Complicity, Cowardice, and Capitulation
Liberal Invitations of Fascism
Ismatu Gwendolyn, a Black writer and culture worker, has been encouraging people to engage in “political journaling,” in which we take an active role in documenting the events we’re living through. Her prompts tend to circle around the idea of truth:
“What do you know to be true?”
“What do you wish to be true?”
“What is truth?”
As someone with degrees in psychology and religious studies1, I am well-versed in the subjectivity of truth. Our worldviews, contexts, experiences, and bodies all shape how we interpret what happens around us. Some people misunderstand this to mean that I don’t think there’s anything that’s actually true. When I talk about “scientism,” people often refuse to think deeply about the concept and jump to weird, surface level conclusions, like that I don’t believe in vaccines.
In actuality, scientism is the idea that even science is filtered through colonial frameworks and is a belief system in and of itself. I have met academics that insist that things aren’t “true” or “real” until there’s been a peer-reviewed study published in an accredited journal according to “Western” scientific standards on the matter. For the record, I do believe in vaccines, I stay up to date on my vaccinations, and I’m glad that we have vaccines for COVID-19. And I think its important to recognize who created the vaccines, which populations the vaccines are designed for and therefore most effective for, how vaccines are distributed, who profits off of the vaccines, and that vaccination alone is not enough for many people, like immunocompromised folks.
We need to engage in the difficult work of thinking critically about the contexts that frame the information we receive, rather than resorting to binary thinking and offhand dismissals.2 Ismatu’s prompts push us to recognize that the truth is something we’re fighting to define, the truth is deeply political, and the truth, especially in the so-called United States in 2025, can be difficult to locate.
Here are some things I see as obviously true, apolitical facts, that have been used to frame me as a radical extremist:
COVID-19 is not over, and marginalized communities are the most impacted by the lack of adequate care, support, and prevention.
Wearing masks helps prevent the spread of airborne viruses.
Queer people exist.
Genocide is bad.
I’ve seen these truths evolve and warp into political statements worthy of debate and contention rather than immediate action, even in purportedly liberal spaces, like the social work agency and public library administration I’ve worked within. My observations on this warping of truth within these “liberal” spaces can be categorized into three overlapping and interlinked patterns of behavior: complicity, cowardice, and capitulation. Through these patterns, liberalism facilitates the rise of fascism.
Complicity
The Nuremberg defense, used by Nazis during the Nuremberg trials after World War II, is when people attempt to plea innocent to crimes because they were “just following orders.” This defense did not hold up in court for Nazis, and we cannot allow it to hold in our personal relationships and current times either. We’ve been complicit in the ethnic cleansing and genocide of Palestinians for at least a year and close to eight decades, depending on how you frame the narrative. The active bombing and massacre of Palestinians live-streamed to our phones has been happening for nearly two years. This is a basic truth. Anyone with internet access can verify this for themselves. Other genocides, in Congo and Sudan, to name just a couple, are not broadcasted in the same way, and are no less true, atrocious, and in need of immediate correction3.
As someone who lives in Colorado, I feel a deep responsibility for the bombs dropped on Rafah in May 2024 that contained components constructed by Woodward Inc, headquarted in Fort Collins. As someone who utilizes technology that contains cobalt, I recognize my complicity in the exploitation of the Congo for resources, as well as of Congolese people to mine these resources. Our tax money funds the military that just bombed Iran. For me, our complicity is a basic truth, and my actions speak to that obligation.4
The liberals around me often don’t feel the same way, either choosing silence, comfort, and ignorance, or offering platitudes like “these things are out of our control.” I’ve found that many of my community members live in a state of denial. They remain passive in their complicity because they simply can’t accept the reality in front of them. People seem to believe that if things were really as bad as they are, then more people would be acting in opposition. Then they themselves become an agent of oppression, labeling those resisting as extremists to justify their own passivity.
Those who agree that genocide is happening and is bad often exhibit learned helplessness, believing that they have no way of enacting change around them and therefore there’s no point in voicing their beliefs. I’ve been around liberals who seem to think that cheering on acts of resistance, or turning a blind eye to our actions rather than condemning and reporting us, counts as praxis. They think that existing near us, being “tolerant” of us, is enough to atone for their complicity, with no action or risk (allyship rather than co-conspiratorship) of their own.
This lack of solidarity and passivity means those who are vocal are scapegoated and isolated. I have been trying to learn not to shoulder burdens alone, to work within community, to recognize it’s ego that tells me that it’s possible to save the world by myself. But the patterns I’ve found even while sharing the work is that the burden is still far too heavy for those of us trying to carry it. From personal experience, those of us who have been doing the work and have been the loudest tend to be queer, gender-nonconforming, disabled, and visibly racialized. We already exist at the intersections of multiple marginalizations, we already carry the brunt of blame and hatred from the political systems in this country looking for people to scapegoat, and then we’re burdened with the thankless task of trying to rectify our national communal complicity. We are being crucified.
My loves, you are still complicit, I am still complicit, because as of July 2025, the bombs are still raining on Gaza. Our complicity ends when the violence ends.5 Act accordingly.
Cowardice
Dr. Devon Price, a white trans autistic social psychologist, talks about how symptoms of c-PTSD/ long-term trauma cannot be separated from neurodivergence/autism so long as we live in an ableist society. It encourages autistics to teach our bodies that we won’t die if we’re disliked or disobedient, though the discomfort may feel akin to dying at first. The ability to be contrary is necessary and valuable, especially through ongoing genocide and fascism. In “The Myth of Normal,” Gabor Maté, a pro-Palestinian Jewish physician, discusses the tensions between our needs for authenticity and acceptance and how the two often feel contradictory to one another while both are necessary for sustained wellbeing. Stephanie Foo, a Malaysian Chinese American who was formerly a journalist with This American Life, discusses the impacts of generational trauma on our epigenetic expression in “What My Bones Know”. aja monet, a Black surrealist poet, says “Healing is a duty and obligation” in one of her songs with Eryn Allen Kane, “Love Supreme.”6
When I name cowardice, I don’t mean to be disparaging. In fact, in situations where I disclose that I am immunocompromised and explain that wearing a mask is one of the most effective ways of protecting me, and people still knowingly refuse to wear a mask around me, cowardice is the kindest explanation I can conjure. I am speaking with these writers in mind and from a place of personal knowing of just how potent fear can be in our veins, rewiring our bodies on a cellular level. If we intend to resist fascism, we cannot let cowardice and fear dictate our actions.
As social creatures, our genetic wiring demands that we seek social acceptance and cohesion. Especially during childhood, our survival is dependent on acceptance from our parental figures. And such is the gift of intergenerational trauma - many many many of us were raised by traumatized parents who were not adequately equipped to care for us. We had to contort ourselves into the shape most lovable to parents who were grappling with their own inherited histories of war, famine, upheaval, fascism. Part of the journey of adulthood is cultivating the environments and connections where we can finally be our authentic selves, learning into who this new version of self can be, and grieving the selves we’ve had to be to get to where we are now. This healing process takes time, intention, and courage.
As I’ve named before, many of the people I’ve seen advocating for Palestine are queer/trans (along with many other intersecting marginalizations), and I believe it’s because we’ve already had to experience the process of speaking firmly about something we believe in while knowing many people will hate us for it. We risk familial rejection, scapegoating, bigotry, and genuine danger just to be ourselves. In high school, I knew I was queer for (at least) a full year before trying to communicate it to another person, then sat with my fingers frozen over the computer keyboard, trying to silently will myself to type out “I’m gay” for hours at a time, over the span of days, if not weeks.
I am intimately familiar with the way that fear grips your whole body, the disconnect between my desire to be seen and my physiological inability to move. It took effort and practice and years and finding the right people, to be able to be out and proud and visible and queer. And the fear still revisits, especially as my identity continues to evolve, the process of coming out never ends, and the political scapegoating of queer people escalates.
I wish I could say I exist as an out and proud trans dyke in safety, but the interpersonal safety I experience with loved ones still coexists with emboldened fascist on the street and ignorant, if not outright malicious, coworkers. In Denver, many liberals take deep personal offense at any suggestion that fascism is alive and well here.
Meanwhile, Jax Gratton was a hairstylist in my community, a white trans woman who was murdered and missing for months before her body was identified in an alley in Lakewood just a few weeks ago. Jax will be one of the people we mourn and remember on November 20, Trans Day of Remembrance (TDOR), a day we had to set aside for grief because this is an unfortunately common occurrence for the trans community. Some reframe TDOR as Trans Day of Resilience, encapsulating the sentiment of “mourn the dead and fight like hell for the living.”
Relatedly, Indigenous communities mark May 5th as the National Day of Awareness for Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, Two-Spirit people, and Relatives, often protrayed as MMIW, MMIW2S+, or MMIR, among other variations, to remember and advocate for the continuous pattern of Indigenous people who are murdered or go missing with little to no information, much less justice. The trans community sees overwhelming violence leveraged against Black, brown, and Indigenous trans women during TDOR, highlighting the overlap between these violences.
After being illegally detained by Israel for trying to sail the Madleen, a ship carrying humanitarian aid, to Gaza, a reporter asked Greta Thunberg “Why do you think so many countries, governments around the world are just ignoring what is happening in Gaza?”
She responded:
“Because of racism. That’s the simple answer. Racism and basically desperately trying to defend a destructive deadly system that systematically puts short-term economic profit and to maximize geopolitical power over the wellbeing of humans and the planet.”
Baseline truth, the United States is a country built on the genocide of Indigenous people and the enslavement of Black people. All of us have internalized antiBlackness to unlearn, because the work of uprooting antiBlackness within ourselves must never end while we live in a racist society. The dates set aside to mourn, the names we remember, the data we investigate, begs that we confront our collective apathy towards the death of Black, brown, and Indigenous people, queer people, marginalized people. We have allowed the ongoing deaths of Palestinians because our country is numb to the death and suffering of Black, Indigenous, and Arab people. Current ongoing ICE raids demonstrate how this pattern will play out for people within the United States as well.
I wish the fear was only in my head, but the reality of violence is something I must face every day, as I exist in a racialized trans body. And I also carry immense privilege as a transmasculine, relatively light-skinned East Asian person with United States citizenship, juxtaposed with the horrific violence that Black, brown, and Indigenous transfeminine people routinely and systemically experience within our communities. It’s no wonder we’ve been conditioned to feel like we’ll die when faced with the potential for rejection. Bigotry genuinely kills us.
This puts us in a challenging position, where we need to simultaneously unlearn the fear of dying that arises within our bodies when learning to move in resistance, while recognizing that the risk of death can be genuine and imminent for many. The fact is, we are all going to die one day. This is a morally neutral truth. People with legacies of resistance, like people of the global majority existing in white supremacist contexts, Black folks descended from slavery, Palestinians, disabled folks, queer and trans folks, people existing at the intersection of any of these identities and more, have no choice but to move through this fear in order to build lives, families, communities, dreams, and futures. It’s not fair and it is no coincidence that the burden of working towards liberation falls on those for whom staying alive already requires infinite courage.
Fear and genuine danger are two separate experiences. Everyone carries different risk factors and privileges. Meanwhile, we are all complicit in the deaths of those being killed by this empire. I’ve found that many liberals will evaluate risk for themselves as if they are the ones in imminent danger, even when they carry vast protections from racial privilege, wealth, societal power, citizenship, and on and on, at the expense of other people actually dying. Please examine your relationship to this fear and act accordingly. Current patterns of expecting those with the highest risks to bear the brunt of resistance are not strategic nor sustainable.
Capitulation
To me, it’s a basic truth that we’re living under a fascist regime, defined by authoritarian leadership, scapegoating of marginalized communities, and blatant massacres of entire populations of people. I don’t think it’s appropriate to allow any debate around this when our nations top officials publicly mimicked the salute used during Hitler’s regime. I am autistic, and I don’t choose to behave in fascist ways. History has shown that fascism must be met with resistance. But what I’ve seen in supposedly “liberal” spaces more often is preemptive capitulation, the naive and ultimately violent belief that acquiescing to any demands before they’ve even been made, will keep fascists at bay. What you’ve done is invite fascism in, made a bed for it, and brewed it a cup of tea.
For example, during my time working at a nonprofit serving survivors of gender-based violence in the Asian community, I requested that the agency provide more visibility and support for queer and trans Asian people. As a trans Asian, I was willing to be tokenized and do the labor of advocating for the well-being of my queer Asian community. The director of the agency refused this request, saying that queerness was too controversial and would alienate our clients as well as jeopardize our funding. She then described to me the disgust some of my coworkers felt about ungendered restrooms, clearly naming that I worked among peers who hated my existence, and that the agency’s official stance was to protect homophobes and transphobes from discomfort over advocating for my rights. This trickled into my day-to-day interactions, where colleagues understood that their biases against me and their queer clients were protected by our employer, as well as policies that impacted my ability to access gender-affirming care through the healthcare plan provided through my job, and ultimately drove me to leave that workplace.
Over the course of the COVID-19 pandemic, funding for the agency was slashed regardless of their refusal to support queer issues. The same coworkers who told me I needed to keep my head down and stop pushing for queer acceptance from the agency, who worked unpaid overtime hours, never complained, and were severely undervalued for their expertise and labor, lost their pathways to citizenship after the agency revoked sponsorship of their H-1B visas. These coworkers either had to leave the country, or find other employment that would sponsor them. Some were only a year or two away from obtaining citizenship at the time, after waiting over five years, and had to start over from scratch. Another half decade later, many of these former coworkers still don’t have citizenship. Meanwhile, the agency’s trust within queer communities was severely eroded, both for the queer staff they employed and the queer clients they served who recognized that they were not represented by the agency. None of their capitulations protected them from the outcomes they feared, while causing significant harm to queer and Asian communities.
We need to learn from resistance movements of the past and strategize. Preemptive capitulation is a terrible strategy rooted in cowardice that comes at far too high a cost. By definition, capitulation, especially preemptive capitulation where there aren’t even attempts at negotiation, is not resistance. Attempting to predict fascist goals and implementing and enforcing them before the fascists have even lifted a finger just makes you a fascist. Assisting in the implementation of fascist ideologies is fascism. Preemptive capitulation reveals which populations have been deemed acceptable for sacrifice and steadily accelerates fascism’s grip on our communities. People will look back on this time and wonder how we let things get so bad. Yet many liberals, as reflected in our news media and interpersonal interactions, still vilify resistance movements and portray capitulation as the more ethical approach.
While it seems obvious that capitulation is a terrible strategy, I do understand the emotion behind the choice. As a child, I had new neighbors move in with a little girl the same age as me. We were desperate to be friends. The proximity of our homes created a shared intimacy because we each knew the other overheard the dysfunction and abuse from our respective households. In our early attempts to build a friendship, she thought it would be funny to chase me around a pool, threatening to push me in. I panicked, ran, and jumped into the pool before she could push me. I was not dressed for swimming, I did not want to be in the pool, but when faced with the threat of being shoved into the water, I was convinced that jumping in was the better option.
However, since my goal was to not get wet, the decision to jump into the pool was decidedly not a strategic means to that end. Presently, I recognize that a more strategic choice, facilitated by emotional regulation and healthier communication, would have been to express to her that I did not find this game fun, so we could do something else and build the relationship we were both craving. Instead, I ended up cold, wet, and miserable, blamed that experience on her, and we did not become friends. Preemptive capitulation is similarly driven by cowardice and reactionary fear. It implements the very outcomes that we claim to oppose and does not provide a pathway to our goals.
Conclusion
Here are some of my truths: I am tired and angry and frustrated. I am not alone in fighting for the causes I believe in. It’s so grounding and nourishing to learn of histories of resistance, to recognize that folks have fought and won throughout history. People with legacies of resistance have overthrown monarchies, ended empires, freed enslaved people, loved and lived and fucked and fought and survived against all odds. And my heart breaks for the lives we continue to lose every day: Black and brown people, disabled people, queer and trans people, poor and working class people, Palestinian people, Sudanese people, Congolese people, on and on, intersecting iterations of people needlessly suffering and dying. Meanwhile, those benefiting the most from this violence and exploitation refuse to even look at the reality unfolding in front of them.
I wish I could live a life that isn’t defined by resistance. I wish everyone could live a life that isn’t defined by resistance. But we’re not there yet. And while we’re actively living through fascist regimes, refusing to center resistance by replicating patterns of complicity, cowardice, and capitulation is a violent injustice against those targeted by fascism. We are interconnected, no one is free until we are all free, I cannot be free until Palestinians are free, and no matter how much liberals will try to delude themselves, they cannot be free until I am free.
from the same institution that Zohran Mamdani graduated from! Fuck Bowdoin and the elitism of higher education and I am stupidly proud of this right now. To be clear, I don’t expect electoral politics to save us. And, I think it’s important that someone with Mamdani’s views is navigating the system the way he is right now.
As a crip navigating the intersections of queerness and disability, I also cannot ignore the similarities between the COVID-19 pandemic and the AIDS epidemic. We are once again witnessing the systemic justification of deaths of massive numbers of people.
I was tempted to use the word “intervention” but that would imply saviorism and aid, when in reality, a lot of the violence our country implements could stop through inaction. The United States actively sends military resources funded by our taxpayer money to bomb Palestine. It’s not aid or intervention to stop that violence, but rather inaction, or a redirection of those resources towards the well-being of our own communities. Recognizing the ways our technology and wealth rely on the exploitation of resources located in the Congo and Sudan and pushing for policies that humanize Congolese and Sudanese people, along with personal choices in consumerism and targeted boycotts, often rely on strategic choices of inaction as well.
The citations I use are not an endorsement of these particular news sites, but proof that what I’m saying is verified by sources that are considered “legitimate” in our society. Please use these as starting points for your own research and investigation. Feel free to comment more resources and citations!
For Palestine, I know that ceasefire agreements have been announced, and beg people to remember that this is not the first time the United States and Israel have claimed to implement ceasefire agreements while blatantly violating them. To me, the violence ends when there is sustained evidence that generations of Palestinians are able to live peacefully in their homes without military violence until dying of old age.
Thank you Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarsinha for teaching me the the term “textolalia” in “The Future is Disabled” as a crip communication style!