Antifa. Anti-fascist? WTF?

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It's wrong to call something "American." There's no such thing as an "American."

The vast majority of Americans don't deserve the "k."

Quite the contrary, I believe. Antifa is a European communist guerrilla organization that goes all the way back to WWII. Its infiltration into the US is extremely recent.

Antifa traces its roots to the 1920s and ’30s, when militant leftists battled fascists in the streets of Germany, Italy, and Spain. When fascism withered after World War II, antifa did too. But in the ’70s and ’80s, neo-Nazi skinheads began to infiltrate Britain’s punk scene. After the Berlin Wall fell, neo-Nazism also gained prominence in Germany. In response, a cadre of young leftists, including many anarchists and punk fans, revived the tradition of street-level antifascism.

In the late ’80s, left-wing punk fans in the United States began following suit, though they initially called their groups Anti-Racist Action, on the theory that Americans would be more familiar with fighting racism than fascism. According to Mark Bray, the author of the forthcoming Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook, these activists toured with popular alternative bands in the ’90s, trying to ensure that neo-Nazis did not recruit their fans. In 2002, they disrupted a speech by the head of the World Church of the Creator, a white-supremacist group in Pennsylvania; 25 people were arrested in the resulting brawl.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/ar ... ft/534192/

Part of Antifa’s mission is to establish, as Bray puts it, “the historical continuity between different eras of far-right violence and the many forms of collective self-defense that it has necessitated across the globe over the past century.” To this end, the first half of his book is a somewhat rushed history of anti-Fascist groups. The progenitors of Antifa, in this account, were the German and Italian leftists who, following the First World War, banded together to fight proto-Fascist gangs. In Italy, these leftists gathered under the banner of Arditi del Popolo (“the People’s Daring Ones”), while in Weimar Germany, groups like Antifaschistische Aktion, from which Antifa takes its name, evolved from paramilitary factions of existing political parties. Bray moves swiftly to the failure of anti-Fascists in the Spanish Civil War, then races through the second half of the twentieth century. In the late seventies, the punk and hardcore scenes became the primary sites of open conflict between leftists and neo-Nazis; that milieu prefigures much of the style and strategy now associated with the anti-Fascist movement. In the Netherlands and Germany, a group of leftist squatters known as Autonomen pioneered the Black Bloc approach: wearing all-black outfits and masks to help participants evade prosecution and retaliation. Bray reaches the present with his description of “Pinstripe Fascists,” such as Geert Wilders, and the rise of new far-right parties and groups in both Europe and America. The book flits between countries and across decades; analysis is sparse. The message is that Antifa will fight Fascists wherever they appear, and by any means necessary. https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-tu ... -of-antifa

We don't have Antifa here in Australia since it is, I believe, a uniquely American organisation.
Correct me if I am wrong, please.
But we have people like those in Antifa who do exactly what you have said.

People who have this mindset are demonstrably anti-freedom of speech and thought of even moderates simply because they believe in a differing set of principles.

I think it safe to say that most, if not all members of Antifa embrace self-righteousness, virtue signalling and are addicted to their biological chemicals which create emotional gluttony.



Disclosure:
There isn't a great deal of study in this area at this point in time.

I don’t like the “K” because that implies that every American is an as*hole racist.

We have them in the UK but they are not as violent as they are in the states.

To use a British expression, we didn't invite the Nazis for tea and scones in WWII. Why should we do so now? f**k fascism.

I think the thing that bothered me most about them is that they were marching in early 2017 well in advance of any major white nationalist events and spent most of their time attacking people in places like Berkeley who were attending center-right events. It would be one thing if all of this started coming up as a reaction to Charlottesville but it seems like something closer to the opposite was happening.

Yes, f**k fascism.
Any autistic person who supports fascism supports discrimination against themselves.
I think I have made my position clear?

We are fortunate here in Australia, and apparently in the UK also.
We don't have the extreme social violence that is evident in America.
And in no way am I going to support a misguided policy of violence for violence here in Australia.
A pox on both groups of fanatics on either side of the great divide.

Erm.
Have a nice day.