Antifa’s antics are a revival of the violent tactics used during the Weimar Republic in Germany in the 1930s and the Cultural Revolution in Communist China from 1966-1976.
by Jerome R. Corsi
WASHINGTON, D.C. — On September 1, 2017, Politico revealed previously unreported documents showing that the Department of Homeland Security has now designated the activities of Antifa as “domestic terrorist violence.” This conclusion was reached in a previously undisclosed April 2016 DHS/FBI joint intelligence assessment.
The DHS FBI intelligence assessment reported that Antifa “anarchist extremists” were the primary instigators of violence at public rallies against a wide range of targets, including police, government, and political institutions, as well as symbols of “the capitalist system,” such as racism, social injustice, and fascism.
Despite this designation, the mainstream media have continued to champion Antifa as if the group were a freedom-fighting organization standing on moral high ground in justifiable opposition to white supremacist groups espousing a combination of racist, nationalist, and populist sentiments on the extreme far right.
“Fascist Go Home!”
The roots of this left-wing violence can be traced back to the Occupy Wall Street protests in 2011, and then further back to the anti-globalization protests against the World Trade Organization in Seattle, Washington, in 1999.
But since the election of Donald Trump, Antifa has assumed the position as the radical Left’s paramilitary arm of “The Resistance” against President Trump.
Antifa officially assumed this position with the violence they perpetrated in the streets of Washington, D.C., on Inauguration Day. Clothed from head to toe in black and wearing masks or bandannas to hide their faces, thugs threw rocks and bottles at police officers, smashed windows, set fires, and aggressively harassed Trump supporters trying to make their way to the evening’s Inaugural Ball at the city’s downtown convention center.
On August 11 and 12 of this year in Charlottesville, Virginia, Antifa thugs joined in a protest against a “Unite the Right” rally of racists, neo-Nazis, and the KKK, who march under the broad label of Alt-Right (Alternative Right). The Alt-Right sought to rally support from conservatives by coopting the effort to preserve a statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee. In the violent Antifa/Alt-Right clash that ensued, protester Heather Heyer was killed and dozens more were injured when an Alt-Right supporter used his car as a weapon to ram a group of Antifa supporters. Our Left-tilted media used the event to glorify Antifa and reinforce their narrative that President Trump, his supporters, and conservatives in general, are racists and fascists.
The logic of the Left appears to be that Trump is a Nazi, secretly wishing to impose a white supremacist, totalitarian government on the United States. This logic ignores the fact that Trump is a center-right politician, while Adolf Hitler arose from the leftist Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei — or in English the National Socialist German Workers’ Party, more commonly known as the Nazis.
At a deeper level, Antifa embraces the communist critique of the United States, as exemplified by Howard Zinn’s widely used Marxist textbook, A People’s History of the United States, 1492-Present, first published in 1980. The book describes slavery as the unforgivable mortal sin that condemned America to be a racist, sexist, xenophobic, capitalist-imperialist nation in which white privilege rules.
Apparently ignorant of, or unconcerned with, the history of the leftist “Free Speech Movement” in Berkeley in the 1960s, a group of black-clad Antifa anarchists wearing masks disrupted a free-speech event in Martin Luther King Jr. Civic Center Park last August. The rally was organized by the Oregon-based Patriot Prayer — a group the mainstream media portrayed as “a right-wing organization” that “has organized other events that have attracted white supremacists and ended up in violent confrontations among demonstrators on both sides.” However, Patriot Prayer is a multi-ethnic group that denounces violence, has no history of violence, and excludes racist and fascist groups from participating in its events.
Patriot Prayer’s small group of conservative “free speech” protesters was outnumbered by a larger crowd of some 2,000 Antifa agitators determined to “Rally Against Hate” by denying the alleged “racist right-wing white supremacists supporting Trump” the opportunity to hold a small, peaceful event.
“A … Trump supporter was smacked to the ground with homemade shields,” the Washington Post reported. “Another was attacked by five black-clad Antifa members, each wind milling kicks and punches into a man desperately trying to protect himself. A conservative group leader retreated for safety behind a line of riot police as marchers chucked water bottles, shot off pepper spray, and screamed, ‘Fascist go home!’”
Antifa in Austin, Texas: “Everywhere a Battlefield”
While Antifa is a shortened form of “Anti-Fascist,” the Antifa movement in the United States is a return to the communist paramilitary street-riot tactics developed to fight the Brownshirts of the Nazi movement in the Weimar Republic.
The Antifa movement is a self-described Marxist/Leninist/Maoist collective that takes its identity from the Red Guards, a student-based paramilitary social movement organized by Chairman Mao Zedong in Communist China’s Cultural Revolution of 1966-1976.
In an attempt to reinvigorate China’s Communist Revolution of 1945-1949, thousands of Chinese youth clad in military fatigues roamed the streets of major cities, closing universities, destroying churches, burning libraries, destroying statues and historical monuments, and ransacking private homes in an attempt to destroy the “four olds” — old ideas, old customs, old habits, and old culture.
In what ended up as a civil war between the generations in China, almost two million people lost their lives in a cultural revolution that Chinese radicals hoped would “lead the planet into Communism.”
The Red Guards Austin, an Antifa group gaining prominence in Texas, openly advocates violent revolution against capitalism, proclaiming that weapons training is needed for a war “here and now.”
By mixing a fluid, slogan-driven communist ideology with the identification of President Trump as a white supremacist embracing Nazi, fascist, anti-minority politics, the hard-Left has found the perfect formula to justify engaging in the type of street violence used by leftist revolutionaries in the days of Lenin and the Russian Revolution of 1917.
While the Democratic Party has yet to openly embrace Antifa as its paramilitary wing, they have by and large refused to condemn it or disassociate themselves from it. Antifa rhetoric resonates with Hillary Clinton’s campaign attack on Trump supporters as bigoted “deplorables.”
At a fundraising event on September 7, 2016, Hillary Clinton was recorded on video making one of the most defining statements of her presidential campaign.
“You know, to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right?” she said, receiving laughter and applause according to the New York Times. “The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic — you name it. And unfortunately, there are people like that. And he has lifted them up.”
Hillary and Antifa appear to agree in the disparagement with which they choose to describe Trump supporters.
Political Correctness Champions Antifa
On August 13, 2017, when President Trump (in a press conference in Bridgewater, New Jersey) condemned the “egregious display of hatred, bigotry, and violence from many sides” in Charlottesville, he was berated by the mainstream media for condemning Antifa in terms morally equivalent to his condemnation of neo-Nazi white supremacist groups.
Those on the radical Left, for instance, have argued that The National Policy Institute’s Richard Spencer’s white pride legitimizes characterizing him as a neo-Nazi, a KKK member, and a white supremacist – all associations Spencer denies – and justifies violence against him, including an incident where Spencer was videotaped being sucker-punched in the face while giving an interview on the streets of Washington during the inauguration festivities.
The mainstream media have jumped on the politically correct bandwagon, proclaiming the “Alt-Right” – a new term the hard-Left has grabbed to condemn conservatives and libertarians as white supremacist racists – to be an extreme view that must be countered with extreme measures, including Antifa violence designed to prevent any person or group the hard-Left tags as “Alt-Right” from exercising First Amendment rights.
Last November, the Associated Press issued new guidelines for the term “Alt-Right.” Whenever it is used in a story, writers must include this definition: “an offshoot of conservatism mixing racism, white nationalism and populism,” or, more simply, “a white nationalist movement.”
In an article published on the Associated Press blog, John Daniszewski, vice president for standards for the Associated Press, described the “alt-right” as follows:
The ‘alt-right’ or ‘alternative right’ is a name currently embraced by some white supremacists and white nationalists to refer to themselves and their ideology, which emphasizes preserving and protecting the white race in the United States in addition to, or over, other traditional conservative positions such as limited government, low taxes and strict law-and-order.
The movement has been described as a mix of racism, white nationalism and populism.
Although many adherents backed President-elect Donald Trump in the recent election, Trump last week said he disavows and condemns the ‘alt-right.’
The movement criticizes ‘multiculturalism’ and more rights for non-whites, women, Jews, Muslims, gays, immigrants and other minorities. Its members reject the American democratic ideal that all should have equality under the law regardless of creed, gender, ethnic origin or race.
The Associated Press has issued no guidelines requiring that usage of the term “Antifa” also include the definition of it being a terrorist organization on the extreme political Left that champions the use of violent force to prevent any person or group they deem racist from exercising First Amendment rights.
Instead, Daniszewski has issued much more sympathetic guidelines for writers wanting to report on the Antifa movement.
On behalf of the Associated Press, he directed the following:
Finally, a term has emerged in the news recently – an umbrella description for the far-left-leaning militant groups that resist neo-Nazis and white supremacists at demonstrations and other events. The movement calls itself Antifa, a contraction for anti-fascists, and emulates historic anti-fascist actors in Europe going back to the 1930s.
After the Antifa violence in Berkeley, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi finally issued a statement condemning Antifa violence.
“Our democracy has no room for inciting violence or endangering the public, no matter the ideology of those who commit such acts,” she said on August 29, 2017. “The violent actions of people calling themselves antifa in Berkeley this weekend deserve unequivocal condemnation, and the perpetrators should be arrested and prosecuted.”
Interestingly, Pelosi’s statement condemned only the violent actions of “people calling themselves antifa,” carefully sidestepping a direct condemnation of the Antifa movement.
Concerned about offending left-leaning voters and constituents, House Speaker Paul Ryan carefully avoided any statement condemning Antifa until after Pelosi’s office issued her printed statement.
“Speaker Ryan believes, as is obvious, these individuals are left-wing thugs, and those who are committing violence need to be arrested and prosecuted. Antifa is a scourge on our country,” Ryan’s spokeswoman AshLee Strong said in a statement provided exclusively to the Daily Caller.
Incredibly, even after more than a year of intense violence and rioting by Antifa thugs – including an unprecedented effort to disrupt and stop the inauguration of a president of the United States – the liberal-left media continue to romanticize and promote these anarcho-communist fanatics. The same media also have refused to demand that Democratic politicians and party leaders denounce and condemn Antifa rioting, violence, vandalism, and destruction of property – not to mention unprovoked physical assaults on peaceful citizens and violating the rights of Americans to free speech and assembly. The same media relentlessly hounded President Trump to condemn the Alt-Right following the Charlottesville melee – and continued to hound him even after he did condemn them, because he hadn’t used the precise condemnation formula the media leftists demanded. But there has been no similar media outcry for Democrats to disavow Antifa, which ideologically embraces many of the Democratic Party’s causes and marches in the Democrats’ parades. The hypocrisy of the media’s double standard on this issue is beyond outrageous. Aside from Nancy Pelosi’s conditional condemnation, the silence from top party leaders has been deafening. We have heard no denunciations of Antifa from Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, Dianne Feinstein, Charles Schumer, Al Franken, Joe Biden, Al Gore, or any other prominent Democrats.
This reluctance on the part of liberals and Democrats has stunned even the likes of liberal-left NPR commentator Mara Liasson, who says that condemning Antifa should be a “no brainer.” “Every Democrat should get up on their hind legs and scream it from the roof tops,” she told viewers. “People who wear black masks and beat peaceful protesters [should] have no support at all … Democrats should be racing to the microphones,” to condemn Antifa, Liasson declared.
If ordered liberty and the rights we treasure are to survive in America, then all Americans must not only reject violence — from all sides — but also denounce those who advocate and use it as a means to their political ends.