Antifascist and Proud! Hard Facts to Fight Back Against Propaganda.
Being antifascist supposedly makes you a terrorist?! Governments on every continent are signing off on this total delusion, media outlets on a leash are hammering it home and columnists who are nothing but cheap lackeys of the system repeat it on a loop.
Meanwhile, the people who vote for laws that gut our freedoms are supposedly democrats. The people bankrolling the rise of hate with billions are supposedly philanthropists. The people who weaponize poverty to set populations against each other are supposedly patriots. Fuck! This is 1984, straight up! And the bigger the lie, the better it sells!
This article pulls no punches and it’s dedicated to everyone who thinks all of this loudly in their head while we say it out loud. Starting with this: antifascism isn’t a political “side.” It’s the default setting of any human being with a working brain and a shred of memory. So get ready for a wide sweep that rips the masks off fascism. By the end you’ll see who the real terrorists are in this upside-down world! One thing before we start. Unlike fascists, whose favorite sport is bending facts and history, we only need the truth to rub their noses in their own mental shit.
What is antifascism? A quick refresher for the amnesiacs!
Antifascism wasn’t born in a sociology department. It was born in blood! In the sheer urgency of staying alive under regimes that were grinding up whole populations.
The first antifascists were Italian workers getting beaten bloody by Mussolini’s blackshirts in the 1920s. International brigade volunteers who came to Spain to die fighting Franco. Ever since the revolutions against the monarchies, resisters, partisans and guerrillas on every continent chose to die on their feet instead of living on their knees. Plenty of others took torture rather than renounce their ideals of liberty, equality and brotherhood.
We still call those people heroes. Some of their names are carved into monuments. Some countries even have national holidays for them. So calling them terrorists is a hard sell, because erasing history is close to impossible. That’s why the trick is to make the new generation of antifas look like good-for-nothings next to their elders. Modern antifas, so the fascists say, are just rioters with no ideology. Nothing could be further from the truth!
Anyone who thinks antifascism has become a fight from another era should open their eyes for five minutes. Because we live in a hard time. With billionaires in power trampling basic freedoms. With media on their leash turned into propaganda machines. With scapegoats served up to the mob. With the weakest minorities marked for slaughter. So compared to the old days, the setup is exactly the same. Which is why modern antifascism belongs right where it is, as a counterweight to oppressors of every stripe.
What is fascism? The etymology and history of a murderous ideology
The word fascism gets thrown at everything these days. Throw it around long enough and you forget what it actually means. So here’s the quick history, so we know exactly what we’re talking about: fascism comes from the Italian “fascio,” meaning bundle, which comes from the Latin “fasces.” In ancient Rome, the lictors’ fasces were a bunch of wooden rods tied around an axe. They stood for the absolute power of Roman magistrates. The power to punish and the power to kill. Separate the rods and they snap. Bind them together and nothing breaks them. The whole fascist philosophy sits in that image. Unity through force. Submit or be destroyed.
In 1919, in Milan, a former socialist who’d been kicked out of his own party founded the Fasci italiani di combattimento, the Italian fasces of combat. This half-crazed guy was named Benito Mussolini. A megalomaniac narcissist obsessed with the fantasy grandeur of the Roman Empire. An opportunist who flipped his ideology as often as he swapped mistresses. He said himself that he let himself be “aristocratic and democratic, conservative and progressive, reactionary and revolutionary” as circumstances required. Bottom line: he had no real convictions. Just an absolute hunger for power.
His method was violence, physical and verbal, as a political tool. His blackshirts beat up workers, torched the people’s halls and murdered opponents. In 1922 came the March on Rome. The king folded and Mussolini took power. Within a few years he’d methodically wiped out every opposition, seizing the press, banning unions and crushing basic rights. The instruction manual for large-scale totalitarianism was written. Others picked it up and ran with it, more savagely still.
So fascism didn’t stay Italian for long. It spilled across borders fast and became the catch-all name for every flavor of authoritarianism and nationalism. Hitler, Franco, Salazar and plenty of others copied Mussolini’s model, adapted it and usually cranked it up. Everybody knows how that ended. Tens of millions dead. Hundreds of millions brutalized. The biggest slaughter in human history. And the most terrifying part is that the recipe for stripping entire peoples of their freedom hasn’t budged an inch.
The monster gallery: from the founder to fascism’s modern heirs
Mussolini opened the door and what came next was authoritarian insanity. The history of fascism is a long list of butchers in suits and ties, all running the same recipe with local variations.
Hitler in Germany pushed it all the way to industrialized horror. Bankrolled by Germany’s biggest industrialists, and American ones too, he turned fascism into an extermination machine. Six million Jews died in concentration camps. Along with millions of Roma, gay people, disabled people and political opponents of every kind. Franco in Spain set up a dictatorship that lasted almost 40 years, crushing his own people in a civil war of unbelievable violence. Salazar in Portugal kept his country in a stranglehold for more than 40 years. Pétain in France handed whole families over to the Nazis with the eagerness of a star pupil.
And don’t come at us with the line that fascism is a right-wing monopoly! Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot showed that red fascism could be every bit as devastating. From the gulags to the reeducation camps, from the Holodomor to the Khmer Rouge, the totalitarian left more than proved itself at mass horror. The list goes on forever and it spares no continent.
But that’s all in the past, right? Sure, it’s in every history book. So by now we should have learned our lesson about populism. Guess again! Putin crushes Ukraine and poisons his opponents in the name of eternal greater Russia. Trump turns the world’s leading power into an authoritarian circus, with a billionaire throwing Nazi salutes as master of ceremonies. And all over the world far-right parties are at the doorstep of power or already comfortably inside.
What are the different forms of fascism?
A lot of people picture fascism as one monolithic thing, uniforms and military parades. The reality is way more twisted than that! Fascism is a chameleon. It adapts, it mutates, it puts on costumes… But under every mask you find the same psychological profile and the same machinery of domination.
Political fascism: nostalgia for a golden age that never existed
The soil political fascism grows in never changes. Take a population going through real social decline. Add a heavy dose of nostalgia for a past greatness that’s pure fantasy. Stir well and let it simmer.
“Make America Great Again”! Great when exactly? When Black people couldn’t drink from the same fountain as white people? When 12-year-olds worked the mines? And Putin’s “eternal greater Russia”? Which glorious empire are we talking about? The one where the tsars let the peasants starve or the one where Stalin shipped them to the gulag?
Same sleight of hand every time! You invent a glorious past that never happened to justify an authoritarian project in the present. And it works! Because people who are hurting desperately need to believe that going backward will fix everything.
Religious fascism: future glory as a license to oppress and kill
Religion runs the same machinery, just mirrored. Political fascism sells a fantasy past, religious fascism sells a fantasy future. Paradise, the global caliphate, the promised land, God’s kingdom on earth, the return of the messiah… Unverifiable promises, every one of them, and they justify the worst shit imaginable in the name of one or several gods whose existence is still very much unproven. Good luck proving it! We’re still waiting on the evidence…
Meanwhile the list of variations on this giant con keeps growing: evangelical Christian fundamentalism rotting American and Brazilian politics. Radical Islamism turning entire countries into lawless zones. Zionism justifying apartheid in the name of texts written 3,000 years ago. Hindu nationalism lynching Muslims in the name of the sacred cow. Even Buddhism, supposedly the religion of peace, signing off on a genocide in Myanmar. With all that, we’re not out of the shit by a long shot!
No religion gets a pass. Not a single one! The moment a belief system gets into politics and claims the right to force its worldview on people who don’t share it, that’s fascism, plain and simple. Period.
State fascism: the elephant in the room
Now for the part that makes a lot of people angry: ALL governments, no exceptions, carry the seeds of fascism inside them. It’s a matter of degree, not of nature. Proof: which state has clean hands? Which one never crushed a legitimate revolt? Never clubbed peaceful protesters? Never jailed its opponents? Never lied to its own people?… I’ll let you sit with those.
That’s also why anarchists and communists have always cordially loathed each other. Anarchists understood from day one that any centralized power, even in the people’s name, ends up turned against the people. History has proved us right every time. Every fucking time! Which gives me a chance to bring up Louise Michel and her famous line: power is cursed, that’s why I’m an anarchist.
Fascism and capitalism: the perfect marriage!
Fascists of every stripe have always tried to bury one thing. A truth so huge it’s staring you in the face. And almost nobody in mainstream media says it out loud. Fascism has ALWAYS been capital’s armed wing. Always. No exceptions!
Mussolini? Carried to power by Italian industrialists and big landowners who were scared shitless of the workers’ unions. Hitler? We covered that one, funded by big capital. Franco? Backed by the big estate owners and the Spanish oligarchy. Pinochet? Installed by a coup run with Washington’s blessing to protect the interests of American multinationals.
Same pattern every time. The ultra-rich see popular movements threatening their privileges. So they bankroll a strongman to crush the people in the name of the people. And the ultra-rich keep fattening up quietly behind the curtain.
And today? There isn’t even a curtain anymore! Elon Musk, the richest man on the planet, throws Nazi salutes in public and plays adviser to the king at the White House. Peter Thiel openly funds the most radical right in the United States. In Europe billionaires buy up entire media empires and turn them into propaganda machines for their own interests. And it slides right through! After all that, we’re supposed to keep our mouths shut or get labeled terrorists!
The mechanism is crystal clear. Unleashed capitalism produces mass downward mobility. Downward mobility produces anger. And anger is fantastic fuel. All you have to do is aim it at targets that are easy to smear: immigrants, sexual minorities, leftists, moochers, tree huggers… Anyone EXCEPT the people actually responsible. Anyone except the ones gorging themselves at the top of the pyramid while everybody else fights over crumbs at the bottom.
And if after all that you still think Trump, or any other populist leader, gives a shit about your sorry ass, your paycheck or your future… then the smoke machine is working exactly as designed.
How does fascism feed on political and religious populism?
Fascism never falls out of the sky. It doesn’t install itself by magic. It needs fertile soil and that soil is populism. Political or religious, the mechanism is identical. And it always works on two floors.
At the top of the pyramid you always find very smart people. Strategists, communications pros, first-rate manipulators who don’t believe half of what they’re saying. These people know exactly what they’re doing. They know the strings, they know the codes, they know which buttons trigger fear, hate or fake hope. Politics and religion are just tools to them. Levers for getting power and keeping it. They talk to the people and they despise the people. They denounce the elite and they ARE the elite. And they have a good laugh at night counting their cash.
Down below you find the followers. People whose pain is often completely real. Falling status, unemployment, insecurity, the feeling of being ignored by a system that dumped them. All of that is true. The problem is they’re aiming their anger at the wrong people. They’ve been handed culprits who are easy to spot and easy to hate. The immigrant stealing your job. The leftist living off your taxes. The green-haired LGBT. The Muslim threatening your culture. The tree hugger trying to stop you from driving your gas guzzler. Convenient scarecrows, all of them, while the people actually responsible for their misery keep gorging with total impunity.
The religious side runs the exact same scam. Up top, preachers, imams, rabbis and gurus of every kind living like kings off the gullibility of their flock. Down below, sincere believers, often in real distress, promised paradise in exchange for total submission. And between the two, nothing! No debate. No questioning. No critical thinking. Just blind obedience.
Being antifa and lumped in with the great political circus? Hard no!
“Far left.” That’s the idiot label they slap on your forehead the second you run your mouth. You’re against fascism? Far left! You’re against billionaires buying elections? Far left! You’re for social justice? Far left! You’re for free speech? Far left! Basically, if you don’t go along with the program of the oligarchs who’ve cornered power, you’re automatically “extreme” something.
What a beautiful con! “Far left,” what the fuck does that even mean! It’s a flat-out invention built to criminalize any form of dissent. A handy sorting tool for filing troublemakers into a box and discrediting them without ever answering their arguments. You’re labeled, so you’re disqualified. Move along, nothing to see here!
We refuse to play that game! We refuse to take a seat in the bleachers of this political circus where left and right put on a show while the same people pull the strings backstage. That’s exactly what the trap is. Making you believe you get to choose between two sides when both work for the same boss.
And while we’re tearing each other apart over “left” and “right,” over “moderates” and “extremists,” the real fight goes completely unnoticed. The one at the top against the ones at the bottom. The ones who have everything against the ones who have nothing. But that, obviously, is the one thing nobody’s supposed to talk about! Not on the schedule.
So to be perfectly clear: we’re not left, not right, not center, not extreme anything. We’re just on the side of everyone who refuses to get played. And if that bothers people, good! It means it’s working.
Didier Desor’s rat experiment is the key to understanding all of it
What if the key to this whole mess sat in a rat cage? Sounds ridiculous, but an experiment run in 1994 by Didier Desor, a behavioral neuroscience researcher at the University of Nancy in France, lights up our society with surgical precision.
The setup is simple: you take six rats. You put them in a cage whose only way out opens onto a tunnel full of water they have to swim through, holding their breath, to reach the food. And you watch…
After a few days, the same social structure shows up every time. Two exploiters who never get wet and beat the others to steal their food. Two exploited ones who dive, bring back the food, get shaken down and only eat once the exploiters have had their fill. Plus a punching bag who picks up the crumbs. And one autonomous rat who dives for his own food and defends it tooth and nail. The exploiters can’t do a thing about him. They tried to bring him into line and took a serious beating every time. So they leave him alone and fall back on the exploited ones, who don’t fight back.
The really fascinating part comes next… Desor took six exploiters and put them together. They fought all night. By morning, the same structure had rebuilt itself. Two exploiters, two exploited, one punching bag and one autonomous rat. Same thing with six exploited ones. Same thing with six autonomous ones. Every time, the same hierarchy reassembles. Like it’s a basic law of living things.
And when they ran it again with two hundred rats, the cruelty exploded! Three rats mutilated, skin torn off. And the exploiters at the top didn’t even dirty their paws anymore. They’d built themselves lieutenants to do the filthy work for them.
Sound familiar?
The conclusion of this experiment is a monumental slap in the face! It proves that creating stress reliably installs a hierarchy of exploiters, exploited and autonomous. Compared to rats, human beings have invented exactly one thing: persecuting the autonomous.
And that’s exactly where we are! The autonomous ones, the ones who refuse to dominate AND refuse to submit, are the antifascists. At first the exploiters couldn’t break them with brute force. So human beings came up with what rats never had: courts and media propaganda. Where an exploiter rat got smacked around trying to shake down an autonomous one, a state can simply declare him a terrorist and lock him up. Clever, and above all utterly vile.
The inversion of values: when fascism rewrites reality
We live in a time when a billionaire can say in public that Hitler was a communist and millions of people nod along. A time when the word “activist” means criminal. When “resister” means terrorist. When “antifascist” is an insult. We’re deep inside Orwell’s nightmare. War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.
This inversion doesn’t fall out of the sky. It’s deliberate, methodical and extremely effective. The far right figured out long ago that winning the political fight means winning the language fight first. Infiltrate the words. Hijack the concepts. Flip the meaning of things until nobody can tell true from false anymore. Plus the famous Overton window trick, of course.
And to sell that slop they need spokesmen. Media figures. Cardboard heroes like Charlie Kirk in the United States, supposedly able to make any leftist look ridiculous in debates filmed for social media. Except those famous debates are pure circus. Loaded questions thrown at students caught off guard in front of a camera. Editing calibrated to keep only the moments where the opponent stumbles. Pure manipulation! Because the reality is that with the shit he had in his head, the guy wouldn’t have lasted two minutes against an intellectual with even minimal preparation.
But truth doesn’t matter in this game. The show matters. The thirty-second clip with three million views matters. Creating the illusion that fascism has some positive case matters. It never had one! Fascism has never won a single intellectual debate in all of human history. Not one! It wins by force, by fear, by manipulation and by lies. Never by reason.
Which is exactly why they need to smear antifascism. Antifascism is reason. It’s memory. It’s refusing to swallow bullshit wrapped in patriotic or religious gift paper. And to them, that’s the ultimate threat. For all those reasons, we antifas of every country need to get our fight back and take back, at minimum, the ground we’ve handed over to fascism.
Bottom line: being antifascist is a matter of pride, a duty and a real fight
Being antifascist is something to be proud of! There’s nothing to be ashamed of here. Being antifascist puts you in the line of millions of women and men who fought the highest battles humanity has known. People who gave their freedom, their health and often their lives so that you today can open your mouth without ending up in a cell or a mass grave. Their memory deserves to be honored every day. Not once a year at some hypocritical official ceremony where politicians lay wreaths while voting for laws that spit on everything those heroes defended.
Sure, you can’t stop some people from having shit for brains. That’s impossible and it always will be. Because history has proved that human stupidity is an inexhaustible resource. What you can stop is those people setting the rules of the game.
So we’ve got to make every one of these fascists strutting around 24/7 in the media, online and in our streets lower their heads. Neo-Nazis, religious extremists, megalomaniac billionaires, frustrated men’s rights guys, lobotomized tradwives, gutter columnists, crooked politicians… And I’m leaving out plenty worse! All of them belong back down in the sewers they never should have crawled out of. Because antifascism isn’t dead! Because antifascism will never die! Because as long as there’s one asshole trying to crush other people, somebody will stand up and tell him to get back in his kennel. And that somebody is you. It’s us. It’s now!
The only reason we exist is to get articles like this one out as widely as possible to push back against the official narratives. So if you found this useful, please share it far and wide. Posting it on your social media takes a few seconds. While we’re here, a reminder that all our articles are copyleft. If you want to republish it, print it, whatever… there’s nothing to ask. Just cite the source, the way it’s usually done. And if you want to respond to this at length, you can do it on our Mastodon account. Either way, thanks a lot for reading all the way through and see you very soon for more adventures.
If you enjoyed this article,
support copyleft and open source
and help us bring our projects to life.
