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BY ATTACKING ANTI-FASCISM, TRUMP DEFENDS FASCISM  
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C.J. Polychroniou
September 27, 2025
Common Dreams
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_ While there was little doubt before as to where Trump stood on
democracy and human decency, he has made it clear with his decision to
designate Antifa a “terrorist” organization that he and his
coterie are clearly on the side of fascism. _

A protestor stands infront of an image of Trump dressed as Hitler.,
Michael Nigro/Pacific Press/LightRocket via Getty Images

 

Trump’s executive order
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designating Antifa a “domestic terrorist organization” has spurred
widespread interest in the anti-fascist movement. Of course, it is
well understood that Antifa is not a single organization but an
umbrella term for loosely affiliated groups of activists scattered
across the United States and parts of Europe that confront and combat
fascism and racism. Antifa, however, is more of an idea than an actual
organization, so Trump’s order calling on US authorities to act
against “any person claiming to act on behalf of Antifa, or for
which Antifa or any person claiming to act on behalf of Antifa
provided material support” isn’t simply idiotic and
unconstitutional but says a great deal about where the “beloved
leader” stands on free speech and fascism itself.

Simply put, by vilifying anti-fascist struggles, Trump is defending
fascism as a good thing. So is his “comrade-in-arms” Viktor Orbán
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who has also proposed taking similar action in Hungary while his
Minister of Foreign Affairs and Trade Péter Szijjártó
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gone even further by urging the European Union to follow Donald
Trump’s lead and designate Antifa a terrorist organization.

In the age of right-wing authoritarianism and proto-fascist strongmen,
it is understandable that Trump and Orban wish to ban anti-fascist
struggles. Relying on repression to consolidate power is an obligatory
measure for all authoritarian regimes. Netanyahu might be the next
unhinged leader to take action against Antifa. Anti-fascists in Israel
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of far-right Israeli extremists; moreover, there have been voices
inside the country saying that “only an anti-fascist front”
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Israel’s slide toward fascism. That’s dangerous talk in the
current political climate in Israel.

Donald Trump [[link removed]], Viktor
Orbán, and Benjamin Netanyahu are central figures in the global
far-right movement. Indeed, the holy trinity of neofascism is
represented today by Israel, Hungary, and the United States. Far-right
movements and parties are on the rise worldwide, and they are
expanding beyond national borders, “engaging in cross-border
networking to export their ideologies worldwide
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according to Thomas Greven from Freie Universität Berlin. What unites
them are anti-immigrant politics, anti-leftism, traditional family
values, Islamophobia, anti-LGBTQ, and rejection of the ideals and
values of Western European Enlightenment.

Far-right movements and neofascist parties believe that cultural
hegemony is as important as political influence. Hence the attack on
“woke” culture, gender ideology, and secularism. Of course, the
far right is not a monolith, but there are lots of overlaps among the
far-right’s varied movements. However, in the pursuit of creating an
ultranationalistic state and building a homogeneous society, crushing
the forces of the left becomes nothing short of an urgent political
necessity for far-right movements and neofascist parties because of
their awareness that especially the so-called “radical left”
represents the only real political resistance to their dystopian
vision.

Whether there are parallels between the state of liberal democracies
today and that of the 1930s is tricky business. Nonetheless, today’s
left could learn vital lessons by studying the antifascist struggles
of the 1930s and 1940s. For the main task today is, again, defeating
the forces of reaction, most powerfully represented by an idiotic
bully and wannabe dictator in Washington, DC, an autocrat in Budapest,
and the “butcher of Gaza” in Jerusalem.

For starters, the left needs to be united and thus avoid infighting.
Liberals must also be seen as potential allies in the fight against
right-wing authoritarianism and “proto-fascism.” The ability of
the Nazis in Germany to overpower the opposition prior to Hitler’s
rise to power surely relied on a sustained campaign of terror against
the labor movement, communists, and anti-fascist activists while the
state looked the other way, but it was also due to the fact that the
left was fractured while the right united behind Hitler. The left was
also divided in Italy
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while the fascists marched through towns beating and killing hundreds
of labor leaders, socialists, and communists. Sadly enough, a similar
phenomenon was encountered in Spain,
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with the left struggling to unite both before and during the Spanish
Civil War.

Nonetheless, the anti-fascist struggles of the pre-war period remain
of paramount importance and have in fact shaped the left of today, as
Joseph Fronczak has argued in his book Everything Is Possible:
Antifascism and the Left in the Age of Fascism
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The first antifascist organization was the Arditi del Popolo
(People’s Shock Troops) in Italy, formed in 1921 by various
militants (anarchists, left socialists, communists, and Republicans)
who saw that the Socialist Party was either incapable or unwilling to
take the fight to the fascists. Working-class defense organizations
existed in Italy both before and after World War I, but the emergence
of the Arditi del Popolo was driven by the urgent need to “defend
the persons and institutions of the working class from fascist
squadrism by openly confronting fascism on the same terrain of
violence chosen by the Mussolini movement,” as the Italian scholar
Antonio Sonnessa
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has pointed out.

The ultimate organized resistance to Italian fascism took place in
August 1922 in the city of Parma
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when the Arditi del Popolo and their allies Formazioni di difesa
proletaria (Proletarian Defense Formations), outnumbered and
outgunned, repelled and totally humiliated thousands of fascists. This
event represented a rare moment of unity among the different strands
of the Italian left, although the fascists may not have been repelled
if it wasn’t for the valiant support provided by the working-class
people of Parma. As Guido Picelli,
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the head of the Arditi del Popolo of Parma later recalled:

Working-class people took to the streets—as bold as the waters of a
river which is bursting its banks. With their shovels, pick-axes, iron
bars and all sorts of tools, they helped the Arditi del Popolo to dig
up the cobblestones and tram tracks, to dig trenches, and to erect
barricades using carts, benches, timber, iron girders and anything
else they could get their hands on. Men, women, old people, young
people from all parties and from no party at all were all there,
united in a single iron will: resist and fight.

Nevertheless, the main parties of the left went on afterwards to
abandon the Arditi del Popolo and Mussolini was in power just ten
weeks after his horde of fascist thugs were defeated in Parma.

In 1932, the German Communist Party (KPD) launched Antifaschistische
Aktion (Antifascist Action), but the antifa movement failed to create
antifascist unity as the KPD’s ideology and strategy was formed by
Stalinism which had branded the German Social Democratic Party (SPD)
as “social fascists.” That said, the SPD also had nothing but
contempt and even hatred for the KPD and the party’s ideology,
structure, and political culture, as Donna Harsch has argued in her
path-breaking work _German Social Democracy and the Rise of Nazism_
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_left it incapable of taking on the Nazis and helping to avert the
collapse of the Weimar Republic. In this sense, as David Karvala
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one of the spokespeople of Unity Against Fascism and Racism
_Catalonia_, has stressed, “The disastrous failure of the
anti-fascist action strategy should serve as a warning to activists
who want to stop fascism today.”

On October 4, 1936, an estimated 300,000 Londoners, socialists, trade
unionists, communists, Jews (who had been told by the Jewish Chronicle
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to stay home), and Irish dockworkers, blocked a march through the East
End of London, home to the city’s largest Jewish community,
organized by Oswald Mosley’s
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British Union of Fascists (BUF). As the British historian and author
Martin Gilbert
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wrote, the BUFs’ “aim was to intimidate the local Jewish community
and the local anti-Fascist working class.” The antifascist
protesters erected barricades against the fascist march and engaged in
hand-to-hand fighting with Mosley’s thugs and their police escorts
in what became known as the Battle of Cable Street
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Undoubtedly, the Battle of Cable Street was a major anti-fascist
victory, but it also shows that a call to action against fascism,
which is rooted in violence and intimidation, cannot be confined to
passive demonstrations. When the march of fascism becomes an actual
threat, “it has to be physically challenged
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But let us not remain in the distant past. In early August 2024, a
fascist pogrom was defeated in Bristol
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thousands of people, young and old, came together to counter an
anti-immigration rally and to show that Bristol will not tolerate
fascism.

Since then, there have been many other anti-fascist protests and
demonstrations all across Europe and the United States, especially as
the far right now feels empowered by Trump’s return to the White
House and makes no bones about the fact that it is racist and sees
neofascism as a political necessity in today’s world. This was all
in display in London,
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for example, just a couple of weeks ago, in the protest organized by
far-right activist Tommy Robinson and in which scores of police
officers were injured while Elon Musk
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over a video link and urged them to use violence.

While there was little doubt before as to where Trump stood on
democracy and human decency, he has made it clear with his decision to
designate Antifa a “terrorist” organization that he and his
coterie are clearly on the side of fascism. But if they really believe
that antifascism is now dead, they are in for a rude awakening.

Please support Common Dreams. The U.S. is on a fast track to
authoritarianism like nothing I’ve ever seen. Meanwhile, corporate
news outlets are utterly capitulating to Trump, twisting their
coverage to avoid drawing his ire while lining up to stuff cash in his
pockets.

THAT’S WHY I BELIEVE THAT COMMON DREAMS IS DOING THE BEST AND MOST
CONSEQUENTIAL REPORTING THAT WE’VE EVER DONE.

 

* antifa
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* antifascism
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* Fascism
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