The laws targeting queer and trans people that are proliferating across the United States are a symptom of a much deeper and more insidious reaction, the inevitable outgrowth of a deeply repressive and hierarchical society confronting the possibility of collapse. Today’s gender fascism is not confined to the policies of a single political party. It takes different forms across the political spectrum, bringing together essentialist narratives about identity, a resurgent patriarchal mythos, and the persisting power of the state.
This is not the first time that a reactionary society has sought scapegoats. Like our predecessors in the early twentieth century, if we hope to survive, we have to combat these forces on every level, using a wide range of strategies and tools.
In the following ecstatic history, our comrades revisit queer resistance to the Nazis, seeking tactics and inspiration for our own troubled times.
What he found was much more complicated. The leftist Parties—both Social Democrats and Communists—were unable to halt the spread of what he came to term the brown plague. He documents the sectarian and ideological operations of the respective parties, showing how the Communists acquiesced to the rise of the Nazi Party because they foolishly imagined that Nazi repression would mobilize the working class toward proletarian revolution. Many considered a Nazi regime a necessary step toward a socialist state, itself allegedly a step toward a stateless society.
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