Dear comrades.
This speech is from Antifascist Action Oslo.
30 years have passed since AFA Sweden started – and through the years they have been a beacon in the antifascist fight. Their strategies, mobilizations, research, discipline, and hard hitting methods have stopped fascist organizing for three decades.
Our society, organized around a capitalist economy, creates insecurity, alienation, and oppression. When we as humans begin to want a better life than what society gives us – some choose community, solidarity, and soscialism – while others choose division, racism, and fascism. In its nature, fascism is an ideology where those who are defined as “the others” ultimately do not have the right to life.
Our struggle goes back many generations. When antifascism began to mobilize against the fascist movement of the 20s and 30s, there was a slogan that went as a battle cry throughout Europe: No pasaran. No pasaran means no one shall pass – and that is the core of antifascism. A message that socialists, trade unions, communists, and anarchists share with each other – that we, with our bodies, must stop the advance of fascism.
But being the ones who fights against fascism can be an ungrateful and difficult job. Sometimes we have the rest of the left with us, other times we are isolated. We are at times on the edge of a society that would otherwise take care of us – with traumatic and difficult experiences that are not healed, with threats from organized fascists hanging over us, and with the police and state that prossecutes us.
Sometimes this experiences are shared and solidarity arises, but sometimes it happens in secret – only a few others know. But this experiences are also what binds us together – because through our shared fight we know how it feels.
Our struggle goes generations back – and generations forward. And so does solidarity – the fighting spirit and the knowledge. Together we are strong. Together we smash fascism. No pasaran.
Alerta alerta – antifascista.
Antifascistisk Aksjon Oslo