Recipes for Disaster: an anarchist cookbook

We learned that the National Socialist Movement and the Ku Klux Klan were to hold a "white unity" rally at the state capital in few weeks. A planning group formed, which held a series of covert meetings in the days leading up to the fascist rally. Our group included people of a variety of ethnic groups, genders, sexual orientations, and body types; also, just as importantly, it consisted of a range of participants from longtime militant activists to people who didn't consider themselves political at aR. Sometimes, in their efforts to avoid alienating people, activists alienate everyone not famihar with activist protocol and procedure. We did our best to avoid this: our discussions were informal, we had no membership list, no one needed any prior knowledge of activist culture to feel welcome.

We decided we were going to do our best to prevent the rally from happening at all, or, failing that, to make it as trying as possible for the fascists and the city that was hosting them. But why, you ask?don't the fascists have the right to free speech, just like everybody else? And doesn't confronting them just make their position look more attractive? Before we proceed with the account, let's go over these questions.

First of all, for an anarchist like me, the question of "the right to free speech" is a moot point. If you don't believe that any governing power should be able to grant or take away our "rights," but instead hold that social life has to be cooperatively determined by those in the thick of it, the question is not whether someone has the "right" to do something, but whether or not what they're doing is a good, socially responsible thing. The government might grant a corporation the "right" to destroy a forest or evict people from their homes, but that wouldn't make it right for us to stand idly by while they did so. The idea that any government can dole out rights impartially is a fallacy, anyway; since those in power inevitably use that power to represent their own interests, we might as well use

whatever power we have to represent ours. Besides, the moment the Nazis and the Klan have the chance, they'll be thrilled to prevent people like you and me from exercising any so-called rights at all. Protecting their right to organize toward depriving others of rights, on the grounds that it's necessary to maintain the system of rights, is naive at best, if not outright duplicitous.

As for the "just ignore them and they'll go away" school of thought, that didn't work in Italy, Germany, or Spain a few generations back, and it hasn't worked lately in Europe either, where a powerful new fascist movement has been gaining a foothold. These fascist groups, once allowed to recruit members and get active, quickly begin targeting immigrants, radicals, and others with violence; the only solution that has worked is for activists to block their attempts to organize from the very beginning. In fact, scarcely two and a half decades earlier, a similar rally held by the same organizations in a city only an hour away from this one had ended in the murders of antifascist protesters, for which the police never found anyone guilty even though it was obvious who had committed them. Our reluctance to let this rally go unchallenged did not proceed from idle concerns.

Aside from the fascists themselves, we also had a bone to pick with the city. If they had not offered police protection, the fascists surely would not have dared show up to preach their hate and violence, for fear of a taste of their own medicine. As it turned out, the city must have spent tens of thousands of dollars, if not more, to make this rally possible. I know from plenty of experience at demonstrations that cities usually only spend that kind of money to prevent free speech. Having had some of my own attempts to exercise my "right to free speech" end in tear gas and rubber bullet attacks {which are not cheap!), I found it particularly insulting that the government saw fit to allocate so much taxpayer money to enable the fascists to recruit right on their front lawn. Couldn't that money have been better spent on education programs or social security, if it had to be spent at all? ^>^iip^"^^