Resisting Fascism

I had ambitious plans of working yesterday but then I checked the news and those plans went out the window. An ICE thug shot a protester dead in Minneapolis. She was a white female US citizen, widely considered the least threatening demographic and most deserving of protection from violence. Yes, this is not the first person ICE has killed and ICE has been brutalizing immigrants for months. But, if ICE can shoot a white woman in public, with a clear recording of the incident, with impunity, who knows what they can get away with. I have written before about how fascism is unfolding differently in the US and in India. In India, the fascist regime has slowly suffocated democratic institutions, taking them apart brick by brick. No need for shock-and-awe if you have a right-wing population that is broadly supportive of your agenda. And, fascism has to be resisted in the streets because given enough time, fascists neutralize the courts and make sure they don’t lose elections. When fascists control the state, resisting fascism becomes an extraordinarily risky business. But people have always done extraordinarily risky things for love and faith (not necessarily the religious kind). In India, not many days go by without reports of so-called “honour” killings, which is when members of an upper-caste family kill their daughter and her low-caste husband/lover as they believe their romance sullies their family’s “honour”. I read a statistic somewhere that, around the world, women are most at risk of being killed by intimate partners. But, I don’t imagine there are many places where they are at risk of being killed by their fathers and brothers. Honour killings are not a widespread phenomena in India but the very fact that they still happen is an abomination. However, news reports of honour killings fill me with both revulsion and hope and admiration. Hope and admiration for the young lovers who know that they could pay with their lives for loving the wrong person but still do. Humans have always done things that any rational risk assessment would rule out.