Apr 18 • 8M
Fascism and the War on Abortion
A Speech Given on April 15 for Rise Up for Abortion Rights in Chicago
Radical reflections on past and present
Episode details
3 comments
3 Comments
1 more comment...Top
New
Community
No posts
© 2023 Paul Street
Substack is the home for great writing
Fascism and the War on Abortion
bill wolfe you are abusive and have to go away now. Sorry.
The text from which this talk is adopted: Fuck F**k the courts the legislators, women are not incubators.
“The unavoidable truth,” the revolutionary leader Bob Avakian wrote two years ago, “is that this country, the much-proclaimed ‘Shining City on a Hill,’ is full of fascists!—in the government at all levels and in large parts of the society as a whole.”
He’s right. Fascists are everywhere now, terrorizing Black and brown people, terrorizing children, terrorizing trans people, terrifying teachers, terrifying librarians, terrorizing non-fascist politicians, terrifying election officials, terrorizing women and girls. They are working for those in the ruling class who want to rule society with an iron heel and a boot on our necks, in explicitly racist and sexist ways. Others in the elite and the broader popular cling desperately to what’s left of democracy, reason, and rule of law under capitalism, telling us incorrectly that we can just vote our way out of this mess every two or four years.
It’s a long slow civil war with occasional shocking outbreaks like Charlottesville and January 6th and the mass shootings in El Paso and Pittsburgh during Trump and in Buffalo and Highland Park after Trump. Shocking outrages like the Dobbs v Jackson decision last summer. Like a Texas federal judge’s ruling on mifepristone eight days ago.
What do we mean when we say fascism? We mean the revanchist narrative of a once great white supremacist and patriarchal nation that was supposedly ruined – “stabbed in the back” in classic fascist parlance – by liberals and leftists and that needs to be made “great again” – by any and all means necessary. We mean the rejection and overturning of democracy, or what’s left of it under capitalism-imperialism. We mean political violence and the rule of men and force over the rule of law – this even as the fascists talk incessantly of “law and order.” We mean the embrace of cults of personality around an always male maximalist leader. We mean a desire and readiness to eliminate, even exterminate your political opposition. We mean a hate-filled and potentially genocidal “us” versus “them” Othering of racial minorities, feminists, leftists, liberals, gay people, transgendered folks, and intellectuals, all of whom are identified in the fascist world view with scary, dark, multi-cultural, multi-racial, big cities and metropolitan areas – evil urban zones of radical sloth, crime, and transgression that are juxtaposed against the supposed purity and virtue of the white rural and small town “heartland” or Fatherland. We mean wild racist conspiracy “theories” combined with virulent anti-intellectualism and a rejection of modern science. And we mean a passionate desire to restore and impose traditional social hierarchies of class, race, gender, and nationality.
America your shining City on a Hill is full of fascists! One of the nation’s only two viable political parties’ number one presidential candidate Donald Trump tried to overthrow the US government with a violent coup. He’s running around the country calling Black prosecutors who dare to indict and investigate him "radical Left" and "Soros-backed animals.” He’s telling his frothing supporters that he is their “retribution,” their “vengeance” and that we are approaching the nation’s “Final Battle.” Armageddon language!
The no. 2 Republican contender is Ron DeSantis, who just signed a draconian six-week abortion bill in the dead of night – just one of the many ways in which Dear Leader DeFascist and his Republikaner super-majority have turned Florida into the world’s leading fascist laboratory.
Down in Tennessee, white fascist legislators expelled – they tried to politically eliminate – two Democratic Black state representatives from the Tennessee House because they led a protest for gun reform after yet another mass school shooting. Why do guns matter so much to Republicans? Because the nation’s rightmost major party is now a socially, racially, and politically eliminationist formation that embraces the rule of men and force over the rule of law and it knows that its adherents possess a wildly disproportionate share of the insane number of firearms military style weaponry that is out and about in this Armed Madhouse. The fascist NRA is meeting right now, scheming to get more guns into more people’s hands even as the nation has already had more than 150 mass shootings.
Down in Texas, the fascist pig governor Greg Abbott has announced that he will pardon a vicious racist Army Sgt who was just convicted by a jury of his peers for murdering a Black Lives Matter protester in Austin, Texas in July of 2020.
In red states across the country, we have legislatures passing laws criminalizing the accurate teaching of the history of racism, genocide, sexism and gay-bashing in the American experience past and present.
What does the war on abortion have to do with fascism? Everything! The war on abortion has everything to do with fascism. It’s no accident that the people attacking trans folks and pushing guns and suppressing votes and criminalizing history and banning books and expelling Black legislators are the same people trying to end women’s reproductive freedom. Every fascist movement past and present has been centrally dedicated to enforcing militant sexist patriarchy. Fascism is passionately devoted to the restoration and enforcement of traditional social hierarchy. And the imposition of gender hierarchy is a critical part of that project. Every fascist movement past and present has been profoundly male chauvinist. Every fascist movement past and present has been fiercely determined to keep women “in their place,” that is out of careers, out of the workplace, out of school, out of politics, out of the public square, back in the home pregnant, powerless, burdened with raising children and doing housework. And of course that’s what the war on abortion is all about. It’s not about the babies. It’s not about life. If it was about the babies these wouldn’t be the same people going after early childhood education, under-funding K-12 education and tearing up what’s left of the welfare state in the neoliberal nightmare that is 21st Century America. It's about controlling, oppressing, and exploiting women.
Fuck that. Fuck Fascism. Forced Motherhood is Female Enslavement. Forced Motherhood is Fascism. Fuck the Courts and the Legislators, Women are not Incubators!