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Eve's Review

The Anti-Fascists Got It Right

"Antifa, the Anti-Fascist Handbook"
Mark Bray
Melville House, 259 pages
$16.99
Eve Ottenberg
Anti-fascists are often berated by politicians and the media for interfering with the First Amendment rights of Nazis. That media outcry occurs because, before they gain power and ban free speech, fascists always scream about their First Amendment rights. Fascists use those rights to advocate depriving various groups of their life and liberty. They also advocate genocide. Should they be allowed to do so? The illiberal and logical response is no. That has been the answer of anti-fascists from the 1920s to the present. They take fascists at their word, and history has proved them right to do so. They do not underestimate the danger. They know very well that Nazis marching in a Jewish neighborhood in Skokie, Illinois, would kill all the in habitants if they could.

There’s another reality: police often support fascists. In Greece, police in large numbers voted for and have protected the fascist group, now political party, Golden Dawn. According to Mark Bray’s recently published "Antifa, the Anti-Fascist Handbook," with the police “looking the other way, or even participating in anti-immigrant violence,” local immigrants were attacked by Golden Dawn in 2012. The anti-fascist strategy to contain fascists was set back when police arrested and tortured 15 anti-fascists. Meanwhile, closer to home, in Charlottsville last summer, a fascist drove his vehicle into a crowd, killing Heather Heyer, one of many counter-protesters, whom the police failed to protect. Since then, police have guarded fascists in Boston and Washington, D.C. from peaceful counter-protesters, going so far as to escort the beleaguered fascists to the nearest metro stop.

"Antifa, the Anti-Fascist Handbook" lays out five lessons for anti-fascists: Historically fascists have gained power legally; many inter-war anti-fascists didn’t take fascism seriously enough, until it was too late; socialist and communist leadership responded more slowly to fascism than their rank and file membership; fascism steals from left ideology, strategy, imagery and culture; it doesn’t take that many fascists to make fascism. Bray notes the link between fascism and capitalism, warning that “it would be a mistake to entirely reduce fascism to a last resort of an endangered capitalist system.” But at the same time, “anti-fascism must necessarily be anti-capitalist. As long as capitalism continues to foment class struggle…fascism will always loom in the background as an authoritarian solution to popular upheaval.” How many reactionary donors who back Trump would in fact feel more comfortable in a neo-fascist state than in the social democracy advocated by Bernie Sanders? My guess is – a lot.

To the argument that suppressing fascist speech leads to a slippery slope, which ends with other groups or everyone losing free speech, this book replies: not if anti-fascists, rather than the state, do it, and do it through direct action. When fascists are quiet, so are anti-fascists, who do not take disrupting fascist speech to the next level. When they shut up the fascists, who are yammering to kill all the Jews or gays or Muslims, anti-fascists don’t then generally expand their attack to the next garden variety conservative group. “Efforts to deny a platform to fascists,” Bray writes, “grew out of the historic struggle…of movements of leftists – Jews, people of color, Muslims…to make sure that fascists do not grow powerful enough to murder them.”

In the past, many leftists mistook fascism for mere counterrevolution. The mistake cost them dearly in the interwar period. “Fascist ideological, technological and bureaucratic innovations,” Bray writes, “created a vehicle for the imperialism and genocide that Europe had exported around the world to bring its wars of extermination home.” This view casts the current fascist hysteria about a genocide of the white race in a rather strange light. There is no evidence, anywhere, for this supposedly impending white genocide. And speaking of extermination, two of the three countries with enough nuclear firepower to wipe out the human race happen to be majority white countries – the U.S. and Russia.

While “anti-fascists value the free and open exchange of ideas, they simply draw the line at those who use that freedom to promote genocide…” Bray writes. He observes that many liberals “support limiting the speech of working class teens busted for drugs, but not limiting the speech of Nazis.” In this context, it is worth remembering that both Hitler and Mussolini were invited into their respective governments, who knew very well what their views were, because they had expressed them freely for some time. Anti-fascists aim to create a climate in which that will not happen again. They aim to stop something that can start very small and then metastasize very quickly, with all the trappings of legitimacy.

“The Nazis and their allies killed roughly two hundred thousand Roma,” Bray writes, “about two hundred thousand ‘disabled’ people and thousands of homosexuals, leftists and other dissidents, while Hitler’s ‘final solution’ murdered six million Jews…these then are the stakes of the conversation.” Anti-fascist, Jewish and communist partisans helped Western democracies win World War II. The argument could be made that the Red Army did in fact largely win that war for us. These anti-fascist contributions to our current freedom, affluence and security are often conveniently forgotten.

Instead of liberals and leftists climbing up on a high horse to condemn anti-fascists, we should be thanking them. Read More 
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