Opinion news analysis by Tala Karkanawi, Staff Writer and Dimitri Ghantous, Contributor

June 10th, 2020

Recently, United States President Donald Trump announced on his twitter account that he is officially declaring ANTIFA as a ‘terrorist organization’. It came as a shock to many not only in the US, but worldwide, seeing as ANTIFA is in fact not categorized as an organization. ANTIFA is the short form of “anti-fascism”, which categorizes rather as a political ideology and practice which emerged in Europe (first in Germany and Italy) as a way to stop fascism. It is not an organization, nor is it a group or an association, therefore one cannot join ANTIFA nor can one leave it. So, with President Trump’s announcement of declaring ANTIFA as a terrorist organization could be extremely dangerous as it may lead to the political repression of anyone who expresses political opposition to the far-right. 

ANTIFA is not an interconnected nor unified organization, but rather a movement without a hierarchical leadership structure, and it consists of multiple independent groups and individuals. Those who describe themselves as ANTIFA are not necessarily communist, socialists, or anarchists (as Trump has described them) although these groups have a long history of opposing fascism, and thus you are in theory more likely to find ANTIFA affiliated individuals among them. They are against racism, fascism, neo-Nazis or the far-right in general. They tend to be critical of liberalism and capitalism, as they believe that those political systems lie in their historical and ideological tendencies to be lenient and/or directly encourage fascism. 

To understand what the ideology behind ANTIFA stands for, we must first understand fascism. Fascism is a political ideology, that arguably originated from the events of totalitarianism in the 1920s in Italy and Germany. Some common features of fascism include, yet are not limited to, being fond of authoritarian governments and less fond of Constitutional Democracy, being pro-military and pro-police, nationalist, xenophobic, antifeminist, supportive of patriarchy and machismo, anti-communist, and lastly anti-anarchist. 

Supporters of ANTIFA have established a feeling of responsibility in which they believe they must prevent those they categorize as fascist from utilizing a platform to promote their views. The argument here is that public demonstration of those ideas leads to the targeting of marginalized people, including racial minorities, women, and members of the LGBTQ+ community. They are classified as left-wingers since they support social equality, and oppose social hierarchy. Since we’ve established that their goal is to further prevent people from establishing fascism by any means necessary, this may also legitimize resorting to violence. Nevertheless, most of their actions are non-violent (for example launching educational initiatives about what they see as the horrors of fascism and how to fight it, protesting in cases of fascist speaker at public conferences, emailing a company telling them a member of their staff goes to white nationalist meetings etc…). 

Violent actions coming from supporters of ANTIFA ideology are evidently and generally in direct confrontation with Nazis (examples include the events and confrontations in Charlottesville). The idea behind the the slogan “punch a Nazi” is that Nazism should be ultimately prevented by violence, if necessary, seeing that according to them, there may be no peaceful way to eradicate fascism. They argue that fascism is in itself an ideology directed towards the supremacy of one group of people on all others. They tend to take direct and local actions in the aim of preventing fascism from growing wherever they can. ANTIFA are also very critical of violence for violence sake (since they are feminist, they tend to believe that violence can be a display of toxic masculinity). 

Moreover, they are also very vocal about liberal state violence. They believe that by placing too much emphasis on the far-right’s freedom of speech (if not by giving them tribunes for they ideas) they unable them to spread their propaganda. However, if in theory liberals argues that even fascists should be allowed to have their opinion, it implies in practice that they send the police to protect fascistic protests. This is seen as hypocritical by ANTIFA affiliated individuals recognizing that they think that liberals don’t go to that extent to protect the freedom of expression of minorities and never give a tribune to incarcerated people for example. 

From a legal stand point, freedom of speech is an essential human right that has been signed and ratified by 179 UN member states in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. However, their interpretation of that right is particular. Antifascists would agree that hate speech is not free speech. That if you are endangering people with what you say and the actions that are behind them, then you should not have the right to do that. Conservatives and many liberals, on their part, criticize ANTIFA for believing that they have little or no respect for free speech. However, as admitted by the Nazi political scientist Carl Schmitt, Free-speech absolutists aren’t protecting liberal democracy, they are endangering it by allowing nazis to spread their propaganda. In reality, the far-right doesn’t really want to take part in factual debates, they instead use debates as a way to speak to their audience, spreading their propaganda and opening the Overton Window. That is why the Italian writer and scholar Umberto Eco wrote that “freedom of speech is freedom from rhetoric”.

Therefore, when Trump tweeted that ANTIFA should be considered a terrorist organization, yet the KKK (which is a white supremacist hate organization) remains free from such a list, he is giving the right to white supremacists to march with no opposition. Free speech, especially during Trump’s presidency, has become a rhetorical tool to elaborate on something much more sinister: the state’s backing and protection of white supremacists and the country’s refusal to face with its racism and vast inequality. Antifascist philosophy believes that history has given so much perils in giving a manifesto to hate, however they will go in great lengths to suppress any type of hateful comment. This is the antifascist idea idea when it comes to ‘limiting’ or ‘changing’ the idea behind freedom of speech. 

However, as many political commentators pointed out, Trump might use ANTIFA to shift the media’s attention and not talk about police brutality. Moreover, designating ANTIFA as a terrorist organization would very likely be illegal.  The federal government has no authority to mark an exclusively domestic group in the manner it currently designates foreign terrorist organizations. It is also quite likely to be unconstitutional for the US government to label ANTIFA as terrorist because it would violate First Amendment-protected activity inside the US based on a simple ideology. Therefore, Trump’s treat is most likely an unrealistic one whose goal is to scare people from protesting his authoritarian government. However, his political maneuver might have the completely opposite effect and it certainly won’t stop protestors from singing traditional antifascist songs like Bella Ciao or screaming Siamo Tutti Antifascisti (we are all antifascist in Italian) as a symbol of opposition.