Antifa: Loosely organized but on clear-eyed mission
Antifa — short for “antifascist” — is the name for loosely affiliated, left-leaning anti-racist groups that monitor and track the activities of neo-Nazis. The movement has no unified structure or national leadership but has emerged in the form of local bodies nationwide, particularly on the West Coast.
Some of the groups, such as the 10-year-old Rose City Antifa in Portland, Ore., the oldest antifa group in the USA, are particularly well-organized and active online, though its members are individually anonymous.
President Trump singled out antifa as part of what he called the alt-left in his initial claim that “many sides” were to blame for violence in Charlottesville, Va., the weekend of Aug. 12, not just neo-Nazis, the Ku Klux Klan and white nationalists.
Q HOW IS IT THE TERM PRONOUNCED?
“AN-tifa,” emphasis on the first syllable; sounds more like “on” in English than “an.”
Q WHEN DID IT START?
Anti-fascist groups, particularly in Europe, have been around for many decades, notably in Italy against Mussolini, and in Germany against Hitler. In the postwar period, antifa groups resurged to fight neo-Nazi groups, particularly in Germany. In the USA, the antifascist movements grew out of leftist politics in the late ’80s, primarily under the umbrella of Anti-Racist Action.
Q WHAT DOES THE MOVEMENT WANT?
The primary goal is to stop neo-Nazis and white supremacists from gaining a platform rather than to promote a specific agenda. The antifa groups are decidedly anti-racist, anti-sexist and anti-homophobia and socially leftist and anti-capitalist.
Q HOW DO THE GROUPS OPERATE?
Mark Bray, a lecturer at Dartmouth College and author of the new book Antifa: The Antifascist Handbook, says the groups “organize educational campaigns, build community coalitions, monitor fascists, pressure venues to cancel their events, organize selfdefense trainings and physically confront the far right when necessary.”
A main goal is to try to deny fascists a public forum, which is why they turn out in numbers to physically confront neo-Nazis, the KKK and white supremacists at public demonstrations.
Antifa is particularly active in “doxxing,” or identifying neo-Nazis and like-minded people and disseminating that private information to the public and employers to discourage people from joining their ranks.
Q IS ANTIFA VIOLENT?
Members do not eschew violence but rather see themselves as engaging in “selfdefense,” protecting other protesters and primarily confronting neo-Nazis and white supremacists to deny them a platform to publicly spread their views.
“We are unapologetic about the reality that fighting fascism at points requires physical militancy,” Rose City Antifa’s Facebook page reads.
Political activist and author Cornel West, speaking to Amy Goodman on the program Democracy Now about the clashes in Charlottesville, Va., said antifa intervened when the “neofascists” moved against his group of protesters. “We would have been crushed like cockroaches if it were not for the anarchists and the antifascists,” he said.
Q WHERE HAS THE GROUP BEEN?
In addition to Charlottesville, antifa forces, who often dress in black and wear masks, have clashed with far-right groups in such places as the University of California-Berkeley, where protests forced the cancellation of a speech by alt-right activist Milo Yiannopoulos in February and another by conservative commentator Ann Coulter in April.
In June, antifa forces turned out to protest a pro-Trump speech in Portland. Also in June, Antifa confronted Patriot Prayer, a free-speech group protesting “political correctness” at Evergreen State College in Olympia, Wash.