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Comment by jijijijij | Hacker News Reader

This is about finances. If the US declares you a terrorist organization, you cannot do any banking anymore, even outside the US, since most banks do not want to gamble on SWIFT access.

Since the US considers anything "antifa" as terrorism now, it already had most concerning distant effects last year. See GLS bank cancelling Rote Hilfe in Germany. 1933 was the last time Rote Hilfe was cancelled, btw. It's an antifa OG. Pretty good indicator about the status quo..

Anyway, look at e.g. GrapheneOS, which is already treated as probable cause by law enforcement. Encrypted messaging also super sus. Thing is, funding can't escape jurisdictions. Signal servers are not running on love and fellowship, but donations and public money. Opsec won't protect your software stack's foundation against US finance attacks.

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This OFAC action isn't based on "antifa", though the press release predictably takes shots at it. It's based on three designated foreign terrorist organizations, notably the PKK.

PKK is the pretext, there is no evidence.

The US does not give a damn about PKK. They used the Kurdish sister organizations in Syria and Iran. They condemn PKK because Erdogan wants it.

The US would have zero issues with a Kurdish state comprising parts of Turkey and Iran that splinters the region even more.

I don't think US cares about the PKK either, but that's not my point.

> It's based on three designated foreign terrorist organizations, notably the PKK.

In this context, "designated foreign terrorist organizations" is not an explanation, but a tautology. The matter at hand is how and why something got onto that list.

The antifa remark relates to the Rote Hilfe situation. In my opinion, it's an example of how populist rhetoric became a major overreach with real consequences prior to the incident at hand. Rote Hilfe had a very weak relation to "Antifa Ost" (hardly worth US attention). That's how they got cancelled: https://www.state.gov/releases/office-of-the-spokesperson/20...

So the antifa moral panic is indeed very much relevant.

But decide for yourself, if "Antifa Ost" deserves US anti-terrorism attention to the extent of OFAC sanctions, or if it's maaaybe populist action... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dresden_left-wing_extremism_tr...

Incidentally, funny how the NSU isn't on that list, hm?

It's neither an explanation nor a tautology; it's an element of US law.

So if those prior sentences or yours are not related, your argument is part wrong, part irrelevant/nonsensical. Good talk.

It was clearly written as an explanation. The alternative is that you didn't intend for the words you wrote to have any meaning, in which case why did you write them?

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