We celebrate this 80th anniversary of D Day, an iconic image of what it means to be an Antifascist, to be an American as a guarantor of democracy and our universal human rights, and to be a human being bearing a duty of care for others.
“All for one and one for all, united we stand divided we fall” as Dumas teaches us in The Three Musketeers, regardless of the costs, even of our lives.
This anniversary of the Allied invasion of Europe finds us once again confronted by rapacious and cruel tyrants and their mad quests for imperial conquest and dominion; Putin, Netanyahu, Xi Jinpeng. But we are also challenged by the subversion of democracy and the rising tide of fascism, nationalism, white supremacist terror and theocratic patriarchal sexual terror, not only in America by Putin’s star agent and rapist Traitor Trump, but throughout the world.
It remains to be seen if we remain a Band of Brothers still, but in the shadows of Russia’s World War Three and its ten active theatres of conflict which include America in the sabotage of our elections, and with American complicity in the Israeli genocide of the Palestinians, we will find out.
As Biden said in his historic speech of solidarity with Ukraine, as quoted in The Guardian; “The US president used his address at the American commemorative event to send a message to Moscow that the US and its allies “will not bow down” and will “stand for freedom”.
“To surrender to bullies, to bow down to dictators, is simply unthinkable,” Biden said in a speech at the American cemetery in Normandy. “If we were to do that, it means we’d be forgetting what happened here on these hallowed beaches.”
“We will not walk away because if we do Ukraine will be subjugated and it will not end there,” Biden said. “Ukraine’s neighbours will be threatened, all of Europe will be threatened.”
“There are things that are worth fighting and dying for”, Biden said. “Freedom is worth it. Democracy is worth it.”
As written by Dan Sabbagh in The Guardian, in an article entitled D-day 80th anniversary comes at time of conflict and growing carelessness: As grim memory of world war fades, many people are anxious amid rise of nationalist, country-first rhetoric; “Twenty-two British D-day veterans, the youngest nearly 100, crossed the Channel on Tuesday to mark this week’s 80th anniversary of the landings in Normandy, representing a thinning thread to the heroics of two or three generations ago when about 150,000 allied soldiers began a seaborne invasion of western Europe that helped end the second world war.
Ron Hayward, a tank trooper who lost his legs fighting in France three weeks after D-day, told crowds assembled in Portsmouth on Wednesday why he and other soldiers were there: “I represent the men and women who put their lives on hold to go and fight for democracy and this country. I am here to honour their memory and their legacy, and to ensure that their story is never forgotten.”
There will not be many more opportunities to commemorate with survivors, while this time the presence of Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, in France on 6 June will be a reminder that a part of Europe is in the grip of the largest war since 1945. A deadly war also rages in Gaza, while the living memory of the second world war fades into historical record.
That D-day was a risky task is an understatement: 4,441 British, American, Canadian and other allied soldiers are estimated to have been killed on 6 June 1944, and at least a similar number of Germans. One BBC documentary, D-day: the Unheard Tapes, relying on recordings of veterans’ experiences, demonstrates how terrifying the experience was – and how nobody ought to go through it again.
“I just cried my eyes out. I just stood there and cried, I did,” James Kelly, a Royal Marines commando from Liverpool, recalled of finding himself isolated, alone in the French countryside, a few hours after he had managed to fight his way off Sword beach. A buddy had been killed in front of him as they had got to the sand, blood pumping out of his neck, but Kelly had been ordered to press on.
While leaders present at Thursday’s commemorations in Normandy – King Charles, Rishi Sunak, Joe Biden, Emmanuel Macron and Olaf Scholz – will strike appropriate notes, many of those representing forces of division will not be present, not least Vladimir Putin, the architect of the invasion on Ukraine.
On Friday, Biden is due to speak at Pointe du Hoc, where 80 years ago 225 US Rangers scaled 35-metre sheer cliffs using rope ladders shot over the top to capture a strategically situated artillery bunker. It was perhaps the most dangerous single mission on D-day, and casualties were severe. Only 90 were still able to fight when a count was taken a couple of days later.
There is almost certainly another reason for the location of Biden’s address, given the US president has an election to fight. Forty years ago a Republican president, Ronald Reagan, spoke on the cliffs at the same battle site, and in front of an audience of military veterans he justified the struggle of the day in terms not obviously recognisable in Donald Trump’s Republican worldview.
“We in America have learned bitter lessons from two world wars: it is better to be here ready to protect the peace than to take blind shelter across the sea, rushing to respond only after freedom is lost,” Reagan declared – very different to Trump’s comments that he would refuse to defend Nato members who do not spend enough on defence, never mind previous threats to quit the alliance altogether.
Two years of headline news about Ukraine – but also the conflict in Gaza, so deadly for civilians, and elsewhere in the Middle East – is a reminder that there are those who appear to prefer conflict to stability. Quietly, many people are a little anxious: one recent poll, from YouGov, reports that 55% of Britons believe it is somewhat or very likely that the UK will be involved in a war in the next five years.
Since the end of the cold war at least, and perhaps since 1945, it has been easier to take stability and security in Europe for granted, helped partly by the military pact of Nato and the economic alliance of the EU, but also by the grim memory of all-out conflict. But a rise of nationalist, country-first rhetoric suggests there is also a growing carelessness. If it metastasises, as the stories of D-day survivors demonstrate, ordinary people end up bearing the brunt.”
What happens now, when our fragile democracies are threatened by brutal and degenerate thugs like the organ grinder and his monkey, Putin and Trump?
As I wrote in my post of February 20 2024, Manifesto for Bearers of the Torch of Liberty and Proclamation of Lilac City Antifa; To all those who like myself prefer to run amok and be ungovernable to the alternative of submission to authority, who align on the side of Prometheus, rebellion, chaos, anarchy, resistance, transgression, revolution, and the frightening of the horses, I offer here a manifesto for bearers of the Torch of Liberty.
Herein I offer the Second Act of my February 9 description of my work and myself as I interrogated both in reflection on the Substack debut of my journal Torch of Liberty, entitled Why Do I Write, and Why Am I Writing To All of You Here, in the Nakedness of my Life, my Voice, and my Truth, as America Begins Her Last Stand Against Fascism in the 2024 Elections, and I now return to the beginning, my September 15 2019 Proclamation of Lilac City Antifa.
The goal of Antifascism, and of revolutionary struggle and liberation, is to achieve a society of true equality in which we can abandon the social use of force.
As I wrote in my post of March 28 2019, in the wake of the Christchurch white supremacist terror and the direct threat of a copycat atrocity against our local mosque here in Spokane; I’ve thought about the origins of evil, of violence and power in the relationships between fear, anger, hate, and other negative emotions as illnesses, for a long time now and in many roles and contexts.
Here are some things I have learned:
First, the process by which violence operates as a system is the same for all spheres of action and levels of scale; within personal and social contexts and in intimate relationships and families as well as nations and historical civilizations.
The precondition of violence as hate crime, and of both tyranny and terror, is overwhelming and generalized fear as shaped by submission to authority.
Structures and figures of authorized power feed on fear and hate, grow stronger by the cycle of power and violence and the negative emotions and forces of darkness to which they give form and through which they subjugate others.
We must question, challenge, mock and subvert authority whenever it comes to claim us; these are the Four Primary Duties of a Citizen.
Let us be unconquered, masterless, and free; let us answer tyranny with resistance, control with anarchy and civil disobedience, conformity with transgression, plutocracy with socialism.
Let us answer hate with love and fear with our faith in each other; let us reach out across our boundaries and become better than we now are, let us join together and break the chain of lies which binds us through our most atavistic passions to enslavement by authority and addiction to power.
Let us dethrone authority and abandon power over others for an empowered self-ownership of identity; that we may reinvent how to be human as autonomous individuals, through and for one another in glorious diversity, democracy, and a free society of equals.
Let us be bringers of chaos, joy, transformation, and revolution.
Let us evolve toward a nonviolent and noncoercive society together, become bearers of the Torch of Liberty together, and unite to achieve our dreams of democracy together.
As I wrote in my post of July 31 2020, A Useful Past: What is Antifa?; What do we mean when we say we are Antifascists? What do our enemies mean when they use the term? These mirror reverse meanings face us Janus-like in contradiction, and while factions struggle to control the narrative in the media I don’t see much direction provided by anyone speaking as an Antifa-identified voice. I’m changing that, for I speak to you today as the founder of Lilac City Antifa.
In calling Antifa a terrorist group, Trump has inverted its values and libeled every American serviceman who fought in World War II as well as our entire military services today, for they have been the primary force against fascism throughout the world. I am an American patriot and an Antifascist; and if our flag is on your uniform, you are one of us.
The Second World War has been much studied, filmed, and written about; but of course what we mean when we speak of Antifa today proceeds from the history of those whose public service of vigilance in exposing and confronting fascism developed from the partisans of that conflict and from the Allied military and intelligence services sent to assist them in the liberation of Europe, from the Resistance and from those who hunted escaped Nazis after the war.
A very specific historical context and tradition informs and motivates those who, like myself, use the term Antifascist as a descriptor of identity; I have appended some articles on this useful past, but to claim Antifa as an identity is a personal choice to work against fascism and may sometimes be a component of an ideology or belief system but is not an organization. No one calling themselves Antifa speaks for or answers to anyone else; it is a nonhierarchical and mutualistic network of alliances. There is no special tie nor fraternal handshake; membership is by declaration.
To claim you are Antifa is to be Antifa. This means whatever we intend when we say it; there are no authorized truths among us, nor authorized identities.
For myself, to be an antifascist is to belong to a tradition of resistance which originates in multiple forms and traditions; the 1921 founding of Antifa by the Ardito del Popolo in Italy, Antifaschistische Aktion founded in 1932 in Germany, the International Brigades of the 1936-39 Spanish Civil War, and finally in the Resistance of World War Two, a war that has never ended but went underground.
Here I must note that the C.I.A. and the Green Berets or US Special Forces, like many among the West’s intelligence and special operations community, began as antifascist and Nazi-hunting organizations in WWII interdependent with the Resistance partisans they worked and still work with, and remain so in general character, purpose, and function; such are natural allies of Antifa, with common goals, the differences being that where Antifa is a global voluntary network of nonhierarchical alliances outside the control of or membership in any nation, our parallel and interdependent partners in the intelligence and special operations community are institutions of governments and often of military chains of command. To phrase it differently; we swear our loyalty to each other, theirs are oaths sworn to nations and to Constitutions as systems of law.
I look also to our history and the great crusade against slavery that was the Civil War, to the Paris Commune, and to the American Revolution against tyranny and imperial colonialism and its ideology of liberty as a heritage of Humanism and the Enlightenment, for antecedents and inspiration.
For the principles which I feel are consistent with Anti-fascism, see my repost below of the original proclamation with which I founded Lilac City Antifa with the intent to defend our local mosque which was under threat of violence by Christian Identity terrorists led by former Representative Matt Shea and other secessionists who were also planning to murder our policemen and their families as part of a plot to found a white ethnostate or Redoubt here in my lovely part of Washington with its forested mountains and pristine lakes; the militia they were training included members of Atomwaffen Division and The Base, and had links to both the Christchurch and Las Vegas shooters. I took them with great seriousness as threats, and believed we needed a counterforce.
As I wrote in my post of September 15 2019, Proclamation of Lilac City Antifa: Resistance Against Fascism and Tyranny; We, the People of Lilac City and of America, being of all imaginable varieties of historical origin, race and ethnicity, gender and sexual personae, faith and the lack thereof, class and status, and all other informing and motivating sources of becoming human and frames of identity as yet undiscovered, declare our independence from fear and from authorized boundaries and images of ourselves, and the tyranny of false divisions and categories of otherness and exclusion among us.
To make an idea about a kind of people is an act of violence.
We stand united as human beings whose universal rights depend on no government but on the inherent nature of our humanity, and as American citizens and co-owners of our government in a free society of equals, and inclusive of all who so claim and declare as heirs of the legacy and idea of Liberty and of America as an historical expression and manifest form of its ideals and values, among these being freedom and the autonomy of individuals, equality as an absolute structural principle in law and ideal in social relations, truth and its objectivity and testable nature and our right to seek and verify and to communicate it which includes freedom of the press and the right of access to information and from surveillance and all forms of thought control, justice and its impartiality, and a secular state in which freedom of conscience is absolute and there can be no compulsion in matters of faith, for who stands between each of us and the Infinite serves neither.
We are a web of human lives which connect us with one another and anchor us to our Liberty, to our history and to our future, and we are resolved to our common defense as human beings and as Americans, and to the mutual safety and freedom of ourselves and of others from fascist violence and intimidation, coercion and the social use of force, in the performance of our identities and in our rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
We are American patriots and heirs to the glorious tradition of resistance by those who stood for Liberty at the balance points of history, at Saratoga and Yorktown, Gettysburg, Normandy, and many others, against the three primary threats of tyranny and the state as embodied violence, inequalities of race and gender and slavery in all its forms, and fascisms of blood, faith, and soil which combine and expand them as theocratic-nationalist-capitalist dehumanization and systems of oppression, as we must always do against the atavistic forces of barbarism and the nightmares of totalitarian force and control which threaten our nation and our civilization, against what madness and evil may together do.
We must unite together as free citizens who will not be broken by fear, but instead embrace our differences as a strength and a heritage purchased for us all by the blood of our sacred dead in countless wars throughout our history.
To all those who have offered their lives in our service, both to our nation and to all humankind, members and veterans of the military and other security services: join us. If our flag is on your uniform, you are one of us. For America is a Band of Brothers, sworn to one another and to the defense of our union, with liberty and justice for all.
To all enemies of America and a free society of equals: We are many, we are watching, and we are the future.
Join us in resistance, who answer fascism with equality and tyranny with liberty.
I am an American patriot and an Antifascist. I will bet my refusal to submit against any force of tyranny, and our solidarity against any ideology of division as a strategy of our subjugation. Pledge thus with me:
I swear zero tolerance for racism or the supremacy of any persons by identity politics and hierarchies of elite belonging and exclusionary otherness, racist violence and white supremacist terror, ethnic cleansing and genocide, hate and its symbols and speech, for all fascisms of blood, faith, and soil, and place my life in the balance with those of the powerless and the dispossessed, the silenced and the erased.
I will make no compromise with evil.
In closing, a few words of caution, for the use of force is a Rashomon Gate of relative truths and bifurcating possible futures.
The struggle between good and evil in the human heart often pivots and balances on the differences between the purpose of the use of force; to punish transgression when inflicted by authority as an act of subjugation and repression against the powerless, or to seize power in solidarity with the powerless and the dispossessed, the silenced and the erased, as a duty of care for others and as guarantors of each other’s universal human rights. Be very sure you know which cause your actions serve.
All that matters in the end is what we do with our fear, and how we use our power.
D-day 80th anniversary comes at time of conflict and growing carelessness
Biden and Macron use D-day event to emphasise support for Ukraine
Antifa: a reading list
Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook, by Mark Bray
The Antifa Comic Book: 100 Years of Fascism and Antifa Movements
by Gord Hill
Philosophy of Antifascism: Punching Nazis and Fighting White Supremacy
by Devin Zane Shaw
Transatlantic Antifascisms: From the Spanish Civil War to the End of World War II, by Michael Seidman
Writers’ Block: The Paris Antifascist Congress of 1935, by Jacob Boas
Rethinking Antifascism: History, Memory and Politics, 1922 to the Present
by Hugo García Fernández (Editor), Mercedes Yusta Rodrigo (Editor), Xavier Tabet (Editor), Cristina Clímaco (Editor)
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2020/06/anti-fascism-donald-trump-resistance
Torch of Liberty 
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