On September 22 of this year, Donald Trump issued a statement defining “Antifa” (which hardly exists as a formal organization) as a domestic terrorist organization (a category that does not exist in American law.) So far, so surreal, but this was more than just another clownish gesture on the part of the American president.
The proclamation from the Orange House read in part: “I hereby designate Antifa as a ‘domestic terrorist organization.’ All relevant executive departments and agencies shall utilize all applicable authorities to investigate, disrupt, and dismantle any and all illegal operations — especially those involving terrorist actions — conducted by Antifa or any person claiming to act on behalf of Antifa, or for which Antifa or any person claiming to act on behalf of Antifa provided material support, including necessary investigatory and prosecutorial actions against those who fund such operations.”
While many experts pointed out that Trump’s diktat, like so many of his actions, was probably illegal and certainly well outside usual norms of executive action, his shambolic attack on a group that does not in fact exist in any organized sense is likely to inspire more authoritarian actions by the president and his armed goons. Welcome to McCarthyism redux.
Doug Saunders, writing in the Globe and Mail, presciently pointed out in September that “The definition of “antifa” is so loose that virtually anyone who has spoken out against right-wing authoritarianism could be criminally charged.” The BBC commented: “But experts have questioned how the president will actually target the group, which lacks a distinct leader, membership list or structure. In 2020, then-FBI Director Christopher Wray told Congress that Antifa was better defined as an ideology than as a formal organisation.
Brad Evans – professor of political violence at Bath University – warned that Antifa’s lack of an organisational structure and membership “offers a remarkable opportunity to extend the [government’s] remit and apply it to anybody who may be assumed to belong to an organisation that is ill-defined”.”
This is all reminiscent of the toxic red scares that have been the mainstay of conservative politics for more than a century in both Canada and the US. Canadian conservatives are getting on the anti-antifa bandwagon already, with Alberta Tory MP Rachel Thomas charging in outraged tones that federal funds have gone to support anti-fascist publications.
There will be more of this nonsense coming soon in Canada.
So, with all this going on, the recent publication of a revised and updated version of Gord Hill’s The Antifa Comic Book is very timely indeed. Hill is an Indigenous artist, writer and activist with an impressive bibliography that includes his magisterial adaption of the graphic novel format to tell important history about Indigenous resistance to colonialism, 500 Years of Indigenous Resistance.
He has also published The Anti-Capitalist Resistance Comic Book: From the WTO to the G20 (2012) and Direct Action Gets the Goods: A Graphic History of the Strike in Canada (2019). (Full disclosure, I knew Hill some decades ago when he, my son and others were involved in anarchist inspired squats in East Vancouver. Since then, I have followed and admired his many achievements both as an author and an activist. )
In this new and revised version of The Antifa Comic Book, which was originally published in 2018, Hill once again uses a comic book format to address very serious issues.
He narrates the emergence of groups self-identified as anti-fascist in Italy and in Germany in the 1920s and 1930s. No sooner had European fascist parties emerged from the chaos after the Great War than anti-fascist groups formed to oppose these racist, sexist and anti-democratic thugs.
In 1932 the German Communist Party (the KPD) took a leading role in creating Antifaschistische Aktion (AntiFascist Action), an attempt to unite elements in the nation’s splintered left wing to fight the Nazis. To be fair, it should be noted that the Communists had created a lot of the problematic left division by following directions from Moscow to spurn collaboration with the more centrist Social Democrats. Be that as it may, the Party-led Antifa in the German 30s is the only centrally organized membership Antifa known to history. As noted above, Antifa is at most a loose network of independent activists in North America today.
Hill’s well researched book has stories to tell about anti-fascist organizing and activism in every decade since fascism first raised its ugly head in the 1920s. He describes this tradition of grass roots anti-fascism across Europe (with chapters on Spain, Greece, Russia, Sweden, the UK) as well as little known stories of antifascism in Syria, Russia and Israel. True to his roots here on Turtle Island, Hill devotes nearly a third of the book to anti-fascist struggles here in Canada.
This is an important and valuable book for these troubled times. Whether or not the reader has tactical criticisms of some of the activists who identify as antifa, or will be so identified in the coming storm of Red Scare repression (as I do), and whether or not we share all of Hill’s analysis, especially of the Ukrainian situation, (I don’t) we cannot allow our movements to be divided by the wanna be fascists of the contemporary right. In their eyes, we are all Antifa, and it is an identity we should all embrace.
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