Deconstructing Memes: when liberals misrepresent what it means to be antifa

Last Monday the Trump Administration issued another executive order which designated the antifa as a “major terror organization.”  

This should not come as a surprise, considering during the first Trump Administration the President also referred to antifa as “terrorist organization” in 2020, specifically in reference to the George Floyd uprisings all across the country.

Such designations of domestic terrorism have also happened under previous administrations, such as the nearly unanimous adoption of the USA Patriot Act in 2001, which also included language that identified domestic terrorism in such a way as to allow the federal government to target leftist groups that many would refer to as anti-fascist.

The same was true during the Palmer Raids, where federal agents were targeting, arresting, incarcerating and even deporting hundreds of people who were part of the more militant labor movements and those opposing WWI. For an excellent source see the book, From the Palmer Raids to the Patriot Act: A History of the Fight for Free Speech in America.

This brings us to the meme I want to deconstruct, especially since the meme refers to US military generals – Eisenhower, Bradley and Patton – as founding members of antifa. This claim is patently false. In Mark Bray’s book, ANTIFA: The Anti-Fascist Handbook, the author makes it clear that the first anti-fascists that were using such a designation were in various parts of Europe that were resisting the fascist government of Mussolini in the 1920s, and with German and other European groups resisting the Nazi Party. I would also recommend Jason Stanley’s How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them, and Gord Hill’s, The Antifa Comic Book: 100 Years of Fascism and Antifa Movements.

A second point that we can make about what it means to be anti-fascist or antifa, is that you don’t operate hierarchical model, like the military. Anti-fascists are people who more often than not identify as anarchist or socialists and are generally leaderless, often using the consensus process to make decisions. The US military is most definitely is a hierarchical system, where most people take orders from people like military generals.

A third aspect of what is problematic about this meme is that it over simplifies what role the US military played in WWII. It is worth noting that there were local Italian and French antifascist groups that were able to win back their communities and cities from fascist forces, but those were often removed from power by British and US forces who came through after the German and Italian fascists were defeated by their own people. As Noam Chomsky notes in his book, Deterring Democracy, US and and British military forces actively removed the socialist, anarchist and communist movements that had defeated the fascists in Europe. Chomsky states that these antifascist forces were often replaced by fascists collaborators they had defeated, “to weaken unions and other popular organizations, and to block the threat of radical democracy and social reform.” The fascist collaborators were more inclined to embrace capitalism and the social order that came with it, which means that the US and British military ended up being complicit with fascism by putting fascist collaborators in charge of cities in France, Italy and Germany.

I understand the sentiment behind this meme, but this is a standard liberal interpretation of anti-fascism that is not rooted in historical fact and ignores the role that the US government has played in collaborating with fascist governments since WWII. The Trump Administration, like previous administrations will use the US military and cops to target and hunt down those are actually practice anti-fascism by engaging in direct action, being anti-capitalist and acting as autonomous efforts to oppose systems of power and oppression.