Answers on antifa
Five things you need to know about the left-wing organization.
It’s a word that, for many, is just a few weeks old.
But since President Donald Trump blamed “ANTIFA-led anarchists” for violence and looting after George Floyd’s death in Minneapolis, it has become both a buzz word and a policy driver.
Antifa has not come up in connection with any activities in Milwaukee. But Trump uses it regularly, even suggesting 75-year-old Buffalo protester Martin Gugino — who was knocked down by police in a video seen by millions — might be an “ANTIFA provocateur.” U.S. Attorney General William Barr also references it, saying the U.S. Justice Department is investigating “certain individuals that relate to antifa.”
Both allude to an organization of leftwing extremists who destroy property and incite violence to create disorder and overthrow authority.
Stanislav Vysotsky is an associate professor of sociology and criminology at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater. His forthcoming book, “American Antifa: The Tactics, Culture and Practice of Militant Antifascism” is set to release on July 15.
He answered five basic questions for the Journal Sentinel.
What does “antifa” mean?
Vysotsky said antifa is shorthand for anti-fascist, and its meaning is broad.
Fascism is a political philosophy that crystallized between World War I and World War II, Vysotsky said, particularly in Germany with Adolf Hitler and Italy with Benito Mussolini. In its simplest forms, it is a belief in the fundamental inequality between people, in a biological and social sense.
“Fascism seeks to maintain that sense of inequality through violence, through the use of force,” he said. That takes the form of oppression, or even elimination through genocide.
To be an anti-fascist is to oppose the spread of that philosophy, and the violent enforcement of that belief in biological and social inequality. It’s a viewpoint, he said, not an organization.
One of the problems today, Vysotsky said, is that fascism has become a watered-down concept, used as shorthand for everything from authoritarianism to virtually anything someone doesn’t like — or as Vysotsky said, “You’re a fascist because ...”
“Ever single comment Donald Trump has made about anti-fascism” is misleading or fundamentally incorrect, Vysotsky said.
For example, Trump on May 31 tweeted: “The United States of America will be designating ANTIFA as a Terrorist Organization.”
“First and foremost, there is no ANTIFA organization,” Vysotsky said. “There’s no centralized organization. There is no sense of coordination. There is no leadership. There is nothing to point to that would classify it as an organization in the sense that he is using the term.”
Second, to speak of anti-fascism as terrorism, Vysotsky said, is a major re-framing of what it is.
“While some anti-fascists engage in actions that are considered to be violent, the scale and scope of that violence does not meet the criteria of what constitutes terrorists’ violence,” he said.
Has anti-fascism ever been organized?
There were anti-fascist organizations in places like Germany, Italy and the United Kingdom between World War I and World War II. They formed to combat the rise and spread of fascism, and were primarily organized by anarchists, communists and socialists.
Today, are there any anti-fascist groups or organizations?
“No, there is not,” Vysotsky said.
The closest thing to an anti-fascist organization is an informal network of anti-fascists that has been in the United States since the 1980s. Not all individuals with anti-fascist beliefs are part of that network; they may just be acting on their own, he said.
In recent years, a movement has emerged in opposition to the far right, to skinheads and neo-Nazis. But it’s still a decentralized collection of individuals, not an organization.
Why is antifa labeled a terrorist group?
Vysotsky said this actually has more to do with the ideological orientation of the people making the claim, than with those who identify as anti-fascist.
“They are seeking to discredit their political opponents, and they are unable to describe them on the merits of their beliefs and their claims, so they’re trying to associate their political opponents with anti-social political activities,” he said.
Vysotsky dismissed as “political moves” the repeated framing of antifa as an organization with a hierarchy involved in orchestrating terrorism.
“It becomes a false equivalency if one is going to label anti-fascism activism as terrorism,” he said. “You’re placing anti-fascists who have not killed anyone in the United States, not kidnapped anyone in the United States, have not engaged in any actions of large scale intentional property destruction in the name of anti-fascism in the United States, on par with the organizations that have murdered people, kidnapped people, blown up entire buildings, held entire populations in fear.”