Understanding the Other and Radical Empathy
Another example of conflict between peacebuilding and antifa praxis is in the realm of “othering”. Anti-fascists make regular and intensive use of “othering” tactics against fascist and white supremacist movements.
Many anti-fascists make fascists into something that can never be understood but can only be hated and fought. This has strategic value. It’s harder to fight someone with whom you deeply empathize. Conflict transformation suggests something called “radical empathy” attributed to the powerfully brilliant
Tatushi Arai, that allows one to strive to deeply understand the “other” and their needs, while not losing sight of the structural inequalities that influence and often create or maintain the violence. Radical Empathy is an ideal point of reference for antifa praxis against fascism, even though it is much easier said than done. As we struggle to subvert fascism in the world we must also expose it in ourselves. This vulnerability alone can be a source of empathy that allows us to recognize how one could fall into the
memetic viruses associated with fascism and the like.
If fascism is built on theories of dominance and a sort of narcissistic group-selfishness and manipulativeness, then, to that extent, it reflects the sociopathic tendencies which we must undermine in ourselves. When I speak of empathy as a solution to this, I am not speaking of some brittle and impulsive visceral reaction, but rather of a sustained and conscious blurring of the self in order to better understand the “other”. This does not mean that we lose ourselves in our process of recognition because,
if our values are true, then they will always survive the encounter, no matter how deep.
If we are afraid of encountering the “other,” then it is because we are so afraid of inconsistencies within our own politics and values. If that’s the case, then we’d be better off to make these inconsistencies visible and try to understand them. in order to begin undermining them. If you don’t get behind empathy for some higher moral reason, then get behind it for the practical reason— the better you understand your enemy, the more effectively you can fight them. For instance, I personally empathize with the far-right poor white who wants to feel greater certainty in their ability to feed their family or feel safe in their community, even if I disagree with their understanding of how to get there.
Further, from spending significant time around ‘patriots’ and libertarians I have learned of a great many common goals and values and of how to communicate through these frames of reference such as a basic anti-racist instinct in many of them (although it’s often strangled or confused) or contradictions in the application of liberty as they describe it that can be pointed out to some effect. These are all potential bridges for practical real-life conversation.
Alternatively, antifa as a military praxis depends on a certain degree of dehumanization. We have to “crush the disease” of fascism. We have to “kill the nazis”. This is the problem of having an identity based around being ‘anti-’ something else.
An oppositional identity has a built-in requirement of its enemy to exist and it necessitates othering. It would seem quite strange if someone was like, “We need to kill the poor whites who got so convinced by their fear of death and increased restriction of access to means that they believe that African Americans and Muslims are their problem”. It’s not impossible to still beat the $#@! out of that guy, but you’re more likely to want to convince him that he’s been seriously $#@!ing hustled.
So if our goal is to control and limit the number of fascists out there recruiting and terrorizing neighborhoods, then it is in some ways more effective to not really think about the humanity of those you would kill. I mean, I’ve never heard of an army that meditates before battle on the humanity of their enemy. Radical empathy has more to do with our approach to the entire situation though than just what we do on the streets. It means that we think differently about how to strategize against fascists and also how to engage with them in dialogue when it’s appropriate.
We can still throw a chair at someone we more deeply understand and empathize with. I mean, haven’t you ever been to a family reunion?
This trend of oppositional identity extends so far that eventually it even gets into some nasty classism where leftists condescend to the ignorance of poor communities that are often manipulated by the GOP.
We forget that your average Republican has a set of values and ethics: it is from a deeper understanding of what these values are that we can often convince them that the means they’ve chosen are not in line with the ends they seek. Arguments can then be made that modern capitalism is not in line with the values such as freedom and liberty set forth by the ideologues of capitalism because of a range of issues such as state-protected monopolies and a landed upper one-percent concentration of extreme wealth.
Any right-wing aficionado with a basic grasp of Libertarian values will then perk their ears up and you begin to have the possibility of an actual conversation. Of course generally though, even the most militant groups practice basic propaganda and even the most pacifist groups wouldn’t just try to talk sense to an armed right wing militia group.
There are important and contextual questions of timing and safety that we deal with on a case-by-case basis.
An example of how this can and does occur is when, like in the film “When Tommy Met Mo”, every time a liberal swoops in to say that Islam is a religion of peace, but has never read the Koran, a right-winger, citing a sketchy memory of certain damning passages, looks with condescension and disbelief upon the ignorance and denial of the liberal. Alternatively, when a conservative, uses the behavior of a proportionately incredibly small section of people identified as Muslim, to malign the entire group, a liberal looks with condescension and disbelief upon the ignorance and denial of the conservative.
Both think that the other is a monster bent on destroying and attacking their respective values. This pair may then be pushed farther to their respective extreme, with the right-wing conservative feeling increasingly only understood by extreme right wing nationalist groups, and the liberal feeling only understood by far leftists.
This whole situation of anti-magnetism can be avoided through more nuanced and less polarized avenues for dialogue.
I’m not minimizing the importance of militant repression of fascism.
There is much evidence that fascism flourishes in the sunlight and withers in the shadows because of its ideologies of: “We are temporarily oppressed by XYZ but we are the rightful heirs of everything great including dominance”. So generally, when we need to quickly stop a bunch of Nazi’s from harassing a group of Muslims or a bunch of right wingers assaulting women seeking an abortion, we don’t really think about their trajectory, or who they are as people, or how to undermine them in a more sustainable way.
We just focus on stopping the $#@! they’re doing now because that is also important. In some ways, the rhetoric against dehumanization in peacebuilding applies to a different situation such as in Rwanda, where Tutsis were referred to as cockroaches by Hutus with relatively little by way of reason supporting this dehumanization
(outside of a colonially implanted ideology/power structure). Whereas, if I call a nazi a cockroach, it’s because they are self-identified white supremacists. The power differential and the sensibility is different.
White-supremacy has systemic state support, whereas antifa radicalism does not. State power is part of what makes othering so lethal and insidious. Words have more impact when they’re backed by the violence of the state.
I do not go as far as to claim that the police will
always support white supremacists and
never support antifa, as the U.S history in this regard is quite mixed, from the
Greensboro massacre to
Waco.
This mixed history does not contradict the fact that “the state” does have a vested interest in maintaining some degree of invisible and visible white supremacy. There is additional complexity in that, the othering of an empowered agent of state approved violence such as cops (the blue militia), is not at all the same thing as a cop othering a disenfranchised civilian. If a cop dehumanizes a civilian they can get away with shooting them. If I say “$#@! the pigs” it really won’t have any impact on them. In terms of the academic theory side we might not even call the latter (FTP!) othering even though it shares so many of the same behaviors and traits because it lacks the systemic punch.
Antifa members can strategically utilize othering of these grossly empowered fascists as a tactic but they must beware of the potential negative consequences of that tactic such as decreased ability to counter-recruit, decreased ability to understand the “enemy” enough to strategize effectively, or the loss of perspective when it comes to ethics around violence. To see the slipperiness of the slope, consider for a moment– if fascists are just “cockroaches” at what point does it become genocide rather than just ‘pest elimination’? This regression doesn’t mean we should abandon violence all together in some hand-waving idealism. It just that we need to maintain ethical and intellectual vigilance when utilizing tactics such as “othering” in our work.
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