Corvid Gossip & Advice: January 28, 2025

Dear CAW, 

Should I punch a fascist or a liberal? 

- feeling confused and punchy

Dear Punchy,

As all crows do, we like to investigate wrong-doings and then confirm our findings together, to think through them, then act. And for your timely question it’s not a straightforward answer. Your impulse to want to punch liberals is bang on, it’s frustrating!  There is a direct pipeline between liberalism and fascism and it ain’t new — it’s a rotten history filled with one atrocity after another…

But we think it’s just colonialism doing its thing. In other words, a nazi or a (settler) liberal: on stolen land, they both are colonizers. 

In that case, why not do both? Are your punches scarce? The ubiquity of both liberals and fascists these days certainly compels one to distribute a few licks. From a historical point of view, we have learned that the function of the liberal is to deliver the state to the fascists, as they have more affinity with authoritarianism than anarchy. They see us as a threat–to civility and reason, but also to their false attempts at stopping the fascist creep: we would only give the fascists more material to play the victim. But their marketplace of ideas played out in the “free speech” of debating misses the point of how these power systems work. Where the liberal opposes reason to fascist ideology, the fascist parries easily since their power works through seduction and desire, not seemingly self-evident solutions to actual problems (as opposed to manufactured problems)

So if the Nazi works through desire, then maybe give in to the yen that our motor running! 

But what about the liberal? Does this blubbering idiot claiming reason deserve our violence? While they think the right words are enough to stop a reactionary right from seizing control of the state power, we might think that stopping them with force is the right counterpoint. Liberals claim a balance between the extremism of both the left and the right–but this is false, the wind always blows them in one direction. The best we can hope from liberals are temporary reforms that simply sap our righteous fury and effective action. Given all this, our inkling is to punch the liberal too, make them cry about non-violence as the only effective tactic, and show them that in fact a certain violence is quite effective. Note that in recent years the only time that the liberals joined forces with us was at Charlottesville, which was an antifascist event planned through the logic of violence. Otherwise, they act at best as peacekeepers and at worst as snitches selling us out. We have nothing to expect from them, except the possibility that they water down our desires towards the false pleasures of normativity. 

Punch away, punchy! We hope it thrills you. 

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