassed backgrounds (2002: 34). Sakai has also made interesting contributions to the role of ecological thought, in particular blood & soil doctrine, to fascist, in particular national socialist, thinking (2007).

However, while Hammerquist and Sakai’s writings on the question of fascism provide a most interesting, and probably fruitful, avenue for discussion, they nevertheless remain a minority view within the left. As such, let us return to Dimitrov’s definition which, as was noted above, remains the most popular by those self-professing credentials as part of the revolutionary anti-capitalist movement. It is here that I wish to direct my own critique of fascist ideology, identity, and the question of resistance.

Reflecting back on the lack of specificity within Dimitrov’s formulation of fascism, let us note that others have had to delve deeper into the fascist experience to flesh it out further and to attempt to deliver a genuinely helpful analytic. In particular, political economist Zak Cope (2015), in his book Divided World Divided Class: Global Political Economy and the Stratification of Labour Under Capitalism, sums up the attempts to give more depth to the Dimitrovian analysis of fascism, and it is worth quoting him at length. He says:

Fascism is the attempt by the imperialist bourgeoisie to solidify its rule on the basis of popular middle-class support for counter-revolutionary dictatorship. Ideologically fascism is the relative admixture of authoritarianism, racism, militarism and pseudo-socialism necessary to make this bid successful. In the first place, authoritarianism justifies right-wing dictatorship aimed at robbing and repressing any and all actual or potential opponents of imperialist rule. Secondly, racism or extreme national chauvinism provides fascist rule with a pseudo-democratic facade, promising to level all distinctions of rank and class via national aggrandisement. Thirdly, militarism allows the fascist movement both to recruit déclassé ex-military and paramilitary elements to its cause and to prepare the popular conscience for the inevitable aggressive war. Finally, social-fascism offers higher wages and living standards to the national workforce at the expense of foreign and colonised workers. As such, denunciations of “unproductive” and “usurers” capital, of “bourgeois” nations (that is, the dominant imperialist nations) and of the workers’ betrayal by reformist “socialism” are part and parcel of the fascist appeal (294).

As Cope further notes, this summation is not out of line with the pre-Dimitrov (and, also, pre-Hitlerian) discussion of fascism in the Programme of the Communist International, which noted that “[T]he combination of Social Democracy, corruption and active white terror, in conjunction with extreme imperialist aggression in the sphere of foreign politics, are the charecteristic features of Fascism” (1929). However, as with most of the contemporary left, Cope essentially remains within the general contours of Dimitrov’s work, holding fascism to be an “exceptional form of the bourgeois state” (2015: 294).

Beyond the COMINTERN: Colonial Violence Turned Inwards

For the colonized, both inside and outside of north amerika, these formulations of fascism are ultimately insufficient. However, in his own reading of fascism, Cope does open up a window onto what I propose is the true heart of fascism. He says: “Geographically speaking, on its own soil fascism is imperialist repression turned inward” (294). This is an aspect of fascism which I believe is essentially missing from other definitions, from the liberal-historical to Dimitrov, to Hammequist & Sakai, from both the pithy and the detailed. In essence, following this line of reasoning, we can say that fascism is when the violence that the colonialist-imperialist nations have visited upon the world over the course of the development of the modern, parasitic capitalist world-system comes back home to visit.

This direct lineal connection from colonial violence to fascism was beautifully, if disturbingly, described by Aimé Césaire in his Discourse on Colonialism (1972), saying:

[W]e must show that each time a head is cut off or an eye put out in Vietnam and in France they accept the fact…each time a Madagascan is tortured and in France and they accept the fact, civilization acquires another dead weight, a universal regression takes place, a gangrene sets in, a center of infection begins to spread; and that at the end of all these treaties that have been violated, all these lies that have been propagated, all these punitive expeditions that have been tolerated, all these prisoners who have been tied up and “interrogated, all these patriots who have been tortured, at the end of all the racial pride that has been encouraged, all the boastfulness that has been displayed, a poison has been instilled into the veins of Europe and, slowly but surely, the continent proceeds toward savagery (13).

Regarding the shock of fascism’s recapitulation of colonialist-imperialist violence arriving on the shores of the homeland Césaire adds:

People are surprised, they become indignant. They say: “How strange! But never mind-it’s Nazism, it will, pass!” And they wait, and they hope; and they hide the truth from themselves, that it is barbarism, but the supreme barbarism, the crowning barbarism that sums up all the daily barbarisms; that it is Nazism, yes, but that before they were its victims, they were its accomplices; that they tolerated that Nazism before it was inflicted on them, that they absolved it, shut their eyes to it, legitimized it, because, until then, it had been applied only to non-European peoples; that they have cultivated that Nazism, that they are responsible for it, and that before engulfing the whole of Western, Christian civilization in its reddened waters, it oozes, seeps, and trickles from every crack (14).

So this brings me back to my secondary question, what does fascism mean to the Indigenous person? To the colonized? In particular, as Cope adds that fascism “whilst on foreign soil” is “imperialist repression employed by comprador autocracies” (2014: 294) or even Hammerquist and Sakai’s discussion of the globalization of fascism (2002; 2002)? But what does it mean for an analysis of fascism  when being on “foreign soil” is also being in its “own soil?” In other words, what, if anything, can fascism mean to those of us trapped within the belly of a violent settler colonial beast?

The Terrain below Fascism

Building on this recognition of fascism as colonial violence turned inwards, we are then immediately confronted with the truth that the terrain for even the possibility of the development of a domestic fascist movement in north amerika is a terrain—in terms of both the literal material meaning of the land, as well as less direct meanings of the psychic, political, social, cultural, ideological and economic fields—is a terrain already soaked in blood. In particular it is a terrain that is already soaked in the blood of Red and Black Peoples.

In the case of the north amerikan settler colony, the sense of exteriority inherent in Césaire’s description of the perfection of what would become fascist oppression within the deployment of colonial violence overseas becomes interior. While for Césaire and Cope the violence of fascism is brought home from the distant colonies of the metropolitan imperialist powers, in the settler colonial context this violence is one that was perfected within the exceptional state of the expansion of the frontier, the clearing and civilizing of Indigenous People to make the land ripe for settlement, and the carceral continuum that has marked Black existence on this land from chattel slavery to the modern hyperghetto.

Thus, before one can even begin a discussion of fascism (or even capitalism for that matter[i]), and the possibility of its emergence on this land, it is important to recognize that fascism in north amerika can only occur in a context always-already defined by two fundamental axes of violence: indigenous genocide and antiblackness. These two axes, while being somewhat incommensurable with one another, also overlap, and of course also intersect with the general parasitism of the imperialist countries upon the Third World and other colonized peoples worldwide. Broadly we can say though that both the psychic and material life of white north amerikan society is sutured together by anti-indigenous and antiblack solidarity and violence.

Settler Colonialism & Indigenous Genocide

Firstly, north amerika is a settler colonial estate. As noted above, this means that one of the principal features that distinguishes north amerikan settler colonialism (as well as the autralasian and israeli forms) from more traditionally theorized metropolitan, or franchise, colonialism is the fundamental drive towards the elimination of Indigenous peoples (Veracini, 2010). This is what the late theorist of settler colonialism Patrick Wolfe referred to the logic of elimination (2006). Indeed for there to even be a kanada or a united states of amerika Indigenous People must disappear in order for non-Indigenous settlers to claim rightful ownership and title over the continent. Further the logic of elimination exists in a dialectic with an extensive project of settler self-indigenization. While this process is most stark in regions such as Appalachia and Quebec (Pearson, 2013) it is pervasive across the continent.

Additionally, while much of these processes have taken place juridically, and are daily reinforced within the codes of the civil society of the white settler nation, these processes are, and always have been, drenched in literal Native blood. To define Native life under the existence of settler colonialism is to see it defined through the multiple, converging “vectors of death” arrayed against us, and our resistance to them (Churchill, 2001). All of these processes can be summed up in what Nicolas Juarez refers to as the grammars of suffering of Red life: clearing and civilization (2014). Additionally, while this violence is structural and ontological, it is also enacted in a quotidian fashion by the settler population itself. As Patrick Wolfe notes, there is, from the Indigenous perspective, a fundamental inability to separate the individual settler from the settler state, with the former being the latter’s principal agent of expansion (2016).

Antiblackness and the Continued Inheritance of Enslaveability

Along with the clearing of the continent of Indigenous Peoples, within the racial discourses of north amerika, as thinkers as diverse as Sora Han (2002), Jared Sexton (2008) and Angela Harris (2000) have noted, blackness is equated with an inherent (and inheritable) status of enslaveability, and is marked for permanent exclusion from the social fold. While, as sociologist Loïc Wacquant has pointed out, the particular manifestations of this process have evolved over time—from chattel slavery, to Jim Crow, to the ghetto to the modern hyperghetto with its accompanying carceral continuum (the ghetto to prison to ghetto circuit)—the underlying logic has remained the same (2010; 2002). Under this regime the Black body itself becomes a site of accumulation, nothing more than property, which can then be subjected to violence. This is what Sexton, Frank B. Wilderson, III (2010) and other related theorists mean when they note that the grammars of suffering for Black life are accumulation and fungibility. The enduring legacy of antiblackness is the direct line from slaveability through lynching, extrajudicial executions of Black men, modern hyperincarceration and the criminalization of Blackness. All of this is enforced is enforced and made allowable by continuous, gratuitous antiblack violence.

What is Fascism then to Red and Black People?

So what then does fascism mean to us, the colonized, the Red and Black Peoples of this land, from whom it was stolen and who were stolen to work it? What does it mean for us if Trump is indeed a fascist? A proto-fascist? A para-fascist? What does it mean to us if he is one of those things, a right-wing national-populist, or something else entirely yet facilitates their rise and their existence?

To paraphrase the African People’s Socialist Party (2015) and Jesse Nevel of the Uhuru Solidarity Movement (2016), and to ask this question more specifically, what does the potential rise of fascism in north amerika mean to Red and Black peoples who have suffered, and who continue to suffer, the hells of genocide, slavery, land theft, convict leasing, forced marches, Jim Crow, popular lynchings, public police murders, corralling and containment in reservations, ghettos and barrios, mass incarceration numbering in the millions, residential schools, economic quarantine and military occupation of our communities? What does fascist violence mean to us as peoples who already face structural processes that seek to drive us to alcoholism, drug abuse, suicide, mental illness and abject poverty, and which, in collusion with the more blatant aspects of our colonial oppression, seek to wipe out Red and Black Bodies? What does fascist violence mean to us when we already live under such states identified by Jodi Byrd (2011) as “unlivable, ungrievable conditions within the state-sponsored economies of slow death and letting die” (38).

Thus it may seem that to equate our current status with fascism is erroneous, if not outright outrageous, given what our people have already experienced, and what we continue to experience on a daily basis. Again, the African People’s Socialist Party (2015) notes “A stand that fears Trump fails to recognize that when Africans in the U.S. were subjected to public, mass lynchings, that terror was carried out by non-fascist ‘democratic’ states and ordinary white citizens.”

However, with that said, we should not ignore the potential for violence in excess of standard settler colonial operating procedure that the modern north amerikan fascist movement holds. This is seen most starkly in the Quebec City mosque shootings. While the suspect, Alexandre Bissonnette, appears to have acted alone, we must not forget that this is a city where the local Soldiers of Odin chapter has stated that is wishes to launch patrols of Islamic neighbourhoods. In general we can say that, as noted by Stephen Pearson (2017), in excess of the right-wing national-populism of Trump and his kanadian interlocutors, these forces, whether they explicitly engage in the kind of German Nazi fetishism associated with such individuals and organizations Andrew Anglin of The Daily Stormer or the National Socialist Movement, something which many people continue to stereotype as the most publicly visible mark of fascism, they all thirst for a new frontier, for recolonization, for territories, for a white homeland. In other words, they thirst for the fulfilment of the settler dream—which is a project, it is important to note, they think has failed—to be dreamt anew

And this is where we can begin to tease out a distinction between a genuine fascist movement, and the right-wing national-populism of the Trump presidency. While Trump drove home the slogan “make America great again,” it was not fundamentally premised on the idea that the amerikan project had failed. The modern north amerikan fascist movement however embraces a body politic that embodies a love for what amerika “might have been, if only.” In this sense it is a different rhetoric and politic than that of Trump. Indeed, it exceeds the standard settler colonial project of settler self-Indigenization (though, of course, they engage in this as well) by way of a complete embrace of the settler self, including all its horrors. It is a proclamation of reassertion: white power naked and with no smiling lies. It is white power that is not only unashamed, but proud (Pearson, 2017)

Ultimately, however, the issue does fold back in on itself, because the fact of the foundational anti-indigenous and antiblack violence of the north amerikan political project is ever present. The basal liberalism of north amerikan political life and civil society has always articulated a war over life and death with two fundamental aims: the elimination of Indigenous peoples and the subjugation and exclusion of Black peoples. In this regard, liberalism and fascism in north amerika are on the same ethical-political continuum, one rooted in settler colonialism and antiblackness. In this regard, from the perspective of the colonized, the distance between a Dimitrovian formulation of fascism as a tool of big business and one rooted in Hammerquist and Sakai that regards it as an altogether different social force begins to lose its importance.

And so here we return again to the question of colonial violence in the politic of fascism, because from the perspective of colonized life, whether the governing political logic of the colonial state is liberal or fascist, the fundamental warfare remains in place. The principal threat then of fascism to colonized peoples is not one that we would move from a state of having not been subjected to violence from every angle to one where we would, but rather that the pacing of the eliminative and accumulative logics of settler colonialism would be accelerated.

However, this means that in the final analysis the question being posed to Red and Black peoples by our erstwhile white left allies, who right now are sounding the anti-fascist alarm, is an impossible choice between non-fascist, nominally “democratic” colonialism, and fascist colonialism. Not only is this an impossible choice, but it is also, as I have shown, a false one, because what is fascism in the face of gruelling colonial violence without end? At best the choice lies between a slow (“democratic”) and a fast (fascist) colonialism, in which the latter would most certainly accelerate north amerika’s underlying anti-indigenous and antiblack logics. We cannot choose between “democratic” colonialism and fascist colonialism because the ultimate problem is the same: colonialism.

What is to be Done?

All of that said though, the question remains of how do we fight fascism? For myself the answer is much the same as my answer to what we must do to fight capitalism (2016), and in this regard the answer is simple: anti-fascism without decolonization, genuine decolonization, is meaningless—if you want to fight fascism, you have to decolonize. Again, to quote the African People’s Socialist Party, ” Our liberation—and that’s what we must win—will only come about by an all-out struggle to overturn the colonial relationship we have with white power” (2015).

This is a basic truth that I believe should, indeed must, be grasped by all people claiming revolutionary credentials. We must have the power to decide our own fate, and we must be independent of any need to rely on the white ruling class, the colonialist-capitalist state and its institutions of civil society. Perhaps the most basic way to say this is to say that our goal must be Red and Black Power.

Additionally, as we move towards this goal, we must resist something that has become traditional for the white left when it comes to colonized peoples, which is to attempt to set the agenda for our liberation. A principal effect of this imperialist and opportunist practice on the part of the white left is to disorient our peoples, turn us away from the struggle against the forces and structures of colonialization, and to set as the common programme for all the needs of the colonizer, over and above the needs of the colonized (African People’s Socialist Party, 2015; Ena͞emaehkiw Wākecānāpaew Kesīqnaeh, 2016).

But what does Decolonization look like? What does Red and Black Power look like? The overarching goal of course is, as the African People’s Socialist Party States, “the revolutionary overthrow of U.S. capitalist-colonialism—this includes U.S. capitalist-colonialist democracy or fascism or whatever form the colonial State assumes in imposing its illegitimate rule over our oppressed people” (2015). In particular though the programme of decolonization was broken down into three succinct aspects by Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang (2012), outlined below with a few expansions of my own:

1. The repatriation of land to sovereign Native nations; that is, all of the land, not just symbolically and without compensation for the settler population who stole it and who’s continued occupation has been to ensure that it remains stolen;
2. The abolition of slavery in its contemporary forms, including the carceral continuum of antiblackness, reparations to Afrikan people for kidnapping and stolen labour and the right to control their own communities free of military occupation;
3. The dismantling of the imperialist metropole, and an end to the parasitism of the imperialist nations upon the bodies of the colonized peoples of the Third World.

These goals are also summed up in part by Frank B. Wilderson, III who asks, and then answers:

What are the foundational questions of the ethico-political? Why are these questions so scandalous that they are rarely posed politically, intellectually, and cinematically—unless they are posed obliquely and unconsciously, as if by accident? Give Turtle Island back to the “Savage.” Give life itself back to the Slave. Two Simple sentences, fourteen simple words, and the structure of U.S. (and perhaps global) antagonisms would be dismantled (2010: 2-3)

To put it another way, and to echo the great revolutionary anti-colonial leader of Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde Amílcar Cabral (1972), while we cannot be sure that the defeat of fascism (or capitalism) alone will be enough to bring about the decolonization of Turtle Island, we can be sure that the defeat of colonialism on this land will be the final defeat of even the possibility of fascism, much less fascism itself.

Finally, all of this applies to white people as well, many of whom I know are worried, as I said before, about the possibile rise of fascism in the united states and kanada. I say to you, my white friends, coworkers and allies, that the best way for you to guarantee the defeat of fascism is to rise with us, in solidarity with us, and united with our goals for decolonization. Join us in fighting against the parasitic relationship all white people have enjoyed at our expense for 600 years. Work in solidarity to Defeat u.s., kanadian and european colonialism–in all corners of the world, from Afrika, to the Caribbean, to Afghanistan, to Palestine, to Syria, to the South China Sea, to so-called “South America” to Turtle Island–and fascism, along with all the other most vile manifestations of capitalism, will surely fall with it.

A better world awaits all of us.

Notes

[i] To be clear, as I have always tried to be on this site, I am not saying that capitalism is not problem. It most certainly is, and I believe for there to ever be any kind of development of real world wide justice then the capitalist world-system must be torn down and replaced. In this regard, despite ideological growth I retain many of my old Marxist principles, commitments and points of analysis.

[ii] While I hear quote Smith, it is not an endorsement of her, especially in light of the question that have arisen in the past few years regarding the veracity of her claims to Indigeneity.

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