Premature Antifascism Redux

The DTRPG thing that happened a few weeks ago has since sunk beneath newer waves of controversy and internet turmoil and far-right activist chicanery, but I keep thinking about it. It touched a nerve with me, obviously, provoking me to bleat (or skeet, if you insist, you degenerates) more in one thread than I think I'd done in all my prior days on Bluesky. I've since lapsed back into relative social-media quietude, but I keep thinking about punching Nazis (and being told not to).

As I said then, I don't think it's crazy for small businesses to err on the side of caution in cases like this (I'm also sympathetic to itch.io in their recent mess; of course they could have communicated better and more promptly, but when somebody threatens essentially to cut off your revenue entirely, what can you do?). It is plausible, in these benighted times, that you might be brought up on terrorism charges, or God knows what else, for having committed (or abetted, or financially benefited from) “hate crimes against Republicans,” never mind that they aren't in any sense a protected class. Hate crimes against Christians, maybe. Against white people. Who knows!

At any rate, I stand by the rest of what I said too. DTRPG's defense of their actions was weaselly and dishonest, pretending that the preface to Rebel Scum was far more violent and inflammatory than it actually was. “We didn't want to get sued or prosecuted for hate crimes,” unfortunately, would be a valid position; these are bad times. But pretending that the whole thing was obviously dangerous and unhinged and beyond the pale sidestepped the real question. Another comprehensible response might be “We personally thought that the level of vitriol in this material was more than we were comfortable with.” Hard to argue with a personal opinion, right? And I'd rather have seen that answer than a dishonest one. I still wouldn't have liked it, though.

The crux of the issue, and the question they dodged: Is it time to take a stand against fascism, and if so, what does that look like? If not, when is the right time? Does it ever come? (The corollary, of course: Can you talk about it on the internet? Hopefully, yes, as long as you keep everything vague and hypothetical.)

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It's easy for me, a semi-anonymous schmuck with a blog that 40 people read, to call for people to be ready to man the barricades. People whose livelihoods depend on selling stuff from their small-business storefront? I understand why they'd prefer to keep a lower profile. But I think there's a broader cultural phenomenon at play here, something that's not easy to grapple with.

If you’re anything like me (i.e., the kind of nerd who’s been fascinated by the Spanish Civil War since he was a child), you are surely familiar with the concept of “premature antifascism.” In case you're not, though: American leftists who had gone to Spain to fight for the democratically elected government between 1936 and 1939 got tagged with this label even as, during the Second World War, leftism and antifascism were partially rehabilitated. The Soviet Union was an American ally and we briefly thought—or asserted to the public, at any rate—that communism was A-OK after all. But we still didn't trust people who'd been sympathetic to communism even back when the mainstream of American opinion leaned more toward sympathy with fascism and Nazism.

Somebody whose principles or internationalist political allegiances are stronger than his conformism and willingness to just do whatever his government tells him, right or wrong, is a problem. Somebody willing to break the law, whether for the purposes of revolutionary terrorism or good old American nonviolent civil disobedience, is a problem.

To wit: If you could go back in time and kill Hitler, when would be appropriate? We have the old “would you kill baby Hitler?” conundrum, of course. Nobody could believe how dangerous this baby would become; you'd be seen as a monster. But forget baby Hitler. What's the youngest adult Hitler you could step out of a time machine to bump off and not be tarred as a cold-blooded killer and commie terrorist? In 1940, sure, you'd be a hero—if you could get away alive. Even just two years earlier, though, in 1938, you'd be a much more ambivalent figure. Maybe it was for the best, people would say, but assassination? How uncivilized. What about 1933? What about 1928? You'd hang, of course.

We can't really talk about political violence, of course. I'm not going to propose that anybody break the law, and I'm certainly not going to propose that anybody do harm to anybody else. But we can at least talk about how we find ourselves in a cultural moment that demands ideological purity in art, but excuses the gravest moral cowardice in our real-world politics. And I don't mean the way we self-interestedly tiptoe around these real-world questions (and delist shit we might get sued or deplatformed over). I mean the way our ostensible opposition party dismisses everything the government does as a “distraction” while taking no action, the way our supposedly liberal media flatter our would-be dictator and downplay the enormity of his actions.

Meanwhile, art that asks people to sympathize with or identify with people who are morally compromised or who have done, or are planning to do, terrible things has never been met with more discomfort, even outright hostility. Each of us wants to believe that we're pure and good and uncompromised and would never countenance doing awful things nor admit any kind of ambivalence about the cause of righteousness. And yet here we are, watching the country sink into Nazism, and our resistance is haphazard, bewildered, ambivalent. Many people—many of the same people who want our movies, our games, our literature to outline a black and white morality, to present only flawless, pure-of-heart protagonists, are also dismayed that fascist politicians should be harassed in public or that awards shows taking blood money from war criminals should meet mild, measured censure.

“Games about punching Nazis are good, but when you start to talk about punching Nazis in real life, you've crossed a line” is a morally deranged position. In make believe, we should be comfortable trying on all sorts of positions (we murder and steal on the regular, in TTRPGs). It's in real life that we need to draw a line.