One of the most difficult and confusing things to try to understand about anti-fascism is its history. The internet is filled with bad, ad hoc, or just plain made up information on the topic, often written by someone with an agenda to deliberately disinform.
Our agenda is to get the facts right, as best as that’s possible. To that end, we’ve set ourselves the task of researching, documenting, and recording the most accurate history of anti-fascism as we can create, from the core concepts that existed long before fascism was even a thing to the present day.
It wouldn’t be inaccurate to say that the fundamental human struggle for liberty, from the murky and unreliable records of the Seth Rebellion and other uprisings during Egypt’s Second Dynasty to the currently ongoing (at the time of this writing) worldwide protests of the Black Lives Matter movement (with many other groups and non-groups like “antifa” in solidarity), people have assassinated, struggled, seduced, and warred to be free of oppression whether dictatorial or systemic, religious or political or economic.
We see in the great mass of reporting and think-pieces about anti-fascism wildly variable and impossible to reconcile assertions, all claiming to be authoritative, regarding the “origin” of anti-fascism. The simple reality is that “anti-fascism” and its derivatives like “antifa” are neologisms; new words created to describe, in some cases, ancient behavior. While it’s not within our scope to exhaustively detail every populist rebellion in history, it’s well worth taking a moment to look at a brief overview of these events and reference a few “high points” to establish the case that “anti-fascism” really amounts to “anti-authoritarianism,” which has been a basic human goal since pre-history.
In the western world – that which has historically (and erroneously in many cases) focused identity mostly on European and Middle-Eastern roots – we may learn of the many rebellions and uprisings in ancient Greece and Rome: the overthrow of the Roman monarchy by those wishing a more representative form of government, called a “republic,” the establishment of the Tribune of the Plebs in 494 BCE, the Maccabean Revolt (characterized in Jewish religious tradition as a revolt against the decree of Antiochus IV forbidding Jewish religious practice; other historians make the case was more related to conflicts between orthodox and reformist elements within the Jewish culture), and so forth through history to the present day.
In surveying the history of revolt and rebellion in human cultures, it seems clear that the primary motivating factor in each, either directly or indirectly, is the desire of human beings to a reasonable degree of autonomy. While some of these play out as direct overthrow attempts against a despotic ruler, in others questions of religious freedom come heavily in to play. It could reasonably be said that other than economic conditions, religious liberty has been one of the primary motivators of rebellion historically.
In both these cases, and moving in to the modern era, the fundamental and constant motivations of popular rebellion, uprising, and protest have tended to come down to human beings fighting against oppression. In ancient Rome, the plebes and slaves often drove revolt; in the middle east, the prohibition of certain religious practices has tended more often to be a factor. Moving farther east, we find various ancient Chinese revolutions and uprisings tended to be based on popular desire for freedom from a despotic or tyrannical ruler or series of rulers, as in the Rebellion of the Three Guards and Red Eyebrow rebellions, or of another nation or etho-geographic population pushing back against occupying rulers, such as the various rebellions of the region – later nation – of Vietnam.
It’s not until fairly modern history – the U.S. Civil War – that we find the idea of popular uprising being truly usurped and inverted as a tool used in pursuit of maintaining oppression; in that case, the oppression of black people of both African and Carribbean nativity as chattel slaves in the American south. This was made undeniably clear in the so-called “Cornerstone Speech” of Confederate Vice-President Alexander Stevens, made in the contemporary manner to the public at the Athenaeum in Savannah, Georgia in March of 1861, a few weeks before the first shots of the war were fired:
Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its corner-stone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition.
Revisionist history continues to this very day in an attempt to cast this uprising as a populist rebellion for “states’ rights” against an oppressive government in Washington – originally a disinformation narrative fashioned by John C. Calhoun and sometimes referred to as the ‘Calhoun Doctrine,’ based on part on this speech in which Calhoun argues that
…the enactment of any law, which should directly, or by its effects, deprive the citizens of any of the States of this Union from emigrating, with their property, into any of the territories of the United States…would, therefore, be a violation of the constitution and the rights of the States from which such citizens emigrated
without ever mentioning that the property in question and at issue was, specifically, black human slaves.
This doctrine was later promulgated by Confederate President Jefferson Davis and consequently by uncountable advocates against the fundamental human rights of black people, and to this day the “states’ rights” argument is one of the most proliferated and repeated nonsense arguments in all recorded human dialogue.
In spite of that, the basic truth of the matter is that this war was always about trying to maintain the “right” to own other human beings, specifically blacks, as property, based on the theory that black people are a separate and inferior species to white. While propaganda and disinformation tactics are nearly as old as time, this was the first major conflict in which the entire conflict was predicated on the dishonest notion that the oppressors were themselves oppressed.
Various academics and pontificators have opined that anti-fascism must not possibly extend to, for instance, a national military because any national military is inherently fascist. Others suggest that anti-fascism and extremist leftist ideologies are synonymous. We disagree with both assertions and believe these claims serve only the interests of perpetuating fascism by attempting to cast opposition to it as a fringe, radical, and dangerous ideology adhered to only by those who wish to inflict violence, etc. The very word “antifascist” works to muddy the issue and position fascism within the narrative frame as a superior and default human ideology.
The truth, as we can see, is exactly the opposite. Long before fascism existed, anti-fascism was part and parcel of the human condition and continues to be so to this very moment.
