Post–World War II anti-fascism
Central Europe Germany Italy Spain (Spanish Civil War) Albania Austria Baltic states Belgium Bulgaria Burma China Czechia Denmark France Germany Greece Italy Japan Jewish Luxembourg Netherlands Norway Poland Romania Slovakia Spain Soviet Union Yugoslavia Germany Italy Netherlands Portugal Spain Sweden Switzerland United Kingdom United States Post–World War II anti-fascism, including antifa groups (/ˈæntifɑː, ænˈtiːfə/[1]), anti-fascist movements and anti-fascist action networks, saw the development of political movements describing themselves as anti-fascist and in opposition to fascism.
The onset however, of the Cold War saw the urgency attached to these goals diminish in the face of superpower competition, and anti-fascist activities becoming less prominent.
In Germany Neo-Nazism was never eradicated, and former Nazis including Reinhard Gehlen and former chancellor Kurt Georg Kiesinger rose to positions of great power.
In post-WWII Great Britain, skinheads and football hooligans often promoted vehement racism; the English Defence League was founded in 2009.
The German right has grown rapidly since the Fall of the Berlin Wall, and the far-right party Alternative for Germany was founded in 2012, followed shortly thereafter by the anti-immigrant Pegida movement.
[6] In the western zones, these anti-fascist committees began to recede by the late summer of 1945, marginalized by Allied bans on political organization and by re-emerging divisions between Communists and others and the emerging state doctrine of anti-communism in what became West Germany.
According to the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, the use of the epithet fascist against opponents and the understanding of capitalism as a form of fascism are central to the movement.
[9][8] According to political scientist and Christian Democratic Union politician Tim Peters, the term anti-fascism is primarily used by the far left in contemporary Germany.
[16] The modern movement largely adopted the aesthetics of the Antifaschistische Aktion during the late Weimar Republic, including the abbreviated name Antifa and a version of its logo, while being ideologically somewhat dissimilar.
[23] PhD student Jonathan Arlow has written on the topic, saying "in the absence of effective extreme right forces, anti-fascism acts as a form of prophylactic action.
The song originally aligned itself with Italian partisans fighting against Nazi German occupation troops, but has since become to merely stand for the inherent rights of all people to be liberated from tyranny.
The re-appearance of a Dutch opera-singer Johannes Heesters, who performed for the Nazis and was even photographed when visiting Dachau concentration camp and befriending SS-officers, led to loud protest that were nationally published.
The AFA-Fryslân (Frisia) is regionally one of the most active, especially combating the Dutch extreme right and their parties, such as the PVV and Forum voor Democratie.
[38] In the 1970s, fascist and far-right parties such as the National Front (NF) and British Movement (BM) were making significant gains electorally, and were increasingly bold in their public appearances.
During this period, there were also a number of black-led anti-fascist organizations, including the Campaign Against Racism and Fascism (CARF) and local groups like the Newham Monitoring Project.
[citation needed] In 1991, the Campaign Against Fascism in Europe (CAFE) coordinated a large militant protest against the visit to London by French right-wing leader, Jean-Marie Le Pen.
[46][47] Militant anti-fascism emerged in Sweden in the early 1990s, in particular around the yearly November 30 protests in Lund and Stockholm propelled by blockades of neo-nazi marches in both cities in 1991.
In the early 2000s Antifascist Action split, with the now defunct, more Marxist and Workerkist Revolutionära Fronten (The Revolutionary Front) forming out of remnants of its Gothenburg, Stockholm and Örebro branches.
Since the late 2000s the type of militant street-based antifascism that AFA and Revolutionära Fronten represented has declined, in response to a more parliamentarian and online focus in the far right.
[52] A network of anti-fascist groups in Ukraine and Europe, the Solidarity Collectives, was set up to gather equipment to send to comrades fighting Russian forces.
It supports Ukrainian resistance and opposes the Russian invasion by sabotaging railways and communications masts, and attacking army enlistment offices.
This led to the creation of local resistance groups like the People's Anti-Fascist Front whose goal is to prevent a situation similar to that of Palestine.
[57][64][65] The incident began when a Kurdish man in Japan claimed to have been unfairly questioned by Metropolitan Police officers and subjected to violence.
[57][67][68][69] However, on June 13, the Japanese Kurdish Cultural Association, which consists of Kurds, expressed a negative view of the protest claims on their official Facebook page.
The association declared that they did not support the protest and did not take any part in it, and abandoned the said person, saying there was no room to defend his actions in light of Japanese laws and customs.
[64][65][70] On October 15, 2024, the Anti-Fascist Internationalist Front formed to train Chin rebels to fight against the Myanmar State Administration Council military junta.
[71] [72] [73] After World War II, but prior to the development of the modern antifa movement, violent confrontations with Fascist elements happened sporadically in the United States.
In 1958, over 500 Lumbee men armed with rocks, sticks and firearms attacked and disrupted a Ku Klux Klan rally, wounding several Klansmen in an event known as the Battle of Hayes Pond.
"[74] In response, as the marchers collected, a caravan of ten cars (and a van) filled with an estimated 40 KKK and American Nazi Party members confronted the protesters, culminating in a shootout known as the Greensboro Massacre.
[85] Hundreds of foreign Antifa leftists have joined the International Freedom Battalion (founded in 2015) of the People's Protection Units (YPG) in the region called Rojava by Kurdish militias, in the North and East of Syria, out of a mixture of opposition to the Islamic State during the Syrian Civil War and willingness to defend what they call "Rojava Revolution" against the Turkish military and the Syrian Arab Republic.
