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Without in any way diminishing the horror of the Holocaust, to a certain extent we can understand Nazism as European colonialism and imperialism brought home.
The decimation of the indigenous populations of the Americas and Australia, the tens of millions who died of famine in India under British rule, the ten million killed by Belgian king Leopold’s Congo Free State, and the horrors of transatlantic slavery are but a sliver of the mass death and societal decimation wrought by European powers prior to the rise of Hitler.
French emperor Napoleon III sought to suppress working-class politics while appealing to the populace through the cultivation of his masculine image.
Ultimately the socialists and communists were too preoccupied with each other to recognize that the Nazis were not simply a new variant of traditional counterrevolution. Both leaderships were too stuck in their ways to rapidly countenance innovative and confrontational tactical options. The entire continent, and its Jewish population in particular, would pay a heavy price for the failure to stop Hitler.
Jewish veterans formed the Ex-Servicemen’s Movement Against Fascism (EMAF) “to attack Fascism in its strongholds,” and then the Legion of the Blue and White Shirts, which terrified the fascists so much they referred to them as “the storm troops of Jewry.”
Meanwhile at home, the Soviet “Great Purge” was underway. Over the course of several years, any Soviet leader who could conceivably challenge Stalin’s power was forced to confess to belonging to the “Trotskyite-Zinovievite Terrorist Center” or some other plot while “millions of others were being arrested and hundreds of thousands killed after trials behind closed doors or with no trials at all.”
The purge even extended to Spain, where the Soviet military intelligence unit (GRU) and secret police (NKVD) committed assassinations and kidnappings of prominent anti-Stalinist leftists who were sometimes locked up in secret prisons.
Four days of street fighting ensued as the anarchist CNT and the Trotskyist POUM attempted to defend the gains of their revolution from the attacks of the police and armed communist units.
After fighting for the POUM during the May Days, Orwell snuck out of Spain, not to escape the fascists but to evade the communists who had labelled him and his comrades “Trotsky-Fascist[s].”125
The Autonomen, as these militants of all genders were called, rejected the “stale” traditions of the Left. Instead they sought to “practice different forms of life in the here and now.” “We fight for ourselves,” one autonomous journal explained in 1982, “We do not engage in representative struggles. We do not fight for ideology, or for the proletariat, or for ‘the people.’ We fight for a self-determined life.”
Street anti-fascism (demonstrations, marches, etc.) today is at an impasse: either it confronts extreme right groups that are politically insignificant, but physically dangerous; or it tries to confront organizations that are politically significant and finds itself faced with parties that are not only absent from the street, but are by this point well integrated into the political game, sustained by law enforcement, and perceived as legitimate by the population…one of the effects of the lepénisation des esprits is to render anti-fascist action illegitimate in the eyes of power and of the
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certainly, some of the anti-Yiannopoulos protesters opposed the antifa tactics. But the triumphant cheering and spontaneous dance party that erupted after the cancellation attests to the fact that many students were happy with the results of those tactics—a fact largely unreported by the media. Ultimately, Prieto observes, “students’ lives might have been saved that night.”297
the 2008 election of the first black president, Barack Obama, exploded this growth, evident in the increase of antigovernment “Patriot groups” from 149 in 2008 to 1,360 in 2012.305 Such groups found an increasingly receptive white population that was alienated by the decay of so-called traditional values, and was struggling amid the post-industrial economic crisis.
“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 alt-right has developed into a big tent for a wide range of reactionaries—from “race realists” to “archeofuturists” to the oxymoronic “anarcho-capitalists”—that defines itself in opposition to establishment “cuckservatives,” a racist combination of the terms “cuckold” and “conservative” implying that traditional conservatives are like pathetic white men who watch helplessly as black men have sex with their wives.
the Alt Right is defined by racial nationalism, the inequality of people and races, the need for traditional gender roles, the necessity of hierarchy and general anti-democracy, and anti-Semitism. When compared with screeching neo-Nazis waving Swastika banners, what separates the Alt Right is its tech savvy adherent, clever memes, and upper-middle class, college educated constituencies.
Against the increasingly popular leftist concept of “white privilege,” white nationalists counter that white people are no longer conquerors but victims.
In the era of Trump, the word “alternative” bypasses normative valuation. Statements are not right or wrong, they are, according to Trump advisor Kellyanne Conway, “alternative facts.”
By framing feminism, queer liberation, and antiracism as facets of a stultifying, unnatural, “PC” hegemony, the alt-right have given frustrated racist white people, especially men, a “rebellious” outlet to express what they had been thinking all along.
Both Trump and the alt-right have managed to tap into a widespread white conservative anxiety about the rapid demise of “traditional” white America—an
Trump campaign created a platform for the alt-right to mobilize white anger against feminism, Black Lives Matter, Muslims, and Latinos.
the mostly black and Latino Smash Racism is a “loose affinity group” that is working toward creating a local network of similar groups, in order to “make DC and the surrounding area too unsafe for outright neo-Nazi groups and fascists.”
Laws under consideration in Tennessee, North Carolina, and North Dakota would even allow motorists to plow into protesters in the street.324
and a New York Times headline asked “Is it O.K. to punch a Nazi?”325
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.
More recently, after Minneapolis police killed Philando Castile and Jamar Clark, Black Lives Matter organized an eighteen-day occupation outside of the fourth precinct. The GDC was one of several groups that helped to provide security for the occupation.
Redneck Revolt (RnR) which seeks to reclaim the historical association between the term “redneck” and the red bandannas of the armed rebels of the 1921 Battle of Blair Mountain in West Virginia—the largest labor uprising in American history—in order to “incite a movement amongst white working people” against white supremacy.
Given how the “Left has ceded guns to the Right,” as Tyler claims, the goal of RnR is to “legitimize community defense and guns on the Left.”
Other leftist gun clubs/community self-defense groups include the Maoist Red Guards in Austin, Texas, the Huey P. Newton Gun Club, which includes eight organizations around the country, and the LGBTQ Trigger Warning (TW) gun club in Rochester, New York. Oscar of TW explained that the group started right after Trump’s election, in response to a rise in local homophobia and racism.
historical facts have cast doubt on the liberal formula for opposing fascism. That formula essentially amounts to faith in reasoned debate to counteract fascist ideas, in the police to counteract fascist violence, and in the institutions of parliamentary government to counteract fascist attempts to seize power. There is no doubt that sometimes this formula has worked. There is also no doubt that sometimes it has not.
Fascism and Nazism emerged as emotional, antirational appeals grounded in masculine promises of renewed national vigor.
While reason is always necessary, it is unfortunately insufficient on its own from an anti-fascist perspective.
When interwar economic and political elites felt sufficiently threatened by the prospect of revolution, they turned to figures like Mussolini and Hitler to ruthlessly crush dissent and protect private property.
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.
As for the police counteracting fascist violence—at times the police have arrested and persecuted fascists, yet the historical record shows that along with the military they have also been among the most eager for a “return to order.” Studies show that high percentages of police voted for Golden Dawn and the Front National over the past few years.354 In the United States, it is clear that many police welcomed Trump as a “Blue Lives Matter” president who would allow law enforcement to continue its harassment and murder of communities of color unimpeded. Recently it was revealed that the FBI has
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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.
As long as there has been revolution, there has been counterrevolution.
Fascist ideological, technological, and bureaucratic innovations created a vehicle for the imperialism and genocide that Europe had exported around the world to bring its wars of extermination home.
It comes into play when the antifascist lens is applied to phenomena that may not be fascist, technically speaking, but are fascistic. For example, were the Black Panthers wrong to call cops who killed black people with impunity “fascist pigs” if they did not personally hold fascist beliefs or if the American government was not literally fascist? At a Madrid antifa demonstration, I saw a rainbow flag with the slogan “homophobia is fascism.” Does the existence of non-fascist homophobes invalidate the argument?
Keyword : Systemic
many individual socialists, who were far less encumbered by legalistic party ideology and master-plan electoral strategy, seem to have been more sensitive to changing conditions on the ground and far more eager to take the fight to fascism.
Rank-and-file communists and socialists generally did not hate each other nearly as much as their leaders did. In fact, early unity initiatives between socialists and communists in France and Austria, for example, developed from below.365 These examples demonstrate some of the drawbacks of hierarchical organization.
anti-ideological, antirational paradoxes like “national syndicalism” and “national socialism.”
“Left” Fascists and Nazis were purged as their parties gained power and cozied up to the economic elite, but the nationalist co-optation of the rhetoric of working-class populism played a key role in getting them there.
This model of far-right political charity has been adopted by the Greek Golden Dawn, the Italian CasaPound, the Hogar Social Madrid, and the British National Action, all of whom have started giving out free food and groceries to ethnic Greeks, Italians, Spaniards, and “whites” only.
IT DOESN’T TAKE THAT MANY FASCISTS TO MAKE FASCISM.
In 1919 Mussolini’s fasci had a hundred members. When Mussolini was appointed prime minister in 1922 only about 7 to 8 percent of the Italian population, and only thirty-five of the more than five hundred members of parliament, belonged to his PNF (Partito Nazionale Fascista).
The German Workers’ Party only had fifty-four members when Hitler attended his first meeting after the First World War. When Hitler was appointed chancellor in 1933, only about 1....
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anti-fascists have concluded that since the future is unwritten, and fascism often emerges out of small, marginal groups, every fascist or white-supremacist group should be treated as if they could be Mussolini’s one hundred fasci, or the fifty-four members of the German Workers’ Party that provided Hitler’s first stepping stone.
The tragic irony of modern anti-fascism is that the more successful it is, the more its raison d’être is called into question. Its greatest successes lie in hypothetical limbo: How many murderous fascist movements have been nipped in the bud over the past seventy years by antifa groups before their violence could metastasize? We will never know—and that’s a very good thing indeed.
The clashes of early 2017 brought the “masked self-styled anarchists bent on wreaking havoc” known as antifa into the public spotlight.371 Despite a complete lack of historical or theoretical knowledge, pundits concluded that anti-fascism is a greater threat to free speech than even fascism itself.
