Thinking people who have experienced authoritarian repression often describe feeling sullied and compromised by the regime, even if they didn’t support it directly. The Czech dissident Václav Havel called it the “contamination of the moral environment.”
You have to live in the regime’s shadow and in its stupid, violent midst. To go about your normal routines, you have to adjust yourself, to some extent, to its depravity. It’s not the same as collaboration, but you’re forced to accommodate and witness it, even if you’re also engaged in resistance.
The thing to remember is that the MAGA fascists want you to feel demoralized. They want you to feel disempowered and complicit. It’s part of their nihilistic plan to dirty everything until you no longer care enough to fight for its preservation.
The fascist program has many ugly and violent facets, but one of them is to slowly drain their opponents’ energy, through repetition of force and dishonesty, of any sense of hope or idealism.
Some start strong, but eventually wither. When they do, they feel frightened and dismayed.
Others sign on enthusiastically or put up only token resistance. These spiritual blanks, for the most part, feel nothing, except, maybe, the intoxication of belonging.
Many of us, though, can feel the slow, grinding away of human dignity, either our own or that of others.
Preserving your moral core and finding ways to assert this for yourself and on behalf of others is a daily battle. In the defense of democracy, it is EVERYTHING.
Trust yourselves. Find and build community. Don’t waver.
We are all fighting for our lives to different extents and in different ways. Let’s fight together for as long as it takes.
Resist much, obey little (Whitman).
ALEXANDER KARN 
Leave a comment