[D66] An Intimate History of Antifa

[R.O.]

  An Intimate History of Antifa

By
Daniel Penny
newyorker.com
8 min
View Original 
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On October 4, 1936, tens of thousands of Zionists, Socialists, Irish 
dockworkers, Communists, anarchists, and various outraged residents of 
London’s East End gathered to prevent Oswald Mosley and his British 
Union of Fascists from marching through their neighborhood. This clash 
would eventually be known as the Battle of Cable Street: protesters 
formed a blockade and beat back some three thousand Fascist Black Shirts 
and six thousand police officers. To stop the march, the protesters 
exploded homemade bombs, threw marbles at the feet of police horses, and 
turned over a burning lorry. They rained down a fusillade of projectiles 
on the marchers and the police attempting to protect them: rocks, 
brickbats, shaken-up lemonade bottles, and the contents of chamber pots. 
Mosley and his men were forced to retreat.

In “Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook 
<https://www.amazon.com/dp/1612197035/?tag=thneyo0f-20>,” published last 
week by Melville House, the historian Mark Bray presents the Battle of 
Cable Street as a potent symbol of how to stop Fascism: a strong, 
unified coalition outnumbered and humiliated Fascists to such an extent 
that their movement fizzled. For many members of contemporary 
anti-Fascist groups, the incident remains central to their mythology, a 
kind of North Star in the fight against Fascism and white supremacy 
<http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/what-a-white-supremacist-told-me-after-donald-trump-was-elected> 
across Europe and, increasingly, the United States. According to Bray, 
Antifa (pronounced an-/tee/-fah) “can variously be described as a kind 
of ideology, an identity, a tendency or milieu, or an activity of 
self-defense.” It’s a leaderless, horizontal movement whose roots lie in 
various leftist causes—Communism, anarchism, Socialism, anti-racism. The 
movement’s profile has surged since Antifa activists engaged in a wave 
of property destruction during Donald Trump’s Inauguration 
<http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/the-ongoing-legal-battle-over-the-black-bloc-inauguration-day-protest>—when 
one masked figure famously punched the white supremacist Richard Spencer 
in the face—and ahead of a planned appearance, in February, by Milo 
Yiannopoulos at the University of California, Berkeley 
<http://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/the-mistake-the-berkeley-protesters-made-about-milo-yiannopoulos>, 
which was cancelled. At the “Unite the Right” rally 
<http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/how-church-leaders-in-charlottesville-prepared-for-white-supremacists> 
in Charlottesville 
<http://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/the-battle-of-charlottesville>, 
Virginia, a number of Antifa activists, carrying sticks, blocked 
entrances to Emancipation Park, where white supremacists planned to 
gather. Fights broke out; some Antifa activists reportedly sprayed 
chemicals and threw paint-filled balloons 
<https://www.washingtonpost.com/classic-apps/recounting-a-day-of-rage-hate-violence-and-death/2017/08/14/b5ccaca4-811c-11e7-ab27-1a21a8e006ab_story.html?utm_term=.8026be841b22>. 
Multiple clergy members credited activists with saving their lives 
<http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2017/08/what_the_alt_left_was_actually_doing_in_charlottesville.html>. 
Fox News reported that a White House petition urging that Antifa be 
labelled a terrorist organization had received more than a hundred 
thousand signatures 
<http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2017/08/21/petition-urging-terror-label-for-antifa-gets-enough-signatures-for-white-house-response.html>.

Bray’s book is many things: the first English-language transnational 
history of Antifa, a how-to for would-be activists, and a record of 
advice from anti-Fascist organizers past and present—a project that he 
calls “history, politics, and theory on the run.” Antifa activists don’t 
often speak to the media, but Bray is a former Occupy Wall Street 
organizer and an avowed leftist; he has intimate access to his subjects, 
if not much critical distance from them. Especially in later chapters of 
the book, that access helps him to provide an unusually informed account 
of how Antifa members conceptualize their disruptive and sometimes 
violent methods.

Many liberals who are broadly sympathetic to the goals of Antifa 
criticize the movement for its illiberal tactics. In the latest issue of 
/The Atlantic/, Peter Beinart, citing a series of incidents in Portland, 
Oregon, writes, “The people preventing Republicans from safely 
assembling on the streets of Portland may consider themselves fierce 
opponents of the authoritarianism growing on the American right. In 
truth, however, they are its unlikeliest allies.” (Beinart’s piece is 
headlined “The Rise of the Violent Left 
<https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/09/the-rise-of-the-violent-left/534192/>.”) 
According to Bray, though, Antifa activists believe that Fascists 
forfeit their rights to speak and assemble when they deny those same 
rights to others through violence and intimidation. For instance, last 
week, the North Dakota newspaper /The Forum/ published a letter from 
Pearce Tefft 
<http://www.inforum.com/opinion/letters/4311880-letter-family-denounces-teffts-racist-rhetoric-and-actions> 
in which he recalled a chilling exchange about free speech with his son, 
Peter, shortly before Peter headed to the rally in Charlottesville. “The 
thing about us fascists is, it’s not that we don’t believe in freedom of 
speech,” the younger Tefft reportedly said to his father. “You can say 
whatever you want. We’ll just throw you in an oven.”

For Bray and his subjects, the horror of this history and the threat of 
its return demands that citizens, in the absence of state suppression of 
Fascism, take action themselves. Bray notes that state-based protections 
failed in Italy and Germany, where Fascists were able to take over 
governments through legal rather than revolutionary means—much as the 
alt-right frames its activities as a defense of free speech, Fascists 
were able to spread their ideology under the aegis of liberal tolerance. 
Antifa does not abide by John Milton’s dictum that, “in a free and open 
encounter,” truthful ideas will prevail. “After Auschwitz and 
Treblinka,” Bray writes, “anti-fascists committed themselves to fighting 
to the death the ability of organized Nazis to say anything.”

Part of Antifa’s mission is to establish, as Bray puts it, “the 
historical continuity between different eras of far-right violence and 
the many forms of collective self-defense that it has necessitated 
across the globe over the past century.” To this end, the first half of 
his book is a somewhat rushed history of anti-Fascist groups. The 
progenitors of Antifa, in this account, were the German and Italian 
leftists who, following the First World War, banded together to fight 
proto-Fascist gangs. In Italy, these leftists gathered under the banner 
of Arditi del Popolo (“the People’s Daring Ones”), while in Weimar 
Germany, groups like Antifaschistische Aktion, from which Antifa takes 
its name, evolved from paramilitary factions of existing political 
parties. Bray moves swiftlyto the failure of anti-Fascists in the 
Spanish Civil War, then races through the second half of the twentieth 
century. In the late seventies, the punk and hardcore scenes became the 
primary sites of open conflict between leftists and neo-Nazis; that 
milieu prefigures much of the style and strategy now associated with the 
anti-Fascist movement. In the Netherlands and Germany, a group of 
leftist squatters known as Autonomen pioneered the Black Bloc approach: 
wearing all-black outfits and masks to help participants evade 
prosecution and retaliation. Bray reaches the present with his 
description of “Pinstripe Fascists,” such as Geert Wilders 
<http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/03/27/the-dutch-donald-trump-loses>, 
and the rise of new far-right parties and groups in both Europe and 
America. The book flits between countries and across decades; analysis 
is sparse. The message is that Antifa will fight Fascists wherever they 
appear, and by any means necessary.

The book’s later chapters, such as “Five Historical Lessons for 
Anti-Fascists” and “ ‘So Much for the Tolerant Left!’: ‘No Platform’ and 
Free Speech,” which are adapted from essays published elsewhere, are 
more focussed and persuasive. Here Bray explicitly deals with the 
philosophical and practical problems of Antifa: violence versus 
nonviolence; mass movements versus militancy; choosing targets and 
changing tactics. Bray concedes that the practice of disrupting Fascist 
rallies and events could be construed as a violation of the right to 
free speech and assembly 
<http://www.newyorker.com/news/benjamin-wallace-wells/the-boston-protests-revealed-the-limits-of-trumpism>—but 
he contends that such protections are meant to prevent the government 
from arresting citizens, not to prevent citizens from disrupting one 
another’s speech. Speech is already curtailed in the U.S. by laws 
related to “obscenity, incitement to violence, copyright infringement, 
press censorship during wartime,” and “restrictions for the 
incarcerated,” Bray points out. Why not add one more 
restriction—curtailing hate speech—as many European democracies do? As 
for the slippery-slopists, afraid that Antifa will begin with Fascists 
and eventually attack anybody who opposes them, Bray maintains that the 
historical record does not support this fear: anti-Fascists who have 
shut down local hate groups, as in Denmark, usually go dark themselves, 
or turn their attention to other political projects, rather than finding 
new enemies to fight. (In his /Atlantic/ piece, Beinart notes, “When 
fascism withered after World War II, antifa did too.”)

Violence, Bray insists, is not the preferred method for past or present 
Antifa—but it is definitely on the table. He quotes a Baltimore-based 
activist who goes by the name Murray to explain the movement’s outlook:

    You fight them by writing letters and making phone calls so you
    don’t have to fight them with fists. You fight them with fists so
    you don’t have to fight them with knives. You fight them with knives
    so you don’t have to fight them with guns. You fight them with guns
    so you don’t have to fight them with tanks.

There is a moral logic to this notion of anticipatory self-defense, but 
the progression, from writing letters to fighting with guns, is 
worrisome nonetheless. Right-wing militiamen in Charlottesville made a 
point of displaying force 
<http://www.newyorker.com/culture/annals-of-appearances/an-image-of-revolutionary-fire-at-charlottesville>, 
and this was reportedly “unnerving to law enforcement officials on the 
scene.” Should anti-Fascists start toting AR-15s, like the right-wing 
Oathkeepers? The idea can seem naïve in an American context, where, 
practically speaking, only white people can carry guns openly without 
fear of police interference 
<http://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/old-questions-but-no-new-answers-in-the-philando-castile-verdict>. 
Bray mentions a few pro-gun Antifa groups, including the Huey P. Newton 
Gun Club, and a collective with the punning moniker Trigger Warning; he 
quibbles with liberal scholars, including Erica Chenoweth and Maria J. 
Stephan, who dismiss violent protest as an ineffective tool for 
garnering public support. But it is unclear from the book whether he 
thinks that brandishing guns is an ethical concern as well as a tactical 
one, or whether he worries about an escalation of violence. Postwar 
Antifa, as Bray details in earlier chapters, has largely been a European 
project, in which opposing sides sometimes beat each other senseless and 
stabbed one another to death. They didn’t have assault rifles. The 
Battle of Cable Street was fought with rocks and paving stones.

What were the effects of Cable Street, exactly? Scholars continue to 
debate the showdown’s consequences. After the battle, Mosley, like 
present-day Fascists, was able to cast himself in the role of a 
law-abiding victim assaulted by immigrant hordes. In the months 
following, Fascist youth attacked London’s Jewish residents and 
businesses in what became known as the Mile End Pogrom 
<https://www.pri.org/stories/2016-10-05/britain-remembers-massive-riot-against-fascism-london-1936>, 
and the British Union of Fascists did better at the polls in 1937 
<https://www.historytoday.com/daniel-tilles/myth-cable-street> than they 
had in years prior. Bray argues that such results do not undermine the 
legacy of the incident, because it radicalized and galvanized a 
community, which continued to fight Fascists in Britain through the 
buildup to the war and beyond, and whose efforts were largely successful.

In the British press, at least, Cable Street has been referenced 
<http://www.newstatesman.com/world/2017/08/stand-against-nazis-charlottesville-has-echoes-cable-street> 
repeatedly 
<http://foreignpolicy.com/2017/08/18/when-and-when-not-to-fight-with-fascists-alt-right-charlottesville/> 
in coverage of the protests and the terrorism in Charlottesville 
<http://www.newyorker.com/news/as-told-to/a-witness-to-terrorism-in-charlottesville>, 
an event that has forced a discussion of what to do when far-right 
extremists come to your town. Bray, for his part, believes that one can 
practice “everyday anti-fascism” by confronting bigots in nonviolent 
ways, “from calling them out, to boycotting their business, to shaming 
them for their oppressive beliefs, to ending a friendship unless someone 
shapes up.” The point, as he sees it, is to shut down Fascists not just 
in the street but in every interaction. “An anti-fascist outlook has no 
tolerance for ‘intolerance.’ ” he writes.“It will not ‘agree to disagree.’ ”


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