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We all know the media are shameless liars, but sometimes they surpass even themselves. One such time was when a CNN reporter stood in front of a backdrop of burning cars and buildings and black-clad thugs hurling bricks and declared with a straight face that it was a “mostly peaceful protest”.
The incident brought to mind Theodore Dalrymple’s observation about Soviet propaganda: its purpose “was not to persuade or convince, not to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better”. The point was to force people to “assent to obvious lies”.
A society of emasculated liars is easy to control.
Another obvious lie is that the threat of political violence in the West comes solely from the so-called ‘far right’ (an all-purpose boogeyman who is, usefully no doubt, never defined). Yet another is that the most obviously violent – both in scale and tenacity – group, Antifa is the antithesis of ‘fascism’ (another boogeyman whom the left never, probably because they cannot, define).
In fact, when you consider the hallmarks of Mussolini’s fascism – a collectivist ideology of complete state power, a penchant for black clothing and an absolute commitment to street-gangster violence, up to and including outright assassination — Antifa seem indistinguishable from actual fascists. Like all such groups whose nomenclature seems at odds with their reality (communist ‘democratic republics’, National Socialists, and so on), the key to understanding the apparent dichotomy is understanding the historic roots of their names.
The communists saw themselves as peoples’ states, thus, ‘democratic’. The Nazis wanted a socialist state, but only for the pure ‘Aryan’ race, thus, the National Socialist German Worker’s Party.
Antifa traces its origins, rightly or wrongly, to the same time and place as the Nazis. The Stalinist Communist Party of Germany were bitterly opposed to the National Socialists, whom they (wrongly) lumped in with Italy’s Fascists. Hence, they called their armed wing “Antifaschistische Aktion”. These communist bootboys were every bit as violent and intolerant as the Nazis. In fact, both groups were just twin vicious dogs fighting over the same bone.
Like the German Communists they model themselves on, the modern Antifa wrongly blanket-label everyone they disagree with as ‘fascists’. Thus, they sincerely dub themselves “Anti-Fascist” while behaving every inch the actual fascists.
The contemporary Antifa movement began with the formation of the Maoist Communist League in the early 1970s. The influence of Maoist philosophy, with its emphasis on constant struggle and Mao Zedong’s justification of violence, has been too easily overlooked in recent years […]
They rose to the surface after the death of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police in 2020, which became the trigger for a wave of violence and destruction in cities across the US. The pattern of the violent outbreaks indicated they were far from spontaneous. It was the eruption of a violent, anti-capitalist, cultural war that had been workshopped for six decades.
Another obvious lie of the mainstream media is to proclaim, against all evidence, that Antifa ‘doesn’t exist’. The gambit behind this lie is that ‘there is no Antifa organisation’. Which is true to a point, because it’s based on the classic terrorist ‘cell’ structure.
So, should we be worried about Antifa, or are they just a bunch of rich-kid commie students LARPing at being revolutionaries? Yes, and no. While the characterisation is true enough, Antifa are clearly very dangerous. They’ve caused massive property damage, viciously assaulted scores of innocent people and even committed murder.
But they’re as likely to overthrow Western democracies as the J6 protesters were actually staging an ‘insurrection’.
Democracy survived the left-wing terror campaigns of the Weather Underground and other radicals in the US and the murderous Baader-Meinhof Gang in Germany. But those violent radicals were attacking robust and confident democracies.
The lesson from the early 20th century is that liberal democracies are seldom, if ever, overthrown by actual violence. Democracies crumble of their own accord when violence becomes normalised and even embraced by the intelligentsia.
Openly violent anti-Semites are invading and occupying Western university campuses for the first time since the National Socialist German Student League stormed German universities in 1933 to quickly and violently drive out Jewish students and academics.
The West ignores the threat of Antifa at its peril.
