Antifa
The antifa (/ænˈtiːfə, ˈæntiˌfɑː/) movement in the United States is a militant, left-wing, anti-fascist political activist movement which comprises autonomous activist groups that aim to achieve their political objectives through the use of direct action rather than through policy reform. Activists engage in varied protest tactics, including digital activism, property damage, physical violence and harassment against those whom they identify as fascist, racist or on the far-right.
Individuals involved in the movement tend to hold anti-capitalist views,and subscribe to a range of ideologies such as anarchism, socialism, communism, liberalism and social democracy.
When Italian dictator Benito Mussolini consolidated power under his National Fascist Party in the mid-1920s, an oppositional anti-fascist movement surfaced both in Italy and countries such as the United States. Many anti-fascist leaders in the United States were syndicalist, anarchist, and socialist émigrés from Italy with experience in labor organizing and militancy. Ideologically, antifa in America sees itself as the successor to anti-Nazi activists of the 1930s; European activist groups that originally organized to oppose World War II-era fascist dictatorships re-emerged in the 1970s and 1980s to oppose white supremacy and skinheads, and eventually spread to America. After World War II, but prior to the development of the modern antifa movement, violent confrontations with fascist elements continued sporadically.
Modern antifa politics can be traced to opposition to the infiltration of Britain's punk scene by white power skinheads in the 1970s and 1980s, and the emergence of neo-Nazism in Germany following the fall of the Berlin Wall. In Germany, young leftists, including anarchists and punk fans, renewed the practice of street-level anti-fascism. Columnist Peter Beinart writes that "in the late '80s, left-wing punk fans in the United States began following suit, though they initially called their groups Anti-Racist Action (ARA) on the theory that Americans would be more familiar with fighting racism than they would be with fighting fascism."
Dartmouth College historian Mark Bray, author of Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook, credits ARA as the precursor of the modern US antifa groups in the United States and Canada. In the late 1980s and 1990s, ARA activists toured with popular punk rock and skinhead bands in order to prevent Klansmen, neo-Nazis and other assorted white supremacists from recruiting. Their motto was "We go where they go" by which they meant that they would confront far-right activists in concerts and actively remove their materials from public places. In 2002, the ARA disrupted a speech in Pennsylvania by Matthew F. Hale, the head of the white supremacist group World Church of the Creator, resulting in a fight and twenty-five arrests. One of the earliest antifa groups in the U.S. was Rose City Antifa, which was formed in Portland, Oregon in 2007.
Other antifa groups in the U.S. have other genealogies, for example in Minneapolis, Minnesota, where a group called the Baldies was formed in 1987 with the intent to fight neo-Nazi groups directly
References
- ^https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antifa_(United_States)
