No need to Falsely Tar Antifa. They're Their Own Worst Enemies.

A lot of false nonsense has come out of 4chan and similar circles regarding Antifa, such as a Snopes recent expose of faked Antifa flyers calling for the murder of white children.  Other hoaxes have involved a flyer from Emerald City Antifa warning people against dating white people, a man being stabbed for allegedly having a “fascist haircut” and a phony “Antifa manual” that appeared in, among other places, a site that equates Antifa with the alt left. 

Don’t believe any of it. 

While I worry about Antifa's propensity to mob rule and vigilante violence, let's keep in mind what they profess to be up against here.  While actual neo-Nazi activity in America is very low and quite marginal, the history of the appeasement of the Nazis both inside the Weimar Republic and, later from Britain and France during the 1930s should teach a clear lesson. Had Hitler been stopped much earlier in his career, and there were countless opportunities to do this right up until the 1938 German annexation of Czechoslovakia, the inevitable war against him would have been far less bloody.  Those who would take the fight to a resurgent Nazism before it's allowed to take real roots have a strong historical case to back them up.

But so too do Antifa's critics.

The good cause that is fighting fascism does not excuse Antifa from the very real dumb things they do.  Plus a lot of the false flags being carried out against Antifa, while not justifiable in and of themselves, are carried out because the nature of hard line ideological movements make them especially vulnerable to those kinds of tactics, as well as rule out the more moderate forms of dialogue and debate.  The actions of 4chan and other right wing sources, despite their own glaring disconnects from reality, shouldn't surprise us.  We should rather be surprised that it is 4chan and not the FBI that are carrying these kinds of actions.  This is how radical politics have played out in the west and in America in particular for a long time now. Many parallels with the new left of the 1960s and 70s burning itself out on ideological excesses abound here.

It might well behoove Antifa to adopt some semblance of a formal national structure and issue a statement of principles, a manifesto or something of the like outlining precisely what they believe and how they hope to go about achieving their goals. This could include a statement to the effect that persons who are not fascists have nothing to fear from them. They'd do well to resolve their differences with Trump supporters through debate or the ballot box, and make clear that they'll fight only in self defense at this time.

The decentralized and utopian nature of the far left in America mitigates against this kind of thing happening, however.  Especially so given the Manichean worldview that's so typical of extremist thinking in general.  There can be no negotiation with pure evil, and that being anything other than themselves.  The western left, from Antifa to its antecedents in Occupy Wall Street to their antecedents in anti-WTO protests and going all the way back to 19^th century communal utopians, have a long history of utopian naivety and reliance on ideological purism for movement cohesion. There’ve been exceptions, of course, but they had their own problems, such as the Communist Party USA parroting the Soviet era Kremlin’s line on damn near everything. 

But, by and large, English speaking radicals have tended to eschew the procedure and organization of parliamentary institutions in favor of an admittedly well intended but ultimately ineffective commitment to purity of consensus.  Doubly so now given how committed to a lot of critical theory/postmodernist concepts (the "authority of experience" for example) the western left has become, lending themselves to eschew classical definitions of fascism (if not the very concept of classical definitions) in favor defining fascism along the lines of being anyone unwilling to give "marginalized peoples" a complete moral blank check vis-a-vis the rest of the population to decide on everyone's behalf what is and isn't oppressive and offensive.

In a similar vein, they've opened themselves up to these old Leninist arguments of "revolutionary violence" that Herbert Marcuse also explored in the 1960s, which basically said that violence was justified if carried out on behalf of "marginalized" "oppressed" or "revolutionary vanguard" groups against their "oppressors", be these the police, the state, peaceful conservatives or anyone so hateful enough as to be born with white skin. 

The left have largely sold their souls to these kinds of concepts, and the result is the creation of echo chambers that are short on reality testing and dissent and long on boundary policing.  This not only alienates potential support and doubtlessly drives away those supporters who end up on the wrong end of some internal power struggle or another, but makes groups like Antifa vulnerable to infiltration and subversion via false flag operations, both from their political opponents (think 4chan) and from state enforcement agencies wanting to avoid dirtying their image via open police state tactics.

Expect COINTELPRO types of activities to be carried out against Antifa - if they haven't been already, because that's what the historical precedent would suggest. I don't support such tactics, of course, but through its embrace of that eternal albatross around the neck of the western left, revolutionary romanticism, Antifa is doing little to help themselves here and I find them hard therefore to sympathize with.

Simply saying "you've all been duped by the conservative media" isn't going to help any, especially given how much media (CNN, Huff Post, the Guardian, Salon, Mic and a host of other news blogs) are decidedly not conservative.  Plus, as any politically minded YouTuber these days would be more than happy to tell you, anti fascism has now become a full fledged moral panic on the left and even in the center, so blaming Antifa's poor reputation entirely on the media dodges the core issue.

The real way to fight fascism is to shore up the center - to create and defend robust democratic institutions that are transparent, inclusive and accountable to the people they're intended to serve.  Most western nations have a long way to go in that regard.  This is especially true in the US, where unrestrained money in politics has all but completely compromised the integrity of political institutions, and the resulting lack of public confidence should therefore not surprise us.  That's what got Trump into office, and that's when extremist ideological movements start becoming attractive to people.

Likewise, that's when people stop believing in the power or even the desirability of the state maintaining order in the face of rising extremism, and take matters into their own hands via groups like Antifa.  This should trouble us, for this is precisely the kind of scenario that makes the rise of authoritarianism more palatable to the mainstream, who would otherwise eschew it.  While groups like Antifa overstate the threat posed by Trump himself - the man is no Hitler, he's not a step in the right direction either.  The great danger is that by contributing to a climate of chaos and political violence, Antifa may well lend legitimacy to calls for a strong man to come along and restore order the old fashioned way, and thus end up with a kind of tragic self fulfilling prophecy.  

I don't believe that Antifa are the moral equivalent of Nazi skinheads and I grow weary of those who suggest that they are.  If Antifa were a Marxist Leninist movement, a case for that could be made.  If they extolled Stalin or Mao, you can say that they’re as bad, or at least in the same league, as Hitler and the Nazis.  There may be some of these inside Antifa, and Antifa may themselves be clear that they regard the fascists as a much more clear and present threat than the bolshevik types and choose therefore to prioritize fascists as a target and even ally with hard line communists against them. Much like our governments did in WWII.  But they primarily identify themselves as anarchists, not cold war era Kremlin mouthpieces with red flags.

But that does not place Antifa above criticism, however much one may agree with the stated goal of fighting Nazis, and does not mean that Antifa are not dangerous in their own ways.  If Antifa are dangerous, at least to their targets at "free speech" rallies, can their targets really be blamed for taking action against them, becoming a kind of AntiAntifa, if you will? 

Antifa are burying themselves in their own ideological excesses, and they have no one to blame for that but themselves.