Antifa: Simply Explained
Are you confused about ‘Antifa’? Maybe you are always thinking about how to it explain it to those who have no clue? Or you’re trying to perfect your response to people who just don’t get it and keep asking stupid questions?
Read the explanation below, it will help you out. Written by a friend.
I see an awful lot of talk against the whole idea of ‘Antifa‘ as a group, to which I chuckle to myself and quietly reply “You deluded Muppets.”
Kids, Antifa is not a group.
It’s an ideology – a practical, ethical political theory.
It literally stands for ‘anti-fascism‘. It means that you oppose fascism in all its’ forms, by ANY MEANS NECESSARY.
That opposition takes many forms including, and leading up to, violence, like punching Nazis.
It can also take other forms – emailing a conference centre or hotel and telling them that white supremacists are going to use their venue as a meeting place, identifying marchers at a white supremacist rally and emailing their employers to get them fired, turning up at a rally and staging a non-violent counter-demonstration, tearing down their posters, cleaning up their graffiti, DDOSing their websites, asking shops not to display their books or materials, etc.
If you have some modicum of social power, there are other things you can do – defending working-class communities from evictions and police violence, setting up shelters when government cuts force official ones to close . . . as well as helping people, this also restricts fascists’ ability to draw on community frustrations for recruiting.
But the biggest thing is – help and defend each other.
Help and defend your communities. Because no matter what the makeup of our communities might be, fascists will eventually come for us. And they will divide us into the camps of “Us v Them”.
Now, I get that some of you will be saying “But!! You’re espousing the same ‘Us and Them’ dichotomy that you’re supposedly opposing! Your argument is not intellectually sound!”
To which I must reply, “Fuck off you Jordan Peterson supporting shitlickers. You’re not mature enough to understand what the word ‘dichotomy’ actually means.”
Allow me to explain the difference.
If you’re a fascist and anti-fascists come for you, you have a choice. You can give it up – renounce what you said, stop turning up to fascist rallies, get some better education, and get on with the rest of your life. Anti-fascists probably aren’t gonna shout you a beer and be your best mate, but they’ll move on.
But if you’re a person of colour, LGBTQIA, non-Christian or live with a disability and fascists come for you, there is absolutely fucking NOTHING you can do that will make them happy . . . apart from ceasing to exist. The only way they will be happy is through your death.
That’s the key difference between the far left and the far right.
Antifascists organise themselves against those that are building fascism. If you’re doing that, that is something you can non-violently stop doing. If you’re a political enemy of antifa, you can become a friend.
If you’re a political enemy of fascism, either they lose, or you die.
¡No pasarán!