Saturday, November 11, 2023

Reading Around For Chasing Ashes

 So who comes when the devil calls?

Scuppernong Books has a reading list, Antifascist Reading List - Books, which does not shake anything loose in my brain. 

That led me to UNC Greensboro's library guide on fascism. Still, not what I am looking for.

LitHub's On the Antifascist Activists Who Fought in the Streets Long Before Antifa: The Rich American History of Nazi-Punching did find out a few things worth sharing:

Yet the street-fighting mode of antifascism has a genealogy in the United States that predates the 1980s, and this collection attempts to flesh it out as well. The flash points here include the famous battle inside and outside of Madison Square Garden between antifascists and supporters of the pro-Nazi German American Bund in 1939, captured in Felix Morrow’s “All Races, Creeds Join Picket Line.” Robert F. Williams provides a theoretical justification for armed self-defense in the excerpt from Negroes with Guns (1962)—a piece that has gone unrecognized as part of the antifascist tradition, even though Williams, a World War II veteran, repeatedly identified his white supremacist enemies as “fascists.” Yet street-level action against fascists and protofascists was rarely articulated as a political philosophy before the 1980s.

Moreover, the record of fascist-versus-antifascist violence in the United States is actually quite long, and we have used the pieces by Morrow and Williams merely to index this history, rather than to catalog it. Other instances, not directly discussed in this volume, include the sometimes-lethal resistance from immigrant communities to marches by the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s; Italian American antifascist clashes with Mussolini supporters in the 1920s and 1930s; Jewish American self-defense units formed to fight back against the anti-Semitic violence of the Christian Front in Boston and New York during World War II; the mass brawls inside and outside George Wallace’s Madison Square Garden rally in October 1968; and the shootout at the so-called “Greensboro Massacre” of 1979, discussed in outline in the Ken Lawrence piece, “The Ku Klux Klan and Fascism” (1982).
Transatlantic Writers: Between the Wars from The American Writers Museum gave me nothing, other than a new slant on Thomas Wolfe:

A very different reaction to the growth of Fascism came from Thomas Wolfe. Despite being another writer closely identified with his hometown (in this case, Asheville, North Carolina), Wolfe also traveled throughout Europe in the 1920s and developed a particular fondness for Germany. This fondness made him even more horrified by the rise of Hitler, and in 1936 he wrote pieces warning against Nazism that got him banned from Germany. Wolfe himself would die two years later, before the start of the war that would devastate the continent that formed so many American writers of his generation.

Nor did Wikipedia's Proletarian literature do much except point me to John Steinbeck, Theodore Dreiser, and John Dos Passos.

Jack London is all I have on my list, so far.

I have other things to do, I need to think more on this.

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