Tony Chiado

The United States has a vibrant folklore of fighting the oppressors. Consider the Civil War and our moral crusade against slavery or the Second World War and our liberation of the Nazi death camps. It’s central to how we see ourselves as a people. Though for nearly one hundred years after the Civil War, Black Americans lived under an apartheid state in both the North and the South. And try as we might to forget it, the White Supremacist “America First” movement, which paralleled the rise of fascism in Germany, fully endorsed the Nazi’s antisemitic and genocidal position.

Nonetheless, we see ourselves as liberators of the oppressed time and time again throughout history. And when you asked any American in conversation over the past thirty years whether they would have been abolitionists in the 1850s or resisted the Nazis in the 1920s, the overwhelming majority told you yes with a sort of bombastic certainty. It is easy to look to the past and say such things. It is harder to do so in the present.

That thought experiment is less useful today. Instead, we need only look at the present state of affairs in the United States and ask ourselves this: What are we doing to resist a fascist regime on our own soil today? The historical hypothetical has arrived, here and now. We no longer have the privilege of imposing the clarity of today on a past event. Rather, we are tasked now, in this moment, with a variation of that historical question.

I don’t speak hyperbolically. You and I are living in a moment of great moral importance. Is it as severe as the Civil War or World War II? Time will tell, though I don’t think weighing each event to the milligram will serve us well. This moment has eclipsed the moral weight necessary to ask that question: What are we doing to resist a fascist regime on our own soil today?

The evidence that we live in such a moment is crushing. Presidential plans of genocide in Gaza and hostile rhetoric against our closest ally in Canada rear the imperialist mindset of the fascist Trump Regime. Sending good-willed immigrants and American citizens alike to Guantanamo Bay and El Salvadorian prisons for not being the Trump Regime’s preferred kind of American, the Trump Regime presents itself as an authoritarian state. Such actions would rightly be viewed as fascist if they were occurring abroad and we were not so blinded by our closeness to them.

The 20th century project to fulfill the Declaration of Independence’s promise that “all men are created equal” is being unraveled in the most ghoulish ways. The rule of law is shattering around us as the Trump Regime ignores court orders and the checks and balances that have preserved the United States. Critical media is silenced, and loyal media amplified. The information being disseminated to the American people is tainted by the oppressive Trump Regime. There is much I have failed to name, that I could not possibly begin to name. We face a blitzkrieg of fascist policies and actions.

For all those that said, unequivocally, that they would have resisted the oppressor, and this is a large camp, find your conscience now. I look around and I see compliance. Perhaps worse, I see indifference. The same people whose eyes now glaze over the present atrocities almost certainly would not have been abolitionists or resistant to Nazi Germany. Why? Because they don’t dare to oppose fascism now, as it raps on their doors.

Please, find your conscience now. Talk to your friends about the rise of fascism. March in the streets. Organize at your workplace. Support the marginalized in your communities. Speak up for them. Perhaps greater sacrifice will be needed. You said you would do it a century and a half ago. You said you would do it a century ago. You must do it now. No more historical hypotheticals, the question today is this: What are we doing to resist a fascist regime on our own soil today?