Arnie Alpert, Active with the Activists
Arnie Alpert spent decades as a community organizer/educator in NH movements for social justice and peace. Officially retired from the American Friends Service Committee since 2020, he keeps his hands (and feet) in the activist world while writing about past and present social movements. Email him at arnie.alpert@indepthnh.org.
ANDOVER—Donna Baker-Hartwell pulled into the parking lot behind the Andover town office at about 2:45 PM on Friday, November 15, greeted the people waiting for her, and began taking signs out of the back of her car.
“Who wants ‘No Due Process’?” she asked. “Who wants ‘Racial Profiling’?”
Most signs named a specific issue, with the words, “This is Fascism,” underneath. Hand painted on recycled political campaign signs, they were black with white lettering, all caps.
“Deploying the military on us.” “Rejecting election results.” “Anti-Science.” “Re-writing history.” “Appointing loyalists.” “Contempt for the rule of law.” Fifteen in all.
Two signs were white with black lettering. One read, “Signs of Fascism,” the other, “Our grandparents fought fascism. Will you?”
It was the beginning of a “Signs of Fascism” protest, the third one held in New Hampshire in recent weeks.
The idea came from a demonstration held in early September a few thousand miles away. A video, posted on Facebook, showed a line of people, silently holding signs along a roadside in Sequim, Washington. (Think Burma Shave, if you’re old enough.)
Arnie Arnesen, the well-known Concord talk radio host and longtime political activist, saw the video. “I’m looking at this, going, this is amazing,” Arnesen told me Friday. “This is teachable. These aren’t holding political signs. It’s teaching history. It’s teaching what is fascism, and we’re living it. So, I am so motivated, I posted it, and I said, ‘We should do this.’ And then I realized, as soon as I said ‘we,’ I knew that I should do this.” Arnesen invited people to her barn to make signs.
Baker-Hartwell, also a longtime activist, joined the sign-making party with her husband and a couple of friends. Together, they arrayed their signs along Main Street in downtown Concord on October 29 and again in Bedford on November 7. Arnesen’s Facebook post about the Bedford “Signs of Fascism” received more than 2000 reactions and was shared 98 times. “If you want to organize a ‘this is fascism’ pop up in your town message me,” Arnesen wrote. Baker-Hartwell decided they should take the display to Andover, where she has lived for decades.
On Friday, Baker-Hartwell passed out signs to fifteen people, all dressed in black, who showed up from Andover, Northfield, Concord, Sanbornton, Warner, and Nottingham. With their signs and instructions to stand fifteen feet apart, the anti-fascist sign-holders walked the short distance from the parking lot to Main Street. Andover is a small town, population 2406 in the latest census. Its Main Street is not as busy as the one in Concord or River Road in Bedford, but late afternoon traffic was steady.
Cars headed west first saw Baker-Hartwell with her white, “Signs of Fascism” sign, followed by the others every fifteen feet or so. Plenty of drivers honked and waved as they went by. Arnesen held the “Our grandparents fought fascism” sign at the end of the line.
One young man walking by with a lacrosse stick took out his cellphone to take photos. He’s not really into politics, he told me, but he likes the idea of people exercising their freedom of speech. “My great grandfather fought in World War Two, and I think that we have to kind of value what they fought for,” he said, gesturing to Arnesen’s sign.
Sheryl Anderson of Sanbornton held the sign about racial profiling. Racism has been with us “our entire life as a country,” she said, but now, with the Trump administration’s round-up of immigrants, “the Supreme Court even said it’s okay if they look brown or black or they work in the wrong place, whatever, just take them in.” It’s so blatant, she said, noone’s even trying to hide it.
Toward the end of the scheduled one-hour protest, Anderson was approached by four teenagers. One high school senior said she had just begun work on a paper about fascism and democracy in America. “Do you mind if I take a picture of your sign?” she asked.
She and her crew moved down the line to Arnie Arnesen. “I’m writing my AP gov final essay on fascism and American democracy,” she said. Arnesen was thrilled.
“Fascism basically wants to undermine our rights. Understand, it’s what’s happening with healthcare. It’s what’s happening with the military. Look at Hegseth,” Arnesen said.
But what is fascism, anyway? Is it the same as authoritarianism? Do we need to understand the regimes of Mussolini, or Hitler, or Franco to recognize it in our own time? Do we need to take a college class or read a book? Can it be described in a short online column?
As Sheryl Anderson pointed out, we’ve had racial profiling forever in this country. We’ve had the National Guard unleashed on striking workers. We’ve had administrations which sanctioned torture, and others which captured and deported thousands of people, including U.S. citizens. In the decades of Jim Crow, African Americans had ample reason to fear being kidnapped and lynched by masked patrols operating in league with local police. Was that fascism?
The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum says “Fascism is characterized by: strident, often exclusionary nationalism; fixation with national decline (real or perceived) and threats to the existence of the national community; [and] embrace of paramilitarism.”
The museum’s description continues, “In fascist states, violence is accepted—even celebrated—if it serves or advances the national community. For fascists, violence often has a redemptive or purifying quality.
“Fascism rejects the practices of representative or liberal democratic government. It holds that these practices interfere with the expression of the national will. Instead, fascist governments are one-party states led by an authoritarian leader who claims to embody the national will.”
The signs displayed in Sequim and Andover are based on a 2003 article, “Fascism, Anyone?” by Laurence Britt, a political scientist, originally published in Free Inquiry. From there, they were abridged, reprinted, and passed around, for example on a poster titled, “Early Warning Signs of Fascism.” Britt’s warnings cited extreme nationalism, disdain for human rights, control of the mass media cronyism and corruption, suppression of intellectuals and artists, and scapegoating of groups identified as “enemies,” and more. You get the picture.
None of them, by themselves, define a regime or a movement as “fascist.” It’s “when you check all the boxes,” Arnesen said, that the label applies.
“If we aren’t antifa then we aren’t patriots,” wrote Baker-Hartwell after the protest. “USA patriots are people who believe in the US Constitution, in freedom and democracy.”
“We are two-and-a-half generations removed from the horrors of Nazi Germany, although constant reminders jog the consciousness,” Britt wrote two decades ago. It is the jogging of the consciousness that Arnesen, Baker-Hartwell, and others are trying to accomplish. They have heard from groups in several other New Hampshire communities that would like to borrow or create their own sets of “warning signs” signs. Watch for them in your town.