Trump Opponents Fight Like They’re Facing 1968 Nixon When They’re Dealing With 1934 Hitler — Why the Civil Uprising As It’s Conceived Now Is a Huge Mistake.
Lessons from a Reluctant Activist
I imagine some Americans are feeling pretty good about their little Spartacus moment in anti-Trump demonstrations across the U.S. last weekend. No one likes someone to rain on their parade, or in this case, march. But I have to — because the strategy being advanced is terribly, horribly wrong, and it’s going to end in mass arrests, more deportations, more brazen displays of fascism. Probably not right away, but soon.
Sorry, but these demonstrations do not accomplish one damn thing.
I know this because I’ve been doing some advocacy work over an African country.
Ding! There it is. The reflexive double-take, dismissive breath or eye-roll. Let me guess: many readers will automatically want to tell me, Hey, pal, the U.S. is not Africa. Even leftists and liberals are not immune from that nice, warm security blanket of American exceptionalism — which was always made out of tissue paper.
Here’s the deal. Trump rode into office on a wave of populist support, but his administration ignores the rule of law, punishes institutions that disagree with him and is conducting mass illegal deportations while his acolyte thugs go on the attack against everyone from university professors to clergy.
In Ethiopia, Abiy Ahmed rode into office on a wave of populist support, but his administration ignores the rule of law, punishes institutions that disagree with him, and instead of demonizing “migrants,” his regime picks on ethnic groups such as the Amhara, Gurage and Afar. His acolyte thugs — with many shills on social media — attack everyone from journalists to university professors to Ethiopian Orthodox clergy. A drone strike recently killed 120 people preparing to mark Easter, and I bet most of you have heard nothing about that.
Because the situation is very complicated, and Western media doesn’t want you to know more.
We can talk about Ethiopia another day, but you can take my word for it that much of Big Media will complacently, stupidly not bother to report in great detail on what is unfolding in America either. And by the time they grow a spine, it may be too late. It’s up to you who live in the States, but those leading the charge are going about it all wrong.
Last week, Robert Reich — and I like Robert Reich a lot — started his address to a rally at the University of Berkeley by invoking the Free Speech movement of the 1960s, and I thought, Oh, Jeezus. Then he endorsed a suggestion by the New York Times’ David Brooks, who bleated in a cliché-ridden hack job of a column that “What is happening now is not normal politics.” You see, Brooks called for a nonviolent civil uprising.
Sorry, not sorry. This is the chicken-shit response to fascism. And it could get you killed. Or in prison.
You’re not dealing with 1964 Lyndon Johnson or 1968 Richard Nixon. You are dealing with an American cocktail of 1934 Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler.
It’s astonishing to me that more historians don’t cite the “Duce” because all the economic incompetence, the obtuse publicity stunts — that’s the Mussolini playbook. Demonization of minorities, the call to export people — not deport, export as if they were things — that’s also Mussolini but more so Hitler, of course.
Brooks cited a book, Why Civil Resistance Works by Erica Chenoweth and Maria J. Stephan to make his case, telling us that the authors “looked at hundreds of nonviolent uprisings.”
The problem is this is a lousy book. Brooks doesn’t bother to tells us that it’s badly outdated (published in 2011) — especially given how internet and digital architecture is so different today — and sure, the authors may have studied “hundreds” of uprisings, but they don’t give us hundreds of uprisings to consider. They give us four, and they’re weird choices at that, such as the 1979 revolution in Iran (which ended in Islamic misogynistic zealots running the show), the first Palestinian Intifada (hardly a success story, given what happened to the Palestinian people both then and now) and the attempted uprising in Burma in 1988, which they concede was a failure.
And it’s worth pointing out that a younger generation of Burmese, impatient with the old methods that had little to show for results, turned to armed resistance. The country is embroiled in a civil war that may be chaotic but it’s at least given the Tatmadaw the greatest challenge it’s had in sixty plus years.
Lesson 1: Nonviolence only works in one political scenario
Get it through your heads. And absorb this now. Nonviolent protest only works on an enemy that feels shame. The British in India felt shame. They felt their prestige suffer immensely, they saw how their hypocrisy was being outed, and that they couldn’t pretend to be these upholders of law and order and civilization.
But the Fascists of Spain and Italy and the German Nazis felt no shame. They didn’t have to deal with coordinated international pressure. Similarly, Abiy Ahmed’s regime faced absolutely no rebuke from the Biden White House as massacre after massacre was committed in Ethiopia against Amhara, and those of us who lobbied and shouted at the top of our lungs for some kind of action got nowhere with the Democrats. The new administration has been no better. Trump likes dictators and thinks African nations are “shithole countries.” So, do you really think he’s going to listen to his own fellow citizens because they pour into the streets?
The British quit India when it had to face the fact that it was the bully. But Trump, Musk, Stephen Miller, et al. revel in being the bully. You cannot adopt the old tactic of Martin Luther King that “we’ll fill up your jails” because in this modern era, that won’t work anymore. Not when Trump is willing to dump your ass in a country where you may not even speak the language.
Lesson 2: A protest is not the goal — it’s a tactic that’s supposed to reach a goal
For four years, I watched Ethiopian diaspora communities organize marches, many outside the White House, to protest the persecution of the Amhara people.
Absolutely nothing changed. Part of that had to do with the attitudes of Big Media, which I’ll discuss later, but the point is that organizers refused and still refuse to adapt and learn.
A protest is by its very nature, performance art. You want to be seen and heard. You want media coverage to spread your message.
But the attention is supposed to be a means to an end, not the end in itself.
If you can’t get in the door with legislators to persuade them one on one, or the media coverage doesn’t turn into consistent political pressure to make new decisions, your protest doesn’t do much.
This is why leftists will hate it, but I will point out here that Occupy Wall Street was a complete failure. It achieved nothing. The Adbusters magazine inadvertently exposed the underlying narcissism of the effort by famously asking, “Are you ready for a Tahrir moment?” — referencing the protests going on in Cairo’s Tahrir Square back in 2011. I found it nauseating to watch participants pat themselves on the back, to see self-congratulatory, smug books come out that commemorated this party disguised as a protest. Organizers can’t point to their efforts directly leading to a single piece of progressive legislation — not one.
But the lessons haven’t been learned. Organizers for the multiple anti-Trump protests last weekend did the same thing as the Occupy Wall Street protesters. They rattled off a shopping list, shorter than Occupy but still muddled. They told CNN they had three demands: “an end to the billionaire takeover and rampant corruption of the Trump administration; an end to slashing federal funds for Medicaid, Social Security, and other programs working people rely on; and an end to the attacks on immigrants, trans people, and other communities.”
Notice that in these demands, there is nothing of substance for how the government should respond. How does one “end a billionaire takeover” exactly? What are the concrete steps for “ending the attacks on immigrants, trans people, and other communities (tell us which ones)?” Does this mean reorganizing, dismantling, defunding ICE? Does this mean restoring funding to universities? What?
I want to be fair, but as I scrolled through the Toolkit that was prepared for protest “hosts,” I noticed everything was about the protests with no specific steps that were agreed upon for action, and worse, its approach to media handling was pitifully amateurish. There is virtually nothing about following up with media… yet you are told to “post your stories and videos online.”
Yes, these protests were covered by the BBC, CNN, Associated Press, The Guardian… Wonderful. What actually got accomplished? I mean in a tangible sense.
I checked the Sunday evening broadcasts of the big three — ABC, CBS, NBC — and I didn’t see Trump White House staffers cowering. In fact, CBS only referenced the protests the next day in a single line for another story. There was no momentum.
Because the lessons haven’t been learned! It sounds harsh and dismissive, but the blunt truth is that many folks showing up for protests are treating these events as if they’re going to a concert. “I’ve been to three of the Santa Rosa protests and they were wonderful,” someone named Bev told The Borowitz Report. “Like a big party of kind people who care about our democracy. Beautiful music, beautiful signs, beautiful smiles.”
I have no doubt these folks sincerely care about their democracy, but this attitude plays right into the Trump regime’s hands. The whole weekend warrior, I can come and go as I please, and that showing up is doing the job. Sorry, this is asinine.
Notice that when huge rallies and protests happen in places like Istanbul, there’s only one main goal — in Turkey’s case back in March, to free from jail a key rival of Recep Erdogan, the city’s mayor. No laundry list of objectives, just one thing that everyone could wrap their head around. Hundreds of thousands hit the streets for something specific that mattered to them.
Surprise! The government didn’t care. Trials have started for about 200 arrested protesters, some of whom could face up to five years in prison.
Because a fascist regime doesn’t care about your show of solidarity and your numbers. If it cared about numbers, it wouldn’t be a fascist regime in the first place, with a cult around one lunatic.
Which is why protest movements in other countries like Turkey and Iran coordinate their rallies with other tactics and gestures to resist. They don’t bet everything on one shot. When they hit the streets, they do it as a show of strength, knowing that some of their individual activists and organizers could wind up in cells, but it doesn’t end there, it’s part of a whole organized campaign that has several pieces to it. And I doubt very much there’s a “weekend party” atmosphere at these events. These folks are fighting for their lives, their future.
And this brings us to one of the most important aspects of this struggle.
Lesson 3: Most Americans have no “lived experience” with fascism so they don’t know how to fight fascism
Please spare me any reflexive defensiveness that you really do. Most of you don’t. We can debate the history and how there were periods in American history with authoritarian actions, such as Lincoln suspending habeas corpus, and okay, your great grandfather escaped out of Holland from the Nazis, and you heard his stories, but that’s not you.
Unless you are George Takei or another Japanese American who got tossed into a concentration camp under the Alien Enemies Act, you don’t know firsthand what real institutionalized fascism is in America. (Yes, I concede that many elements of American society have been fascist in nature, because I can already hear the leftist quibbles, but the sad reality is that the majority were happy to support such measures and enjoyed their voting rights).
Unless you are an immigrant from an eastern European nation or Turkey or Iran or some other country with a repressive regime, you don’t know. The majority of white Americans simply don’t know.
Even if you as a white Westerner have stood in a newsroom in Yangon like I once did, decades ago, and watched a young reporter come back traumatized because one of the Burmese generals threatened her, laughing as he did it, you barely have a sense of what fascism on a daily basis feels like.
This is why demonstrators last weekend had to invoke Paul Revere and all the other baggage from the American Revolution. Blame it on me being a Canadian, but I find it rather silly because dredging up this old fife and drum stuff does not help you — you’re not fighting Redcoats. You’re fighting one of your own. So yes, the “No Kings” slogan works, but most Americans don’t understand the fight they’re in.
And I am warning you now, giving it to you straight, that as impressive as the protests were, a general strike will be an embarrassing clusterfuck.
A general strike relies on mass participation and discipline, and if the U.S. election proved anything, it’s that no, you’re not united right now, you’re not disciplined at the moment. And this tactic cuts both ways — not showing up for work or not purchasing goods puts a tremendous strain on people.
Sure, it can work in certain contexts. Gandhi used it to marvelous effect against the British, but the Indians were dealing with a colonial foreign oppressor, while — as despicable as Trump is — the oppressor in this case still enjoys widespread popularity.
The Wobblies of the early 20th century in the United States — “One Big Union” that evolved into an anarchist movement working for revolution — tried this stunt. Several times. Their attempts at big-scale general strikes all fizzled, and for that very reason, because most Americans were at heart still on the side of the traditional political barons.
Lesson 4: Big Media is a tool, it’s not your friend
I could write a book — and I did — on how Big Media like the BBC, Associated Press, and CNN lied about a war in Ethiopia and got away with it. And they’re still doing it.
Major media operations often take a collective position that skews coverage. It’s why Americans couldn’t learn about the famine in Ukraine under Stalin from the New York Times, and why a bunch of idiot correspondents let themselves get suckered by a North Vietnamese spy during the Vietnam War (yes, I’m writing a book about journalism’s dirty little secrets and sins, too.)
My point is that the media approaches any protest movement as a story to sell. It doesn’t care about your cause, your life, your kids’ future, your effort to save your democracy. It wants clicks, views, ratings. Most media is a business. When the Trump goons banned the Associated Press from White House briefings (and still do, despite a court order), the sensible, ethical thing for the rest of the press corps to do, if only for self-preservation, would have been to walk out en masse. It didn’t. With a Seinfeld-like shrug of “What a shame,” it watched its colleagues get the bum rush and went back to listening to White House Barbie.
It’s one of the greatest displays of cowardice in American journalism. Ever. Guess what? They’ll do it to you.
Because editors with the morals and spine of a limpet will chant the “objectivity” dogma and claim “both sides have to be covered.” So, yes, you might get a few stories about the heroic solidarity of a general strike effort, but they will also rush to quote folks laid off from that grocery chain you’ve boycotted or they’ll interview that union official — who’s already on record as supporting Trump’s tariffs — because surely he’s plugged into what working people think, right?
And it will be carefully implied how your protest blocking the factory doors is hurting innocents just minding their own business.
Media is a business. Media didn’t give a damn about Palestinians until it was bad for business to ignore them. Until the rubble of Gaza and the tableau of bloody bodies proved so horrific and media monitors caught onto their “passive writing” tricks that they had to change their coverage. But only so far.
This is the same media, kids. It’s the same big media that peddled a story that activists at Columbia University were supposedly terrorizing a campus with bicycle locks. In Nazi Germany, the foreign press corps was mostly evicted. The Associated Press was allowed to stay behind, and believe me, its conduct is far from admirable.
Trump’s regime will eventually step up its thinning of the news herd and try to revoke broadcast licenses and impose censorship, which means that protests are living on borrowed time in terms of coverage. If you keep planning on marches with all things staying equal, I have to say you’re delusional. Use these outlets while you can. but prepare now for the worst.
There are more sophisticated ways I can discuss about how to get the best out of news operations, but I’ll save that for another article or maybe even just for organizers who reach out to me.
Just remember, coverage is only supposed to be a means to an end. What you really want to accomplish is change.
That means that organizers — and let’s call them what they’ll have to evolve into, Resistance fighters — must start cultivating more media contacts and government legislative networks in Europe, the last place where political pressure might have an effect on Trump. Nothing is guaranteed, but I recommend getting started.
Lesson 5: You have to get mean.
Nonviolent protest suggests that when the enemy finally sees the light, there can be reconciliation. That’s the whole reason for not physically attacking them. But there is no gentle persuasion with an enemy trying to exterminate you. Make no mistake: if you’re an American, your future under Trump is to be either a docile consumer or a demonized felon — but either way, you will be an inmate.
So, it’s time to truly educate yourself about Resistance, and history is your best tool, your secret ally. The one great advantage you have is that Fascists by nature don’t read, and they often employ idiots who don’t bother to read. If they did, they’d know this:
The unsettling truth is that Resistance movements during World War Two most often didn’t start as mass uprisings or even enjoyed much popular support when they began. They started with a small, core group of dedicated individuals who knew they might even be turned in by their fellow citizens. The French were occupied for about a year before anyone took a bold step to openly fight back. Their first powerful strike was to shoot a German naval officer in the Paris Metro.
If you want to put things in more practical terms for the immediate future, here they are. Mass rallies and protests may go ahead in the next few months. But eventually the Trump regime will get tired of these protests, and they will use brutality. And that will mean media attention but won’t change a damn thing. Because Trump Nazis will call you “nasty, bad people” anyway, spin that lie on Fox and Newsmax, and then in a few hours use facial recognition software and other means to round you up. Think you’re special as an American? Ask a Turkish demonstrator or a young Iranian activist. A police club feels exactly the same.
There is only way to fight fascism, and that is with imaginative methods of sabotage, disruption and yes, violence that’s carefully coordinated to do the least harm to innocent civilians. But violence does not always mean resorting to guns. And for those who tiresomely whine about nonviolence, I would like to know what they’ll do when confronted by state violence. Stand by and watch their neighbor taken away and then write a “stern” letter to the New York Times? How brave of you.
Notice, too, there’s often a serious disconnect in values; the same liberals and leftists who don’t want to see people resort to violence in Chicago and Minneapolis know that Ukrainians have no choice. Do these folks expect the Burmese to win against the Tatmadaw with harsh language?
Those who push nonviolence live in a dream world where they expect confrontation will be minimal, and they can go home after their protest that had “beautiful music.” At heart, they’re not willing to sacrifice anything but a Saturday afternoon out in the sunshine. Well, Turks, Iranians, Burmese, Ethiopians and others all know freedom isn’t gained like that.
It’s not even a case of advocating violence as a recognition that it will be inevitable. Because how long will you let those ICE Gestapo drag people away, screaming in confusion and fear? Confrontations will be necessary, but they don’t always have to be public, and they should be done in a surgical strike way that again serves a specific goal, even if that goal is to save a single life from the horrors of a foreign prison.
So, Be smarter. In Iran, protesters have long had to get creative. From putting dumpster bins in the way of security vehicles to knocking off clerics’ turbans in the street, they figured out ways to make the regime uncomfortable, even fearful of their power.
There is a way out of this darkness, but I guarantee you it won’t be through “a big party of kind people.” It’ll be thanks to those with courage and vision and most importantly, the fortitude to see the effort through to its proper conclusion.
