Things are moving much faster than anyone would have thought possible and violence, real physical violence is an unavoidable property of any fascist regime.

I would kindly ask you to speak for yourself. Leftists and historians have warned about the fascist tendencies of Trump and the Republican Party for years. We know from history how fast things move once fascists start seizing actual power (as opposed to just cultural power/media hegemony). It’s okay to be surprised, it’s okay to admit you did not expect this, as corporate media and the center-right Democrat establishment has largely been downplaying the seriousness of your situation. But please don’t erase all the voices that have been warning you about this, as they are also the ones you should listen to more if you want to resist fascism.

• Remember jan 6th? That was your wakeup call. Democrats largely treated it as a cosmetic issue (defeat the Republicans by playing respectability politics and painting themselves as the “adults in the room”). You should have buried the insurrectionists and Trump with criminal charges. And those charges should have been treated with the utmost seriousness and urgency.
• https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Z55AEOPYlYc
• https://forward.com/culture/546615/book-bans-nazis-berlin-florida/
• https://www.newsweek.com/ron-desantis-nazi-symbol-campaign-sonnenrad-1814801
• https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Tyranny …

The way I see it, the Democrats have to open up to leftists and progressives and abandon their bipartisan centrism bs. You need another FDR and an associated narrative to stomp out fascism. You need a proper alliance of the center and the left, which requires the Democrats to get their sh** together and actually start resisting. Walz is doing great btw if you want an example of what left-moderate Democrats should be doing rn.

Here’s one of my favorite quotes from Erich Kästner (1899-1974), a german pacifist and staunch opponent of the nazi-regime, whose books were burned by the nazis, outlining his lessons from that horrible time in history:

Die Ereignisse von 1933 bis 1945 hätten spätestens 1928 bekämpft werden müssen. Später war es zu spät. Man darf nicht warten, bis der Freiheitskampf Landesverrat genannt wird. Man darf nicht warten, bis aus dem Schneeball eine Lawine geworden ist. Man muss den rollenden Schneeball zertreten. Die Lawine hält keiner mehr auf. Sie ruht erst, wenn sie alles unter sich begraben hat. Das ist die Lehre, das ist das Fazit dessen, was uns 1933 widerfuhr. Das ist der Schluss, den wir aus unseren Erfahrungen ziehen müssen, und es ist der Schluss meiner Rede. Drohende Diktaturen lassen sich nur bekämpfen, ehe sie die Macht übernommen haben.

My attempt at translation (German to English is kind of weird if you want to keep the sentence structure close to the original text):

We should have put all our efforts into fighting the nazi regime [1933-1945 was the time of the nazi dictatorship] no later than 1928, any time later would have been too late. We can not and must not wait until resistance is treated as sedition. We must not wait until the snowball [of fascism] has become an avalanche. We must stomp on/crush the snowball before it can become an avalanche. Once it has become an avalanche there is no stopping it [fascism]. It [the avalanche] will only come to rest once it has buried us all. This is the lesson we should learn from the events of 1933. This is the crux of what our experiences [what we have lived through] have taught us and I hereby conclude my speech. Imminent dictatorships can only be fought before they have seized power.