Bill Ayers

There’s a lot of talk about fascism now, the fascist core of the far right which is currently led by Trump but which has a long, deep history. We wonder: is fascism here? is it likely to come here? is this like Germany in the 30’s?

I’d like to offer a different thought on it, a different definition of fascism. That is this: fascism is colonial methods brought home to the “mother country.” Italy and Germany had been happily slaughtering colonial peoples in Africa for decades before they began the mass bloodletting inside of Europe.

To worry about fascism, that we “might” be getting fascism, is to ignore the fascist (authoritarian, genocidal) experience of people in the colonies since. . . . since forever. Why not call what Indigenous people have experienced fascism? Why not the enslavement and ongoing murder and oppression of Africans? We worry that there “might be” some fascism in the coming years but what are Black and Brown people experiencing in prison today, in a prison population that has increased ten-fold since the 60’s? Do they join us in wondering, “is fascism coming?” They are living it (and came to it under mass incarceration initiatives by Democrats like President Clinton and Biden during his Senate years, as well as mayors like Eric Adams).

Do the people of Palestine worry about fascism coming? They are living under it, the fire and steel of mass slaughter, today.

If you think of the US not as the immediate borders of the continental US but rather as the extended American empire, then the people of Chile under Pinochet experienced fascism, and that was US-sponsored fascism, even as some trappings of democracy were presented inside the US. Not only Chile, but all over Latin America as well as Africa and Asia, what we call fascism is well practiced.

So will “we” get fascism? I dearly hope not. But let’s not pretend it is some distant thing. And let’s be as determined to end the fascist oppression of colonized peoples as we are for ourselves.