In the spirit of encouraging resistance to the fascist upsurge, Heckle presents eyewitness testimony from a comrade of ours, Joe, who took part in the anti-fascist counter-demonstration in Bristol on Saturday 3rd of August. By their quick thinking and tenacious courage, Joe and his comrades blocked a horde of fascists from breaking into a hotel housing asylum seekers and committing a pogrom. Read all about it in Joe’s own words below.
The thing that made all of us feel really strongly that we absolutely had to hold the line was that when we got to the hotel, we could see, looking out of the windows, families of asylum seekers and refugees, including weans, kids, looking out. And we were trying to chant things at them like “you’re welcome here”, “we love you and we’re here to support you”. And then it sort of dawned on me after all the violence had died down that a lot of those kids would probably have seen what happened with the fascists charging at the hotel and I just can’t even imagine how scared they would have been, it’s… It doesn’t really bear thinking about, about what would have happened if we hadn’t been there, and there were no police, and the fascists had been able to get into the- I don’t really want to think about what would have happened if the fascists had been able to get into the hotel.
If you are in the UK and are at all able to go, or get together some friends and get to one of the counter-demos across the UK tomorrow (august 7), please do so! There will be many others there, and we've seen over and over there is safety in numbers. We can't depend on the cops, we have to defend our communities ourselves!