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Kindle Notes & Highlights
It wasn’t just the self-defense that made communities more comfortable with antifa, Daniel from Madrid suggested to me; he felt that much of the alarm that the spectacle of masked antifa creates was dispelled when small groups of anti-fascists had a chance to organize and establish meaningful relationships in a community.
In France, militant anti-fascists work toward merging small-group militant action with broader mobilization by working through intermediary and mass-level assemblies.
the first level of organizing is the “antifa radical group,” and the second level is the “antifa collective,” such as Vigilances 69 in Lyon or Comité Antifa St-Etienne, mixing people from unions and community activists. Organizers in Toulouse are currently “experimenting” with a third level, “the anti-fascist assembly,” which groups together other activist and leftist organizations with antifa collectives. Even when inactive, these larger bodies act like “cells of vigilance that are ready to be activated in case of Nazi activities,”
In Spain, too, similar organizational models have been put into practice.
the open, popular struggle of Madrid para todas and the more militant direct actions of smaller security-culture-oriented antifa groups represent the “two faces of anti-fascism…and we don’t forget either face.” These two struggles are “parallel” to each other, he said, but “they do not mix” directly.
was forced to shift its focus toward mobilizing local populations to physically oppose the fascists. The strategy was called “Laat ze niet lopen” (Do not let them walk): Once the location of a march was publicized, a crew of ten to twelve antifa would travel to the town, establish contacts, put up posters, and set up an office offering legal and press resources.
On the day of the fascist demonstration, organizers would pass out maps with a phone number for the latest news and directions, and post the information online.
…a critical mass of groups like the local immigrant youth, the local football hooligans and the traveler community, would come out in their hundreds and put pressure on the Nazi march in a way that even a block of veteran autonomous militants never would,
anti-fascists prioritize working with marginal communities to neutralize any potential threats, whether it’s popular with “the majority” or not. This perspective is especially important in anti-fascist work given the historical fact that those who have suffered the most under fascist regimes have not had the backing of most of the rest of society.
refuses to accept the dangerous notion that homophobia is just someone’s “opinion” to which they are entitled. It refuses to accept opposition to the basic proposal that “black lives matter” as a simple political disagreement. An anti-fascist outlook has no tolerance for “intolerance.” It will not “agree to disagree.”
we must point out that our critique is not against violence, incivility, discrimination, or disrupting speeches in the abstract, but against those who do so in the service of white supremacy, hetero-patriarchy, class oppression, and genocide.
Why was he embarrassed? Because Nazism has been so thoroughly discredited that he felt like he was in a tiny minority, at odds with everyone around him. In other words, the antiracist movements of the past constructed the high social cost that white-supremacist views carried,
Fascist regimes thrive on widespread support, or at least consent, by cultivating pride in, and fear of the loss of, a variety of identities, privileges, and traditions.
Despite the popular perception that race is “natural” or “timeless,” the biological notion of race is a modern European invention. When race was invented, however, it was invented as “the child of racism, not the father,” as Ta-Nehisi Coates points out, and “the process of naming ‘the people’ has never been a matter of genealogy and physiognomy so much as one of hierarchy.”
My Jewish and Irish ancestors were not considered “white” when they first arrived in this country in the early twentieth century, but over time they were gradually welcomed into what Joel Olson terms “white democracy.”
reflects on the horrors of the First World War to point out what the victims of colonialism and imperialism had known for generations: “This is not Europe gone mad; this is not aberration nor insanity; this is Europe; this seeming Terrible is the real soul of white culture—back of all culture—stripped and visible today.”
And while many European and American commentators saw the Holocaust and the rise of fascism as a lamentable deviation from the Enlightenment traditions of “Western Civilization,” Aimé Césaire rightly concluded that “Europe is indefensible.”446 So too must we add that, as a modern identity forged through slavery and class rule, whiteness is indefensible.
On its own, militant anti-fascism is necessary but not sufficient to build a new world in the shell of the old.
