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Comment by z9e | Hacker News Reader

How is reason.com being authoritarian here?

How is antifa intimidating and attacking political dissenters not closer to a truer authoritarian accusation? I’m not sure where the “antifa is not violent” gaslighting is stemming from, but there’s a tremendous amount of YouTube footage that anyone can objectively discern from what a violent group of people looks like. The violence is not just them, it’s also right wing agitators such as patriot prayer and the proud boys. All groups involved are the foot soldiers for the ideology they represent.

You can argue antifa isn’t a mob and are just a small agitator involved in an overwhelming complex culture war, but that doesn’t negate their actions that have been documented.

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The first problem is when people try to treat antifa as an organization rather than as a loose ideology that is supported by groups across a wide spectrum, and then tries to use that to assign guilt by correlation.

E.g. the original antifa was set up by the KPD (pre-war German communist party), but many modern antifa groups use logos that incorporates symbols that were used by the SPD to explicitly attack the KPD and Hitler (and Papen; who eventually demonstrated how dangerous he was by being the person who brought Hitler to power) who they saw as just as authoritarian as Hitler (with good reason - KPD were Stalinists). E.g. you might recognise the 3 arrows from this poster [1].

You'll find antifa groups coming out of groups with political ideologies that are close to mortal enemies. The only things they have in common is opposition to fascism and some general symbolism.

[1] https://antifacwb.files.wordpress.com/2009/05/ka003265.jpg?w...

> opposition to fascism

For me, the problem with contemporary Antifa movements is that either "fascism" is left undefined, or perhaps worse yet, it is defined in a way that actually excludes a lot of the earlier Leftist activism from which Antifa ultimately derives. For example, many of the intellectuals of May '68 (who did, after all, believe that they were anti-fascist and seeking to rid the world of vestiges of Nazism etc.) would actually be considered fascist by probably most self-identified Antifa today, because their framework was pre-feminism and pre-trans-activism.

I've yet to see any antifa groups push views of the type you're suggesting, though I don't doubt that they do exist, as the point I was making is that the labelling has been full of contradictions from the start:

KPD who formed the original Antifaschistische Aktion, was just as authoritarian as the fascists themselves, as as I pointed out, common modern symbols of antifa were symbols used against the KPD as well as the nazis.

When the term was resurrected again in modern use, it was resurrected by anarcho-syndicalists (hence why you often find antifa logos mixing black and red or entirely black) who rejected all forms of authoritarianism.

As such trying to treat them as anything resembling a single grouping, or even a single coherent ideology is meaningless, and does not in any way reflect reality.

They share a handful of ideas, and different groups place those ideas in entirely different frameworks and comingle them with entirely different other sets of ideas.

Names are important.

If you wanted to start a club, and you called this club the Ku Klux Klan, people would assume you were a bunch of racists, even if you insisted you totally weren't. Even if, in reality, you actually weren't.

"Antifa" is a bad name to choose if you don't want people to assume you're a bunch of communists, just like "Ku Klux Klan" is a bad name to choose if you don't want people to assume you're a bunch of racists.

Antifa has been far more diverse than that for decades before most people had heard about them.

There's now a massive amount of attempts to pretend they're a unified organisation with a single ideology that is almost exclusively coming from people wanting to discredit anti-fascism in general, who don't care at all that the image of antifa they're trying to push has very little to do with reality.

The original antifa and that modern antifa have a lot in common. They share the name, symbols, violence, and ideology. The original antifa was so awful that it made people want Hitler. The modern antifa might achieve a similar accomplishment.

> The original antifa and that modern antifa have a lot in common. They share the name, symbols, violence, and ideology

And yet a whole lot of antifa, uses symbols that were inherently opposed to the founders of the original Antifa, such as the three diagnonal arrows. And their symbols go across a massive range of symbolism of which a substantial proportion has no connection to the original AFA either.

You're demonstrating exactly the kind of attempt to conflate a whole range of groups with almost nothing in common by making things up about them. When I looked into antifa symbols a while back, I found many dozens of symbols that had no connection to the original AFA at all, but had links to all kinds of other movements. Their ideologies are similarly varied.

Already the "original" of the modern antifa explicitly used symbolism, through incorporating black for anarchism, that stood in direct opposition to the views of the KPD who founded the original.

The only thing they have in common is opposition to fascism. Everything else varies along multiple axes, and suggesting they all "have a lot in common" comes across as flatly ignoring the evidence.

> The original antifa was so awful that it made people want Hitler.

This is just pure fiction.

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