Can we talk about your silence?

before fascism stops us (**uncomfortable ideas incoming)

As a nice, mid-life, white woman I am not meant to point fingers and use accusatory (you/your) language. I am meant to keep my activism and resistance polite and inclusive. I am meant to shape-shift and dance around situations to make those ensconced in the status quo feel as comfortable as possible while I tentatively invite change and wave flags and ring bells.

But!

The state of the world has produced in me a surging, self-disregarding compulsion, a fierce sense of responsibility, to challenge this limiting mindset, neigh to chuck a bomb under it.

So, sorry-not-sorry-here-we-go.

We are in trouble, dearest friends. Big fat trouble. Fascism is descending, the kind that disrupts the whole planet, the kind that takes generations to recover from, the kind that everyone claims they didn’t see coming.

And if you are someone who is not using every means possible to voice up right now, then your inaction, your silence, is dangerous. To you, to me, to the human endeavour.

The United States is in (or, bare minimum, on the cusp of) autocracy, martial law and/or civil war, depending on the day and the commentator. The Trump administration has now complected roughly half of the Project 2025 manifesto, which could accurately be described as a blueprint for autocratic takeover. Did you catch this video, below, that the President shared on his Truth Social platform on the weekend? That’s Russel Vought, the White House budget director who authored Project 2025, playing the Grim Reaper.

I presume you also caught some of Trump’s speech delivered to the nation’s 800-odd military chiefs who’d been ordered into a room for a talking-to? The one where he declared they were now at war on Americans. (“It’s a war from within”…”and we’re going to straighten them out one by one.”)

I mean, the evidence mounts hourly. The three “breaking news” grabs below hit my feed in a five-minute timeframe yesterday:

Then there’s Israel. It is committing a genocide in Gaza. But it is also successfully silencing all international opposition to it via the Israeli lobby (AIPAC etc), in the process dragging much of the world into a deadly race to the bottom. It’s death by collective moral injury. The UK watches in shock as its police are ordered to arrest thousands of peaceful demonstrators - including an 83-year old female pastor - protesting genocide with cardboard signs. Germany is doing the same with horrible violence, even against children. Or what about the US “thought police” bill that was introduced to Congress that would strip citizens of their passports if they criticise Israel? Our leaders are complicit with a regime that is committing countless war crimes. How the f*ck did we come to this? I’m sure you’ve noted many such instances in your own country…

This is fascism creep. This is how fascism descends.

But this time it’s worse than usual. The oligarchical Tech Bros’ intimate and highly vested involvement takes it to a whole different level. They have commissioned the manifestos and stacked the governments and international bodies. They also own the technology that monitors all of our movements around the planet, the border controls, when and how we can interact with each other, whether our vote counts, and the bulk of them have a hand to play in the genocide, per the recent UN report “From Economy of Occupation to Economy of Genocide”.

One example from the past week or so: The Former British PM Tony Blair….who has been slated by Trump to run the the transitional authority in post-genocide Gaza…. also has a think tank that advocates for mandatory digital ID… which is funded largely by Oracle’s Larry Ellison (the second richest man in the world)….who happens to own digital ID technology…and who, oh!, is also the largest donor to the IDF.

Fascist regimes always take over the media. This time the pro-Israel Tech Bros are. TikTok in the US is about to become majority (60%) controlled by, sigh, Larry Ellison, his fellow ‘bro Michael Dell and Rupert Murdoch, while Trump announced he would make it “100% MAGA”. In a meeting with pro-Israel American influencers last week Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu described social media as “the most important weapon” in his war and that the TikTok purchase would have “consequential” influence. Zuckerberg’s META and Musk’s X have been shown to repeatedly shadowban and suppress pro-Palestine content.

Every fibre of my being is telling me that we are on the precipice of something incredibly dangerous, disgraceful and largely irreversible, at least for a long, long time. And so now is the precisely, uniquely, urgent time to fight for what we have taken for granted - democracy, our rights, our freedom, our lives.

And it is time for the cautiously or fearfully silent to be pushed to join the party.

I’m also being prompted to write this post, and to issue my accusatory rally cry, by the fact that I’m being approached by more and more friends and peers who, clearly uncomfortable about their silence, are awkwardly raising tricky subjects (that they remain silent on), seemingly wanting something from me. I’ve been assuming they are wanting to be pushed; that some part of their psyche is needing (forceful) permission to challenge what they might be observing in themselves as a dangerous complicity.

So I’ve been pushing them. This post gives the gist of my push.

I’ll continue with the second-person address, as uncomfortable as it makes me feel. I mean, obviously #notallofYOU. And, yet, also #allofUS. My argument probably applies to anyone who has not yet gone as far as boarding a flotilla. Or standing in front of a train.¹ I know I am still holding back to some extent, still waiting for some kind of right moment before I go all in with all limbs flailing…

Y(our) silence is exactly what *they* planned

I totally appreciate that many of you are feeling you have to turn away from what is happening because it’s got too hard. And it’s one of those situations where once you tune out from what’s happening in the news it becomes a monstrous ordeal to step back in, to try to pick up the complex political and sociological threads again…and so, yep, you just give up even more.

But fascist and authoritarian regimes descend by doing precisely this - by overwhelming and bamboozling the masses and specifically so that they stop paying attention and give up. They expressly “flood the zone with shit”, as Trump’s advisor Steve Bannon put it, to disorientate us all. They “brain scramble” and bullshit.

Brain scrambling as fluent bullshit tactic and the new muscularity

They sit around planning ways to ensure that you stop staying informed and engaging in politics and debates that affect your future and your kids’ futures. They push anti-intellectualism, they ban books, cancel academics, de-fund universities and outlaw protests.

All to make you voluntarily choose silence. It saves them having to use force - at first.

So when you say, “it’s all too much for me, I need to tune out”, you are falling for their trap.

And when you say, “I don’t follow the news any more” or “I don’t talk about politics, it’s all so ridiculous now”, it’s not a cute act of resistance or defiance, it’s sublimation.

You might have seen the memes that go, “Staying is silent on Gaza is your privilege speaking”? It’s not really. It’s your captivity speaking.

It’s so important we say things as they are now. And we need to say them now, before it’s too late²

Fascism has always gone like this

Fascism, indeed, creeps up. It vanquishes through exhaustion and overwhelm and “hypernormalisation”, a term coined by anthropologist Alexei Yurchak to describe how civilians in Soviet Russia stayed silent, pretending everything was normal, allowing the baseline of acceptability to shift beneath them.

Hannah Arendt, who escaped the Nazis twice, observed fascism creep astutely. She argued that fascism happens when ordinary people stop thinking critically, stop engaging, allowing the corrupt few to target particular groups - at first - before coming for everybody else.

“The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction … and the distinction between true and false, no longer exist.”

Which might remind you of that famous statement made by that Lutheran minister who survived Nazi Germany:

“First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—
because I was not a socialist.
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—
because I was not a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—
because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.”

🚨 Of course, fascism’s most effective tool is that it makes you think there’s time, that you can speak up in a bit, not quite yet. You know, when it gets bad enough… by which time, of course, it’s too late. Much like that frog in the proverbial warming post of water. More to this below…

The most recent U.S. ambassador to Viktor Orban’s Hungary, who witnessed the country fall to authoritarianism, wrote a brutal op-ed back in July, observing that Americans are now, “…responding to authoritarian advances just as their Hungarian counterparts have — not with defiance, but with capitulation.”

The New York Times somewhat mysteriously keeps reposting this video of columnist M.Gessen who grew up in a secret police state (in Russia) describing how the US has now become one. It was originally published five months ago, but is worth watching in light of what has happened in the US in the past week or so.

You think that nothing you say will make a difference?

Oh, but it’s just not true!

For the moment, many leaders, media and multinationals are still responding to what large amounts of people say and share. Protests and boycotts, while we’re still able to get away with them, work. Witness ABC/Disney’s Jimmy Kimmel about-face and the (far too late and too feeble) recognition of the state of Palestine by Australia, France and Canada recently.

Social media also has incredible clout and it’s where many of you/us can get started immediately. Someone on the socials recently shared a conversation they had with ChatGPT about this. The LLM, when quizzed on whether social media still has value for activists, exposed that the apps struggle to muzzle true critical mass:

But I don’t think this will be the case for too much longer. Which is exactly why we all need to be - bare minimum - whacking a ❤️ on these kinds of posts now, while we still can! Before the pot really starts simmering hard.

The big social platforms are indeed increasingly shadowbanning and suppressing content and users. More and more everyday technologies are coming under the surveillance and control of fascist and technofeudalist forces (did you see that Oura rings have partnered with the US Department of Defence, with Peter Thiel’s Palantir in charge of the “secure handling” of the data?).

I believe we are a matter of months away from being silenced in a more comprehensive manner. We have a small window to fight for what is being taken from us; we need to make use of it!

And so if you’re going to do it, don’t be waiting for a better moment. This is the moment. We are at that point in history where folk in the future look back and go, why didn’t anyone do anything when it was so obvious it was their last chance?

There’s also this: Non-silence begets more non-silence. Which is to say, it has a hectic multiplier effect. Particularly on social media. You might only have, say, 100 followers on Instagram. But when you speak up on fascism, the Tech Bros or the genocide in Gaza - even if it’s a mere ❤️ on someone else’s post - you normalise resistance, and more effectively than, say, someone with 100,000 followers to the same group of people (because those 100 people are likely to follow you at an intimate level). Your one ❤️, or share, or post has a 100x impact.

Plus, there’s this: Your non-silence keeps those who are really putting themselves on the line safe. Likes and comments make it harder for the Gretas and the Motaz Azaizavs of the world to be doxxed, disappeared and threatened. Likes and comments say “we are all watching” to the powers-that-be.

I know personally I’d have felt a lot safer if more of my friends and peers supported me when I wrote my more controversial posts. As it is - and I’ll just have to say it straight - no more than six or seven of my friends do so.

But even more importantly, attending protests, likes and comments let those who are in peril - Gazans, for example - know that their horrible plight is not in vain, that we haven’t forgotten them. Can you imagine being imprisoned in Gaza, your life on the line, and with only the ability to show the world what is going on… and then observing you stop bearing witness because it’s too uncomfortable?

Your freedom kicks in as soon as you speak up. I promise.

Cass wrote in the comments last week:

I just heard this quote by Dan Savage “During the darkest days of the AIDS crisis, we buried our friends in the morning, we protested in the afternoon and we danced all night. The dance kept us in the fight because it was the dance we were fighting for.”

The awesome (history professor and democracy expert) Heather Cox Richardson speaks to this:

There are countless studies that show that the best way through tough times is to turn your anxiety and pain into action and activism. Our stress hormones need a release. Staying silent keeps us trapped in our anxiety and pain. Holding back keeps us psychically, spiritually constipated.

Flipside, speaking up keeps us contributing to the moral light. Resistance is where we find the spark of human dignity. It preserves our agency, our humanity.

We need to see this spark in each other.

But we also need to see it in ourselves if we are to continue to find any kind of meaning in our lives going forward.

Here’s a starting point…

Start small, but do it now. Support those who are already speaking up. Normalise resistance with a like, a comment…then perhaps graduate to sharing and writing on your own feed. But, I’ll say it again, if you’re going to do it, don’t wait for a better moment. This is the moment.

I realise that some of “you” are not posters, or likers, or commenters on anything. But that’s irrelevant. These are wildly special times. When fascism arrives, it’s all hands on deck.

Perhaps click on every hyperlink in this post and do a search on every startling statement I’ve included, and read about what’s going on. Godspeed with that rabbit-holing, though. This is all going to get mighty confusing and frightening very soon.

Unfollow vacuous feeds on the socials. Do you really need to know how to apply under-eye cover-up? Aren’t matcha latte finds so very cringe now? Follow better prophets and festoon their posts with likes and comments. Take back control of your feed. Play the algorithms.

And, look, if you need to start even smaller, repost the bejesus out of the situation. Are you aware of the repost feature on Instagram? As Hannah Ferguson says, “it’s an echo chamber challenger”.

I also like how Liz Plank wrote about it this week in an essay, “Being Informed Feels Like Being Awake During Surgery”:

“But here’s what I want you to remember: when we look at how people have survived authoritarian governments, disinformation, and social collapse, it looks like this. It’s almost never feels heroic. It’s by doing small, stubborn, deeply human things that keep reality alive. In fascist Italy, in Soviet Russia, in Chile under Pinochet, in apartheid South Africa, people survived by refusing to let lies become language. They whispered real facts to each other when newspapers were propaganda. They shared banned books, wrote poems by hand, passed around leaflets, taught kids what was actually happening. They kept a thread of honesty alive between them.”

Finally…

I’m aware a lot of activists are increasingly imploring their followers to speak up with increasing passion, sometimes aggressively.

British activist Aja Barber recently shared on her Instagram a frustration I, too, experience when my friends (the ones who avoid any engagement with my activist posts) tell me privately (in DMs or in person) that it’s great that I write and talk on these “scary” subjects. Barber wrote:

“I can’t take it. Stop congratulating those around you who do the action and start doing the action yourself.”

My frustration (and I suspect Aja’s), however, doesn’t come from a resentment that I’m putting my safety and comfort on the line while others get to talk matcha latte finds and are able to go about their lives without the horrible fear of career-ending Israeli lobby blowback. I would rather speak up. I really can’t imagine not doing it. The pain - the moral injury - of not acting on what I no longer unsee would be too immense for me to continue living, to be honest.

And this is the sentiment I think many - Mehdi Hasan, Owen Jones, Aja, Naomi Klein, Francesca Albanese and others - are trying to convey. We are worried for anyone who fails to speak up now. We are worried about what is going to happen when they realise they missed the moment. We are worried about the collective moral injury that occurs when we see good people give up on the human endeavour.

Throughout history those who do speak up have oftentimes regarded the silent as more dangerous than those who loudly support what’s going on for this reason - the collective moral injury that is caused.

If you’re a “stay silent” type, then it’s likely you’re avoiding the news, too. Which means you probably don’t realise how perilous your position is - that we are in this moment now. And so there is this surging sense of responsibility in those who are somewhat abreast of the shitshow to scream, Fire! Get informed! Speak Up! Fast!

All of that said, I confess my motivation for this rant is also fear. I’m scared it is too dangerous for someone like me to travel to the US now. US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) would already have my details; getting a burner phone and deleting my social media accounts would still see me “disappeared” at customs if I were stopped. I have a book coming out in the US in June that speaks up on all the above issues and it might only be a matter of time before I am silenced in other ways. And so when anyone - particularly friends and peers - do speak up with me, around me, in support of people like me, and bear witness generally, I feel safer. But more than this, I feel that all of us are safer. First they come for the activists, the woke, the migrants, the brown and black people, the transexuals, the women…

Sarah xx

(PS This was a very long post… thanks for hanging in to the end. In the comments, shall we chat about why we hold back from speaking up?)

1. Obviously, if you’re reading this post, you’re probably more engaged than most.

2. Timothy Garton Ash, a professor of European Studies at the University of Oxford, warned last month that Americans have 400 days to save democracy.