Marcel Winatschek

The Quiet Work

Fascism looks good, which is part of what makes it work. Architecture, symbols, uniforms—everything’s designed to pull at something specific. That’s not accidental. That’s the whole plan.

There’s always the question of what you do about it. Not the big fantasy where you’re the hero—you know that doesn’t happen. I mean the actual everyday stuff. The propaganda sitting there. The conversations that start going that way. The people around you who haven’t quite said it out loud but definitely think it.

Someone sent me to Kein Bock Auf Nazis once, a German site that just laid out the basic things. Don’t look away. Clean up the propaganda when you see it. Find some people and do something. The radical stuff isn’t radical—it’s just paying attention and treating it like it matters.

The thing is, it does matter, and nobody else is going to fix it. It falls on us, which is unfair and frustrating, but pretending otherwise is just surrender in a better costume.