If I am a pacifist, it is in no way inherent to my nature.
My nature is to spit at injustice, to be pugnacious in its face, and I don't find shame in that. My first thought when faced with a Fascist is what angle his head might meet the ground. My first thought with a Klansmen is how flammable his robes might be. My first thought with a Nazi is how he may look whilst crucified. And there is no shame in that, any more than there is shame in a good Christian hating the Devil, or a good Englishman hating the French. And I'll brook no shame of it from anyone, either.
But when I give it any real clarity of thought, I realize that violence is the weapon of the enemy--when I am given space to breathe, (and perhaps more level headed companionship) I realize all that has risen by the sword has been wicked beyond redemption--and the darkness which faces us is unique in that all arms brought against it will be answered a billion fold upon the lives of innocents. Much like Islamic terrorism, spilling blood only feeds the creature and makes it stronger.
This is chiefly because so petty and malicious are our opponents that a scratch upon their face will be met with the deaths of hundreds. So overwhelming their power that no number of sledgehammers or molotov cocktails will even slow their machine. So monstrously divorced from the truth their mouthpieces that a villanous stream of lies about all leftists will be spewed, and any truth we add to them will be broadcast from every possible screen.
It occurs to me, then, that the first weapons of Fascists, and of The Fascist, are hatred and lies.
The first weapons of his enemy, then, must be knowledge and compassion. The compassion's not for him, of course. He may have his intestines spooled in the gears if Big Ben, and we'll make a laugh of it. No, compassion for the sorry souls who now lay burdened with terrible fear. Compassion for those people who have suffered the yoke of oppression for decades and see the weight about to be added to it. Compassion for the poor and the downtrodden has been the namesake and defining feature of the Left for its whole existence.
That compassion, lit with righteous fury, burns bright and red in the heart of any decent Leftist. From the most moderate liberal to the most radicalized anarcho-communist, complete with firebombs and barbed-wire bats, that is what unites us. Compassion for those under the boots of Capitalism and Fascism.
But how to use these weapons of knowledge and compassion against him? The battle plan is centuries old. It toppled empires and the heads of emperors.
The Classical Liberals posited (amongst many other things) that the rights of democracy, freedom of expression, pursuit of happiness--might belong to all. We have yet to meet a world where those in power agree with this position, likely because the power of many requires these rights, the birthright of all humanity, to be sidelined, to be equivocated around, to be gently penned in where possible and squeezed by razor wire and bayonet otherwise.
Since the date these thoughts were penned it has been terribly dangerous to have them. The Right has pretended to some heritage to these ideas--poorly pretended, and with a great deal of thoughtless and foolish exceptions. Free Speech is wonderful but mustn't anger the wrong fellow or speak against power--Free Press is lovely except for that Communist rag--Free Religion is fantastic until some foreign pollutant brings in their heresy--and Free Assembly is the gift of God, to be jealously kept from the godless Left who might cause a fuss and use it to change something, to interrupt the rhythm of the machine that grinds human beings into human resources.
So it is time to seize these rights. To exercise them until they land us in prison, and then whilst in prison, and the moment we are out of prison until we are there again, and make Reds of every inmate and guard. And here is how we should do it:
We have in our government a great number of terrified bureaucrats, whom we euphemistically call "Members of Congress" and whom I uneuphemistically call "Invertebrate Slime," who think themselves as caught in the winds of change, helplessly trying to find some semblance of normality or oficiousness or authority to cling to. The Slime, dear friends, is merely frightened. It lacks direction. It lacks purpose.
We will give these invertebrates some purpose. We will threaten their power at every turn. We will march in terrible numbers on their streets. We will rage on their phones, we will arrive without notice upon their offices, we will appear at their town halls and ask them horribly unanswerable questions on sordid affairs and watch them squirm as the eyes of a damning nation glower from the other side of a million screens.
We will remind them who the power belongs to. We will take back our system. And if the day should come, friends, when The Fascist learns of the power of this scheme, and he takes these tools away from us--if his thugs make a killing field of Congress, a gallows of SCOTUS, and an empire of his office and a spy of every third neighbor...
Well, then, I will humbly admit that didn't work. And following that day, I will learn if the Klansman's robes are flammable, how cleanly a swastika tattoo may be cut from its owner, and whether a blackshirt's garb may double as a garotte.
But unless that desperate and final struggle arrives when we discard our tortured hand and draw bloody cards anew, let us use the weapons our enemy sorely lacks, by the definition of his terrible being--knowledge and compassion. For these there is no replacement.
I would like every Nazi to die. But the unfortunate nature of ideas is they may remain past the death of their owners. Killing Fascists does not kill Fascism, and killing The Fascist certainly won't. But killing Fascism, that we can do. It shrieks in the face of Truth and withers in the presence of Love. And wonder how much more tortuous than any physical pain you might imagine it would be, for the last Fascist to die not howling pain, but whimpering, in his last moments, "why didn't it work? By God, we had everything and these pinkos took the rug out from under us. How did we lose?"
And the answer, which he might read aloud and never understand, is because we gave a damn.
