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<h1 class="css-1z36ek">An Intimate History of Antifa</h1>
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<div class="css-7kp13n">By</div>
<div class="css-7ol5x1"><span class="css-acjdas">Daniel
Penny</span></div>
<div class="css-8rl9b7">newyorker.com</div>
<div class="css-zskk6u">8 min</div>
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<p>On <span data-page="page_1"></span>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.</p>
<p>In “<a rel="nofollow"
href="https://www.amazon.com/dp/1612197035/?tag=thneyo0f-20">Antifa:
The Anti-Fascist Handbook</a>,”
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 <a
href="http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/what-a-white-supremacist-told-me-after-donald-trump-was-elected">white
supremacy</a> across Europe and,
increasingly, the United States.
According to Bray, Antifa (pronounced
an-<em>tee</em>-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 <a
href="http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/the-ongoing-legal-battle-over-the-black-bloc-inauguration-day-protest">during
Donald Trump’s Inauguration</a>—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 <a
href="http://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/the-mistake-the-berkeley-protesters-made-about-milo-yiannopoulos">at
the University of California,
Berkeley</a>, which was cancelled.
At <a
href="http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/how-church-leaders-in-charlottesville-prepared-for-white-supremacists">the
“Unite the Right” rally</a> in <a
href="http://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/the-battle-of-charlottesville">Charlottesville</a>,
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 <a
href="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">sprayed
chemicals and threw paint-filled
balloons</a>. Multiple clergy
members credited activists with <a
href="http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2017/08/what_the_alt_left_was_actually_doing_in_charlottesville.html">saving
their lives</a>. Fox News reported
that a White House petition urging
that Antifa be labelled a terrorist
organization had received <a
href="http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2017/08/21/petition-urging-terror-label-for-antifa-gets-enough-signatures-for-white-house-response.html">more
than a hundred thousand signatures</a>.</p>
</div>
<div>
<p>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.</p>
<p>Many liberals who are broadly
sympathetic to the goals of Antifa
criticize the movement for its
illiberal tactics. In the latest issue
of <em>The Atlantic</em>, 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 “<a
href="https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/09/the-rise-of-the-violent-left/534192/">The
Rise of the Violent Left</a>.”)
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 <em>The
Forum</em> published <a
href="http://www.inforum.com/opinion/letters/4311880-letter-family-denounces-teffts-racist-rhetoric-and-actions">a
letter from Pearce Tefft</a> 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.”</p>
<p>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.”</p>
<p>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 swiftly<span
data-page="page_2"></span> to 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 <a
href="http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/03/27/the-dutch-donald-trump-loses">Geert
Wilders</a>, 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.</p>
<p>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 <a
href="http://www.newyorker.com/news/benjamin-wallace-wells/the-boston-protests-revealed-the-limits-of-trumpism">the
right to free speech and assembly</a>—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 <em>Atlantic</em>
piece, Beinart notes, “When fascism
withered after World War II, antifa
did too.”)</p>
<p>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:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>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.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>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 <a
href="http://www.newyorker.com/culture/annals-of-appearances/an-image-of-revolutionary-fire-at-charlottesville">displaying
force</a>, 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 <a
href="http://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/old-questions-but-no-new-answers-in-the-philando-castile-verdict">without
fear of police interference</a>.
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.</p>
</div>
<div>
<p>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 <a
href="https://www.pri.org/stories/2016-10-05/britain-remembers-massive-riot-against-fascism-london-1936">the
Mile End Pogrom</a>, and the British
Union of Fascists <a
href="https://www.historytoday.com/daniel-tilles/myth-cable-street">did
better at the polls in 1937</a> 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.</p>
<p>In the British press, at least, Cable
Street has been <a
href="http://www.newstatesman.com/world/2017/08/stand-against-nazis-charlottesville-has-echoes-cable-street">referenced</a>
<a
href="http://foreignpolicy.com/2017/08/18/when-and-when-not-to-fight-with-fascists-alt-right-charlottesville/">repeatedly</a>
in coverage of the protests and the <a
href="http://www.newyorker.com/news/as-told-to/a-witness-to-terrorism-in-charlottesville">terrorism
in Charlottesville</a>, 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.<span
data-page="page_final"></span> “It
will not ‘agree to disagree.’ ”</p>
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