Understanding Antifa: The Unnerving, the Destructive, and the Admirable

August 13, 2018 Confluence

Reading Time: 6 minutes

By: Lisa M. Hayes – Confluence Daily is your daily news source for women in the know.

You’ve undoubtedly been hearing the term Antifa a lot more since Donald Trump took office. In fact, it wasn’t until the events in Charlottesville last summer, that most people had any significant awareness of Antifa and their activities. Antifa is both incredibly simple and wildly complicated. It’s non-organization with no central leadership can make understanding what they’re up to very challenging. However, the one thing you can count on is where there are Nazi’s, Antifa will show up to oppose them, by any means necessary.

What is Antifa? Where did it come from? Militant anti-fascist or “Antifa” (pronounced ANtifa) is a radical pan-leftist politics of social revolution applied to fighting, or waging war against the far right. Its “members” are predominantly communists, socialists, and anarchists who reject turning to the police or the state to halt the advance of white supremacy. Instead, they advocate popular opposition to fascism as we witnessed in Charlottesville and in riots and protests around the country.

Recent Antifa fueled protests in Portland, Oregon have been making even Portland’s very liberal left-leaning hipsters a little or a lot uncomfortable. If you want to see what Antifa does for fun, get on YouTube and search, “Punch a Nazi”. You’ll either be amused or alarmed. I won’t judge either way.

There are Antifa groups around the world, but Antifa is not itself an interconnected organization, any more than an ideology like socialism. Social media has connected Antifa groups in ways that make organizing more efficient, but Antifa is not traditionally organized in any way. There is no power structure. Antifa is autonomous anti-racist groups that monitor and track the activities of local neo-Nazis. They expose them to their neighbors and employers, they conduct public education campaigns, they support migrants and refugees and they pressure venues to cancel white power events.

These tactics can have devastating consequences for those outed as Nazis to their communities. Being exposed in a “Know the Nazi Next Door” campaign has serious consequences: jobs lost, businesses closed, relationships abruptly ended. So, Antifa groups act both carefully and exactly in their work when “outing” Nazis. They do not exaggerate and they do not miss their mark.

The vast majority of anti-fascist organizing is nonviolent. But their willingness to physically defend themselves and others from white supremacist violence and preemptively shut down fascist organizing efforts before they turn deadly distinguishes them from liberal anti-racists. It also distinguishes them from stereotypical anarchists who will set things on fire and break windows for no good reason, (or in other words: to disrupt capitalism). Antifa operates with a singular and very specific purpose – oppose racists.

Antifa members talk openly about being willing to stop Nazi organizing “at any cost, by any means necessary” and that’s not just talking. Recent violent clashes have proven that commitment holds true. While it sounds admirable in theory, the repercussions of that ideology aren’t always welcome in communities that inadvertently host clashes between Antifa and the Alt-right. A lot of people think Antifa is merely drawing attention to the thing they oppose by giving white supremacy more airtime through their efforts. Most communities would rather let the Nazis march and organize in peace because cleaning up after a brawl is expensive, in dollars and cents and PR.

Last weekend’s rally in Washington DC is a good example of that. The Alt-Right rally that had garnered so much media attention in the weeks leading up to it, only had a couple of dozen Alt-right protestors show up. That in comparison to hundreds of anti-nazi protestors who showed in opposition made the event look more like an Antifa family reunion. Gearing up for it also cost the city of Washington DC a lot of money. No city wants to be underprepared after Charlottesville.

Antifascists argue that after the horrors of chattel slavery and the Holocaust, physical violence against white supremacists is both ethically justifiable and strategically effective. We should not, they argue, abstractly assess the ethical status of violence in the absence of the values and context behind it. Instead, they put forth an ethically consistent, historically informed argument for fighting Nazis before it’s too late. As Cornel West explained after surviving neo-Nazi attacks in Charlottesville, “If it hadn’t been for the antifascists protecting us from the neo-fascists, we would have been crushed like cockroaches.”

Modern Antifa politics can be traced to resistance to waves of xenophobia and the emergence of white power skinhead culture in Britain in the 1970s and ’80s. It also has its roots in self-defense groups organized by revolutionaries and migrants in Germany, as the fall of the Berlin Wall unleashed a violent neo-Nazi backlash.

In the United States and Canada, activists of the Anti-Racist Action Network (ARA) doggedly pursued Klansmen, neo-Nazis and other assorted white supremacists from the late 1980s into the 2000s. Their motto was simple but bold: “We go where they go.” If Nazi skinheads handed out leaflets at a punk show in Indiana about how “Hitler was right,” ARA was there to show them the door. If fascists plastered downtown Alberta’s Edmonton with racist posters, ARA tore them down and replaced them with anti-racist slogans.

Responding to small fascist groups may seem unimportant, if not downright trivial but the rise of Hitler and Mussolini show that resistance is not a light switch that can simply be flipped on the spot. Once the Nazi and fascist parties gained control of the government, it was too late to pull the emergency brake. Historians and political scholars are rightfully wondering if we’re not rapidly approaching that boiling point in the U.S. right now.

In retrospect, antifascists have concluded, it would have been much easier to stop Mussolini back in 1919 when his first fascist nucleus had 100 men. Or to stamp out the far-right German Workers’ Party, which had only 54 members when Hitler attended his first meeting before he transformed it into the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (the Nazi Party). Though the regimes that inspired their original protests are long dead, antifascists have devoted themselves to treating small fascist and Nazi groups as if they could be the nucleus of a murderous movement or regime of the future.

For years, antifascists have been maligned for treating groups of 40 or 60 Klansmen or fascists with the utmost seriousness. Members of the 10-year-old Rose City Antifa of Portland, Ore., the country’s oldest currently existing Antifa group, confronted criticism even from the left for devoting themselves to unmasking and exposing the activities of small groups of local racists, Islamophobes, and fascists rather than focusing on more large-scale, systemic injustices.

However, it’s fair to say at this point that small groups of extreme race-driven crazies seem to have a contagion that is spreading at a rate in this country most of us wouldn’t have believed possible. President Trump’s ‘America First’ slogan was popularized by Nazi sympathizers. It’s not hard to see the small seeds planted by a few vocal Alt-right supports taking root and growing on a world stage.

Some would say racism and racists have always been there and we’re just noticing them. However, even if that’s the case, the documented rise in hate crimes since Trump took office tells us that an emboldened racist is more dangerous than one in hiding. Antifa believes and operates on the principle that all white supremacists are uniquely and equally dangerous and none can be ignored.

Years before the alt-right even had a name, antifascists were spending thankless hours scouring seedy message boards and researching clandestine neo-Nazi gatherings. They were tracking those who planted the seeds of the death that we all witnessed in Charlottesville. Agree or disagree with their methods, the Antifa, who devote themselves to combating racism, are in no way equivalent to alt-right trolls who joke about gas chambers. Behind the masks, Antifa are nurses, teachers, neighbors, and relatives of all races and genders who do not hesitate to put themselves on the line to shut down fascism by any means necessary.

It should not have taken the murder of Heather Heyer for so many of us, especially white people, to take seriously the threat of white power that has plagued communities of color for generations. The history of anti-fascist demands that we take seriously the violence of white supremacists. The days of “just ignoring them” are over.

I’ve personally marched at rallies with Antifa and I’ve always been glad they were there. They come with the best first aid supplies and know what to do if the tear gas starts to flow. Moreover, they march with a mission that’s easy to align with. Racism cannot be ignored or it will raise its ugly head to a place where you can’t help but have to deal with it – which is right about where we are now. While some might not like their tactics, no one can suggest they were wrong. Every Nazi is dangerous and the ideology of racism must be not just contained, but put into the light so it can be put out.

Source: Washington Post

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