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NY Times, August 18 2017
‘Antifa’ Grows as Left-Wing Faction Set to, Literally, Fight the Far Right
By THOMAS FULLER, ALAN FEUER and SERGE F. KOVALESKI
OAKLAND, Calif. — Last weekend, when a 27-year-old bike messenger showed
up at the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Va., he came ready
for battle. He joined a human chain that stretched in front of
Emancipation Park and linked his arms with others, blocking waves of
white supremacists — some of them in full Nazi regalia — from entering.
“As soon as they got close,” said the young man, who declined to give
his real name and goes by Frank Sabaté after the famous Spanish
anarchist, “they started swinging clubs, fists, shields. I’m not
embarrassed to say that we were not shy in defending ourselves.”
Sabaté is an adherent of a controversial force on the left known as
antifa. The term, a contraction of the word “anti-fascist,” describes
the loose affiliation of radical activists who have surfaced in recent
months at events around the country and have openly scuffled with white
supremacists, right-wing extremists and, in some cases, ordinary
supporters of President Trump. Energized in part by Mr. Trump’s
election, they have sparred with their conservative opponents at
political rallies and college campus speaking engagements, arguing that
one crucial way to combat the far right is to confront its supporters on
the streets.
Unlike most of the counterdemonstrators in Charlottesville and
elsewhere, members of antifa have shown no qualms about using their
fists, sticks or canisters of pepper spray to meet an array of
right-wing antagonists whom they call a fascist threat to American
democracy. As explained this week by a dozen adherents of the movement,
the ascendant new right in the country requires a physical response.
“People are starting to understand that neo-Nazis don’t care if you’re
quiet, you’re peaceful,” said Emily Rose Nauert, a 20-year-old antifa
member who became a symbol of the movement in April when a white
nationalist leader punched her in the face during a melee near the
University of California, Berkeley.
“You need violence in order to protect nonviolence,” Ms. Nauert added.
“That’s what’s very obviously necessary right now. It’s full-on war,
basically.”
Others on the left disagree, saying antifa’s methods harm the fight
against right-wing extremism and have allowed Mr. Trump to argue that
the two sides are equivalent. These critics point to the power of
peaceful disobedience during the civil rights era, when mass marches and
lunch-counter protests in the South slowly eroded the legal enshrinement
of discrimination.
“We’re against violence, just straight up,” said Heidi Beirich, director
of the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Intelligence Project, which tracks
hate groups. “If you want to protest racists and anti-Semites, it needs
to be peacefully and hopefully somewhere away from where those guys are
rallying.”
Antifa adherents — some armed with sticks and masked in bandannas —
played a visible role in the running street battles in Charlottesville,
but it is impossible to know how many people count themselves as members
of the movement. Its followers acknowledge it is secretive, without
official leaders and organized into autonomous local cells. It is also
only one in a constellation of activist movements that have come
together in the past several months to the fight the far right.
Driven by a range of political passions — including anticapitalism,
environmentalism, and gay and indigenous rights — the diverse collection
of anarchists, communists and socialists has found common cause in
opposing right-wing extremists and white supremacists. In the fight
against the far right, antifa has allied itself at times with local
clergy, members of the Black Lives Matter movement and grass-roots
social-justice activists. It has also supported niche groups like Black
Bloc fighters, who scrapped with right-wing forces in Berkeley this
year, and By Any Means Necessary, a coalition formed more than two
decades ago to protest California’s ban on affirmative action for
universities.
George Ciccariello-Maher, a professor at Drexel University in
Philadelphia who counts himself as both an antifa follower and a scholar
of the movement, said it did not have a single origin story. The group
has antecedents in Europe, especially Germany and Italy, where its early
followers traded shots with Nazis in the 1930s and fought against Benito
Mussolini’s Blackshirts. Its more recent history has roots in the
straight-edge punk rock music scene, the anti-globalization protests of
the 1990s and the Occupy Wall Street movement.
The closest thing antifa may have to a guiding principle is that
ideologies it identifies as fascistic or based on a belief in genetic
inferiority cannot be reasoned with and must be physically resisted. Its
adherents express disdain for mainstream liberal politics, seeing it as
inadequately muscular, and tend to fight the right though what they call
“direct actions” rather than relying on government authorities.
“When you look at this grave and dangerous threat — and the violence it
has already caused — is it more dangerous to do nothing and tolerate it,
or should we confront it?” Frank Sabaté said. “Their existence itself is
violent and dangerous, so I don’t think using force or violence to
oppose them is unethical.”
Another antifa activist, Asha, 28, from Philadelphia, who also declined
to give her full name, said that “when people advocate for genocide and
white supremacy, that is violence.” She added, “If we just stand back,
we are allowing them to build a movement whose end goal is genocide.”
In the days after the violent events in Charlottesville, some antifa
members responded with an angry call to arms, saying they could not back
down from what they described as the “aggressors” on the right, even if
it meant an escalation into gunfights.
“I hope we never get there,” said a 29-year-old antifa anarchist from
California who goes by the pseudonym Tony Hooligan. “But we are willing
to get there.”
Not all antifa followers are as belligerent, nor are their tactics
exclusively violent. When not attending what he called “big
mobilizations” like the one in Charlottesville, Frank Sabaté has done
ordinary community organizing, advocating prison reform and distributing
anarchist literature at punk rock shows. Others say they do the same in
antifa strongholds like Philadelphia, the Bay Area of California and the
Pacific Northwest.
The Berkeley campus has been a particular hotbed of antifa activity, and
university officials have criticized the group. In February, black-clad
protesters, some of whom identified themselves as antifa, smashed
windows, threw gasoline bombs and broke into a campus building, causing
$100,000 in damage.
“The very notion of contesting ideas and perspectives with violence is
antithetical to everything a university stands for,” said Dan Mogulof, a
spokesman.
One of antifa’s chief functions, members said, is to monitor right-wing
and white supremacist websites like The Daily Stormer and to expose the
extremist groups in dispatches on their own websites like
ItsGoingDown.org. According to James Anderson, who helps run
ItsGoingDown, interest in the site has spiked since the events in
Charlottesville, with more than 4,000 followers added for a total of
over 23,000.
But antifa is “not some new sexy thing,” Mr. Anderson added. He noted
that some of those who had scuffled with those on the right at Mr.
Trump’s inauguration or at more recent events in New Orleans and
Portland, Ore., were veterans of actions at the Republican National
Convention in Minneapolis in 2008, where hundreds of people were
arrested, and at Occupy encampments in cities across the country.
Nonetheless, Mr. Anderson said, the far right’s resurgence under Mr.
Trump has created a fresh sense of urgency. “Suddenly,” he said, “people
are coming into your town with hate. It has to be confronted.”
One of the most vivid examples of antifa violence occurred in January at
Mr. Trump’s inauguration, where a masked member of the movement punched
the prominent white supremacist Richard B. Spencer (who was
pepper-sprayed by an antifa activist in Charlottesville). That single
blow started a national debate over whether it was morally justifiable
to “punch a Nazi.”
Mr. Spencer, an avid opponent of the left, still drew distinctions among
factions within the left-wing community.
“It’s important to differentiate antifa from liberals,” he said. “I
don’t think it’s an overstatement to say that antifa believes in
whatever means necessary. They have a sadistic streak.”
Other right-wing figures, like Gavin McInnes, the founder of the Proud
Boys, a so-called conservative fraternity of Western chauvinists, have
said antifa has done itself no favors by assuming that its enemies all
share the same views. Mr. McInnes was invited to Charlottesville but
declined to go, he said, because of the presence of explicit white
supremacists like Mr. Spencer.
In the past, antifa activists have engaged with people who were clearly
something less than outright neo-Nazis, raising questions about who, if
anyone, deserves to be punched and whether there is such a thing as
legitimate political violence.
Like many of their opponents, some antifa members insist that they are
merely reacting to pre-existing aggression.
“The essence of their message is violence,” Jed, an antifa organizer in
New York who asked that his name not be used, said of his right-wing
foes. “The other side” — his side — “is just responding.”
But Ms. Nauert said she believed that, now more than ever, “physical
confrontation” would be needed.
“In the end,” she said, “that’s what it’s going to take — because Nazis
and white supremacists are not around to talk.”
Thomas Fuller reported from Oakland, and Alan Feuer and Serge F.
Kovaleski from New York. Caitlin Dickerson contributed reporting from
New York, and Sonner Kehrt from Berkeley, Calif. Alain Delaquérière
contributed research.
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