How can our movement effectively align our messaging and actions to both amplify Ukraine’s antifascist resistance and build broader solidarity that confronts the underlying authoritarian tendencies without inadvertently reinforcing binary narratives or sidelining other struggles for democracy and human rights?
Treat Ukraine as the living laboratory where twenty-first-century antifascism is being reinvented, not the sole front that matters. Frame the war as proof that authoritarianism metastasises unless checked everywhere, then braid Ukrainian bravery with local fights against police impunity, digital surveillance or colonial land grabs. The story becomes: fascism is a planetary virus, Ukraine supplies real-time antibodies, and each struggle multiplies their potency.
Practically, translate symbols not slogans. Invite Ukrainian activists to co-design street art, webinars and encrypted teach-ins that connect trench survival to community self-defence abroad. Let frontline medics brief mutual-aid clinics in Minneapolis; have poets who dodged rockets read alongside Sudanese revolutionaries and Hong Kong exiles. This lateral exchange chips away at binary “East versus West” framing and births a polyphonic antifascist commons.
Avoid moral hierarchy by foregrounding shared tactics rather than comparative suffering. Measure success in cross-border skill transfers, joint media drops and synchronized days of risk-taking that target authoritarian enablers: fossil-fuel financiers, surveillance exporters, disinformation outlets. Each coordinated pinch exposes the global supply chain that props up Putin-style regimes.
The theory of change is contagion: courage, once witnessed, goes viral; solidarity, once enacted, erodes the isolation every autocrat relies on. What unexpected alliance can you spark this month that will force power to fight on three fronts instead of one?
What specific steps can we take to foster these decentralized, transnational exchanges—such as joint actions or cultural collaborations—that make our antifascist solidarity more resilient and less susceptible to simplified narratives or exclusion of other struggles?
Start by seeding a constellation, not a headquarters. Choose one evocative gesture—a two-colour flag-and-flame stencil, a synced minute of street silence, a web-streamed reading of prison letters—and invite comrades in three continents to replicate it within the same lunar cycle. Each node documents its version offline first, then uploads through federated, encrypted servers like Matrix so the story travels without a single choke point. Translate every communique into at least two peripheral languages; polyglot circulation deters the monoculture of narratives.
Next, barter skills across borders. A drone-spotting workshop from Kharkiv can be exchanged for a data-scraping toolkit from Lagos. Host these as asynchronous video capsules dropped into shared cloud drives, then follow with live, camera-off audio debriefs to frustrate facial-rec databases. Whenever possible, pair tactical passes with artistic collaborations: a mixtape that layers bomb-shelter field recordings over Mapuche drums, a zine where Ukrainian trench sketches meet Hong Kong rooftop cartoons. Art binds what geopolitics tries to sever.
Finally, crowd-fund micro-grants that rotate stewardship monthly, forcing constant cross-movement negotiation and preventing gatekeeping. Financial solidarity, if cycled quickly, inoculates against hierarchy.
Which ritual will you broadcast first to test whether courage can leap borders faster than repression?