Is Antifa a terrorist organisation?

No.

Well, there is no “the ANTIFA”, since it’s not an organisation. Antifa is short for anti-fascist, and it generally refers to a loosely organised set of groups, networks and individuals who oppose fascism, racism and far-right extremism. It’s not a centralized organisation by any means. Designating something as vague as “Antifa” as a terrorist organisation says a lot more about the stupid regime that Trump presents than it does about “Antifa”.

You just can’t designate an organisation that doesn’t exist as a terrorist organisation.

But more importantly, saying that your country opposes anti-fascism means that you’re for fascism.

Antifa has no single leadership, no list of members or any headquarters, so to speak. It’s a decentralized movement that is active all over the world. When there’s an anti-fascist protest, people can join it as they wish, and that doesn’t make them terrorists or freedom fighters or whatever.

A bit of History

In the 1920s to 1930s, the original “Antifaschistische Aktion” was a militant left-wing group in Weimar Germany opposing Adolf Hitler’s Nazis as well as other fascist movements. Similar anti-fascist movements emerged all over Europe during that era. After World War II, Anti-fascist groups re-emerged wherever far-right movements gained traction. Nowadays, “antifa” networks gained a ton of visibility in the late 20th and early 21st century as responses to white supremacist, neo-Nazi and far-right groups.

More specifically, you can see how many white supremacist and antisemite talking points and dogwhistles have made their way into political parties, public discourse, protests and more in many different countries – and perhaps especially in the United States of America.

As a result, there are a lot of people out there who want to oppose those ideals and values and as such take to the street.

While the original Antifaschistische Aktion (Antifa) was in parts founded by the Communist Party of Germany in 1932 (Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands, or KPD for short), it presented more of a reaction to widespread fascism rather than some type of communist movement or anything of the sort.

Germany in the late 1920s and early 1930s was in political and economic turmoil after World War I and the Great Depression. Far-right groups, Hitler’s National Socialist German Workers’ Party (NSDAP) in particular, gained a ton of traction as other countries and certain minorities were made out to be the scapegoats for the people’s suffering.

On top of that, there were violent clashes between Nazi paramilitaries (Sturmabteilung or SA, aka the “Brownshirts”) and left-wing groups, in which civilian bystanders would also get attacked.

As such, Antifa was formed as a response to fascism, and while the original group was founded by the KPD as part of its strategy to mobilise workers against the threat that Nazis and fascism as a whole presented, it was very different from what we understand as “Antifa” in this day and age. It wasn’t comprised of decentralised networks and instead had formal ties to a political party, making it a lot more structured.

On top of that, it was presented as a “united front” initiative, intended to bring together not only communists but also other left-leaning workers to oppose fascism – which is still quite specific compared to today’s more vague understanding.

What does Antifa look like today?

These days, Antifa in Germany is quite different from the original Antifaschistische Aktion of the 1930s. It’s no longer a party-run initiative and has no ties to politicians and parties in the slightest, rather being a decentralised network of autonomous groups and activists.

Again, there is no single Antifa organisation.

Some groups collaborate regionally but each operates independently, deciding their own priorities and tactics. Most of them still use the “red-and-black-flags in a circle” logo that is a direct reference to the 1932 movement.

The core beliefs are opposition to racism, fascism, nationalism, far-right extremism, xenophobia and antisemitism.

The people who would join protests also range manifold. There are communists, socialists, queer people, left-leaning folks, but also moderates, liberals and random normal people who just don’t like fascism… and I know it sounds silly to have to mention that normal people don’t like fascism but it appears that many countries, including the U.S., haven’t really understood that fascism is a bad idea.

Extremism is bad but…

Lastly, I want to talk about the actual actions that “antifa” does and how a ton of folks argue that Antifa is a terrorist organisation or bad or whatever because of vandalism and violence.

So, for starters, antifa activities include organisation of counter-protests of far-right marches, rallies, and parties like the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) or other neo-Nazi groups. Most of the groups don’t partake in any violent or extremist behaviours.

The issue with not being centralised, however, means that certain individuals and even groups of people can join a protest and then do things that are not okay by any means, including vandalism and acts of violence. Some folks will do a sit-in blockade of the far-right protest that the other people are protesting, which ends up not helping at all and can often result in a whole slew of issues.

That said, this doesn’t mean that the whole group is bad, just because some individuals act out of line, just like how there were some individuals during the BLM protests who used the opportunity to loot shops and damage vehicles on the road. This doesn’t mean that all of BLM consists of looters and vandals. It just means that some people are shitty opportunists who tar the whole group and taint the movement with their own shitty brushes.

Extremism is bad. 100%.
But… left-leaning extremism tends to hurt a lot less people compared to right-leaning extremism. When one looks at statistics, you can see that right-leaning extremism is on the rise… like… a lot a lot. Here’s one of many sources, but it’s in German. Meanwhile, left-motivated crimes are also on the rise, but not by as much compared to right-motivated crimes.

In Germany, right-wing extremists were responsible for 28,945 politically motivated offences in 2023. Left-wing extremists were only responsible for 7,777 in 2023. It’s still a large number, of course, but it’s a lot less compared to right-wing crimes. There are some caveats to these statistics and others but those don’t really matter as much in the context of this post. If someone wants a breakdown of those and further German crime statistics, I will reply to comments, and I’ll probably also write another post in the near future once the new crime statistics drop for 2025. :)

Anyhow, “Antifa” isn’t an organisation, it’s a loose network. Not everyone knows each other, there is no leader, and typically, protests tend to be peaceful.

Typically.

These days, there have been many cases of the police force in Germany using brutal means on peaceful protesters for absolutely no reason at all. In June 2023, an activist (Lars Ritter) filed a lawsuit in Berlin after the local police force used so-called “pain compliance holds” on him during a peaceful climate protest. Similarly, the police force also went viral a while ago for using similar “pain grips” on a peaceful protester, which a lot of commentators say is “tantamount to torture”. Here’s another article on a police officer getting sued for beating up protestors at the Nakba Day demo in Berlin recently. Here’s one on people getting pepper-sprayed by the police force for absolutely no reason when they tried to stop a march of neo-nazis with a sit-in. In Hamburg, during the G20 protests, the police force used brute force and escalated the situation considerably. In late 2023, the police force used almost 200 officers to conduct raids on the homes of members of the pro-Palestinian, anti-fascist feminist collective Zora. Meanwhile, just last month, a peace demonstration in Cologne, mostly comprised of young people and teenagers, was surrounded by police for nearly 11 hours.

I just used a lot of different examples here to paint a picture. Meanwhile, the same sort of excessive violence and lack of restraint isn’t seen when it comes to right-wing protests of any kind, even when protesters there directly escalate confrontations with the police force, as has been the case in my city. People don’t get asked for identification on the right-wing protests but the left-leaning counter protest sees the full use of violence, riot gear, pepper spray, water sprayers and other means deployed.

A friend of mine once got detained for 24 hours, denied water and a phone call, and the pigs pissed in his shoes. When he went ahead to file a complaint about this treatment, the police force denied that he ever was detained in the first place.

Stuff like that is relatively common in Germany because 1) the police clearly “doesn’t have a structural racism problem” (Horst Seehofer (CSU), Christine Lambrecht (SPD), Joachim Herrmann (CSU))… and 2) if you have a problem with the police’s conduct, you can’t just go to a separate entity to file a complain. You complain to the police about the very same police. It’s no surprise then that most of these complains end up getting swept under the rug.

“I couldn’t find anything wrong here”, the accused policeman said after investigating his own conduct and finding no problems with it.

There’s a structural problem with the police force in Germany and the way they are being utilized. There were more than triple the number of police officers present at the local “Gathe bleibt” protest that happened in my city recently compared to the amount of protestors. They even had dogs present, many cars that kept patrolling, and various hundreds of officers in other places on stand-by. Some of these police officers were armed.

…and nothing happened. They were bored out of their minds and looked genuinely pissed that they weren’t needed in any capacity whatsoever.

If you’re Anti-Antifa, you’re just FA

So, to summarize, Antifa protests are mostly peaceful because most of the folks there just want to use the right they have as citizens of a democracy to go out on a protest… also enacting the responsibility they have as citizens of a democracy to never let fascism happen again. We have a responsibility to oppose fascism, in fact, as every citizen of a democratic country has.

Trump doesn’t know this. In his head, “Antifa is a terrorist organization. We are anti antifa” (not the actual quote) sounds like a super smart thing to say when he’s just admitting to being fascist. It’s as smart as talking about trucks and construction when he’s asked about the death of his “dear friend” or not even waiting for three minutes before talking about crowd sizes when the matter at hand is actually Kirk’s death, for instance.

Trump isn’t a smart cookie… at all.

There are a ton of people out there, in fact, who are similarly lacking in intellect and who are not aware of what double negation is. They’re not not-idiots…

If you’re against the opposition of fascism, you’re for fascism. Being against Anti-Fascism means being for Fascism. It’s that easy.

ANTIFA just stands for ANTI-FASCISM. Being against fascism. If there’s a protest against fascism organised by Trump supporters, then that protest is ANTIFA.

There is no organisation or anything of the sort, so Antifa cannot be a terrorist organisation.

This post was originally written by Dan Dicere from Indiecator.

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