I Wish They Weren't My Enemies

or: on going to the shooting range

If you’ll bear with me, this isn’t a story about zombies, but there’s a zombie movie in it. The 2020 movie called Malnazidos, translated as “Valley of the Dead” is on Netflix. It’s about an anarchist militia in the Spanish Civil War fighting against Nazi zombies.

It’s a good movie. While the film itself is firmly pro-revolutionary (and antifascist), the protagonist starts off as a nationalist (fighting for Franco and the fascist forces) who is about to be executed by his own side. The biggest villains are the foreign authoritarian powers: the Nazis (who made zombies) and the Stalinists (who are waiting to betray the revolution and only care about power).

This essay isn’t really about that movie, but there’s a scene, early on, where two of the nationalists are talking to one another. The older nationalist asks the younger nationalist, a young naive man, why he joined the Francoist forces. The young man, really more of a kid, says basically “well, I liked the nuns in my village. They gave us cookies. The republicans were attacking the nuns, so I joined up to fight the republicans.”

Of course, the nationalists had betrayed that kid’s trust and were about to kill him when the movie starts. But his reasoning, a simple, gut “you were attacking the people who are nice to me,” was reason enough for him to join the bad guys.

At its core, Valley of the Dead is a piece of art produced in modern Spain trying to reckon with the civil war that killed half a million people. (Of course, far and away the largest chunk of people killed in that war were civilians executed by the Fascists.) It’s a film trying to reckon with why Spaniards just killed the shit out of each other for a couple of years after decades of a growing right/left divide.

So… it’s something to pay attention to as an American.

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Okay, another part of this story. I have a friend whose family were all Nazis in Germany. He’s as antifascist as they come, a lovely man, a second generation immigrant. He got stabbed in a bar fight once for defending his friend against a man who was harassing her. I like him. His family were Nazis. Fortunately, fascism isn’t genetic.

He told me his family’s story. He didn’t offer it as a defense of their decisions. He said: “my whole family lived in Southwest Germany and were against the Nazis for years, but then the allies bombed the town and killed 90% of the family in one night. The remaining 10% signed up to fight against the allies.”

I think about that story pretty often. Look, the word for “soldier in the Nazi army that isn’t ideologically committed to fascism” is “Nazi.” It is perfectly reasonable to fight them, to kill them. Killing large enough numbers of them was the only way we were able to stop the Nazis from, you know, doing the whole Nazi thing. But I also don’t know that I know anyone who wouldn’t, if they lost 90% of their family in a single night, set out to avenge their family.

I think the bombing of Germany by the allies is one of the most tangly ethical questions of history. As an anarchist, I believe there is no act more authoritarian than murder. I believe that it is never ethical to kill innocent people, only ethical to stop people from enacting harm—by violence if necessary. To that end, I don’t think you should bomb population centers. (It’s funny how, outside of war, certain things seem obvious, like “you shouldn’t blow up apartment buildings full of innocent people,” yet once there’s a war on it becomes the kind of thing that people would actually debate.)

Who is innocent? Are the workers on the death star innocent? Probably not—they operate a death machine, whether or not they hold a blaster in their hands. I don’t know enough about Star Wars to continue this analogy further. But is any given German in 1943 innocent? Maybe. Maybe “guilt” and “innocence” are the wrong framework. Maybe “do those people need to be stopped?” is the better question, because it relies less on things like being cognizant of doing harm. In order for murder to be murder, the murderer has to be thinking “I’m gonna kill that person.”

All these questions are fussy. People who want to sell you easy answers are selling you something. Usually they’re selling you the easy answer of bloodlust. Occasionally they’re selling you the easy answer of pacifism.

Friends who study World War II far more than me have told me that the bombing of population centers by the Allies did not materially advance the war against fascism, and I want to believe that, because I want to believe that my own easy answer (that there is no way to ethically bomb a population center) is not just ethically but strategically true.

But I can say, for certain, that Allied bombings turned my friend’s family into Nazis, and in that particular way strengthened fascism.

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I took a concealed carry class last weekend in the rural area of Appalachia where I live, and the layers of concealment went particularly deep for me because I put on blue jeans and did my best impression of a cisgendered heterosexual man. Not everyone was convinced. Well, specifically, I got the impression that the apolitical rural folks in the class were absolutely fine with me with my braids and gold body jewelry but that a sizable minority of the class was ideologically committed to a position that is more or less opposite of my own, and those people saw right through my disguise. It’s very strange to go to a gun range with people and realize that while many them could be your friends, some of them were practicing with firearms so that they could, well, kill you and your friends.

Myself, I was there because I know what some people want to do to trans women, and I have received more than my share of death threats from fascists. Well, that’s what got me into firearms, but if I’m being honest I enjoy shooting as a hobby at this point, even if I have very complicated feelings about guns.