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By the end of the decade, the legitimacy of antifa organizing influenced public opinion to transcend the earlier tendency to equate fascists and antifascists as equivalent “extremists.”
The next morning one of them, Hans Koch, lay dead in his cell. In retaliation, kraakers attacked police stations and government buildings and incinerated police cars in three nights of rioting. Meanwhile, another wing of the movement called RaRa (Anti-Racist Action Group) waged a successful campaign of firebombings against Makro supermarkets to get the company to divest from apartheid South Africa.200
True, direct reaction. Why does this happen elsewhere and not here?
Fascist violence and the broader Marxist analysis of fascism as integrally linked to the capitalist system led the Italian revolutionary Left to fuse the anti-fascist and anticapitalist struggles.
Apart from covert armed actions, Italian revolutionaries were more than willing to engage in militant street action.
Although left-wing violence during this era has often generated more attention, fascists were actually responsible for most of the political deaths that occurred from 1969 to 1980.204
Media
Berlusconi’s sympathy toward fascism was clear years later when he claimed that “Mussolini did not murder anyone. Mussolini used to send people on vacation in internal exile.”207
Sounds like Mussolini's granddaughter last month.
“direct action is the only argument they can understand.”
Yet, whenever this new fascist counterculture spread, the growing model of militant antifa was right on its heels.
Malcolm X as saying “We need allies who will fight and not tell us to be nonviolent. If a white man wants to be an ally, just ask him what does he think of John Brown. Do you know what John Brown did? He went to war.”
to highlight the hypocrisy of the American anti-Nazi self-image maintained while the police were terrorizing the black community on a daily basis. And there is an element of continuity between the raised fist of anti-fascism and black power.
By this point, ARA was expanding beyond its roots in the punk scene to encompass a wider and more diverse array of several thousand activists organized in over two hundred locations across the United States, Canada, and South America. Politically, ARA was predominantly anarchist and antiauthoritarian, as reflected in the influential role of the Love and Rage Revolutionary Anarchist Federation, though there were also Trotskyist, Maoist, and other Left members as well.
“go where they go”
Sounds like the Antifa rule.
“The refugees told me,” Dominic remembered, “that we came from a war zone where we were threatened with death every day, and now we are threatened again.” Dominic “felt ashamed” of his country, but defending the mainly Syrian refugees “made me feel like this is the right thing to do and I want to do it until the end.”233
Although statistics show that refugees have not caused a notable increase in poverty or crime, “perception is reality,” Georg Pazderski of the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) argued, “and at the moment, our citizens feel unwell, insecure.”236
Sounds just like Rush Limbaugh in 2016 on facts vs feelings.
Their “euroskeptic” solutions entail a turn away from the “globalism” of the European Union toward a return to the traditional sovereignty and chauvinism of the nation-state.
Anti-immigrant sentiment only escalated when eighty women reported being sexually assaulted by a thousand men “of Arab or North African appearance” according to police on New Year’s Eve moving into 2016.
How could this even be possible?
pressuring Merkel to apologize for her open stance on refugees, and to strike a deal with Turkey to reduce the number of Syrians that would be allowed into Europe. As well, Merkel’s party aggressively pursued the swelling AfD electorate by proposing a ban on burkas in public and a new Integration Law that would control where refugees can live and force them to learn German language, culture, and history.238
Like “many young people” in Germany, anti-fascism was his “first stop in the process of political radicalization.”
Critics called PEGIDA “pinstripe Nazis,” to emphasize the underlying fascism beneath their veneer of respectability.
perhaps the most successful method of combating them has been exposing their actions and identities. In English this is called “doxxing” (or “doxing”): making someone’s private information public in order to intimidate them or leverage public opinion to embarrass them, get them fired, or cause some other negative outcome. While researching and exposing fascists has long been a staple of postwar anti-fascism, its scope has expanded with the growth of the Internet and social media. Today it plays a central role in both fascist and anti-fascist playbooks.
“doxxing is a very important tool to create conflict within far-right movements” because it establishes a constant “mental burden.”255
as well as social and economic burden
the rise of the Front National legitimized casual racism and marginalized the antiracist position. This dynamic, which many commentators have come to call the “lepénisation des esprits” (Le Pen-ization of the minds), has become a hallmark of the banal new far right.
the only way to respond to the rise of mainstream far-right parties is “to transform anti-fascism into a concrete and large solidarity movement that can develop the concept and practice of self-defense against the police, state, and racist activism…The Front National’s fuel is fear. Our fuel is solidarity.”
highly visible patrols were “psychologically important” for the anti-fascist movement.
months after fascists entered parliament, nearly every conversation I had with local anarchists included comments along the lines of, “We had no idea this would happen. They were a complete joke before.”
Sounds like Trump being elected....
the oldest existing antifa group in the United States: Rose City Antifa (RCA) in Portland, Oregon.
After peaking in 2011, however, the number of “hate groups” gradually declined through 2014, when they hit their lowest levels since 2004. That was not because white-supremacist politics were fading, but because more and more neo-Nazis were shifting their focus to the Internet and social media, where they flourished on Reddit and 4chan.
The hate did not diminish, it just found new outlets.
“alt-right”—a term coined in 2008 by Richard Spencer, the “professional racist in khakis” who leads the white-supremacist National Policy Institute.
Against the increasingly popular leftist concept of “white privilege,” white nationalists counter that white people are no longer conquerors but victims.
The degree to which Trump’s victory can be ascribed solely to a white backlash can be overstated if we ignore the fact that Trump’s share of the white electorate was nearly identical to Mitt Romney’s four years earlier. That shows how in many ways Clinton lost more than Trump won. Nevertheless, the Trump campaign created a platform for the alt-right to mobilize white anger against feminism, Black Lives Matter, Muslims, and Latinos. His victory emboldened explicit and implicit white supremacy, energizing racism beyond numbers at the polls.
The mass arrest and excessive charges are clearly an effort to curb disruptive protest, and are in line with recently proposed legislation in eighteen states that would criminalize blocking roadways, wearing masks, and other forms of protest. Laws under consideration in Tennessee, North Carolina, and North Dakota would even allow motorists to plow into protesters in the street.
If Rock Against Racism promoted “NF=No Fun,” then Spencer getting punched to beats of DMX made the alt-right “alt-wrong” for many young people, even if only for a moment. Perhaps more importantly, the incident made a significant contribution toward legitimizing anti-fascism and, more specifically, the idea of physically confronting fascists and white supremacists.
goal was to “move from a ninja anti-fascism to a popular mass-based anti-fascism.”
“Not everyone who is anti-fascist is gonna be able to mask up and go smash things,” explained Joe from the North Carolina GDC. “There have to be roles for elderly folks, disabled folks who are not going to be able to hit the streets.”330
Thank you.
The anti-fascist struggle in Russia is all the more difficult given the authoritarian politics of the Kremlin and a range of collaboration between authorities and various far-right groups.
Although it is beyond the geographical scope of this book, it would be a grave injustice to write a book about international anti-fascism in 2017 without at least touching upon the antifascist core of the greatest popular revolution of our times: the Rojava Revolution in Northern Syria.
When Syrian president Assad withdrew his forces from the country’s north in 2012 amid the ongoing civil war, the task of fighting off ISIS in the region the Kurds call Rojava fell to the Kurdish Protection Units (YPG) and the affiliated Women’s Protection Units (YPJ),
As they drew international volunteers, "While many of the early Western volunteers were evangelical Christians , such as the members of the Sons of Liberty International, subsequently more and more of the volunteers were leftists, according to an anarchist internationalist in Rojava I managed to interview. In his opinion, most of the Turks are Marxist-Leninists or Maoists, but the Europeans are pretty evenly split between Marxists and anarchists. Regardless of their politics, however, he was adamant that Kurds and internationals alike consider both ISIS and Turkish president Erdogan to be fascist, and the defense of the Rojava Revolution to be an anti-fascist struggle."
On January 27, 2015, however, this under-resourced, socialist feminist militia, which eschews ranks and elects its commanders democratically, shocked the world by defeating ISIS in Kobanî.
As the revolution developed, the Democratic Society Movement (TEV-Dem), formed by the PYD and other forces, started to govern the newly autonomous cantons of Rojava, about the size of Connecticut with a population of 4.6 million, according to Öcalan’s horizontal and feminist doctrines. Local communes of three hundred members federated into larger districts that were organized into “people’s councils.” Decision-making flows from the bottom up, and all bodies were required to be composed of at least 40 percent women.
This sounds like the communist or socialist strategy laid out by Lenin in his revisions to the Constitution.
By all accounts the number of foreign volunteers is not very high, but many of them have paid the ultimate price for their anti-fascism: As of February 2017, more than twenty foreign volunteers had been killed in the conflict and far more Kurds, Yazidis, and members of other regional ethnic groups have died in the fight against fascisms on all sides. In the words of the Antifascist International Tabur, “We take our symbol from the revolutionaries who fought in Spain, in 1936, for a world without borders, without shadows and without fear—History did not defeat them. Their dreams did not die,
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FASCIST REVOLUTIONS HAVE NEVER SUCCEEDED. FASCISTS GAINED POWER LEGALLY.
Fascism and Nazism emerged as emotional, antirational appeals grounded in masculine promises of renewed national vigor. While political argumentation is always important in appealing to the potential popular base of fascism, its sharpness is blunted when confronted with ideologies that reject the terms of rational debate. Rationality did not stop the Fascists or the Nazis. While reason is always necessary, it is unfortunately insufficient on its own from an anti-fascist perspective.
parliamentary government is not always a barrier to fascism. To the contrary, on several occasions it has been more of a red carpet.
turned to figures like Mussolini and Hitler to ruthlessly crush dissent and protect private property. While
A key here is the protection of private propery --- the protection of capitalism at the cost of the lives of citizens if necessary.
As long as capitalism continues to foment class struggle, they argue, fascism will always loom in the background as an authoritarian solution to popular upheaval.
regardless of the composition of the U.S. police force, the fact that it developed out of Southern slave patrols and Northern opposition to the labor movement gives us insight into its role in the white-supremacist criminal “justice” system.
historically fascism has gained entry to the halls of power not by smashing down the gates, but by convincing the gatekeepers to politely swing them open.
TO VARYING DEGREES, MANY INTERWAR ANTI-FASCIST LEADERS AND THEORISTS ASSUMED THAT FASCISM WAS SIMPLY A VARIANT OF TRADITIONAL COUNTERREVOLUTIONARY POLITICS. THEY DID NOT TAKE IT SERIOUSLY ENOUGH UNTIL IT WAS TOO LATE.
We saw this absolutely with tRump.
previously antagonistic sectors like traditional landowners and bourgeois capitalists could form a united counterrevolutionary movement.359 The Marxist focus on the underlying class dynamics of fascism revealed elements of this puzzling new doctrine that centrist observers failed to grasp.
Because centrists do not read Marx. They read articles written by people who have read articles about Marx, and it gets lost in the game of telephone by media translation.
At the turn of the century, leftists had reason to anticipate that eras of repression would come and go. Fascism changed the rules of the game.
Maybe too much introspection of thought and not enough outward analysis or practice.
