On October 4, 1936, tens of thousands of Zionists,
Socialists, Irish dockworkers, Communists, anarchists, and various outraged
residents of London’s East End gathered to prevent Oswald Mosley and his
British Union of Fascists from marching through their neighborhood. This clash
would eventually be known as the Battle of Cable Street: protesters formed a
blockade and beat back some three thousand Fascist Black Shirts and six
thousand police officers. To stop the march, the protesters exploded homemade
bombs, threw marbles at the feet of police horses, and turned over a burning
lorry. They rained down a fusillade of projectiles on the marchers and the
police attempting to protect them: rocks, brickbats, shaken-up lemonade
bottles, and the contents of chamber pots. Mosley and his men were forced to
retreat.
In “Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook,” published last week by
Melville House, the historian Mark Bray presents the Battle of Cable Street as
a potent symbol of how to stop Fascism: a strong, unified coalition outnumbered
and humiliated Fascists to such an extent that their movement fizzled. For many
members of contemporary anti-Fascist groups, the incident remains central to
their mythology, a kind of North Star in the fight against Fascism and white
supremacy across Europe and, increasingly, the United States.
According to Bray, antifa (pronounced an-tee-fah) “can variously be
described as a kind of ideology, an identity, a tendency or milieu, or an
activity of self-defense.” It’s a leaderless, horizontal movement whose roots
lie in various leftist causes—Communism, anarchism, Socialism, anti-racism. The
movement’s profile has surged since antifa activists engaged in a wave of
property destruction during
Donald Trump’s Inauguration—when one masked figure famously punched the
white supremacist Richard Spencer in the face—and ahead of a planned appearance,
in February, by Milo Yiannopoulos at
the University of California, Berkeley, which was cancelled. At the
“Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville,
Virginia, a number of antifa activists, carrying sticks, blocked entrances to
Emancipation Park, where white supremacists planned to gather. Fights broke
out; some antifa activists reportedly sprayed chemicals and threw paint-filled balloons. Multiple
clergy members credited activists with saving their lives. Fox News reported that a White House
petition urging that antifa be labelled a terrorist organization had
received more than a hundred thousand signatures.
Bray’s book is many things: the first English-language transnational
history of antifa, a how-to for would-be activists, and a record of advice from
anti-Fascist organizers past and present—a project that he calls “history,
politics, and theory on the run.” Antifa activists don’t often speak to the
media, but Bray is a former Occupy Wall Street organizer and an avowed leftist;
he has intimate access to his subjects, if not much critical distance from
them. Especially in later chapters of the book, that access helps him to
provide an unusually informed account of how antifa members conceptualize their
disruptive and sometimes violent methods.
Many liberals who are broadly sympathetic to the goals of
antifa criticize the movement for its illiberal tactics. In the latest issue
of The Atlantic, Peter Beinart, citing a series of incidents in
Portland, Oregon, writes, “The people preventing Republicans from safely
assembling on the streets of Portland may consider themselves fierce opponents
of the authoritarianism growing on the American right. In truth, however, they are
its unlikeliest allies.” (Beinart’s piece is headlined “The Rise of the Violent Left.”) According to Bray, though,
antifa activists believe that Fascists forfeit their rights to speak and
assemble when they deny those same rights to others through violence and
intimidation. For instance, last week, the North Dakota newspaper The
Forum published a letter from Pearce Tefft in which he recalled a
chilling exchange about free speech with his son, Peter, shortly before Peter
headed to the rally in Charlottesville. “The thing about us fascists is, it’s
not that we don’t believe in freedom of speech,” the younger Tefft reportedly
said to his father. “You can say whatever you want. We’ll just throw you in an
oven.”
For Bray and his subjects, the horror of this history and
the threat of its return demands that citizens, in the absence of state
suppression of Fascism, take action themselves. Bray notes that state-based
protections failed in Italy and Germany, where Fascists were able to take
over governments through legal rather than revolutionary means—much as the
alt-right frames its activities as a defense of free speech, Fascists were able
to spread their ideology under the aegis of liberal tolerance. Antifa does not
abide by John Milton’s dictum that, “in a free and open encounter,” truthful
ideas will prevail. “After Auschwitz and Treblinka,” Bray writes,
“anti-fascists committed themselves to fighting to the death the ability of
organized Nazis to say anything.”
Part of antifa’s mission is to establish, as Bray puts it,
“the historical continuity between different eras of far-right violence and the
many forms of collective self-defense that it has necessitated across the globe
over the past century.” To this end, the first half of his book is a somewhat
rushed history of anti-Fascist groups. The progenitors of antifa, in this
account, were the German and Italian leftists who, following the First World
War, banded together to fight proto-Fascist gangs. In Italy, these leftists
gathered under the banner of Arditi del Popolo (“the People’s Daring Ones”),
while in Weimar Germany, groups like Antifaschistische Aktion, from which
antifa takes its name, evolved from paramilitary factions of existing political
parties. Bray moves swiftly to the failure of anti-Fascists in the Spanish
Civil War, then races through the second half of the twentieth century. In the
late seventies, the punk and hardcore scenes became the primary sites of open
conflict between leftists and neo-Nazis; that milieu prefigures much of the
style and strategy now associated with the anti-Fascist movement. In the
Netherlands and Germany, a group of leftist squatters known as Autonomen
pioneered the Black Bloc approach: wearing all-black outfits and masks to help
participants evade prosecution and retaliation. Bray reaches the present with
his description of “Pinstripe Fascists,” such as Geert
Wilders, and the rise of new far-right parties and groups in both Europe
and America. The book flits between countries and across decades; analysis is
sparse. The message is that antifa will fight Fascists wherever they appear,
and by any means necessary.
The book’s later chapters, such as “Five Historical Lessons
for Anti-Fascists” and “ ‘So Much for the Tolerant Left!’: ‘No Platform’ and
Free Speech,” which are adapted from essays published elsewhere, are more
focussed and persuasive. Here Bray explicitly deals with the philosophical and
practical problems of antifa: violence versus nonviolence; mass movements
versus militancy; choosing targets and changing tactics. Bray concedes that the
practice of disrupting Fascist rallies and events could be construed as a
violation of the
right to free speech and assembly—but he contends that such protections are
meant to prevent the government from arresting citizens, not to prevent
citizens from disrupting one another’s speech. Speech is already curtailed in
the U.S. by laws related to “obscenity, incitement to violence, copyright
infringement, press censorship during wartime,” and “restrictions for the
incarcerated,” Bray points out. Why not add one more restriction—curtailing
hate speech—as many European democracies do? As for the slippery-slopists,
afraid that antifa will begin with Fascists and eventually attack anybody who
opposes them, Bray maintains that the historical record does not support this
fear: anti-Fascists who have shut down local hate groups, as in Denmark,
usually go dark themselves, or turn their attention to other political
projects, rather than finding new enemies to fight. (In his Atlantic piece,
Beinart notes, “When fascism withered after World War II, antifa did too.”)
Violence, Bray insists, is not the preferred method for past
or present antifa—but it is definitely on the table. He quotes a
Baltimore-based activist who goes by the name Murray to explain the movement’s
outlook:
You fight them by writing letters and making phone calls so
you don’t have to fight them with fists. You fight them with fists so you don’t
have to fight them with knives. You fight them with knives so you don’t have to
fight them with guns. You fight them with guns so you don’t have to fight them
with tanks.
There is a moral logic to this notion of anticipatory
self-defense, but the progression, from writing letters to fighting with guns,
is worrisome nonetheless. Right-wing militiamen in Charlottesville made a point
of displaying
force, and this was reportedly “unnerving to law enforcement officials on
the scene.” Should anti-Fascists start toting AR-15s, like the right-wing
Oathkeepers? The idea can seem naïve in an American context, where, practically
speaking, only white people can carry guns openly without
fear of police interference. Bray mentions a few pro-gun antifa groups,
including the Huey P. Newton Gun Club, and a collective with the punning
moniker Trigger Warning; he quibbles with liberal scholars, including Erica
Chenoweth and Maria J. Stephan, who dismiss violent protest as an ineffective
tool for garnering public support. But it is unclear from the book whether
he thinks that brandishing guns is an ethical concern as well as a
tactical one, or whether he worries about an escalation of violence. Postwar
antifa, as Bray details in earlier chapters, has largely been a European
project, in which opposing sides sometimes beat each other senseless and
stabbed one another to death. They didn’t have assault rifles. The Battle of
Cable Street was fought with rocks and paving stones.
What were the effects of Cable Street, exactly? Scholars
continue to debate the showdown’s consequences. After the battle, Mosley, like
present-day Fascists, was able to cast himself in the role of a law-abiding
victim assaulted by immigrant hordes. In the months following, Fascist youth
attacked London’s Jewish residents and businesses in what became known as the Mile End Pogrom, and the British Union of
Fascists did better at the polls in 1937than they had in years
prior. Bray argues that such results do not undermine the legacy of the
incident, because it radicalized and galvanized a community, which continued to
fight Fascists in Britain through the buildup to the war and beyond, and whose
efforts were largely successful.
In the British press, at least, Cable Street has been referenced repeatedly in coverage of the protests and the terrorism
in Charlottesville, an event that has forced a discussion of what to do
when far-right extremists come to your town. Bray, for his part, believes that
one can practice “everyday anti-fascism” by confronting bigots in nonviolent
ways, “from calling them out, to boycotting their business, to shaming them for
their oppressive beliefs, to ending a friendship unless someone shapes up.” The
point, as he sees it, is to shut down Fascists not just in the street but in
every interaction. “An anti-fascist outlook has no tolerance for ‘intolerance.’
” he writes. “It will not ‘agree to disagree.’ ”
- Daniel
Penny is a member of The New Yorker’s editorial staff.
__
De THE NEW YORKER, 22/08/2017
Fotografía: Alex
Milan Tracy / Sipa vía AP
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