After a slow start, people are beginning to take the streets. Thousands around the country are demonstrating against ICE raids; in Los Angeles, for example, students led walkouts for days on end, gathering at City Hall and decorating its façade with graffiti reading "Fuck Trump" and "Fuck ICE." In Cincinnati, a historically black community organized itself against a neo-Nazi rally, running off the white supremacists and burning their swastika flags.  Elsewhere, people have shut down Tesla dealerships to protest the power grab that Elon Musk is making on behalf of tech billionaires. One Tesla dealership, in Loveland, Colorado, has been vandalized three times in the past three months. There is a call for demonstrations at Tesla outlets on February 15.

Hiding out while our oppressors consolidate power will only increase the dangers we face. As we argue in the following text, it's safer in the front.

Faced with intensifying repression and state violence, there is an understandable inclination to seek safety by avoiding confrontation. But this is not always the most effective strategy.

“Counterintuitive though it is, in a confusing situation, often the best, if not safest, place to be is the front lines, so you can get a clear visual grasp of what is going on around you.”

- “What I Do for a Living,” an account from the demonstrations against the 2003 European Union summit in Thessaloniki, published in Rolling Thunder #1.

My friend’s grandfather grew up in Germany in the 1920s. Being Jewish, he got involved in radical organizations and sometimes engaged in physical altercations with Nazis. In a memoir that he recorded for his family decades later, he describes the situation when the Nazis took power: “In January 1933, Hitler became chancellor. I thought we would now start a revolution, but actually nothing happened. The communists defected—often en masse—to the Nazis and the social democrats held out a little longer but ultimately dissolved their organizations.”

In May 1933, when he was twenty years old, he learned that he was about to be prosecuted for having broken a Nazi’s nose in a street brawl. Rather than face trial in a judicial system controlled by Nazis, he immediately obtained a passport and boarded a train for Holland that same night at 8 pm.

Some years later, the rest of his family died in the concentration camp in Auschwitz.

This story succinctly illustrates a surprisingly common phenomenon. Had my friend’s grandfather not participated in open confrontations with Nazis from the very beginning, had he kept his head down and avoided trouble, he probably would have remained in Berlin and met the same fate as his relatives. By taking the offensive, he put himself in harm’s way—but paradoxically, in the long run, that worked out better than playing it safe.

Likewise, participants in the guerrilla underground of the Jewish resistance were among the only ones to survive the Nazis’ annihilation of the Jewish ghetto in Warsaw. In organizing to meet the Nazi threat head on, they developed a robust relationship to their agency, and this served them well when the only way out was to organize a daring escape from the besieged and burning ghetto through the sewer system.

For members of targeted groups, the initial impulse is often to withdraw, to go into hiding. Yet when it comes to both individual and collective self-preservation, it can be wiser to act assertively at the beginning, while it is still possible to influence the course of events. Even if this goes badly, it can be better to bring the conflict to a head immediately, before one’s adversary becomes more powerful. If nothing else, this strategy has the virtue of making it impossible to lull oneself into a false sense of security while the threat increases.

It doesn’t always work out this way, but sometimes, it’s safer in the front.

Zines

We’ve released zine versions of several of our recent articles. Please print these out and distribute them!

Design

We are seeking volunteers to assist with zine and poster design! If you could be interested in assisting in preparing posters and zine versions of our texts, please send us examples of your work.

Languages

This month, we have added several of our articles and zines in French, Spanish, Indonesian, and Italian.

If you can help us translate our work into any language, please contact us. We count on your assistance to make what we are doing accessible as part of a global conversation.

What We’re Doing

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If you want to help us expand the scope of our efforts, you can support our projects financially. But the most important thing right now is to form networks that are capable of mutual aid, collective defense, and transformative revolutionary change. Find people who share your desire for a better world and practice taking action together.

For a selection of resources on how to prepare for turbulent times, you can begin here.