The police are calling it an altercation between extremists. And I am livid.
As I don't have the words, I'm posting my own translation of Gustav Almestad's words on the subject. They say it well.
It’s my kind they want to kill
This time, too, it was terrorism. A group of people who decided to go out armed on the International Women’s Day and through violence and fear demonstrate that no corner of the earth can be safe for those who want to see it improved. And it no longer mattered that a drowsy media again looked for neutral, impartial words in which to couch the deed, or that the event was swathed in intimations of equal brawls, of victims having voluntarily joined the extremist’s games. I could feel the fear in my own body, and for my part the illusion is finally gone. I knew that I am myself vulnerable and that a manifestation isn’t just a place of hope and participation, but also a place in which knives can swiftly end a spring day.
My kind they want to kill.
I always knew, felt it in my gut much too late.
Six people wounded in the attack and brought to the hospital, of them 25-year old Showan so seriously that as late as Monday morning he nursed life-threatening injuries and lay in a coma. As one of the founders of the group Football Supporters against Homophobia, Showan had earlier been outed by a site connected to the Swedes’ Party, and could thus very well have been deliberate targeted by the perpetrators. Still that prevarication. “A punch-up,” according to the first responders on the Police, and just as if attempted murder were a game of tit-for-tat there comes the jabbering about “extremists on the right” opposing “extremists on the left.” Renowned Nazis are arrested, yet their motives are pronounced unknown.
Listen, the motives of Nazis are never unknown. They arm themselves because March 8th is a day they hate. This, the perhaps most peaceful day of the year. And we have the gall to call it fighting? They respond to manifestations of support for those attacked by pasting new graffiti in schoolyards. They brag about this. Motives unknown?
Just as how “gang-related warfare” or “previously known to the Police” is now code for a murdered or wounded person being somehow at a remove, not part of the “we” that is simultaneously constructed, so this talk of a clash of extremists creates a false impression of the threat of fascism as understandable, predictable, possible to avoid. It suggests that violent activism on one’s own is a requisite part of victimhood. Just as you are made criminal in the media if you are murdered by a criminal, so are you made extremist when the knife stuck in your stomach is gripped by an extremist.
So the situation is made murky, through an impression that “we”, we needn’t be frightened – so long as we keep from attending that demonstration that might possibly attract a black balaclava. Through comforting fantasies of fascist violence as a sort of hooligan’s firm with an appointment to keep. As long as we sit at a distance, a safe distance. Hoping they’ll shape up. If we all did that, the threat would already have its effect, whether anybody admits it or not. The streets would already belong to the Nazis.
When the victims are too obviously innocents then the motives of the deed are instead thrown into question, in any way possible, from mistake to mental illness. Anything to avoid discussing Breivik and his cohorts’ hatred of feminism, anything to keep from admitting that racial constructs and skin color are important factors in understanding the terrorist Peter Mangs. Anything to avoid admitting how they’re also important factors in understanding why “we” weren’t unduly afraid of a systematic killer in our midst. Because some discover that it isn’t enough to avoid crowds chanting against fascism; they’re slain regardless, their bodies excluded from a constructed “we” that pretends to color-blindness.
After Kärrtorp an awakening seemed nigh – jesus they went for the women and kids! – but the “we” went back to sleep. Weren't a few violent leftists there? And this is in point of fact the desired effect of obfuscation: to grant some the ability to sit in the publisher’s office and discuss drain-pipes and the tone of the debate. To enable critique and the shying away from any manifestation that might pay host to a disagreeable speech or sign. To let people write reports on extremism that only count pegs without the context (fascism still won by 14-0). All in order to let oneself be tricked, at a safe distance from that ominous feeling in one’s body, a knowledge that fascism is here, in arms.
I stood there during the manifestation at La Mano in Stockholm, feeling hope and strength – but I was scared too. I have to be, to be able to defy that fear. And if you haven’t yet felt it in your body you have to trust the ones who have, because that’s how a true we is made. We so vastly outnumber them, and only with our bodies do we stand against them. We’re short on time, they’re murdering us out here.
