Fascist cowards no-show at Mark Bray Antifa book event

On the 29th of September, Mark Bray spoke at Politics and Prose almost next door to Comet Pizza to promote his book "Antifa" subtitled "the anti-fascist handbook." Fascists were expected to attempt to disrupt this militantly anti-fascist event like earlier this year at Potter's House when another antifascist author spoke, but never showed up.

Expecting the worst, two DC area antifascist groups had assembled a stout security presence to protect the event. Both the location and the subject matter were expected to draw fascist opposition, but their defeat at Charlottesville and the string of defeats and cancelled events since then may have demoralized white supremacists. The entire event, as militant as it was, proceeded entirely without interruption.

Mark Bray spoke about the need not to permit fascist groups to get started at all, to deny them the resources, spaces, and logistics they need to organize. The first example given was anti-Fascist organizing in Britain right after WWII, when breaking up the dozen-plus fascist meetings taking place each week in once area stopped the growth of British fascist groups in that immediate postwar era. They grew again later, but that's no fault of those who stopped them in 1946.

There was mention of the fact that simply exposing Nazis in front of their communities can often cost them jobs and housing. This sort of thing both cuts off funding for hate and deters others from getting involved in the first place. Similar tactics attempted by the far-right against anti-fascist activists usually fail in urban areas like DC.

Mark pointed out that the Nazi Holocaust began with somewhere around 50 people in what was then called the "German Worker's Party. There was also discussion of the fact that Nazism was but the return to Europe of the methods of colonialism in the rest of the world. It is a known fact that Hitler sent members of the SS to the United States to study the genocide of Indigenous people here with the intention of replicating it in Europe.

The basic message seemed to be that organization of fascist and white supremacist groups is a direct threat to people's physical safety, and thus must be nipped in the bud, stopped in the earliest possible stages. In essence, this was a frank discussion of counter-terrorism in an environment where the terrorists are supported by the state and the police can be expected to do nothing about them.