Issit?

Jeder hat das Recht, seine Meinung frei zu äußern. Das inkludiert das Recht, von diesem Recht keinen Gebrauch zu machen.

Natürlich ist mir jeder lieb, der sich entsprechend äußert.

Aber es ist sehr wichtig, dass dieses Recht, sich eben nicht zu äußern, absolut respektiert wird. Warum? Das wirst du sehen, wenn die Faschisten dran sind und sich nicht äußern oder pro forma positionieren verdächtig wird. Und das ist leider kein exklusives Rechte-Dings.

Well, it's left of far-right.

And thus if someone tells you they think antifa is purely left-wing, you should listen to them.

Sure, #conservatives in liberal democratic societies are anti-fascist. You can't want to conserve parliamentary democracy/monarchy/individual liberty/the constitution and support fascism.

There is the problem however that #fascism is a bit of a slippery term. "The word Fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies ‘something not desirable’" Orwelll cautioned. Conservatives do care about law and order and tradition, and some people will call them fascist for doing so.

@axeln and yet not allowing to vote for fascist parties / politicians is also restricting people's right to vote and a very slippery slope.

What we need is more education.

this is not true. Anti-fascism is inherently left-wing because any serious anti-fascism necessarily includes a rejection of the values that underly fascism: A desire to oppress racial minorities, women, queer people, disabled people and anyone they consider to be lesser.

And unless you want to strip the word "conservative" of all real meaning, any conservative anti-fascism has to be inherently hollow, since conservatism agrees with these underlying values of fascism.

the reaction of people to the term "antifascism" is really g̶e̶t̶t̶i̶n̶g̶ alarming.

I'm frequently wearing a neutral black t-shirt with "Antifaschist" written in white and a few days ago that triggered an encounter, where a guy reacted with shouting "so you're the opposite of me". People started to be proud of being fascists again 😟

The issue here is that the left/right spectrum is woefully inadequate to capture reality.

Left-authoritarians (Pot, Mao, Lenin, Stalin) are every bit as dangerous as right-authoritarians (Hitler, Mussolini, Franco).

Yes, conservatives are almost fascists. News at eleven.

Maybe a little more serious in the interest of debate, what do you think conservatives are? In my view and experience, conservatives believe in heterosexual marriage family as the basis of society, the right of capital to exploit workers, competition as a natural state, and where people get rights and value via their passport and ethnicity. Those values are adjacent to fascist values, which are essentially the same but in overdrive and antithetical to left values of free expression of love, worker organization, solidarity and universal human rights and equality.

Studies have shown over and over again that the best anti-fascist policy is investment in public services and social security, and conservatives hate that too.

these sound more like some principles that described what it looked like.

What about ideas? Which political ideas, if any, qualify you as a fascist?

Isn't anti-facism always right?

You can be neutral to coal power plant or eating animals, fascism is boolean, everything else is arguable.

Depends.

Antifaschistische Aktion in Nazi Germany were communist, and the social democratic Iron Front (three arrows) were enemies. Iron Front was anti communist and antifascist, so the AFA who were communists saw them as enemies.

Not to be confused with UK AFA and ANL!

I'm an anarcho-syndicalist so the nazis, fascists, and communists would all have come after me - but I support antifa within our current political context. Solidarity against the common enemy, fascists are scum.

I disagree, anti-fascism has a specific political meaning that historically is absolutely left. Historically, most antifascist partisans were collectivists, communists and socialists.

If you just mean anti-fascist as a word game, that's another thing altogether.

being anti-fascist after the inception of fascism was about the most American thing you could do.

There’s a not pretty history of America reluctantly pretending to be anti-fascist and joining in for WW2. Once they did join the rally cry was anti-fascism. The fascist dictators must be stopped.

The ones who cheered for eugenics and kindled friendship with the fathers of fascism left a long lived line of power that we are now being ruled by today.

@ianrogers
It appears to me that you are not up to date with this topic.
It is true that it started with socialists etc in Italy against Mussolini but even at that time some conservative and catholic groups started calling themselves anti-fashists.
With the WWII the complete British conservative party does.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-fas…

@jwildeboer