As with Saul Alinsky, once more I learn that I am a follower or advocate of something that I never heard of before right-wingers educated me about what I believe, thanks to their magical psychic mind-reading powers that let them know what I believe better than I do myself. Wow! The things I learn from right wingers! I wonder if they volunteer for the Pentagon to psychically read the mind of Kim Young’un over in Korea with those amazing psychic powers of theirs?!
So anyhow, reading further, “antifa” stands for “Anti-Fascist”. Okay, I’m anti-Fascist. I’m in virulent disagreement with the government policies promulgated by the fascist governments of Germany, Italy, Japan, Spain, and Portugal in the 1930’s and 1940’s. What sensible human being wouldn’t be? I mean, their militaristic attempt to conquer half the world killed bajillions of people, and their domestic policies, where they exterminated Jews and political opponents by the millions, were horrifying. Who in the world could be pro fascist?!
So then the right wing informs me that “antifa” are the real fascists. Because they’re against right wingers. And the real fascists in Germany, Italy, etc. were left wingers. At which point I come to a full screeching halt and say, “Wha?!”.
Look. Historians have a way of classifying political organizations as left wing, right wing, or centrist.
Left wing: Believes in equality for women and religious and ethnic minorities, progressive taxation, government regulation of business, labor unions, more money spent on social programs, less money spent on the military.
Right wing: Does not believe in equality for women, believes the religious and ethnic majority should have more rights than the minorities, against progressive taxation, believes that industrialists should rule the government rather than vice-versa, labor unions should be banned, and we should spend more money on the military and less on social programs.
Note that I don’t say anything about “democracy” or “free speech” in there. Both left wing and right wing political groups have their extremists who care nothing for democracy or free speech. I don’t mention anything about anti-Communist there either — there have been left wing anti-Communist parties just as there have been right wing anti-Communist parties. There’s a lot of other commonality between the most extreme left and right wing groups I could come up with too if I tried. But the above is how historians, in general, classify political parties. And by those classifications, the fascist parties in Italy and Germany were decidedly right wing — they were against equal rights for minorities, against equality of women, against social programs, for greatly increased military spending, and so forth.
So back to “antifa”. Who the heck are they, again? So I go do some research and find that they appear to be anarchists of the American variety. Some are anarcho-Communists, some are anarcho-syndicalists. Their beliefs would be “left wing” by the definition historians use above in that they’re pro equality, pro labor, and against military spending. They’ve adopted or adapted “black bloc” tactics from other anarchist groups. And they’re assholes.
The problem is, they’re the only assholes actually fighting fascists on the streets.
Why that is a problem basically comes down to the reality that right wingers have otherwise had a monopoly on political violence. Their troll armies swiftly pollute the comments section of any article that mentions the right wing in a disparaging way with pro-Nazi anti-leftist drivel. They relentlessly “dox” people and harass them at home. They threaten people with bodily harm, and, occasionally, follow through. Hell, a bunch of right-wingers even aimed guns at police officers and BLM employees who were just doing their job as ordered by a court, and basically ran the cops out of town there at Bundyville Nevada. And the instances of violence are increasing, as the recent shooting of a left-wing protester in Seattle shows.
And when the right wingers have a monopoly on political violence, we all know where that ends. The liberal left in Germany in the 1920’s, as with the liberal left in today’s United States, instead chose a legalistic strategy of filing lawsuits and running for office, and their leaders were eventually killed by the blackshirts or brownshirts, rendering them harmless. Then the fascists just rolled into office. They’d won. There weren’t enough of the anarchists and Communists to stop the blackshirts and brownshirt, and the anarchists and Communists were overwhelmed by the fasicsts. The facists had killed all the opposition that could have prevented their takeover, and the police, just as at Bundyville, weren’t willing to confront them.
The biggest party in Weimar Germany was the SPD, the Social Democrat Party. They were a somewhat socialist left wing party, the largest left wing party, the largest party period. They, too, engaged in a campaign to demonize their version of the “antifa”, eventually outlawing the Roter Frontkämpferbund in 1929, just as our own largest left wing party is engaged in a campaign to demonize our own version of the antifa and, presumably, outlaw them (though how you outlaw an anarchist organization that explicitly has no officers, no treasury, no assets, no organizational structure, somewhat eludes me, but then again this is a government that outlawed a weed, so). And all of the SPD’s top leadership ended up being killed by the SA brownshirts, or ended up arrested and sent to Hitler’s concentration camps.
Maybe suppressing their antifa hadn’t been so smart, after all.
Just sayin’.
– Badtux the History Penguin
Read Full Post »
