What was the moment that radicalized you against #fascism?

@BlackAzizAnansi Birth.

@BlackAzizAnansi When they made up so many lies about Obama, and proceeded to elect Trump.

@BlackAzizAnansi I didn’t really understand it very well until 2016, so I’d say 2016.

@BlackAzizAnansi Being taken by my father to visit Dachau when I was a lad.

@BlackAzizAnansi The minute the 🍊💩🤡 announced that rapists and drug dealers were coming to the US from Mexico!

#TrumpIsAFascist
#RacismInAmerica
#FascistGOP

@BlackAzizAnansi Birth! No seriously, I guess I've pretty much always knew fascism was and is wrong. When you consider the fact that U.S. soldiers going to fight Hitler were called Anti-Fascists (let's call it Anti-Fa for short) then there is no other way to be.

@BlackAzizAnansi it’s been a gradual process, but #Ferguson solidified it for me.

Watching firsthand as plainsclothes officers threw rocks at the uniformed officers left no doubt that there is no interest in peace. It’s about subverting the rights of anyone who doesn’t look like them, while leaving themselves unimpeachable. #ACAB and so are all those who support them blindly.

@BlackAzizAnansi This girl I was dating in Munich introduced me to her grandparents, who proudly showed off their nice, vintage furniture they'd been "gifted" by their Jewish neighbors when they "moved away."

SPOILER ALERT: Those fucks ratted out their neighbors and then stole their shit.

@BlackAzizAnansi i was raised Antifa….my dad was in the military and my great uncles were in WWII, so it’s a family tradition. These guys were definitely Antifa!!!

@BlackAzizAnansi Becoming a target for a fascist who lived in the same building as me and who threatened to murder me.

@BlackAzizAnansi It was also the time I realised the police would never protect me from such a person. I was afraid for my life and they sent someone around the day after, I presume they were expecting to find a dead body.
I became antifa and realised acab on that day.

@Legit_Spaghetti @BlackAzizAnansi All these years later, it’s still good to know about Nazis being Nazis.

@BlackAzizAnansi, I would like to say: I am German, but unfortunately, there are still fascist Germans. However, it was our history that clearly made me an antifascist.

@BlackAzizAnansi I didn’t realize it was facism at the time, but it was the No Child Left Behind Act.

I was in high school, and it was the first time new legislation affected me personally. I had no idea how anyone could write a law while being so utterly ignorant of the facts.

Then I found out it was wasn’t written to actually help; it was there to hurt poor communities. And that was when I first realized conservatism was poison.

@BlackAzizAnansi I'm old enough to clearly remember the assassinations of JFK, MLK, and Bobby Kennedy. I also remember my parents' stories about the racists who rioted in reaction to Paul Robeson's scheduled 1949 concert in Peekskill NY. It started for me at that point, though I still had a lot more to learn.

@BlackAzizAnansi January 6th. I realized America really fell that day and the constitution won't last another 200 years

@BlackAzizAnansi Being called a kike as I was being hit in the face with my own flute case at the bus stop. That was the moment I realized no one was going to save me, I had to be prepared to do it myself. I was 12.

@BlackAzizAnansi When my grandpa told me how his half brother was tortured in the Spanish Civil war. I’ve been thinking a lot about it lately, he’s gone now, but he made a point of telling me when I was around 8.

I’ve realized others in my family don’t know the story — it’s now my task to pass it down with the warnings: peace is never guaranteed, churches are not to be trusted, eat well every time you can.

@dreamwinder @BlackAzizAnansi NCLB had a precedent in Virginia, when Gov. George "Macaca" Allen introduced Standard of Learning tests. Those have been the bane of students and teachers ever since. Useless harassment masquerading as performance measurement...

@BlackAzizAnansi Bush v. Gore in 2000. I was a freshman in high school and was just becoming aware of politics. It just seemed so wrong for the Supreme Court to step in and just stop the recount in Florida.

The Bush Administration furthered my radicalism against fascism.

@BlackAzizAnansi being a fat kid. Really. There were so many other things, but fat politics informs all my other thinking

@Legit_Spaghetti
@BlackAzizAnansi

Emphasis on *was* dating

@Legit_Spaghetti @BlackAzizAnansi 😡😡

@BlackAzizAnansi @lisamelton Being born of Jewish ancestry, and hearing of the branches of my family that were wiped out or forced to flee across Europe to the U.S.

@BlackAzizAnansi Albert Speer's autobiography, which I read on my own while in law school, and Eichmann's trial while in middle school. And saw some number tattoos on wrists at local stores. And a landlady who described how her kid came back pretty much unharmed from Dr. Mengele--which none did.

@BlackAzizAnansi

In 3rd grade my friend told me half of her family died in the Holocaust.

@BlackAzizAnansi Star Trek TOS, “Patterns Of Force.” After I saw it, I wanted to know more so I read Shirer’s The Rise And Fall Of The Third Reich.

The kind of people that will make dozens of men, women and children dig a hole, line them up along the edge and machine-gun them to their deaths down into it CANNOT be allowed to amass power.

@BlackAzizAnansi

learning about the holocaust when i was in grammar school. sadly, there always seem to be things going on in the world to reinforce the lesson.

@BlackAzizAnansi Actually it was before Reagan. It was Nixon running for second term against McGovern. We had an election in elementary school and me and the lone black boy were the only ones that “voted” for McGovern. All the white kids turned around and said “eww.” I’ve hated those motherfuckers ever since.

@BlackAzizAnansi the moment it really sank in was when the Tea Party thing happened

@BlackAzizAnansi Being physically attacked for placing signs of black candidates. Then getting mercilessly harrased and impersonated for taking them to court.

@BlackAzizAnansi
I grew up in an area that bought into the whole "compassionate conservatism," but I wasn't political at all and most of what I learned in Texas public schools was inaccurate or incomplete (intentionally so).

Until I had my daughters. They are both disabled. And we spent a lot of time with other families with disabled children. I knew that our experiences with all the related services (school, medicine, etc.) had been crappy, but I met a family with triplets in the mid-2000s (pre-Obamacare). One of their infant triplets had extensive medical needs. One of the machines the infant needed cost $10k a month. Their private insurance company would not cover it. Without the equipment, the infant would die. The health insurance company did not care. That was the moment I saw our country for what it was. I'm just sorry it didn't happen sooner. There'd always been people suffering and I was too self-absorbed to notice. I've spent my life since then trying to right that wrong.

@BlackAzizAnansi
I thought eugenics was a thing of the past, but I realized it was alive and well. And that it was being enforced by a lot of "moderate" government policies.

@BlackAzizAnansi It wasn't just one thing, more like drops eroding a cave into existence.

But one of the personal ones was when I realized a (former) friend saw me as more of a prop than a person. A token marginalized buddy. I was his special case, but I could never actually get him to fully rethink his assumptions beyond specifically me. If even that much.

And just describing my experiences was enough to make him bail on me when he couldn't handle the realization that he'd been thoughtless.

@BlackAzizAnansi It's not one moment, but a collection of watching my family become more and more hateful toward random people that did not deserve it. Lots of "well they're one of the good ones" to my friends. By college my eyes were open to how things were going, made some friends, and found myself part of some anti-fascist communities that really dumped the theory and literature on me, and I just absorbed it like a dry sponge.

@BlackAzizAnansi getting tear gassed by armored riot cops in tanks at the WTO protests in Seattle in 99. I was young and pretty shocked to learn that the evening news was not telling the story of what we had experienced at the hands of the police

@BlackAzizAnansi I don't know if there is one single point (I read "The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich" as a teen), and I listened to a lot of punk. What crystalized everything I'd read was finding out that Tom Metzger (leader of White Aryan Resistance) was using my university's facilities to host his public access TV talk show, "Race and Reason". Was involved in weeks of protests until the university kicked him off campus.

@RoyAwesome @BlackAzizAnansi I mentioned it elsewhere, but that's almost a flip side to mine? Me realizing I was "one of the good ones" to a friend was part of what made things really click.

@glitchontwitch @BlackAzizAnansi Yeah. "One of the Good Ones" type behavior is a real big clue you aren't around people you want to be around.

@BlackAzizAnansi Once I realized that fascists aren't history the way they tried to tell us in school. Fascists live among us and constantly strive for their dreams of an authoritarian state where everyone either looks/thinks/talks like them or works for them, or falls beneath their bootheels.

@BlackAzizAnansi Didn't need one. I have family I never met because of pogroms in the Lviv ghetto and the camps. I grew up knowing what happens when hate becomes a political ideology.

"Never again" is in my blood and I can not forget it.

@BlackAzizAnansi watching how my friends and neighbors were treated growing up. (Im lower middle class white, but was raised in upper lower class black neighborhoods)

@BlackAzizAnansi When I realized that life could be so much better than it is for so many people and animals, and that there are individuals who benefit from the status quo and they will do anything they can to keep sick systems in place.

@BlackAzizAnansi it was also about the time that some WWII documents had been released from Russia and people were making films (like Katyn) and I came across audio books of Victor Frankl and The IBM And The Holocaust so I could see what the patterns were like

@kinsale42 @BlackAzizAnansi Brooks Brothers “riots” and SCOTUS handing the presidency to bush. Was obvious to me then that we were heading down a dark path we may not recover from

@BlackAzizAnansi watching the feds deploy chemical weapons and snatch people off the street to crush BLM protests in Portland.

@emmasrandomthoughts @BlackAzizAnansi

My mom showed us photos of of my great grandparents and their families. Most of the people in the photos did not survive the Holocaust.

@BlackAzizAnansi I yelled “Fuck you!” At some “it’s ok to be white” fools who were standing on an overpass. They yelled “fuck ANTIFA” back, and then I was like, “yeah, ok, I’m ANTIFA.”

@BlackAzizAnansi little green men kidnapping protestors in PDX into rented vans. Cops in body armor escorted by NG humvees, screaming “light ‘em up” as they shot gas cannisters at people sitting on their own porches. Watching cops here give water to chuds in body armor illegally open-carrying ARs and handguns, while the cops beat the everloving hell out of unarmed protestors. Watching cops nearly kill an elderly protestor on live TV. 2020.

@BlackAzizAnansi 2004. Waterboarding at Gitmo, and Abu Ghraib photos

I was anti-racist and -fascist from an early age, but it took some education to learn to really understand it. And to see what is happening now in our country.

The first real panic I felt about the danger we're in now was when I read in summer '16 that Trump had appointed Paul Manafort his campaign manager. I made quite a bit of noise about Manafort's history and my fears. White men responded with, "There, there little lady, don't worry. It can't happen here. Our institutions will protect us."

As you all know, this has proven to be bullshit. Our institutions have been undermined and some have been turned against us. We are in real danger of authoritarian, minority rule.

I'm a white, cis woman, but even I don't always feel terribly safe living in a small town in Idaho. Some of my neighbors have been radicalized enough to want bloodshed, and they hate "liberals." And there are people in state government who are fine with this.

@BlackAzizAnansi

I've been thinking about this since last night. It's hard to point to a moment, more of a long hard slog that started with having a Nazi stepfather. And having no health insurance for most of my life. And starving a lot of years. And dealing with violent misogyny everywhere. And learning to connect all that with racism. And classism. And the whole kyriarchy.
Then finally seeing the US explode in fury because a Black man was elected president. It all came together as a whole.