Roots of Antifa: This 'Idea' Has Violent Consequences

They are a dangerous international organization. They are unAmerican.

Antifa is, in fact, hard to pin down. It has no known leaders, no address, not even a Twitter account. A number of specific groups involved in street violence embrace the antifa label. Those groups, in turn, are highly secretive and loosely organized. Stanislav Vysotsky, a former antifa activist and author of “American Antifa: The Tactics, Culture, and Practice of Militant Antifascism” (2020), concedes that “for most people antifa is a mystery wrapped in an enigma wearing a black mask.”

This elusiveness, which appears to be by design, makes it difficult to define or even identify members of a movement that nevertheless has had an outsized impact on American society.


Yet, the black mask slips. Scholarly research and daily journalism shed light on antifa’s ideology and its long history in the United States. Its mixture of left-wing politics and anarchist nihilism can be traced back more than 100 years. Its modern incarnation, centered in the Pacific Northwest, features 1960s radicals, including former members of the Weather Underground, anti-racist skateboard punks who emerged in the 1980s, and younger radicals. Their racial and ethnic makeup is uncertain, but significant numbers are white. Arrest records and other publicly available information suggest many of those identifying as antifa are itinerant or marginally employed.


Scholars agree with Vysotsky that “antifascism is simultaneously a complex and simple political phenomenon.” It is simple in that it is an oppositional movement – it is defined by its resistance to “fascism.” Unlike leftists, its adherents are not seeking to gain the levers of power to build a utopia. They are skeptical of state power, hence their frequent clashes with the police, and are more intent on confronting those they see as enemies.

But antifascism is also complex because fascism itself “is often an extremely murky concept,” writes Mark Bray, a history lecturer at Rutgers, self-described political organizer and author of “The Antifa Handbook.” To clarify what fascism is, antifa sympathizers try to connect the American movement to a series of obscure 20th century left-wing groups that resisted the likes of Hitler, Mussolini and General Francisco Franco in the Spanish Civil War of the 1930s.The leftist slogan of that war, “No pasarán” (“They shall not pass”), is often invoked by American adherents. In general, antifa partisans show no embarrassment from associations with leftist totalitarians. Bray notes that an antifa-sympathizing self-defense group called the “Maoist Red Guards” is still active in Austin.


At the same time, antifa activists are intensely hostile to American historical traditions. In Portland, rioters recently smashed windows of the Oregon Historical Society, stealing and damaging a quilt made by black women to celebrate America’s bicentennial. That same night, rioters tore down statues of Abraham Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt that had stood in Portland for more than a century.


While American antifa adherents explicitly reject the First Amendment and other classically liberal ideas about free speech and assembly, they see as their spiritual ancestors 19th century slavery abolitionists and others who fought slavery and later racism. Bray writes that John Brown, the white man who tried to spark a slave revolt by attacking a federal arsenal at Harper’s Ferry, Va., in 1859, is a particular hero.

See also:

A Brief History of Antifa: Part I


A Brief History of Antifa: Part II