by Tabitha Korol and Kevin O’Neil
We can
all fight for a cause, but
The function of wisdom is to
discriminate between good and evil.
Marcus Tullius Cicero
Two kinds of antifascism – respecting and
disrespecting the individual
They began as idealists, working to save the French-Jewish army
Captain Alfred Dreyfus who’d been falsely accused of conspiring
with the Prussian army. The Dreyfus Affair of the mid-1890s and early
1900s was the impulsion for people to unite in support of the rights
of the individual before a military authority that was rightly seen
as draconian and dismissive. A worthy cause, yet the case divided
France into the anti-Dreyfusards, fascist, Jew-hating
ultranationalists, and the “Dreyfusards,” the anti-fascists who
formed associations and humanitarian consensus to gain his
exoneration.
Today’s antifascists, “Antifa,” miss the point if they see
themselves as successors to the Dreyfusards. The latter were inspired
by love of the individual, a positive inspiration, whereas Antifa is
motivated by negative hatred for the establishment and the abuse of
the individual who happens to disagree with them.
What is fascism?
Defining the term fascism has proven notoriously difficult. There
were German antifascists in the early 1900s who joined the Jewish
working class to fight for dignity and better wages, and Italian
antifascists who fought against Benito Mussolini’s Fascist Party
and Hitler’s growing influence. There were also Spanish
antifascists both before and during Spain’s civil war, with writers
Orwell and Hemingway among their ranks.
But there are sufficient differences between the various fascist
regimes that make it virtually impossible to identify a commonality.
However, most leading scholars agree that all fascists support the
violent revolutionary overthrow of the state’s entire government to
be replaced with a totalitarian system that diminishes the value of
the individual to a mere component of the whole. Any difference of
opinion is seen as fair game to be silenced.
Antifa serve fascism, not antifascism
Antifa are a burgeoning collection of discontented
militant-leftist groups who, convinced that white supremacism was
responsible for chattel slavery and the Holocaust, are allied in
their attempt to overthrow “white” western government by any
means available, including violence.
British political theorist Roger Griffin, author of “The
Nature of Fascism,” wrote, “Fascism is a genus of political
ideology whose mythic core in its various permutations is …
palingenetic,” which means that a “rebirth” would follow the
demolition of the existing political order. By this scholarly
definition, Antifa’s own methods and goals fulfill the criteria –
not of anti-fascism – but of Fascism!
But they really believe they serve antifascism
After interviewing 61 current members in 17 countries, Mark Bray,
author of “Antifa:
The Anti-Fascist Handbook,” asserts that militant antifascism
is a “reasonable, historically informed response to the fascist
threat that persisted” after World War II and into recent years.
They argue that every fascist or white-supremacist group has the
potential of being the start of Mussolini’s original hundred or
Hitler’s first fifty-four members of the German Workers’ Party.
Hence, they believe they have a righteous obligation to stop what
they regard as fascist “violence, incivility, discrimination, and
speeches that stimulate further white supremacy, oppression and
genocide.”
And fascism, real fascism, must be opposed. Edmund Burke’s
statement was never more apposite, “The only thing necessary for
the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.”
When do we act?
In “The View from My Window: The Ethics of Using Violence to
Fight Fascism,” Elie Wiesel recalled familiar riots while he was
watching one play out below his fifth-floor window in Berkeley. It
brought to mind the millions of people who fought fascism throughout
Europe and he suitably wondered at what point resistance to fascism
may be justifiable.
A very sobering question! And whatever the “point” is at which
action is justified, one thing is certain: we must be able to define
fascism and be convinced that the group we oppose is truly fascistic.
To serve antifascism effectively, remember what the real thing was like
Not only had Wiesel witnessed real fascism at work, but had
suffered from it, and lost both parents and a sister to the Nazis. He
recalled the brave month-long resistance of the Jews in the Warsaw
Ghetto when the Nazis came to liquidate it, April 19, 1943. Move
than fifty-six thousand Jews were killed, very few escaping. This is
the face of real fascism.
America is not Warsaw; neither is it remotely similar. We are not
ruled by an authoritarian power, and our laws are not for the
subjugation of the individual but for his/her protection. Antifa must
ask themselves if they are even capable of actually recognizing true
Fascism.
When liberators become oppressors
Columnist Mark Thiessen wrote in The Washington Times (6.30.17) that Antifa was the “moral equivalent of neo-Nazis.”
The statement may or may not be prescient, but it will not be the
first time in history that a movement that began as an ideological
liberator abandoned reason and descended into violence and incoherent
rage. In the famous words of Goya, “The sleep of reason produces
monsters.”
If Antifa truly aspire to being worthy successors to the antifascist groups of history, they must urgently learn the meaning and methods of fascism and be prepared to come to some very disturbing conclusions.
About the image
“We’ll Call It Antifascism — Huey Long” by The Graphic Details is licensed under CC BY 2.0

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