“Our opponents know full well that we are entering an age of emergency, but have responded by. . . choosing to let the Earth burn. Our task is to build a wide and deep movement, as spiritual as it is political, strong enough to stop these unhinged traitors. A movement rooted in a steadfast commitment to one another, across our many differences and divides, and to this miraculous, singular planet.”
-Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor, The Rise of End Times Fascism
Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor have written a timely and important article published recently in The Guardian, The Rise of End Times Fascism. Clearly well researched, they have gone deep into what is the plan for the world of the Trumpfascists and their billionaire co-conspirators.
Two thoughts came to me as I reflected on the article. One is how much of what they say dovetails with the brilliant, satirical movie, Don’t Look Up, which ends with a rocket ship taking billionaire types and their front people in government to a supposedly safe planet light years away as a massive asteroid pulverizes the Earth because a billionaire prevented the action needed to neutralize it. Spoiler alert: it turns out that the safe planet wasn’t, which was a great ending.
The other thought was a remembrance of what I heard being said about 30 years ago by a decades-long, career military man who at the time had a high-level job at the Pentagon. In the quiet backyard of a northern Virginia house, he volunteered his belief, one clearly shared by others he worked with, that the earth’s population needed to be reduced to about ½ billion people. He was completely serious about this point of view, as if he saw himself working toward that objective.
End Times Fascism deepens our understanding of the abject depravity of those who right now have life and death power over what kind of a future humankind and many living things will experience. And they’ve chosen death or the risk of it for everything except for a very small elite which has an objective of “splintering governments and carving up the world into hyper-capitalist, democracy-free havens under the sole control of the supremely wealthy, protected by private mercenaries, serviced by AI robots and financed by cryptocurrencies.”
Klein and Taylor identify three “recent material developments” that have “accelerated” this end times, fascist effort: the climate crisis, Covid-19 and the real possibility of future pandemics, and “the rapid advancement and adoption of AI. . . All of these existential crises are layered on top of escalating tensions between nuclear-armed powers.”
Why is this happening? On a recent call a good friend of mine gave a concise, accurate answer: because their corporate-dominated and grossly unjust system is threatened by the refusal of tens of millions of us around the world to capitulate and give up. We who believe in freedom are not resting until we’ve turned this world around.
Klein and Taylor summarize the situation this way: “We must first understand this simple fact: we are up against an ideology that has given up not only on the premise and promise of liberal democracy but on the livability of our shared world—on its beauty, on its people, on our children, on other species. The forces we are up against have made peace with mass death. . . In this moment, when end times fascism is waging war on every front, new alliances are essential.”
One example of what we need is something happening in the state where I live, in New Jersey. For the last six months, since Trump’s election, an African American led, multi-racial and multi-issue coalition of almost 300 organizations has come together. Our first action was on January 18th, a Martin Luther King March for Justice and Resistance in Newark. Out of the success of that action, we initiated work which led to a hopeful, positive MLK People’s Convention attended by hundreds on April 26 which successfully adopted a comprehensive and substantive People’s Agenda putting forward solutions on a wide range of issues.
The successes of this newly-formed, statewide alliance has given us new energy to keep moving forward together, with plans developing for a series of actions into next year.
Alliance-building right now is the key, and it’s happening all over. Thousands of local, state and national groups have joined together in the HandsOff/50501/MayDayStrong network that over the last three months has mobilized millions of people in coordinated street actions in every single state in the US. These actions have strengthened the resolve of those participating and emboldened others—lawyers, judges, media figures, schools like Harvard, a wide and growing swath of US society—to resist and fight, nonviolently.
Next up for this national mass movement: June 14th, Flag Day, Trump’s birthday, the day of a Trumpfascist organized military parade of thousands of armed troops, tanks and more along Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, DC. In response, we need many millions of us to come out in actions all around the country, more than the three million who participated in Hands Off actions around the country on April 5.
Step by step, action by action, locally and nationally, we are building the progressive political force which can change this country and world. Si, se puede!
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