Don't Just Do Nothing: 20 Things You Can Do to Counter Fascism -- Yes, You! Yes, Now!
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(Intro is below)
Backing track here
It is not your responsibility to finish the work, but neither are you free to desist from it.
Pirkei Avot
As Christofascism takes the reins of US power, thereby impacting the whole of this continent and the globe, it should be abundantly clear at this point that appealing to the state---any state---is a losing strategy. The world had already lost when the "choice" this November was between two versions of fascism.
We offer up this sampler of ideas, encouraging you to think and act for yourselves, with each other, as precisely the only winning strategy. If each idea here seems not enough on its own---well, it isn't.
The Pirkei Avot quote, perhaps the most widely known and cited teaching from Jewish text, was penned some two thousand years ago. So many forms of despotism---empires, monarchies, and states---have risen and fallen in that time. We are not alone, as anarchists and Jews, in our ethical imperative to wrestle with every type of authority.
Ancestors throughout human history---people of all colors, genders, and cultures of this earth---have struggled together to resist the imposition of coercive, hierarchical violence. Crucially, people have autonomously organized, defended, and practiced myriad forms of mutual aid, collective care, and self-governance for millennia---what is often called "prefigurative politics." They haven't put off the worlds they want to see but instead have directly acted as if they were already free.
As diasporic rebels, our Jewishness teaches us to rely on solidarity beyond all borders. Our teachings compel us to lean on the community of others to live lives worth living, whether we are mourning or celebrating, or grappling time and again with what liberation should and could look like. When we start Shabbat each week---twenty-five hours of practicing "the world to come"---and end it with Havdalah---when we ease ourselves back into this brutal "world as it is"---we do so with braided offerings (bread and a candle, respectively). Such braids, in these times, underscore the imperative for interwovenness, for interrelationality, between each and every one of us, from all walks of life, who want to destroy fascism and bring about liberatory social transformations.
May all freedom-seeking peoples journey side by side toward those aspirations by better loving and caring for each other.
Here are twenty things you can do to counter fascism---yes, you! yes, now! Dream up and put into motion many, many more things too. This is only a beginning.
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This zine is a communal effort, with advice gleaned from the following Jewish anarchists: alice, asher, cat, chanaleh, cindy, cindy barukh, hannah, jhaavo, lilli, mazel, scarab, simcha, and vicky.
"Just Don't Do Nothing: 20 Things You Can Do to Counter Fascism --- Yes, You! Yes, Now" is intended as inspiration for everyone who is striving toward a world without fascism --- whether or not they're Jewish or an anarchist. Please share this zine freely and widely.
November 2024
1
Do doikayt (hereness) within your one-on-one relationships. What would it look like to check in with each of your beloveds based on your current conditions and communicate with love to each other what you envision for the world you want to build? Identify the soil amendments necessary in thought, word, and deed for those seeds to flourish.
2
Make people soup and do not stop inviting them over for soup! Be a reason for living.
