Antifa is a movement against fascism. But is everything so simple?

2024 Author: Henry Conors | [email protected]. Last modified: 2024-02-12 02:45

Technical progress, the development of various fields of activity, the improvement of the general culture - all this is observed in the course of the development of the modern world. However, this is not all. As part of the emergence of organizations and trends, those arise or are renewed that aim to forever eradicate certain categories that, in the opinion of their representatives, have a destructive effect on society. One of these movements is antifa - this is an international community that sets as its task the fight against any manifestations of fascism.

History of occurrence

Antifa is a subculture whose full name is "anti-fascism", uniting under its flag representatives of the left and left-wing radical party sector, as well as independent groups and organizations that eradicate racism and neo-Nazism.

This concept first appeared in Mussolini's Italy. The term "antifa", "against fascism", denoted opponents of the military leader and the dictator, the system he was imposing.

Since 1923, a similar association existed in Germany. Its members belonged to the German Communist Party during the Weimar Republic, howeverlater, the anti-fascist trend also attracted socialists. Be that as it may, neither one nor the other were revolutionaries, and did not fight against fascism as such, but denied it from the point of view of future progressiveness and advocated the ideals of the Weimar Republic. When the country was headed by A. Hitler, the term was forgotten, was used extremely rarely and was associated with the resistance of the communists.

In the USSR, antifa is a controversial policy

Yes, anti-fascism also existed in the Soviet Union as part of the fight against invaders during the Second World War, and, therefore, the Great Patriotic War. So, many prisoners of war were trained and converted to antifa forcibly, became communists, such as, for example, a prisoner of war from Hungary Pal Maleter.

However, the actions of the leadership of the USSR were not consistent, which was skillfully used by Hitler and Nazi Germany as a debunking of the entire movement. Thus, the Soviet Union returned hundreds of political emigrants-communists back to their native country, where nothing but torture, torture and death awaited them.

Modern movement

Today, antifa are organizations, associations and communities that set as their main task the eradication of any fascist tendencies, which include fascism, Nazism, racism, xenophobia, anti-Semitism, chauvinism and everything that can be attributed to discrimination. Sometimes representatives of this trend even oppose capitalism.

The idea of antifa is especially developed in European countries, where, in general, the “leftist” ideology is more firmly rooted thanin Russia. Anti-fascists interfere with the marches of neo-Nazis, disrupt their actions. In general, it can be said that representatives of these opposing movements often move away from the problems that it would seem they should be dealing with and go to war directly with each other, and often this ends in blood.

Thus, 2009 can be marked as a tragic year for the entire Russian anti-fascist movement, because it was then that journalist Anastasia Baburova, lawyer Stanislav Markelov and activist Ivan Khutorskoy, nicknamed Kostol, were killed. Each of them was a representative of the antifa association. These cases are just a drop in the ocean, and both one and the other current reacts to aggression with retaliatory aggression, and violence breeds violence. So, despite the denial of anti-fascists, there are deaths on their account - in the fall of 2012, student Alexander Dudin, who supported nationalist views, was stabbed in the stomach during a small skirmish. He was not taken to the hospital in time, and he died in an ambulance.

In youth slang, opponents of anti-fascists are called Bons - these are ultra-right, radical nationalists, followers of the so-called. bonism. Previously, it was easy to identify them - they included shaven-headed skinheads in berets, but today such distinctive features have mixed with others and, on the whole, have partially disappeared. Bonds, in turn, call anti-fascists mongrels.

Antifa in Russia

In our country, anti-fascists are people of a wide variety of political and ideologicalviews, united by the main common idea. Today, antifa is communists, socialists, anarchists, liberals, and even those who are distant and have nothing to do with politics; skinheads, rappers, punks and other subcultural youth associations. All of them, as a rule, exist in separate autonomous groups that promote and develop the movement based on their own means and capabilities - paint graffiti on the walls and hang educational posters, disseminate information on the Internet, or act in line with full-fledged planned actions. Is the antifa movement growing? Moscow, which initially had a much smaller number of representatives of this movement, today concentrates thousands of anti-fascists on its territory, and this figure only continues to grow.

Symbol

The main attribute of antifa are the red and black flags, which the activists adopted from the Anti-Fascist Action, a movement during the Second World War, which was an integral part of the German Rot Front.

Websites, newspapers and other resources for anti-fascists

Today, the resource base of anti-fascists is quite well developed. So, there are specialized pages on social networks dedicated to introducing the essence of the movement, anarchist sites that also consider this topic, and various samizdat periodicals, magazines and newspapers.