Why real anti-fascists must oppose Antifa

These activists say they are fighting tyranny, but their methods mirror the regimes they claim to despise.

To argue that Antifa is authentically anti-fascist is akin to arguing that the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea is authentically democratic. Definitions of fascism may vary, but the one consistent aspect shared by all fascistic regimes is the violent suppression of political dissent. In this regard, those who brand themselves as ‘Antifa’ have consistently allied themselves with fascism.

This week, Donald Trump issued an executive order pronouncing Antifa as a ‘domestic terrorist organisation’. Critics have pointed out that the movement is decentralised, lacks a command structure, and so it cannot therefore be deemed a terrorist group. However, the various bodies who organise under the ‘Antifa’ label share a common ideology, one whose key driving feature is the violent opposition of free speech and a voguish obsession with identity politics.

The claim of Antifa members to be standing up for minorities is somewhat undermined by their many attacks on Andy Ngo, a gay journalist of Vietnamese heritage, who has repeatedly exposed the corruption within various Antifa groups. He suffered a brain injury after one particularly vicious assault in Portland, Oregon. For all their social justice posturing, many Antifa chapters seem to comprise of gangs of posh white kids beating up anyone who disagrees with their regressive worldview.

The redefinition of language has always been a chief tactic of culture warriors. Like ‘Black Lives Matter’, groups that fall under the umbrella of ‘Antifa’ rely on the good nature of a public who are likely to interpret their name literally. After all, only a fascist would complain about anti-fascism. Right?

Mara Liasson, the national political correspondent for NPR, fell for this basic rhetorical trick when she described the Normandy landing of more than 150,000 Allied troops as the ‘biggest Antifa rally in history’. Similarly, the activist singer Billy Bragg once posted an image of Winston Churchill captioned simply with ‘ANTIFA’. These are the kinds of simplistic misunderstandings that such word games are always apt to engender, particularly among the literal-minded.

Ugly ideologies do not require a centralised structure to spread rapidly. There is no one figurehead or war council of the neofascist movement we call ‘Islamism’, but its supporters all share the same conviction that dissent must be crushed with violence rather than debate. Where Antifa and Islamism dovetail most clearly is in the explicitly anti-liberal strategies they adopt. That many commentators mislabel Antifa supporters as ‘liberal’ has added to the general confusion.

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