Yahoo! reporter Caitlin Dickson penned a gushing paean Monday for the secretive movement of combative leftists who seek to destroy authoritarian movements with direct action. The piece even included a photo of a large group of smiling happy warriors, unarmed and fists raised in righteous indignation at the white supremacists they would confront.
According to Ms. Dickson, [A]ntifas origins can be traced back to Europe in the 1920s and 30s. Since the end of World War II, antifa activity has ebbed and flowed along with that of neo-Nazis, skinheads and other hate movements that have sprung up around the United Kingdom, Germany and the United States.
In fact, as the avowedly Marxist-socialist periodical Jacobin magazine explains in a much more honest, if not less enthusiastic, appraisal, Antifa, originally known in its native Germany as Antifaschistische Aktion, was founded as the militant wing of the German Communist Party. In the 1930s, it was known to be every bit as violent as its Nazi opponents. After World War Two, Antifa groups re-formed in Germany to collaborate with Soviet communists on subduing the country and rooting out its past to create a new socialist utopia. They were active in Communist-controlled East Germany until that countrys Stalinist leadership got fed up, broke the groups up, and sent many of their leaders to gulags.
The modern Antifa is a transnational movement of pale imitators of their communist forebears who have mostly traded class-struggle for anti-racism and other vague ideologies that tend to justify violently attacking any group they feel ought not to be able to speak. The modern movement began among squat-dwelling punks in West Berlin and other West German cities in the 1980s and soon had chapters throughout Europe. The Antifa scene in the United States, by contrast, began with the more American-friendly name Anti-Racist Action among Midwestern skinheads in the late 1980s and early 1990s. It has grown up recently more than its European counterparts, especially in college towns like Berkeley, California, and cities with bustling punk communities like Chicago, Illinois.
They prefer direct action: They pressure venues to deny white supremacists space to meet, Dickson writes, neglecting to mention that direct action to Antifa means smashing people in the face with bike locks, spraying elderly men with bear mace, sending reporters to the hospital when they film them, and then bragging about it online, all because people with different opinions than theirs are allowed to speak, or simply be, in public.
http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2017/08/15/yahoo-news-antifa-glowing-profile/