by MALIK DIAMOND
One night last August I was sitting at a table on the smoking patio of the Heart & Dagger Saloon in the Lakeshore district of Oakland, a place I fancy for the sole reason that it has a smoking patio. This was less than a month after I had returned from Sun Dance, an annual Lakota renewal ceremony that I’ve been attending for many years. After two weeks of freedom—camping in the woods, prayer songs, flesh offerings, late-night conversations by the kitchen fire, and the now-rare experience of being part of a genuine community—the visit to the saloon was my first venture into a public place other than the grocery store.
I was accompanied by a white friend of mine who I first met in 2015, during my brief career in the Non-Profit Activism Industrial Complex. He’s a writer and a historian, creator of the Cross-Cultural Solidarity project, an extensive resource for civil rights history and anti-racist activism. Upon returning from the periodic autonomous zone of ceremony, it usually takes me at least a month to re-adjust to TechnoBabylon enough to keep company with my non-Native friends. I typically spend most of that month chain-smoking and sobbing.
At some point in our conversation he was expressing to me his concern over the “increasing right-wing extremism” here in America. This prompted an epic rant from me on the subject. My rant, like so many I’ve enjoyed at the ol’ Heart & Dagger, climaxed with me standing on the table’s bench, splashing pale ale out of a pint glass, and hollering into the general vicinity of the clueless gentrifiers who were also on the patio—Look at these motherfuckers, with their pastel clothes and their goddamn spacephones! Braindead yuppie cyborgs! They don’t give a FUCK!
As you may imagine, anyone who wants to stay friends with me must have both a good sense of humor and a basic immunity to public embarrassment. Fortunately, I have an instinctual mastery of just how far I can push things before someone summons the stormtroopers.
Anyway, the crux of my rant was this: frankly, I don’t believe there’s anything extreme about “right-wing extremism.” The fascist MAGA crowd believes that they represent the True America, and in a sense I have to agree with them. This country would not exist without Native genocide, chattel slavery, oppression of women and queers, exploitation of laborers, and ecological murder. While the everyday experience of life for many in this country is indisputably multicultural and polymorphous, there is a trunk from which those branches spring: white supremacism. To believe differently is a dangerous fantasy.
I was reminded of that night’s conversation by one of author Eve Ottenberg’s recent pieces on Counterpunch. In it, she defines fascism as consisting of “corporate control of government, [and] persecution of leftists, non-Christians, and trade unionists.” I wish to perform a bit of savage exegesis on this definition, in order to illuminate what I see as a planet-sized blind spot in most (white) leftist thought regarding the nature of the anti-life machine we call Civilization.
Fascism and Civilization are two things that differ only in degree; they do not differ in kind. Any critique of the evils of fascism is equally true of Civilization itself, if one is willing look past its distractions. Liberal Democracy™, the rapid disintegration of which so many leftish writers have been lamenting, is nothing but a minor and temporary skin rash on the inherently authoritarian body of Civilization. Fascism, which The Left™ claims to oppose, is just an old-fashioned tyrant with stock options instead of a gilded chariot.
Corporate control of government
Counterpunch for more