A Guide to the Everyday Acts That Can Gum Up the Fascist Machine

When the Nazis invaded and occupied Denmark in 1940, the Danes faced a choice: obey or resist. In an article in The nation Earlier this month, Sarah Sophie Flicker details acts of Danes’ daily disobedience in the face of the fascist regime. As the organizer and the artist explains, the inhabitants of Denmark followed “Ten Commandments for Danish” – a set of moral instructions created by Arne Sejr, 17 years old. The advice was simple and included rules such as “do not work for the Nazis or do not support their businesses”, “work slowly or do a bad job when you have to work for the Germans” and “protect anyone who is” chased “by the Nazis”.

Following the commandments was not without risk. Some people had their electricity or their cut water; Others have been beaten, expelled to camps or killed. But their collective actions have helped to change the mentalities of some of the Germans occupying Denmark, including an official who disclosed a plan to expel the country’s 8,000 Jews in concentration camps. Due to this flight, the Danes were able to protect 99% of Danish Jews, many of whom were transported and welcomed in Sweden. Flicker writes that the country also emerged from the Second World War “with a stronger feeling of community, supporting its unrivaled social policies”. She maintains that the Americans today would be wise to follow their traces.

In response to its article, a group of artists and organizers in the United States has set up a “10 challenge commandments”, inspired by the Danish list.

The contemporary list of commands includes demands for protecting education, freedom of expression and fair elections and calls to support unions and people who are attacked by the administration. He encourages people to create “subversive arts and acts of random joy” and to “slow down, obstruct and destroy the machine of fascism”. And the graph, which is shared on social networks, includes a QR code leading people to a resource document which recommends specific actions that people can take, such as a manifestation, repel disinformation, provide community care resources or study one (or more) of the books listed on fascism and resistance.

Those of the group have chosen to be anonymous, explaining in a press release:

This campaign is not intended to raise a single voice, but to remind us that we only create changes when we move together. In a society that rewards individualism, we rather choose to emphasize collective responsibility. It is a way of straightening up in the community, because this is where sustainable transformation begins.

One of the organizers told me that the people of our society tend to believe that because we are witnessing disappearances, violence and genocide alone on our phones, we must solve these problems alone. But that, they said, give us the impression that we can do nothing, so we just have to do nothing. “The way to wake up this spell is to remember that neither of us can do all things,” they said. “We have to come together collectively. At the minute we do, we remember that it is not only as we find power and the construction of power, but this is where we find joy, and this is where we find care, and this is where we find meaning, and this is where we find ourselves, we restore as members of the community.

A second organizer told me that with these commandments, “there is a place for everyone to see each other and the potential to present themselves.” And although religious connotations, the word itself – the commons – do not resonate with everyone, it is a word which is “readable wherever you come”.

The organizers hope that commandments remind people the power of collective action. Whether we are aware of it or not, doing business as usual, each of us already participates in an agreement to respect the rule of law and respect democracy. And when there is an autocrat in the White House, each of us becomes an accomplice of the realization of the reprehensible acts under the law. “This will not decrease the nuisance that living your life can be quite difficult or feeling dangerous or all these things,” said the organizer. “But in the end, they are ordinary people – they are the only ordinary people – who change extraordinary circumstances.”

Indeed, it is ordinary people who raised the crisis in Gaza, contributing to the awareness and global support of the Palestinians who did not exist in previous decades. This is why the Trump administration targets Palestinian activists and hopes to keep students, teachers and online movement leaders. “You cannot understand Gaza without understanding the whole world,” said one of the organizers. “It is a beautiful horrible microcosm of what is all around us. … I never thought of seeing the day when the world said Palestine.”

The awakening that occurred is anchored in the social movements that preceded – the uprisings of George Floyd, Black Lives Matter, Occupy Wall Street, the Civil Rights Movement – and what so many people, including Angela Davis and Noam Chomsky, said for decades, “but nobody cared, no one listened, few people have made a second.”

Now people see “the machine we have been accomplices and we were forced to be a part, and we wake up to the fact that we do not want to be part of it.” The ten commandments of the challenge, explained the organizers, is a call to “keep the front and center our obligation to remain morally unruly and completely engaged in the sense of our sense of morality”.

We hold power, a bit like the Danes. If we were not powerful, they said, “There would be no fear that we were working together. There would be no fear that we are voting together, to get married, to live a life filled with love. ”

However, the organizers recognize that for some people, the cost of participation in these actions could be higher than for others. A person of color or a queer or trans person or a undocumented person could be punished more severely for having taken some of the actions on the list or a person who is employed or is a citizen could have more agency than people who have more vulnerabilities. “We each come from different places at different times and will be placed in a variety of contexts,” said an organizer. But “he cannot do nothing. This is what we can do that allows us to provide and receive care that allows us to provide and receive a refuge and allows us to act and be united. ”

In other words, we have to focus on where we have each one, because “that’s exactly what they want us to forget”. If we do this, together, we can build a society where empathy prevails over fascism.