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Dear Liberal Friends: you do not have the tools to fight Trump

2020-05-17
  • Milena Popova
    • 2016-11-16

    We need to have a talk, because I don’t think you have even begun to realise yet how out of your depth you are. You simply don’t have the frame of reference: you have never lived in a state that was openly, actively, viciously hostile to you, there’s nothing in your set of life experiences to date to help you process this. And that is a problem, because your cluelessness and flailing is playing into the hands of fascism and doing damage to the rest of us.

    Here are three pieces of reading for you to help you build a frame of reference:

    • Masha Gessen’s rule for surviving in an autocracy. She speaks from experience, she grew up in Putin’s Russia.
    • Here’s pookleblinky’s Twitter thread on how fascism is an exponential process.
      • Some key points: for most of its gestation time, fascism is basically invisible and seems like a joke; by the time you see the exponential ramp of its growth, it’s ubiquitous and overwhelming; you are always playing catch up – by the time you think of a strategy to deal with it, that strategy is no longer effective; the time window of effectiveness for each new strategy is shorter than the last; last time fascism reared its ugly head, it had horses and telegraphs–now it has instantaneous global communication, nukes, pervasive normalised surveillance, and biometric databases of close to the entire population.
      • I honestly don’t have a good answer for this. I can only reiterate: start working out how you’re going to keep people alive.
    • here are the 14 characteristics of fascism. Trump and those around him exhibit all 14.

    So, liberal friends. You simply do not have the tools to fight this. Hell, most of you still don’t even believe that there’s anything to fight. You’d better start believing it, and fast. By the time it gets so bad you can see it, people and communities more marginalised than you will be wiped out. So. Listen to those people, to those communities.

    Listen to those of us who have lived experience of an actively hostile state. Take your lead from us. And start figuring out how you’re going to keep us alive, because without us you’re lost.