The horror of nazis marching in your hometown is greater than just “Nazis!
”. It’s knowing that spaces that you identify with don’t actually belong to you in any concrete way. They aren’t magically safe just because of familiarity. Psychological horror is about your mind betraying you. Body horror is about your body betraying you. Cosmic horror is about God betraying you. Nazi horror is about your home betraying you.
There were good parts of the experience, though. Most of the experience was just waiting. Four hours of waiting. Even next to that horror, people found each other in the boredom and talked. I met up with some college boys who gave me a shield and engaged with me in some drills. Someone handed out free ice-cream. Someone had dressed the pioneer statues up with black and red bandanas and black and red flags. It was the first time that I had gotten to talk with a great mass of other radicals.
I saw some action
It wasn’t all waiting, though. It was fantastic, though I shan’t be saying more about it here. That counter-protest got kettled at the end. I wasn’t there for that. I left barely 15 minutes before that because I’d been watching the police redo their formations for another 15 minutes before that. I’d gotten my hits in already, after all. They said on the news, later, that someone had thrown something; as though that worked as a proportionate response, even if it were true.
Though it wasn’t obvious to me at the time, the big difference between this experience punching nazis and more conventional forms of activism was that there didn’t appear to be any meetings. There were no purity tests. There wasn’t a massive time commitment, or the requirement to be friends with a bunch of overly earnest hipsters with unfathomably twee personal views. When someone at an antifascist rally decides to start ranting at me about the need for “balance between the sacred masculine and sacred feminine,” I don’t stand there and awkwardly listen to them be crazy at me. I just walk away. Of course, if you want to get serious about punching nazis, it becomes nothing but meetings and training and forming weird cliques where you have to bow to idiots with lots of social capital. But at the lower level, the level that almost everyone starts at, that just isn’t a thing. You show up, you make your own ent, and you hold your own beliefs.
This sort of radicalization could never be performed in the careful and measured way that Gillis is nostalgic for, where a small group of local activists would involve recruits in their daily practices and let them learn through doing. Gillis brought this up in a recent twitter thread . To summarize, his fear is that internet radicalization has brought a number of horrible, previously fringe, of anarchism. I think that this is true for the internet left, sure. But people involved in actual anarchism tend to be less dogmatically ideological and to have better ideas. They tend to be less opposed to markets, less interested in working with tankies, less interested in pseudo-vanguardism, less interested in “left”-nationalism.
And when the people in the streets start to stick around and form or join institutions, they definitely matter
The old way of doing things that Gillis promotes certainly avoids these excesses of authoritarianism, nationalism, and marxism as well. But it could never have created crowds of thousands or a new, mass movement. Mass movements in the streets are composed of everyday people who are standing up for sexy girls dating Salvador themselves. Everyday people are not going to have read all of the same theory that you, personally, like. Crowds of supposed radicals online are composed of everyday people, except they’re not even necessarily willing to go out into the streets. They’re just willing to sit there, talking, online. When they go out into the streets, they start to maybe matter. So: don’t worry about the internet left. They’ll sort themselves out or go away.
