When confronted with some impending loss, many of us engage in “anticipatory grief.” We run through various scenarios in our minds of what it might feel like and what we might do when the loss finally happens—a dress rehearsal, as it were, for dealing with the death of someone or something we love—thereby shifting how we act before that loss occurs—letting us better self-determine our responses.

These days, I’m in what feels a stronger imperative: “anticipatory rupture,” within which is bundled all of my fears, yet that I know must also include us noticing fissures in the christofascist edifice that we, communally, can generatively rupture.

Rupture involves “the tearing apart of a tissue”—sometimes of the very social fabric; it entails “the state of being broken apart.”

Which brings me to a familiar slogan in anarchist circles: “smash the state.” While it sounds good on paper—or on walls, stickers, and T-shirts—it’s a lot less pleasant when christofascists are the ones doing the smashing.

This isn’t to negate the aspirations embodied within our notions of antistatism, nor to abandon the desire for a world without states. It’s to say that such a vision is wholly incomplete without a liberatory horizon. Indeed, it can be downright scary and to be feared, with immense power to destroy.

We’re seeing this in dizzily accelerated, axe-wielding, real-time action as the Musk-Trump regime goes on a state-smashing spree. In a matter of weeks, they’ve done more to convince the world than we anarchists have in the whole of our tradition’s existence that it’s in fact possible to trash statist trappings, from laws to bureaucracy to so much more, but in the most self-interested, cruelest of ways.

I trust that as anarchists, we aren’t so crass as to celebrate their rapid rupture of the state, on their terms, into what might become “end-stage statism”—some version of “antistatist” christofascism that rapturously saves a handful of uber-wealthy at the literal loss of most of us and the planet.

I hope we turn to our do-it-ourselves’ power to create, especially past and present forms of self-governance—offering a rupture toward borderless freedom and well-being for all.

#BecomeSelfGovernable
#TryAnarchismForLife

(photos, of street art seen during #FuckFascism strolls on the streets of Athens: huge DIY letters painted in white and black on the side of a building, and reading “No border, free world”; tag on a wall in purple saying “destroy everything”; and drawing on a wall in pink of a big fish, with small fishes swimming up below it, and the words “happy new fear,” with the “A” in “happy” circled)