Daze 24 Make Racists Afraid Again

Images of a light fixture swallowed by flames, smashed windows, battered ATMs and blackness-masked demonstrators throwing firecrackers at police officers were broadcast on TV screens across the U.s.a. earlier this month when protests erupted at the University of California, Berkeley.

"Become ungovernable" read a banner carried by the anti-fascist demonstrators. "This is state of war" was scrawled beyond some other.

Thousands of people protested that dark confronting the academy providing a platform for a far-correct speaker known for his anti-immigrant rhetoric, simply nearly 150 black-clad demonstrators decided to employ force, fierce downward rows of police barricades.

As fires burned outside the university, Milo Yiannopoulos, an 'Alt-Right' provocateur and editor at the far-correct Breitbart news blog, was evacuated from the campus before he could deliver his lecture

A day before the incident, Breitbart announced that Yiannopoulos and the far-right David Horowitz Freedom Centre were using his talk at the academy to launch a campaign confronting sanctuary campuses that protect undocumented students.

In a statement before the talk, academy officials expressed concern that he would employ the platform to publicly name undocumented students. Yiannopoulos called the argument "a full fabrication".

A week earlier, a Yiannopoulos supporter shot an anti-fascist activist protesting against a lecture by the Breitbart editor at the University of Washington campus in Seattle.

By Any Ways Necessary (BAMN), a left-wing ceremonious rights arrangement, was one of the militant anti-fascist groups involved in the protest.

"The movement effectively close down Yiannopoulos because it was a mass action with thousands of people who were united in the immediate goal of preventing fascists from gaining a foothold at UC Berkeley," Yvette Felarca, BAMN's northern California coordinator, told Al Jazeera by email.

"BAMN, Black Bloc [protesters] and thousands of others found a way to protect each other and unite together because nosotros shared the same political and tactical goal," she said.

Black bloc is a tactic in which protesters – often anarchists – dress all in blackness and conceal their identities with hoodies, ski masks, sunglasses or scarves. Making it difficult to place protesters serves to protect them from legal consequences.

Felarca added: "Our success at Berkeley, with thousands united together to close him [Yiannopoulos]down by any means necessary, was a rebellion against Trump's endeavor to build a fascist motion in America and destroy the hard fought democratic gains that have been won hither."

What is Antifa?

The violence at Berkeley was only the latest in a series of events involving anti-fascist protesters and others who advocate the apply of forcefulness against the far right.

Based on principles of anti-racism, anti-capitalism and anti-absolutism, anti-fascist groups – often known every bit Antifa – are loosely knit and generally made up of semi-autonomous individuals dedicated to preventing the spread of fascism.

On the twenty-four hour period of President Donald Trump's inauguration, Antifa protesters also used black bloc tactics.

During those protests, a limousine was assault fire, and a masked Antifa activist punched white supremacist Richard Spencer as he was existence interviewed on photographic camera.

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More than 200 protesters were charged over their involvement.

Earlier this month, about 100 anti-fascists protested at New York University, disruptinga lecture byfar-right public effigy Gavin McInnes. Local media reported that at least xi people were arrested, and McInnes was pepper-sprayed by a protesterduring the tussle.

McInnes, who co-founded Vice Media and left the company in 2008, is a Trump supporter who has boasted of his anti-feminist views and defended racism, transphobia and other forms of discrimination. He also founded the Proud Boys, an online grouping whose motto is "West is best".

A argue within the U.s.a. left

In a statement released after the UC Berkeley protests, the university's administration condemned the violence and argued that information technology violated the principles of free speech.

Writing on Twitter, Trump threatened to revoke federal funding for the academy. Just experts say the president is not legally permitted to withdraw funds from a academy for prohibiting someone from speaking on campus.

Nevertheless the violence also sparked a debate betwixt factions of the Usa left.

In the Socialist Worker, a newspaper affiliated with the International Socialist Organization, Mukund Rathi defended the protests confronting Yiannopoulos but condemned the use of black bloc tactics.

Demonstrators started a bonfire exterior as they protested confronting Milo Yiannopoulos at UC Berkeley [Ben Margot/The Associated Printing]

"These tactics endangered several g people who were not given an opportunity to say if they should exist used or not," wrote Rathi, who participated in the protestation.

"Later in the dark, anarchists tagged and smashed the windows of several off-campus banks and other businesses, a pointless exercise in property destruction that doesn't politicise anyone."

But BAMN's Felarca argues that the ascension in the number of racist attacks in the US demonstrates the need for a "mass and militant movement" that is capable of "defending ourselves".

"Our side is growing and likewise prepared to be more politically militant and support more than militant struggle," she said.

"Mass, militant, directly action is essential to stopping neo-fascists and defeating their whole movement. Immigrant communities and all who are targeted by fascists are stronger for having a movement that is prepared to defend confronting the physical and political attacks of white supremacists," Felarca added.

"If the movement continues edifice every bit big and as powerfully in this direction, we can defeat Trump, his entire racist calendar, and get him out without waiting for the next election."

The rising of the far-correct

The growth in the number and membership of anti-fascist groups comes as far-right organisations have been energised past Trump'south campaign and election.

Since the Nov viii elections, the Southern Poverty Law Centre (SPLC) has recorded 1,372 incidents of harassment and intimidation, more than than 25 percent of which were motivated by anti-immigrant sentiments. Almost nineteen percentage of those incidents targeted African Americans, while another nine per centum targeted Muslims.

The SPLC estimates that there are at least 917 United states of america-based hate groups, including 130 Ku Klux Klan capacity, 100 white nationalist organisations and 99 neo Nazi groups.

The SPLC documented at least 130 Ku Klux Klan chapters in the Us in 2016 [File: Erik S Bottom/EPA]

McMaster University's Henry Giroux, writer of America at State of war with Itself and Dangerous Thinking in the Age of New Authoritarianism, describes the ideological worldview of Trump and his allies as "neo fascism".

"Fascist ideologies and practices of the past tin reappear in new forms," he told Al Jazeera. "These forms take on a very specific distinction wrapped in new kinds of symbolism, practices and spectacles, but basically reinforce fascist ideologies, policies and practices."

Giroux pointed to "the appeal to the past, the merits that the nation is in decline, the notion that y'all accept to be xenophobic in order to support a new kind of nationalism, the telephone call for walls and barriers … white supremacy and the racial privileging that informs Trump's soapbox".

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"These all have echoes of a Nazi past," he said. "Instead of talking nigh Jews, he'southward talking nigh Muslims… What yous have in the United States is the death of democracy, even in its nearly frail forms."

Against the backdrop of increased vigilante violence towards groups already enduring state oppression or fail – people of colour, undocumented immigrants, refugees and members of the LGBTQ community, among others – anti-fascist tactics have assumed a renewed relevance. Viewing the land as function of the oppressive appliance that maintains white supremacy, anti-fascists reject a reliance on constabulary enforcement to adjourn or hinder far-right violence and incitement.

The long history of anti-fascism

Anti-fascist movements engagement back to the emergence of European fascism in the 1920s. From their inception, these movements included a wide range of left-fly individuals: anarchists, socialists, communists and others ideologically opposed to fascism.

In 1924, the Ruby-red Front Fighters' League, tied to the Communist Party of Germany, was one of the first organisations to engage in fights with Nazis in the streets. Its membership is estimated to have reached 130,000 within v years. Later on the Nazis took full control, many of its leaders were arrested, jailed, banished to camps and executed. Others fled and joined the fight against fascism in Spain and elsewhere.

The logic of direct confrontation persisted, however, through the writings of prominent leftists and in do on the ground in the form of resistance to fascists.

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In his 1934 book Whither France?, exiled Soviet revolutionary and Marxist ideologue Leon Trotsky tackled the question of how to face the rise of fascism. Arguing for the creation of workers' militias, he wrote: "Only how to disarm the Fascists? Naturally, it is incommunicable to do so with paper manufactures solitary. Fighting squads must exist created."

Two years afterwards, Lithuanian agitator activist and philosopher Emma Goldman visited the international anarchists fighting on the front line confronting Full general Francisco Franco's fascist death squads during the Spanish Civil State of war (1936-1939).

In October 1936, a broad umbrella of communists, anarchists, Jewish and Irish groups clashed with British fascist Oswald Mosley'due south Blackshirts to block thousands of them from marching through Jewish and Irish communities in East London. Tens of thousands resisted the Blackshirts and the police protecting them with barricades, bottles, rocks, pipes and other improvised weapons. The events of that twenty-four hour period are commemorated as the Battle of Cablevision Street and remembered as a people's victory against fascism.

'Anti-fascists protested against British fascists in the Battle of Cable Street [Jewish Chronicle/Heritage Images/Getty Images]

In the Us, a more contempo manifestation of anti-fascism dates back to the explosive growth of racist groups, among them neo-Nazis, in the punk stone scene in the 1980s.

Largely fabricated up of anarchists and, to a lesser extent, activists ascribing to various strands of Marxism, anti-fascist activists decided to adopt the tactic of physical confrontations against white supremacists from across the spectrum: from neo-Nazi punks to the resurgent Ku Klux Klan.

The Anti-Racist Activeness (ARA) was established in 1988 in Minneapolis equally one of the first organised anti-fascist networks.

The ARA's stated goal is "eliminating racism, sexism, anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, homophobia, transphobia, and discrimination against disabled people, the oldest, the youngest, and the most oppressed people" and the cosmos of "a free [and] classless society".

The Torch Antifa Network, a successor to the ARA, is active beyond the country and advocates direct confrontation and the disruption of far-correct events.

As happened at UC Berkeley, one of the primary tasks of Antifa groups is "no platforming" far-right speakers – or blocking them from being provided a venue to espouse racist or xenophobic views.

Eschewing the dominant liberal agreement of gratuitous spoken language, Torch argues that the correct to freedom of expression shouldn't translate into a guaranteed platform and "does not terminate the public from opposing hateful ideas".

'Liberation that includes everyone'

Anti-fascists say media depictions of their tactics residual on several flawed bounds, main among them that Antifa groups and fascists are two sides of the same money, as well equally the assumption that property devastation is tantamount to physical violence against people.

Antifa DFW, a grouping based in the Dallas-Fort Worth area of Texas, argues that media depictions of anti-fascists as but engaging in property destruction "reflects the class position and part of the media in upholding" a power structure that is "patriarchal, heteronormative and white supremacist".

The tunnel-vision focus on broken windows and smashed ATMs, the group says, is "a tactic used to de-legitimise militant struggle and gloss over the violence inherent to these [far-fight] ideologies and the structural violence of commercialism and the land".

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New York City-based Antifa activist Miguel Affections, who spoke to Al Jazeera using a nom de guerre, explained that anti-fascist activities are much broader than no platforming and direct confrontation.

"We make sure that [the far-correct] can't hide their organsing in the shadows, so thattheir community, publishers and issue venues know who nearby is planting the seeds of racist violence," he said.

He said Antifa groups carry enquiry, try to educate their ain communities, train for self-defence force, disrupt far-right meetings and recruitment drives, carry out counter-recruitment drives and publicly betrayal police officers and people in power who have connections to white supremacist groups.

Antifa groups say their work goes across direct confrontation [File: Adrees Latif/Reuters]

They also work with grassroots collectives and NGOs that organise to block immigration raids and offering sanctuary spaces for undocumented people in places of worship and people's homes, as well as monitor police and advocate for prisoners' rights.

"Information technology besides ways organising our communities both for their own liberation and a more than general liberation that includes everyone – and that includes poor white people who do, in fact, need an alternative to the politics of white reaction led by Trump," Angel added.

"Nosotros are faced with the challenge of continuing to let them expand that space of exclusion and violence, or organising the outrage at the regime's racist and authoritarian policies … to brand racists afraid again in more and more parts of the state."

Follow Patrick Strickland on Twitter:@P_Strickland_

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Source: https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2017/2/21/us-anti-fascists-we-can-make-racists-afraid-again