Over a million people, mostly students on strike from school, took to the streets on March 15 in the international #ClimateStrike! 🌎🌍🌏 RefuseFascism.org joined the action here in Seattle. Students lined up, sometimes 4 groups deep, at the Refuse Fascism table after seeing the big orange “This Nightmare Must End! Trump/Pence Must Go!” banner.
In order to speak to many people at once, our lead organizer did an ‘elevator pitch’ (something short enough to tell someone in a trip on an elevator:
- RefuseFascism.org is getting organized for sustained mass protest to drive out the Trump/Pence regime.
- School walk-outs demanding the Trump/Pence Regime Must Go need to be a part of that.
- We’re not waiting till 2020; this has to happen SOON in the name of humanity.
- Fascism can be voted in but it must be driven out.
- Stopping fascism is our responsibility more than any other people living in any other part of the world, just as saving the planet is.
Many of the students shared our urgency and came with a spirit of NOT waiting until 2020 and NOT relying on elections or those in power to save the planet or humanity. Some of them just wanted the swag (great stickers and buttons). 160 signed up to be involved with sustained protests demanding Trump/Pence be removed from power. Students became visibly excited and sometimes said “YES!” when we emphasized that the sustained protests can’t stop or back down until our demand is met.
Some took extra materials and asked if it was okay to copy more if they ran out. (Yes!) They had great questions and insight about how outrages are getting normalized even though every day keeps getting worse. We talked about what fascism is, and why fascism can be voted in, but it must be DRIVEN out by the people.
Many youth were attracted to a message that the people of the US have a responsibility to drive these climate change-denying, lying, white supremacist, child abusing, nuclear threatening fascists from power ASAP for the planet and humanity around the world to have a chance for a future. Some students told us plainly that the problem is bigger than Trump and Pence. That’s right and we agreed whole-heartedly, getting into how, if we succeed, all kinds of pathways to more radical and fundamental change will open and make what are only dreams – as long as a fascist regime is in power – actually possible.
The worldwide protests were inspired by the actions of now 16-year-old Greta Thunberg from Sweden who went on strike from school for the Climate and said to the UN Climate Change COP24 Conference, “if a few children can get headlines all over the world just by not going to school, then imagine what we could all do together if we really wanted to. But to do that, we have to speak clearly, no matter how uncomfortable that may be. You only speak of green eternal economic growth because you are too scared of being unpopular. You only talk about moving forward with the same bad ideas that got us into this mess, even when the only sensible thing to do is pull the emergency brake…Until you start focusing on what needs to be done rather than what is politically possible, there is no hope. We cannot solve a crisis without treating it as a crisis. We need to keep the fossil fuels in the ground, and we need to focus on equity. And if solutions within the system are so impossible to find, maybe we should change the system itself.”
In spite of the urgency argued for by Greta Thunberg, the protests held in the U.S. countered and obscured her clear message by putting the strike in the context of the 2020 elections and promoting delusions of a Green New Deal. The night before, our crew read the article from the Los Angeles Revolution Club, The Green New Deal: Sustainable Snake Oil for a Green American Empire.
The Green New Deal was not brought up to us as many, many students visited our table before the rally, but it, and the importance of voting (even though most of the students are below voting age) was a theme from the stage. This prompted one Refuse Fascism volunteer to express the need for the students to be taught the “whole much bigger picture of cause and effect, to understand the significance of the fact that the U.S. is the #1 Fossil Fuel producer in the world and WHY that is and why we will never get to vote on that. The Green New Deal is framing things in a confined way, to make some window dressing, while ignoring the big picture of how imperialism’s expand-or-die mechanism continues on doing what it has to do, which is determine the most efficient way to take all the fossil fuel out of the earth and spew it into the atmosphere as quickly as possible.”
Toward the end of the rally, two young women who seemed to have read the RefuseFascism.org Call to Action came back to debate the plan of what they perceived as “going around the election system” by mobilizing mass protest. They wanted to know what ‘drive out’ meant and said that it is “a bad thing to circumvent the rules of democracy, because it weakens our democracy!” and also that “what you are promoting will discourage people from voting, when voting is what is needed now more than ever.”
The RefuseFascism.org volunteers responded to the question of what was meant by ‘drive out’ by painting a picture of sustained non-violent protests across the country and on campuses that don’t stop until those in power are compelled to remove the Trump/Pence regime from office, raising the example of South Korea a couple years back. They urged the students to look at past history, that what has happened in the US, any real changes in direction came after mass outpourings in the streets, like women’s suffrage, the labor movement, the Vietnam war, Civil Rights, Black liberation, gay liberation, AIDS protests etc.
The young women said “yes, but things like women’s suffrage were won by a single vote margin in the Senate.” One volunteer responded “That vote would never have happened at all if there had not been a mass movement of women in the streets!” Another volunteer pointed out that “our ‘democratic process’ hasn’t always done good things – look at slavery and wars and genocide.”
While all of this argumentation was good, we summed up that what was underneath the objections of these young women was the popularly held, but wrong, view that it’s not really fascism that humanity is facing. But Trump and Pence are circumventing the traditional rules of democracy because they are consolidating fascism. They’ve been closing paths and tearing apart democratic norms for more than 2 years. Leaving aside the Trump-like idea that it’s undemocratic to protest, the irony is that people can’t stop the horrors of the Trump/Pence regime by trying to save and strengthen traditional democratic channels by participating in them.
With a fascist regime in power, the rules have changed. It’s not simply an extreme pendulum swing from Democrats to Republicans. The only way to ensure a future for humanity and the rest of nature on this planet is is to confront the full danger, learn more about what fascism is and why we must stop it, and step outside the normal channels and our normal lives to drive the Trump/Pence regime from power.