Silverio Villegas González, Keith Porter Jr, Renee Good and Alex Pretti (and countless others who’s names we may never know) will not be the last people we will have to mourn, but we can take steps to prevent as many future deaths as we can, while enacting our last means of non-violent offense against the regime.
(the titles below expand if you click them).
Learn First Aid! ⛑️
As we’re seeing, deadly violence is being used against us and it will only continue. It extremely important to have the skills to be able to keep yourself and others alive if they get hurt.
Tacticool Girlfriend provides a great introduction to building a personal first aid kit, called an IFAK, which can deal with things like bullet wounds and other serious bleeding wounds. I also want to emphasize her recommendation of only buying medical gear from reputable sources (not Amazon!), such as North American Rescue to avoid fakes that could cost you your life.
But you’ll need to learn how to use that equipment, too. The best resource for that is to take a local Stop The Bleed class, which are pretty widely available in most places. They may cost a small fee, but can also sometimes be free. Alternatively, if you cannot access a local class, this video by PrepMedic will give you a solid understanding of how to use Tourniquets and Gauze for wound packing.
Injuries are less harmful if they are tended to early. Learning first aid can help conserve resources when healthcare becomes unaffordable. Having several medics in case of harm by police is an extremely powerful morale booster during a protest that may become a police riot. When you become comfortable with the basics of first aid, riot medicine is the next suggested step.
Establish or join local Mutual Aid networks ✊
If you haven’t already, get to know your neighbors. Mutual aid is a willingness to support and grow your community. This can include informal networks through friends, tenant/renter organizations, solidarity groups, and industrial unions.
These are groups using direct action to solve each other’s problems. Building strong communities makes it difficult for fascism to take root. The actions of the government are going to hit every community hard, and the ones who build trust in each other and work together are most likely to survive. We’ve been building a list of resources in [email protected] to help you on your way. Also check out this handy guide to find existing groups in your area.
This isn’t only for your own community protection. Your ability to organize today will change the political landscape tomorrow. When revolution occurs, the social organizations that show the greatest resilience through the regime are the ones typically calling the shots when the dust settles. When it comes to elections, get out the vote drives are useless if most of the voters are fascists. At some point, you have to do grassroots political education if you don’t want fascist candidates winning elections. Mutual aid networks are excellent forums not only for teaching each other good political ideas, but demonstrating them in practice.
Join a Union and Prepare for an even longer General Strike! 💪
The most effective non-violent action we can take is preparing and organizing for a General Strike.
The country would be brought to its knees if suddenly deprived of profit and labor. That tactic was extremely effective in Chile in 2019, and had they not fallen for the trick of liberal reform, they would’ve had a successful revolution on their hands with virtually no bloodshed.
If you aren’t in a union (or even if you are, it’s worth dual-carding), consider joining the IWW to unionize your workplace (bonus: you’ll get higher wages, better benefits, and more time off if you succeed!) to strengthen a general strike if we manage to enact one, as most unions have a strike fund that can supplement your income during a general strike to make it more financially bearable (you should also save as much money as you can reasonably do, so it can also be used to keep yourself afloat during a strike).
And for our international friends, you should join one as well, as fascism is gaining momentum globally. If your country isn’t listed below, just contact the IWW directly in the link above, and they’ll help you set up a new local branch.
Adopt Security Culture and Digital Camouflage 🛡️
Sometimes benign seeming efforts can turn into unexpected personal data collecting traps. Like an obscure website for exchanging contact info with other students turning into a global ad-tech surveillance network (Facebook), or innocent seeming online personality tests being use to harvest character profiles. Even Etsy, Reddit, Tinder, and Duolingo are feeding information to US Government Agencies like ICE.
Security culture is commonly used to describe the general awareness of such potential traps and how it can affect groups or entire communities. This goes beyond mere individual privacy efforts, as without joint efforts these often fail to work.
Especially in activist circles, security culture is paramount. For opsec reasons not everyone in the group might be aware of what clandestine efforts others are involved in, but with a general security culture many potential data leaks can be avoided.
Movements are made by the volume of their participants, and the easier and less dangerous it is to participate, the more people will get involved. As more people get involved, individual involvement becomes even less dangerous, creating a virtuous cycle.
We’ll start it off with some General Advice:
- Mentally wall off personal uniquely identifying info from your online presence, actively build a habit of opsec so that withholding information is your default mental state
- Be careful about who you meet online
- Use different, unrelated usernames, passwords & emails for every account. And try not to connect to those accounts with your real IP address (use Tor or a VPN)
- Be mindful that anything done online leaves a trail
- agents provocateurs may seek to find patsies willing to perform an ill-advised illegal activity in order to legitimize police repression. If someone is trying to pressure you, especially if you don’t have a long and proven history with them, be extremely wary.
For a full guide on what encrypted communications platforms to use, and how to stay off the radar, read the Digital Camouflage section within the Monthly Meta post here (you’ll need to scroll down. I’d add it here, but it won’t fit in this comment).
I’d also highly recommend anyone reading Full Spectrum Resistance if you want further info on how to resist.
Silverio Villegas González
Understand that this is not happening in a vacuum and that attempts to convert your democracy into authoritarianism are coming for you too; in the UK it’s the Reform party, and they’re using the same old tired canard of demon immigrants to gain power. Keeping authoritarianism and fascism out of your own country, wherever it may be, helps us all.
By yourself you can’t change the world (yet), but you CAN immunize yourself and prepare yourself, so that when your turn comes (may it never, but here we are) you can readily act in your own community.
First, educate yourself: get your news from multiple sources, preferably from multiple continents, so that no one voice or group of voices can manipulate your worldview. Be an armchair expert on British history basics so that you know the bullshit when you see it online. Familiarize yourself with your own constitutional rights and how they are codified, so that you know when they are in danger.
Especially, be aware that corporate-owned, centralized social media is artificially manipulated, and instead of thinking you can’t be drawn in, be aware of the power of even seeing a headline that is worded a certain way to shape how you mentally frame a subject, for example. It’s subtle but it’s real. So tread carefully, or limit your time altogether.
Understand also that over time, social media teaches us how to self-censor and encourages us to value the opinions of others as highly as our own, giving oversized power to group pushback, when in fact it’s all just an artificial space where nothing is real and our natural instincts get very blunted over time, making us ever more intellectually malleable by tiny increments. By way of strong contrast, there is an absolute amount of power inherent in speaking your own truth, uncensored, full of the passion you feel about your subject: stick to online spaces that foster this, and limit your time to whatever lets you feel healthy and whole and still participate.
Secondly, get to know your own community in person, as much as you can. Is there already some kind of protest or direct action going on near you, like an effort to clean up a local waterway or stop an unwanted corporate building project? That’s a great place to get to know people. Even just doing little things like this you learn that just showing up has so much power. Just showing up. You don’t have to save the world. You can just be one person among many, and getting to know your local neighbors and community is the way to do it.
And that’s it. That’s how you start. Educating yourself (and protecting your mind), and getting to know your own community. That is all that Minneapolis has done, but look at how well they are resisting intense provocation and bringing world censure to the wrong that is happening to their town. That’s community working together, just doing what they can do.
You’re doing both of these things, educating yourself and getting to know your neighbors, because change does not come from “speaking truth to power” or strongly worded letters; it comes from simply knowing your neighbors, and amassing with them in large groups when the time comes. If more is ever necessary, then from that place of mutual agreement the best path for that time and that place is formed, but even that all starts with knowing your neighbors and knowing a basic level of truth about whatever you’re facing. It is far, far easier to do this if you’ve already done it before, and it helps when you already know from personal relationships that what you hate for your neighborhood, your neighbors hate too.
Your power comes from being one of many. You have something you can say or do that, in combination with many others, absolutely can make it incredibly difficult for evil to win.
That’s what you’re seeing in Minnesota, and why you’re drawn to help. Ignore the people who would tell you that none of what I just wrote matters, and look instead at Minneapolis: what you’re seeing is exactly this. They learned from the George Floyd protests, got to know their neighbors, and are relying on personal networks to do everything they are doing. The media isn’t talking much about it but ICE has been having to go farther and farther into the rural areas because neighborhood networks, made of people just like you, are making it insanely difficult to get to anyone anymore, and meanwhile relentlessly documenting all their excesses. That’s what’s winning this war: just regular people, like you, like me, doing whatever little tiny thing we each can do.
Also, thank you for your kind and supportive words. Here in the US we are relentlessly firehosed with propaganda from every direction, and to stand against this horrible thing can feel very isolating and alone. When we protest, it is consistently either undercounted or ignored altogether by mainstream media. So hearing you say that you are standing with us in spirit is very heartening, and I know that you’ve protested our insane president before, in many ways and at multiple times: it really means a lot.
Apologies for the wall of text, and thank you again for caring enough to ask the question. Hope it helps.
Beautifully put!
That’s a lot, and I read all of it! Thank you so much!
To respond to just one point, being able to speak your mind on social media without getting censored, what is a place like that that exists, do you think? I switched to Lemmy a few years ago because Reddit was horrible for this, but Lemmy just seems to have its own mods and recommended beliefs (eg Marxist Leninism, anti AI, espousing violence against anyone labeled a ‘Nazi’, etc). And any place that’s apparently truly uncensored is slandered as just being where Nazis hang out, and nobody seems to really take it seriously. I would recommend only client side censorship on social media, but that doesn’t seem to exist.
And as for Reform UK, I am well aware of them. The best I can hope is that they split the right sign vote so Labour gets in - that’s what happened last election.
For myself, Lemmy (for now) is as good as it gets because no matter where you go you’ll always get people who disagree with you, but at least here it’s usually not structured, and not done to serve some third-party narrative (though we did see some of that this weekend). I take the trouble to adjust my comments to be suitable for the community I’m in, but beyond that mostly I either leave toxic threads or if it’s bad, stay offline.
It’s a fact that in online spaces, you will encounter censorship of some sort, but in the Fediverse at least you can absolutely minimize that and still express yourself freely, I think. YMMV, of course. But please note that when I speak for myself, as I have been with you, self-awareness does not equal self-censorship, and obeying the rules as posted is the trade I make for being in a tolerable online space. When it doesn’t work out that way, I leave and find somewhere else, and I recommend the same strategy to you.
Lol, too true. Remember Voat? It really was a Nazi space, among other things. But that’s the paradox of tolerance at work: any decent place is going to have some modicum of moderation (or, as some consider it, censorship), or you end up with Voat, where it really was just a cesspit.
So to me it’s not a matter of avoiding all moderation, it’s a matter of picking the instance that matches your own needs and preferences, and then – above all else – taking the time and trouble to curate your own feed, blocking communities and users that don’t suit. To me, to take your example, I don’t mind learning about other worldviews, so the Marxist/communist/anarchist doesn’t bother me at all, but if they did I’d block them.
It does take work and some maintenance, but it’s very doable, I think.
Mastodon is a Twitter alternative.
I meant more like a forum kind of thing; I’m already technically on Mastodon but that style doesn’t really engage me. Also, is it not censored just like Lemmy?
I think less so since it’s just a bunch of individual accounts.
https://ask.metafilter.com/ is from back in the day. Don’t know how active it is nowadays.