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Mitch Barrie's avatar

I don't think Antifa are harmless. They destroy property and hurt innocent people. Here in Reno last year, we had one of those mostly peaceful protests where the city hall was overrun and vandalized (with a lot more damage that was caused by the (heh heh) "insurrectionists" of 6 January). We don't have a lot of black people here in Reno, but one of them, a journalist, was beaten up during the mostly peaceful protest by a couple of white people who drove 350 miles from a neighboring state apparently just to assault a black guy. This weird man-bites-dog story oddly didn't go very far in the national news, but was reported in our local fishwrap:

https://www.rgj.com/story/news/2020/06/15/journalist-attacked-black-lives-matter-protest-reno-city-hall/3149426001/

Meanwhile, in coastal cities there is fighting in the streets, instigated almost every time by people calling themselves Antifa:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gxSKVP__-ww

Looks a little like the Weimar Republic, no? That sure ended well.

These morons might not represent any sort of coherent political ideology, but they hurt people, destroy property and deliberately escalate all political (and even cultural) discussion and protest into violence. Insisting they aren't smart or subtle enough to represent an important political movement doesn't mean anything because I'm pretty sure few SA members were capable of arguing epistemology over their lagers, but they were effective nonetheless. I think it would be prudent to wait a few years and see how they color political discussion in this country before declaring them "mostly harmless."

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MAT's avatar

Thanks for this necessary critique. Your history is a little off (ironically, it's bit too suffused with contemporary social justice politics.) Antifascists prowled the streets not simply (and not mainly) to protect immigrants and gay people from harassment. The first antifa in the U.S. consisted primarily of Italian immigrant leftists (anarchists, socialists, communists) who saw the danger that Mussolini and his brutal regime posed to democracy in Italy and around the world way before most anyone else in the U.S. or anywhere else outside of Italy did. Italian fascisti in the U.S. were not likely to harass immigrants UNLESS the immigrants were Italians who were openly anti-fascist. Mussolini worked hard to court Italian immigrants by appealing to their hurt pride from being shit on by WASPy Americans and other immigrants (mostly Irish), and he succeeded to a great degree. Those he couldn't convert to the cause he tried to intimidate in a variety of ways, including threats against family members back in Italy. Street fights between fascisti and antifascisti in the US were proxy wars, of a kind, in which antifascisti exacted revenge for the often fatal violence visited upon their comrades in Italy. Also, antifascisti refused to allow Mussolini to claim Italians in the US as his own. Until Mussolini's invasion of Ethiopia, Italian antifascisti were seen by most in the US as thugs. This perception was fueled by stereoptypes of Italians as stupid and prone to violence and by anti-communism. The thinking was, "If Mussolini hates communists (and socialists, and anarchists), he can't be all bad." But antifascisti also published newspapers, and created organizations (like the Anti-fascist Alliance of North America) to counter the influence of the fascisti among the immigrant community and to encourage people outside of leftist Italian immigrant circles to see the antidemocratic nature of fascism. Some American antifascists (in the 1920s there weren't many) made analogies between Mussolini's Blackshirts and the racism and anti-radicalism of the KKK and the American Legion. Hitler's rise to power confirmed the antifascisti's position that fascism would spread. 1930s antifascists, many of them members of the CPUSA, defended the rights of immigrants and actively fought against deportation of leftists on the grounds that they would be sent back to countries in which there was an active campaign against the left and thus their lives would be in danger. And of course, some antifascists went to Spain to fight the fascist General Franco. Unfortunately, many among antifa today have retained the tactics of their antecedents but not their political and organizational acumen, or, in the cases of the Spanish Civil War volunteers of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, their bravery. Sorry if this post is pedantic, but I am writing a book that contains a lot of stuff on anti-fascism in the 1920s and 1930s and I feel a loyalty to the original antifa.

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