Scenes outside the white supremacist terrorist attack in Christchurch, New Zealand.

The American Party of Labor sends its firmest solidarity and support to the families of the victims of the fascist massacre at Christchurch, New Zealand, to those wounded, to those survivors suffering with the horrific events, and to all Muslims around the world living in the shadow of fascist Islamophobia.

In this era of escalating fascism, it is essential that all progressive forces avoid the liberal trap propagated by the media that these incidents of fascist murder, from Charleston to Charlottesville to Christchurch, are the product of “lone wolfs,” or insufficient gun control. In all of these cases, the murderers were radicalized by an online fascist collective, and nations and cities with strong gun control still see fascist violence.

While liberals propose half measures, the American right wing led by Donald Trump stoke racial, religious, and ethnic strife on a daily basis. Children and immigrant families are brutalized on the American border, Trump endorses open Nazis as “very fine people,” virulently Islamophobic imagery catalyzed by Trump’s campaign was brought to the West Virginia state house and cities across the country by the bigoted ACT for America movement, and the president targets those with disabilities with mockery. Online right wing pundits from Ben Shapiro to Lauren Southern, who routinely target Muslims as “corrupting” western civilization, the very ideology behind this attack, have been quick to wash their hands of responsibility. Economically, public education is under attack, medicare and medicaid is facing massive cuts, corporate profits soar and tax rates decline while working class wages decrease and tax rates increase, and the cost of healthcare remains a boundary for many in receiving treatment.

The shooter in New Zealand claimed in his manifesto to be from the working class, his actions in support of working class interests, a defense of working class values. The experience of working people around the world in the 20th and 21st century proves that these fascists serve instead as racial separatists who victimize oppressed nationalities for the benefit of finance capital. Everywhere fascists fight against unions, infiltrate and corrupt them, and oppose campaigns for higher wages and better working conditions. They do not serve the interests of the working class, they coerce working class frustration with liberal capitalism, and seek to turn solidarity between workers into racial, ethnic, and gender hatred in the service of free market capitalist exploitation. The American fascists make “don’t tread on me,” their motto, while supporting the impunity of police officers who murder black Americans, endorsing cuts to healthcare and education, committing murderous atrocities against working class communities, and supporting these atrocities online. Such is the nature of the fascist “working class” politics.

Fascism from its earliest days under Mussolini seeks to divide the working class for the benefit of capital, and to do so, as Georgi Dimitrov argued in his 1935 analysis of the growing fascist movement, with the openly “terrorist dictatorship of the most reactionary, most chauvinist. and most imperialist elements of finance capital.” Lacking a centralized movement in most countries, fascists have turned to exacting this terrorism, a fundamental aspect of their ideology, as individual terrorists. If their growing international movement, watered by the failure of reformist bourgeois liberalism, attains state power, there can be no doubt that this terrorism will be state sponsored, generalized, and made normative.

With this truth in mind, and with the lives of all those lost to fascism in the 20th century up until this very day in our hearts, progressive forces must renounce the liberal fetishization of free speech and advocate, enforce, and fight for no platform for fascists in our towns, cities, and countries. Enough is enough. Fascism is based on an illegal conspiracy to murder and oppress working people, to bring terror and horror to every neighborhood. Those countries that have already suffered the most under fascism, France, Germany, and others, already have laws restricting the free speech of fascists.

As working people, we know the fight against fascist speech is only the beginning of the struggle, particularly given the growth of fascist politics in countries like France and Germany. The true and final answer to the problem of fascism can be seen in the international response to the Christchurch massacre. People of all religions, all nations, all identities, across our differences, must build a movement that supports working people and actively dissolves the boundaries fascist movements seek to create. Already, the Tree of Life Synagogue, itself the victim of a fascist mass shooting, has begun a fundraising campaign to support the victims of the Christchurch massacre, a response from the fundraising Muslim groups did for the Synagogue in the aftermath of the shooting there.

As it was before, so it must be again. During the first fascist scourge of our world in the 20th century, people from around the world, across ideology, religion, ethnicity, race, and culture came together to destroy fascist terrorism. In the Soviet Union, a diverse collection of all the Soviet people, men, women, Russian, Ukrainian, Kazak, Armenian, threw down the fascist barbarity that claimed the lives of 20 million Soviet citizens.

We in the American Party of Labor carry the flag and lessons of that first generation of anti-fascists, and the memories of every individual killed in New Zealand, towards the end of destroying all platforms for fascists, and securing a world based on equality, respect, safety, and dignity, with healthcare, housing, jobs, and education for all. To create, in opposition to the corrupt fascist claim to support working class values, an authentic working class movement that makes solidarity, diversity, and camaraderie between all people its core.

Categories: Statements, U.S. News