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
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.