Date of Posting: 28/04/2023
Do you like doing things? Do you dislike fascism? If you answered yes to both of these questions, antifascist activism may be for you!
Antifascist activism is as old as fascism itself, and has an extensive history of successes and failures. It is an essential tool to curb the rise of fascist movements within communities, and it isn't that difficult to do. People who take part in this form of activism are often colloquially known as 'Antifa', for the following reason:
'Anti' is a prefix which means against, or opposed to. 'Fa' is short for fascism.
And this concludes our intensive six week course.
Antifa therefore can be used to describe anyone actively opposed to fascism. You could be antifa and not even know it. Just doing antifascist work makes you antifa. It isn't an organisation or international group you can join. There is no membership, leadership, or funding. Anybody who says there is has no clue what they're talking about, and are probably being taken in by the sort of racist nonsense along the lines of George Soros funding international protests. And if somebody was to capitalise each letter to make it read 'ANTIFA', that's just to make it seem like a scary entity, rather than just normal people taking time out of their own schedules to prevent the growth of fascist movements.
If you'd like more information on the history of antifascism, the book 'Antifa- The Antifascist Handbook' by Mark Bray is an excellent starting point. It's also just an interesting read, and it will help dispel many of the myths and misconceptions so regularly spread around by lazy media pundits and dodgy politicians.
But Lucretia, I hear you ask through the infinite void of time and space, how am I supposed to do an antifa? I'm just one (1) person!
Well, in many situations that's all you need. Although many activities will be more effective in small groups, you can do antifascist activism yourself just by taking an active interest in your community and your surroundings, and making a deliberate effort to set yourself in opposition to any fascist tendencies that are developing around you.
I'm going to set out 5 specific types of antifascist activity here, that you can do all by yourself. This is by no means an exhaustive list, this is just some ideas to get you started. And if you're in an area where fascists are becoming bolder and more threatening, you're probably going to want to find a few people you trust and work together to think up some ways to disrupt their work.
Every inconvenience we place before a fascist is another reason they should just go home and not do the work required to build fascism. I want to be clear that there can be no polite compromise with fascists, as their goals are completely incompatible with a just society. At the end of the day, as an antifascist we can be satisfied in our results if somebody stops doing fascism. For many of us, myself included, the only way fascists will be satisfied is if we stop existing.
This is why we do the work. If we can inconvenience these people enough, place enough barriers in their way and make doing fascism unappealing enough, they stop. And we don't have to worry about them any more. For now.
This was essentially my introduction to actively engaging in antifascist work. I was simply walking through my local town centre one day, when I came across several lamp posts which had been stickered by a UK neo-nazi hate group. I didn't know that's what they were immediately, but a quick internet search made it obvious that's what they were. Then, as anybody seeing that shit on the streets should do, I destroyed them.
Stickers are not difficult to destroy. You can peel them off, but honestly it's safer and more expedient to just scrape them off using your keys. I say safer, because it's actually quite common practice in some areas for hardened fascists to place razorblades underneath stickers to cut anybody trying to remove them. Because these people are the worst. So yeah, use a tool to scrape stickers off of surfaces.
Posters can function similarly. They're likely to be taped to a surface, because fascists aren't often in a position to carry around paste or other adhesives when working an area. It's not casual enough. But again, consider using your keys or some other tool for safety.
The most common forms of fascist propaganda you're likely to encounter in the street are posters and stickers, as they're the easiest ones to produce and distribute. However, you may also come across fascist graffiti such as writing with permanent markers, or spray paint.
Anything written written in marker is going to be fairly small, so there are a couple of fairly easy options available here. First, you can apply your own stickers! It's not difficult to get small stickers in bulk from most stationary stores, and just put anything you want on them. The point is to obscure your opponent's work, it doesn't really matter what specific thing you use to do that. (Technically this is flyposting and so I can't actually tell you do to this. But I also can't stop you. Make your own choices, I'm just illustrating options).
Secondly, if you also have a marker, it's very easy to turn many symbols into something completely meaningless by adding extra lines or markings to them, to obfuscate them so heavily that the have no symbolic value any more. Same for written language- it's very easy to change letters into other letters so that there's just a string of gobledigook instead of some racist nonsense.
As for spraypaint, that's a more heavy duty matter. You're unlikely to be in a position to clean it, and for obvious reasons I'm not going to suggest that you counter tag them. Find out who in your local government or council service is responsible for cleaning up graffiti, and get onto them to do that. If it's on private property such as a business place or public transport service, contact the company responsible for managing this and get them to sort it out. They very rarely want to leave swastikas on their property for long.
If your opponents are putting up graffiti and flyers, there's a reasonable chance that they're linking back to a website or identify some sort of group. It's possible they'll just post hateful content in the street, but while that gets their message out there, it doesn't give those quietly supporting them anything to latch onto. If they want to grow their movement and power, they need to be able to bring people in, and all but the most underground of orgs will need a web presence for that.
Once you've identified who your opponent is (or more likely they've identified themselves to you) it's time to do some research. Just looking them up in a search engine is a good start (for example Duck Duck Go, which is both perfectly effective and less actively hostile to you than google).
Take notes! Who are they? How do they identify themselves politically? What is their history? What do they claim to have been up to recently? Who do they work with or have affiliations with? Are they selling merchandise or literature?
It's important to know who your enemies are and what they are doing (or at least what they claim to have been doing). This will help you develop a better understanding of them, their ideology, level of power, and methods of operation.
Even better, are they leaking information anywhere? By this, I mean that while most fascist organisations will try to conceal their member's identities, some are careless and will let slip who's been doing what. Often a main org will have links to lots of smaller local orgs, which may have names or faces carelessly posted there by less experienced or savvy fascist activists.
If they're using their own domains, try a whois lookup and see if they've left their registration information exposed. This can instantly reveal who is responsible for a website if they've not bothered to make this information private.
Knowing who and what you're up against will help inform your activities down the line, and taking good quality notes will help you track their actions if they show up again. Information is a powerful tool, and when you're working alone it can be one of the best things you can have. Plus, if you ever start working with others, you can share this to get them up to speed quickly.
Once you've identified your opponents, you'll almost certainly find out that they have a website, as described above. Using the whois lookup described previously, it's also possible to see who is hosting their website.
Most web hosting services do not want to host the content of nazis. They don't actively block it because it's more work than they want to take on, but if you can find a way to report it there's a good chance they'll take it down. It looks extremely bad for your business (in most cases) if you are doing business with open fascists. I have personally had success in getting the websites of fascists hosted by free services such as blogger.com shut down. These free hosts almost all have report buttons somewhere, even if sometimes they try and use clever html edits to hide them.
Bigger web hosts that give customers full control over their website's appearance and content don't have built in reporting functions of course, but can still be pressured to removed things like neo-nazi content. In 2017, large web hosting service GoDaddy finally pulled the plug on Neo-Nazi news site the Daily Stormer, following a mass reporting campaign and the editors of the site actively siding with a murderer. It's harder to get these ones taken down, but not impossible. If your opponent is a smaller entity than something like the Daily Stormer, there's less incentive for their host to keep taking their money if they'll lose face when exposed for hosting extremist content. Not all hosting services are willing to work with you to deplatform fascists. In fact some exist specifically to facilitate this, but that leads us onto our next point...
Being a dickhead on the internet is free. Unless, you want to be a dickhead with full control over your content and hosting. In that case, it'll cost you.
If you get a neo-nazi group kicked off of their free host, keep an eye out for them in future. They may resurface with another free host, in which case go get them kicked off it again. It's funny to do this, so seriously, go for it.
However, they may actually be forced to pay for a premium 'anti-censorship' hosting service. I've seen this happen. By the quotes provided by some of these services, this means that the cost of promoting their fascist agenda online has just gone from nothing to several hundred pounds a year. Perhaps more. You've forced them to expend additional resources just to maintain something they were already committed to, and these are resources that take away from anything else they ever want to do.
Beyond that, it's not hard to trick fascists into wasting money. If they have a merch store (seriously some of these people actually sell merchandise), see if you can get that taken down too so they have to rehost somewhere else. If they have a FREEPOST mailing address for correspondence (the British National Party used to have one of these) send them an inordinate amount of cheap to produce post. They have to pay to receive this mail, and everything you send them will cost them money.
Does your opponent have an event planned which can be attended for free? Confirm your attendance using fake details and email addresses several times in order to inflate the perceived material needs for the event, and then leave them with an empty venue with just a few sad losers milling around.
If your opponent does have an event planned, and you know where and when it is, there's a reasonable chance you can get it shut down. As you've presumably done some of the research from Section 3, you might have a good chance of knowing what they're planning and where it is. Sometimes they're cagey about this, and also they often lie to the venue provider too. However, they have to publicise the event somewhere and if their fellow fash can spot it in the wild you probably can too.
Now if you know where and when they're doing this, and who the group is, you can organise to get the event shut down. Often this can be done by simply contacting the venue to explain to them who they're really hosting. Hardly anybody wants to host neo-nazis, and most don't want to actually be party to something controversial that could eventually result in them losing money or reputation. You might want to email, but if you're up for it a phone call is often far more effective. It's more personal, and while in the current day we all seem to have developed an aversion to phone calls, they are a really effective way of getting some things done.
I know I've mentioned above that this is something solo antifascists can do, but this is one of the tactics that scales very well if you can get more people to do it. You can still see success operating alone, but if you can work together with others you can really apply pressure.
If the venue isn't responsive to this, you could also notify local media, who will often jump at "controversial" topics and help put a spotlight on the situation. This could be counterproductive in some senses, giving additional exposure to fascists, but if it has the desired effect of pressuring their host to cancel the event then you'll still have succeeded in disrupting their organising and legitimisation efforts again.
---Well, there you have it. Five forms of antifascist action you can use for yourself to do the work of undermining fascism. Remember that, ultimately, there's a very high chance these people want you dead in some way or at some point or another. The scope of what is acceptable under the doctrine of fascism is an infinitely shrinking box, and if they're not targeting you today they could be tomorrow. While most fascist groups are in many ways comically inept and kind of pathetic, do not underestimate what violence these people wish to commit if given the chance. Fascism is a genocidal death cult. We must all work to prevent if from advancing. These are steps to help prevent it ever getting off the ground.
In the event it advances beyond this, further steps must be taken which are outside the scope of the article. This article was started a couple of years back, I'm finishing it in the Spring of 2023. The overall global political situation has continued to decline since then, the United States can be seen embracing fascism in it's core political structures in many states. The UK is making attempts to follow suit. These strategies will be most effective against local or regional fascist groups looking to take a foothold. Please seek further direction and work with your friends, colleagues, and other orgs in order to take effective action against fascist forces which have already advanced beyond what can be addressed here.