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Mark Bray
@mark-bray.bsky.social
23K followers 830 following 180 posts
Historian @ruhistorydept.bsky.social
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mark-bray.bsky.social
No Kings Madrid
October 18, 2025 at 10:24 AM
mark-bray.bsky.social
The ‘antifa’ boogeyman

From: www.nj.com/opinion/2025...
Image of a monster next to someone dressed as a stereotypical anarchist with a circle a on their sweatshirt. Caption: “Hi. I’m the Boogeyman. A mythical creature used to frighten children into doing what they’re told. This is my buddy Antifa. He does the same thing but for Republican Adults.”
October 16, 2025 at 5:04 PM
mark-bray.bsky.social
3b) That tension in breaking the law in the name of the (new or real) law is central to fascism and evident in the popular Blue Lives Matter Punisher imagery. Also evident in much of what Trump has to say about the subject.
A Blue Lives Matter Punisher skull logo with the text "To Protect & Serve, Blue Lives Matter" but crossed out with three downward facing red arrows.
October 3, 2025 at 2:06 PM
mark-bray.bsky.social
3a) Notable in the "Manifesto of Fascist Intellectuals:
- the desire to do politics as warfare (important given the legacy of WWI)
- the argument that what was needed at the start of fascism was a 'revolutionary' violation of the (perverted) law to restore 'order', i. e. the "new law."
Mussolini and other fascists marching in black shirts It was the very faith that had ripened in the trenches and in intense reflection on the sacrifice accomplished in the course of battle, a sacrifice for the only worthy goal: the vigor and greatness of the fatherland. It was an energetic, violent faith, unwilling to respect anything opposed to the fatherland's vigor and greatness. This is how squadrism arose. Determined youths, armed, organized in military fashion, and dressed in black shirts, placed themselves outside the law in order to institute a new law. They fought the state in order to found a new state.
October 3, 2025 at 2:00 PM
mark-bray.bsky.social
3) Next, some primary sources like "Manifesto of the Fascist Intellectuals" (1925) by the "philosopher of fascism," Giovanni Gentile.

Given fascism's renunciation of rational consistency, there is arguably something paradoxical in the notion of a "fascist intellectual." Anyway...
Photo of Gentile in a suit. "Manifesto of the Fascist Intellectuals" (1925) On 29-30 March 1925 the first Conference on Fascist Culture was held in Bologna under the leadership of Giovanni Gentile. Over four hundred profascist intellectuals lent their names to the event, though actual attendance was more modest. Its aim was to rally Italian intellectuals behind the regime in an effort to enhance the image of the newly declared dictatorship both at home and abroad. One of the congress's immediate results was the following manifesto, largely drafted by Gentile...
October 3, 2025 at 1:48 PM
mark-bray.bsky.social
2a) Apart from featuring his definition of fascism (which he offers reluctantly), Paxton observes how the fascist relation to ideas is merely tactical and not grounded in intellectual consistency.

Useful for today's world to remember how fascists dont feel the need to "justify" changes in position.
The fascist leaders themselves, as we observed in chapter 1, called their movements ideologies, and many interpreters have taken them at their word. It is commonplace to see fascism defined by extracting common threads from party programs, by analogy with the other “isms.” This works better for the other “isms,” founded in the era of educated elite politics. I tried earlier to suggest that fascism bears a different relation to ideas than the nineteenth-century “isms,” and that intellectual positions (not basic mobilizing passions like racial hatreds, of course) were likely to be dropped or added according to the tactical needs of the moment. All the “isms” did this, but only fascism had such contempt for reason and intellect that it never even bothered to justify its shifts.
October 1, 2025 at 3:25 PM
mark-bray.bsky.social
2) For the same class we read Ch. 8 of Robert Paxton's classic The Anatomy of Fascism. I used his definition of fascism in my book Antifa.

I love his argument that a definition of fascism "encompasses its subject no better than a snapshot encompasses a person."
Cover of The Anatomy of Fascism by Robert O. Paxton. It shows a woman giving a fascist salute. What Is Fascism? The moment has come to give fascism a usable short handle, even though we know that it encompasses its subject no better than a snapshot encompasses a person. Fascism may be defined as a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy, and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion.
October 1, 2025 at 3:21 PM
mark-bray.bsky.social
American journalist Dorothy Thompson on dictatorship in the USA from 1935:

(From “The American Fascists” by Linda Gordon)
“No people ever recognize their dictator in advance. He never stands for election on the platform of dictatorship. He always represents himself as the instrument of Incorporated National Will…When our dictator turns up you can depend on it that he will be one of the boys, and that he will stand for everything traditionally American.” —Dorothy Thompson, 1935
September 30, 2025 at 5:10 PM
mark-bray.bsky.social
1a) 1 takeaway is comparison between the "fascism-producing crisis[es]" of past + present characterized by the prevalence of the "nonintelligibility of power."

When a prominent historian of interwar Europe says we are living through a similar crisis amidst the rise of fascism, we need to listen.
A page of text from the essay with certain sections underlined. With dynamics already apparent from the early 2000s, but sharply worsening since2008-2010, the US polity has entered a steadily escalating version of the dual crisis outlined earlier, one suddenly magnifed and massively jolted by COVID-19: a crisis of cohesion, a crisis of legitimacy. Not only is the polity broken, but very large masses of people have stopped believing in its repair. On the one hand, we have the extreme atrophy of democratic practices in the state, whether inside the legislature or in the relations of the presidency, Senate/Congress, and Supreme Court; or in the attack on voting rights, voting access, and the conduct of elections; or in the curtailment of civil liberties and the scale and character of the carceral state. On the other hand, there is now a default conviction among the citizenry that government consists only in burdensomeness, corruption, incompetence, and nonaccountability– a still-widening popular belief in what I would call the nonintelligibility of power, the belief that power is exercised in a distant place, behind closed doors and opaque glass, by conspiracies of elites who are beholden to no one and simply do not care. crisis of consent; government paralysis, democratic impasse– the prospects can be severe indeed. If we add the fields of structural determation outlined briefly at the very start of this chapter, whose ruinous consequences are now immeasurably expanded and sharpened by the intervening calamity of the COVID-19 pandemic, the severity grows further again. The deeper structural setting will need to be fully proceeding from the huge transformations begun in the 1980s. Here, we need to talk about fundamental capitalist restructuring: deindustrialization and neoliberal globalization. We need to talk about drastic class recomposition, including the reorganization of work and labor circuits and the rewriting of the labor contract...etc
September 30, 2025 at 4:04 PM
mark-bray.bsky.social
1) To start, we read the essay "Liberalism in Crisis" by Geoff Eley from the book Fascism in America.

This essay beautifully balances grounding our understanding of fascism in the interwar context with the need to conceptualize a more portable fascism that can apply to today.
Cover of the book Fascism in America: Past and Present showing the Statue of Liberty doing a fascist salute. First page of the essay "Liberalism in Crisis" by Geoff Eley.
September 30, 2025 at 3:40 PM
mark-bray.bsky.social
Antifascist action red and black flags
September 22, 2025 at 11:41 PM
mark-bray.bsky.social
“Nadie por encima de México” #CDMX
August 15, 2025 at 6:56 PM
mark-bray.bsky.social
Trump as a Nazi cockroach. —Oaxaca
July 17, 2025 at 1:57 PM
mark-bray.bsky.social
“Ningún ser humano es ilegal en tierras robadas” —Oaxaca

#NoOneIsIllegal #RefugeesWelcome
July 16, 2025 at 9:11 PM
mark-bray.bsky.social
Look what came in the mail from @pmpress.bsky.social!

Great book from @batallonbakunin.bsky.social !
#MuerteAlEstado
Cover of the book “Another War is Possible” by Tomas Rothaus
May 12, 2025 at 6:24 PM
mark-bray.bsky.social
Have a joyful and rebellious May Day!
#SmashCapitalism
The Anarchist of Chicago
May 1, 2025 at 12:12 PM
mark-bray.bsky.social
Found this 10 years ago. Rock star radical/anarcho lineup from 1896. Apparently Malatesta was sick and couldn’t make it tho.
London Anarchist-Socialist Groups. Chicago Martyrs Commemoration. A Mass Meeting will be held at the Holborn Town Hall. Gray’s Inn Road, W. C. Wednesday, November 11th, at 7.30 p. m. The speakers will be: Peter Kropotkin, Edward Carpenter, Tom Mann, Touzeau Parris, Louise Michel, John Turner, Lothrop Withington, Morrison Davidson, Jas. Tochatti, Ericco Malatesta, Frank Kitz, W. Banham, I. Caplan, J. Perry, Rudolph Rocker, Sam Mainwaring, H. Alsford, C. T. Quinn, and B. Leggatt.
March 30, 2025 at 11:26 PM
mark-bray.bsky.social
Online talk w/ @miquelramos.bsky.social : “The Struggle Against Fascism and White Supremacy in Spain” at @ruhistorydept.bsky.social

April 9 12 EST (18:00 CET)
@capitanswing.bsky.social
The Struggle Against Fascism and White Supremacy in Spain: Past and Present. A virtual conversation with acclaimed journalist and writer Miquel Ramos and Mark Bray (History Department). Wednesday April 9, 12 pm est. Join us on Zoom: https://tinyurl.com/yfbaant6
March 27, 2025 at 5:48 PM
mark-bray.bsky.social
A shamrock with a Palestinian flag inside.
March 17, 2025 at 4:06 PM
mark-bray.bsky.social
From the National Archives in London:

In 1920 “Catalan Separatist Students” stoned the British Consulate in Barcelona to protest the murder of Tomás Mac Curtain, Sinn Féin Lord Mayor of Cork by the RIC.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom%C3%...
Telegram dated Oct. 29, 1920. It reads: “Stoning of British Consulate at Barcelona. On hearing of the death of Lord Mayor of Cork some Catalan Separatists Students marched to British Consulate and broke some windows. Spanish Government have expressed their regret at nature of incident, which may now be considered as closed.” Photograph of a man in a suit.
February 22, 2025 at 5:01 PM
mark-bray.bsky.social
“Any night the sun can come out”

Seen in Cuenca, Ecuador in 2014.
Graffiti: “cualquier noche puede salir el sol” with a circle A after
February 16, 2025 at 1:32 PM
mark-bray.bsky.social
The Rutgers Faculty Union (AAUP-AFT) voted to divest from Israeli genocide!! #FreePalestine
December 13, 2024 at 10:04 PM
mark-bray.bsky.social
#FreePalestine action at Rutgers-New Brunswick on 12/17 at noon
Rutgers Must Divest from Genocide.
December 12, 2024 at 7:13 PM
mark-bray.bsky.social
In the latest issue of The Journal of Modern History @samuelmoyn.bsky.social said my book, THE ANARCHIST INQUISITION, is “one of the most important studies of European politics at the turn of the twentieth century that I have ever read”!

Get a copy from AK Press:
www.akpress.org/the-anarchis...
The Anarchist Inquisition book cover Fortunately, the virtues of The Anarchist Inquisition are considerable, making it one of the most important studies of European politics at the turn of the twentieth century that I have ever read—
December 9, 2024 at 2:59 PM
mark-bray.bsky.social
Got this beautiful and touching book about Palestine for my kids today. #FreePalestine
A Map for Falasteen by Maysa Odeh.
December 8, 2024 at 11:37 PM