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Antifa: the Anti-Fascist Handbook

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Antifa: the Anti-Fascist Handbook Antifa: the Anti-fascist Handbook Mark Bray August 2017 Contents Introduction 5 What is Anti-Fascism? 7 Antifa 14 One: ¡No Pasarán!: Anti-Fascism Through 1945 15 Two: “Never Again”: the Development of Modern Antifa, 1945–2003 37 Three: the Rise of “Pinstripe Nazis” and Anti-Fascism Today 61 Four: Five Historical Lessons for Anti-Fascists 96 1. Fascist Revolutions Have Never Succeeded. Fascists Gained Power Legally. 96 2. To Varying Degrees, Many Interwar Anti-Fascist Leaders and Theorists Assumed That Fascism Was Simply a Variant of Traditional Counterrevolutionary Politics. They Did Not Take It Seriously Enough Until It Was TooLate. 97 3. For Ideological and Orginizational Reasons, Socialist and Communist Leadership Was Often Slower to Accurately Assess the Threat of Fascism, and Slower toAd- vocate Militant Anti-Fascist Responses, Than Their Parties’ Rank-and-File Mem- bership. ......................................... 100 4. Fascism Steals From Left Ideology, Strategy, Imagery, and Culture. 101 5. It Doesn’t Take That Many Fascists to Make Fascism. 102 Five: “So Much For the Tolerant left!”: “No Platform” and Free Speech 104 How Free is “Free Speech”? ................................. 105 Are Anti-Fascists Anti-Free Speech? ............................ 107 Do Anti-Fascists Agree That “No Platforming” Fascists, That is, Disrupting Their Public Organizing, Violates Their Freedom of Speech? . 108 What About the “Slippery Slope”? ............................. 110 Mustn’t “Truth” be Confronted by “Error”? . 114 Doesn’t “No Platforming” Fascists Erode Free Speech in a Way That Hurts the Left More Than the Right? ................................. 115 Shutting Down Nazis Makes You No Better Than aNazi! . 115 What About Anti-Fascist Principles in the University? . 116 Six: Strategy, (Non)Violence, and Everyday Anti-Fascism 118 Everyday Anti-Fascism ................................... 140 2 Conclusion: Good Night White Pride (or Whiteness is Indefensible) 143 Acknowledgments ...................................... 145 Appendix 146 Appendix A: Advice From the Anti-Fascists of the Past and Present to Those of the Future 147 Organizing Strategies .................................... 147 Intelligence .......................................... 149 Security ............................................ 149 Tactics ............................................ 149 Internal Dynamics ...................................... 150 Appendix B: Select Works on North American and European Anti-Fascism 152 General ............................................ 152 Canada ............................................ 152 Czech Republic ........................................ 152 France ............................................. 152 Germany ........................................... 152 Netherlands .......................................... 153 Italy .............................................. 153 Norway ............................................ 153 Russia ............................................. 153 Spain ............................................. 154 Sweden ............................................ 154 United Kingdom ....................................... 154 United States ......................................... 154 Online Resources ....................................... 155 About the Author 156 3 “Fascism is not to be debated, it is to be destroyed!”—Buenaventura Durruti 4 Introduction I wish there were no need for this book. But someone burned down the Victoria Islamic Center in Victoria, Texas, hours after the announcement of the Trump administration’s Muslim ban. And weeks after a flurry of more than a hundred proposed anti-LGBTQ laws in early 2017,aman smashed through the front door of Casa Ruby, a Washington, D.C., transgender advocacy center, and assaulted a trans woman as he shouted “I’m gonna kill you, faggot!” A day after Donald Trump’s election, Latino students at Royal Oak Middle School in Michigan were brought to tears by their classmates’ chants of “Build that wall!” And then in March, a white-supremacist army veteran who had taken a bus to New York to “target black males” stabbed a homeless black man named Timothy Caughman to death. That same month, a dozen tombstones were toppled and defaced in the Waad Hakolel Jewish cemetery in Rochester, New York. Among those resting in peace in Waad Hakolel is my grandmother’s cousin Ida Braiman, who was fatally shot by an employer months after she arrived in the United States from Ukraine as she stood on apicket line with other immigrant Jewish garment workers in 1913. The recent spate of Jewish cemetery desecrations in Brooklyn, Philadelphia, and elsewhere occurred under the Trump administration, whose statement on the Holocaust omitted any reference to Jews, whose press secretary denied that Hitler gassed anyone, and whose chief advisor was one of the most prominent figures of the notoriously anti-Semitic alt-right. As Walter Benjamin wrote at the apogee of interwar fascism, “even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he wins.”1 Despite a resurgence of white-supremacist and fascistic violence across Europe and the United States, most consider the dead and the living to be safe because they believe fascism to be safely dead—in their eyes, the fascist enemy lost definitively in 1945. But the dead were not so safe when Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi described spending time in Mussolini’s prison camps as a “vacation” in 2003 or the French Front National (National Front) politician Jean-Marie Le Pen called Nazi gas chambers a mere “detail” of history in 2015. Neo-Nazis who in recent years have littered the sites of former Jewish ghettoes in Warsaw, Bialystok, and other Polish citieswith white-power graffiti know very well how their Celtic crosses target the dead as well astheliving. The Haitian anthropologist Michel-Rolph Trouillot cautions us that “… the past does notexist 1 Jim Malewitz, “Investigators: Fire that ravaged Victoria mosque was arson,” Texas Tribune, February 8, 2017: https://www.texastribune.org/2017/02/08/investigators-fire-ravaged-victoria-mosque-arson/; Mary Emily O’Hara, “Wave of Vandalism, Violence Hits LGBTQ Centers Across Nation,” NBC News, March 13, 2017: http://www.nbc-news.com/feature/nbc-out/wave-vandalism-violence-hits-lgbtq-centers-across-nation-n732761; “‘Build that wall!’ Latino school kids reduced to tears by classmates’ pro-Trump chant,” RT, November 11, 2016: https://www.rt.com/viral/366540-build-that-wall-school-/https://www.rt.com/viral/366540-build-that-wall-school- chant/; Shawn Cohen et al., “White supremacist accused of murder says he came to NYC to kill blacks,” New York Post, March 22, 2017: http://nypost.com/2017/03/22/white-supremacist-says-he-killed-/ http://nypost.com/2017/03/22/white-supremacist-says-he-killed-man-because-he-was-black/; Daniel J. Solomon, “Trump Doesn’t Mention Jews in Holocaust Remembrance Day Message,” Fast Forward, January 27, 2017: http://forward.com/fast-forward/361425/trump-doesnt-mention-jews-in-holocaust-remembrance-day- message/; Walter Benjamin, “On the Concept of History”: www.sfu.ca/~andrewf/CONCEPT2.html. 5 independently from the present … The past—or more accurately, pastness—is a position. Thus,in no way can we identify the past as past.”2 This book takes seriously the transhistorical terror of fascism and the power of conjuring the dead when fighting back. It is an unabashedly partisan call to arms that aims to equipa new generation of anti-fascists with the history and theory necessary to defeat the resurgent Far Right. Based on sixty-one interviews with current and former anti-fascists from seventeen countries in North America and Europe, it expands our geographical and temporal outlook to contextualize opposition to Trump and the alt-right within a much wider and broader terrain of resistance. Antifa is the first transnational history of postwar anti-fascism in English and the most comprehensive in any language. It argues that militant anti-fascism is a reasonable, historically informed response to the fascist threat that persisted after 1945 and that has become especially menacing in recent years. You may not walk away from this book a convinced anti- fascist, but at least you will understand that anti-fascism is a legitimate political tradition growing out of a century of global struggle. 2 Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past (Boston: Beacon, 2015), 15. 6 What is Anti-Fascism? Before analyzing anti-fascism, we must first briefly examine fascism. More than perhaps any other mode of politics, fascism is notoriously difficult to pin down. The challenge of defining fascism stems from the fact that it “began as a charismatic movement” united by an “experience of faith” in direct opposition to rationality and the standard constraints of ideological precision.1 Mussolini explained that his movement did “not feel tied to any particular doctrinal form.”2 “Our myth is the nation,” he asserted, “and to this myth, to this grandeur we subordinate all the rest.”3 As historian Robert Paxton argued, fascists “reject any universal value other than the success of chosen peoples in a Darwinian struggle for primacy.”4 Even the party platforms that fascists put forward between the world wars were usually twisted or jettisoned entirely when the exigencies of the pursuit of power made those interwar fascists uneasy bedfellows with traditional conser- vatives. “Left” fascist rhetoric about defending the working class against the capitalist elitewas often among the first of their values to
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