Talk:Antifascist Action/Archive1

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Someone should...

Someone should copy-edit this mess.--Arisboch ☞✍☜☞✉☜ ∈)☼(∋ 09:44, 21 December 2015 (UTC)

Aaaww, anti fascists in Australia have lots of enemies, but no friends...?

Sorry, but I found this simply too (unintentionally) hilarious. Googling for a national AFA/antifa website for Australia (to go with the Danish and Swedish ones I've already added), I found only a WordPress blog (apart from a specific Sydney branch WordPress blog). Very endearingly, the Antifa Australia blog has a list of Our Enemies which includes various right winger parties, movements and factions, but when one clicks the blog's list of Our Friends one is met with an empty page, the ubiquitous "like" button and the sad text "Be the first to like this."

So, apparently, being an Aussie Antifa is a lonesome and friendless task... It reminds me of the opening of A Pub with No Beer:
"It's lonesome away from your kindred and all;
By the campfire at night where the wild dingos call;
But there's nothing so lonesome, so dull or so drear;
Than to stand in the bar of a pub with no beer."
Poor, poor Aussie Antifas; apparently, not even other Antifas want to befriend them, condemning them to a bleak existence surrounded by enemies that extend far beyond the shores of fair Australia and include Golden Dawn and the Ku Klux Klan... ScepticWombat (talk) 07:16, 21 February 2016 (UTC)

Well Antifa is a very wide-spread movement. They may not have friends on the page, but they have enough people in the movement to make it very effective. The only sad thing is several area-specific Antifa movements are communistic, some British ones will even call each other comrade. 𐌈FedoraTippingSkeptic𐌈 (talk) 07:23, 21 February 2016 (UTC)

I hope you realise that I was largely being flippant, right? At most, the "no friends" thing suggests that the Aussie Antifa blog represents a slim number of persons and hasn't bothered listing other national Antifa groups (perhaps because it's so geographically distant from the Antifa "heartland" in Europe). ScepticWombat (talk) 07:33, 21 February 2016 (UTC)

Alright, I just want to point out while there are groups that specifically oppose fascism (like the UAF) the antifascist movement itself isn't really a group. 𐌈FedoraTippingSkeptic𐌈 (talk) 07:38, 21 February 2016 (UTC)

Of course it isn't. It's as amorphous a concept as "leftism" itself and also dependent on national political context. Just off the top of my head, I'd say that the AFA/Antifa movement(s) includes anything from various revolutionary socialists and communists to different flavours of anarchists, as well as probably some direct action-focused democratic socialists/social democrats too (though, as a rule of thumb, I suspect that a rough political demographic of the AFA/Antifa movement would be "to the left of Social Democrats").

Btw, I'd be happy if you added some more helpful descriptions to the links in the footnotes, rather than the singularly uninformative YouTube URLs and the like. ScepticWombat (talk) 07:47, 21 February 2016 (UTC)

Criticism of Antifa comes mostly from the right?

So, you wish to imply, indirectly, that people who consider themselves to be Liberals will typically approve of violent means? This sounds like something Donald Trump would say.Ariel31459 (talk) 14:47, 7 August 2017 (UTC)

Should there be mention of the realized action? Berkley, Boston and Charlotsville come to mind recently. 64.210.21.210 (talk) 07:43, 22 August 2017 (UTC)

Not all Antifa activists or groups are violent. Evil Zionist (talk) 20:24, 22 August 2017 (UTC)

Just the ones that are violent tend to be painfully obvious and get all the media attention. It doesn't help when a lot of them dress up in the same black bloc uniforms. ^{— Unsigned, by: 149.150.238.192 / talk / contribs}

In my experience

The AFA, atleast in Sweden, come across as a movement by (and for) violent assholes. For whatever reason, they tend to mainly harass/bully/threaten/no platform other leftists (including any and all non-violent communists). I've never read about the AFA taking the time to clash with actual Nazis (Sweden is estimated to have the odd 100 individual neo-Nazis in total). Aside from putting up stickers everywhere and performing random and pointless acts of petty vandalism, on occasion they've intelligently been out setting fire to people's cars at night. More than once, according to the local paper, they've actually managed to destroy the wrong person's car in doing so. Reverend Black Percy (talk) 15:35, 7 August 2017 (UTC)

Here in the U.S. the left-wing Antifa movement is comprised of communists, marxists and socialists due to personal experience with such activities. 'GrammarCommie' keeps reverting my minor edits because they seemingly have no idea what left-wing means. Reason given for reverting minor edit is that left-wing comprises moderates and greens LOL! Greens are socialists. Moderates want nothing to do with Antifa. I make a rational edit and the mod irrationally reverts it. I thought this was rational wiki...guess not. ^{— Unsigned, by: Red1 / talk / contribs} 15:09, 18 December 2017 (UTC)

I said AFA also includes Greens, moderates etc. And for the record while there may be some overlap between greens and socialists they are not one and the same. Furthermore, uncorroborated anecdotal claims are not valid source material. GrammarCommie (talk) 15:21, 18 December 2017 (UTC)

There is no one "the" Antifa

The article seems to get this at times and gets it wrong, too. For example it says "they" (now replaced by "AFA") are classified as a terrorist organization in New Jersey, but really there are probably more organizations of that name or a deceptively similar name than anybody could count. Heck, the people's front of Judaea would probably consider them too keen on minor distinctions and splitting up needlessly... Evil Zionist (talk) 18:30, 16 August 2017 (UTC)

You're right to suppose that the AFA is basically more of a 'branding opportunity for local vandals' than anything else. Reverend Black Percy (talk) 20:22, 16 August 2017 (UTC)

That's not actually the way most groups calling themselves Antifa have presented themselves to me thus far. Evil Zionist (talk) 20:22, 22 August 2017 (UTC)

I might be wrong, but isn't this while paragraph full of logical fallacies?

Antifa, notably, doesn't always initiate the violence that breaks out between them and their opponents. Just sometimes. Likewise, in the US, far more violent activities have been linked to Neo-Nazi and white supremacist individuals and groups than to Antifa members. Additionally, the motive behind Antifascist action is re-markedly different than the motive behind Neo-Nazi and other far-right activist groups; the motive of the latter being primarily the oppression and control of others (a la the Nazi party of Germany), while the former primarily being that of self-defense or resistance of authoritarianism (a la the French Resistance, which engaged in defensive violence against members of the Nazi party in WWII). ^{— Unsigned, by: 98.214.243.154 / talk / contribs} 08:28, 5 January 2018 (UTC)

On talk pages, please sign your comments using four tildes (~~~~) or by clicking on the sign button: on the toolbar above the edit panel. You can also indent successive talk page comments using one more colon (:) for each line. Thank you. CowHouse (talk) 08:40, 5 January 2018 (UTC)

It does engage in the "not as bad as" fallacy. Bongolian (talk) 17:03, 5 January 2018 (UTC)