¡No Pasarán!: Antifascist Dispatches from a World in Crisis, edited by Shane Burley, is a brick of a book, and for good reason- it collects a wide variety of anti-fascist voices from various backgrounds and locations around the world. I have always really enjoyed Shane Burley's work. I like his writing style and find his books and pieces engaging, but also have learned a ton about the diversity of far right and other movements therein. This book offers that same diversity for anti-fascist movements while also having the meticulous editing found in Burley's other works. Burley's own pieces in the book are also fantastic (without dominating it or taking up too much space.) He and those who worked on this with him also reached far in their calls for contributions. While there are generally going to be a lot of entries from the USA when one works and lives in the USA, there are also contributions from and/or about various European countries including Greece, South Asian countries, Syria, and Brazil (pardon me if I have left anyone out.)
One thing that stands out to me in this book is how diverse the writing styles are. There are interviews, historical essays, philosophical essays, manifestos, story telling, and more formats, each with their own voice. There are entries that feel like anyone from any background or education level could grasp them, including children. There was only one academic entry that I found to be so painfully jargony that I didn't want to finish it. The other academic essays are far more accessible. The interview questions were well considered and had engaging answers from a variety of organizers. There is decent LGBTQ representation and an important focus on transgender folks who are a current target of fascists in even more extreme ways than usual.
Some of my favorite entries involved discussions of niche subcultures that fascists attempt to co-opt (and why we shouldn't let them.) "Subcultural antifascism: Confronting the far right in heathenry and heavy metal," by Ryan Smith was one of my favorite entries in the book and I also enjoyed "Nazis don't get nice things," by Margaret Killjoy about the importance of generally combatting fascism in all (sub)cultural areas of life, rather than handing things over and moving on. "The meme alibi," by Margaret Rex was a painful case study of a specific person's descent from edgelord online to real life fash really made the whole book feel more intimate. There are others referencing subculture that are also excellent, but these were my favorites. I straddle multiple subcultural worlds, some of which have been used- successfully and not- by fascists for rebranding and recruitment. (I was also a complicated teenage edgelord, luckily before the internet immortalized my embarrassing mistakes, which I thankfully grew out of.) I have a tattoo of the overlapping pentagrams intentionally resembling a certain body orifice symbol for the very gay avant garde, industrial band Coil- who actually collaborated with fascist Boyd Rice before he revealed himself to be a trash fire racist. I no longer call that symbol "the black sun," because that term is synonymous these days with the sunwheel/sonnenrad (a completely different symbol/meaning favored by nazis, that thankfully looks very different.) Industrial music has also been a contentious ground with a vast array of people from the furthest left you can get to pieces of fashy, misogynistic garbage that like playing militaristic dress up. It's also a subculture that I will forever feel a part of. So, of course I feel resentful if someone paints any of these things with a fascist brush as I am sure plenty of people from other subcultures do as well. The idea that all occult, esoteric, dark music, religions/atheism, even veganism, and more just need to be handed over every time a nazi grabs for one bothers me quite a bit, especially due to how many people within those cultures are either targets of fascism or vulnerable to recruitment due to their marginalization by society. I of course concede that there are some things nazis and other fascists will have forever like the backwards swastika. But, I appreciate that there are more people than I realized defending their various subcultures, music scenes, and belief systems from fascist co-optation.
This review feels like it should be longer for such a long book full of great contributions. Rather than writing a lengthy book report on each entry, I will encourage readers to seek them out for themselves. I can't think of a single bad essay in this book. It's definitely an effective balm for the wound that is the false public perception of "antifa" unfortunately crafted by many liberals and the far right. Also, it's another great cover design from AK press.
This was also posted to my goodreads.
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