Noam Chomsky is right about Antifa

Chomsky: Antifa Is A 'Major Gift 

To The Right'

By Steven Nelson



August 22, 2017 "Information Clearing House" - The left-wing "Antifa" movement is rising in prominence after clashing with white supremacists in Charlottesville, Va., but one progressive scholar says the anti-fascists feed the fire they seek to extinguish.

"As for Antifa, it's a minuscule fringe of the Left, just as its predecessors were," Noam Chomsky told the Washington Examiner. "It's a major gift to the Right, including the militant Right, who are exuberant."

Many activists affiliated with the loosely organized Antifa movement consider themselves anarchists or socialists. They often wear black and take measures to conceal their identity.

Chomsky said, "what they do is often wrong in principle – like blocking talks – and [the movement] is generally self-destructive."

"When confrontation shifts to the arena of violence, it's the toughest and most brutal who win – and we know who that is," said Chomsky, a professor emeritus of linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. "That's quite apart from the opportunity costs – the loss of the opportunity for education, organizing, and serious and constructive activism."

The violence in Charlottesville ended Saturday when an alleged white supremacist drove a car into a crowd of anti-racism activists, not all of whom were Antifa activists, killing 32-year-old Heather Heyer and injuring more than a dozen others. The driver has been charged with murder.

On Tuesday, Trump shocked viewers of a press conference, including prominent members of his own party, by saying "both sides" deserved blame for the violence. Critics said the president should single out white supremacists for scorn.

"There was a group on this side, you can call them the Left, you've just called them the Left, that came violently attacking the other group," Trump said on Tuesday. "So, you can say what you want, but that's the way it is."

Where Antifa fits in a historical context of progressive activism is not yet clear, but some observers see the increasingly prominent movement — members of which were mass-arrested at Trump's inauguration after a march that featured window-smashing — as becoming an important, accepted part of the mainstream Left.

Mark Lance, professor of justice and peace at Georgetown University, said the Antifa movement's rise is a clear response to more open fascist organizing.

"I'm seeing more concrete productive discussion between anti-fascists and others on the Left these days than ever before in my life," Lance said.


"There is reason to think that it will become integrated into an emerging coalition that includes Sanders supporters, democratic socialists, dreamers, the Movement for Black Lives, environmentalists, [and] Native American organizers," he said.

Lance said Antifa actions "need not be violent confrontation, but most Antifa, in practice, are willing to physically resist fascist marches and defend themselves against fascist attack."

Reaching for American historical parallels for Antifa is difficult.

Lance said he doesn't see a close historical reference in leftist groups that formed in the 1960s like the Black Panthers or the Weather Underground, which conducted a bombing campaign aimed largely at damaging property. Both were primarily focused on government institutions, he said.

"There's some limited similarity to the Weather Underground," Chomsky said about the group that grew out of the anti-Vietnam War movement. He added, however, that "Weathermen differed not only in radically different context, but also in tactics, almost always against property, in intent at least."

By contrast, "Antifa purports to be defensive," he said.

Anti-fascism during the rise of Nazism in Germany is perhaps a better analogy for today's Antifa, said Chomsky, who expressed alarm at Trump's remarks. He clarified that in Germany, "left violence was hardly the problem."

This article was first published by Washington Examiner -

Noam Chomsky: Antifa is a 'major gift to the right'

World-renowned academic prompts criticism for his attack on the anti-fascist movement in the wake of Charlottesville

TheIndependent,

20 August, 2017

Noam Chomsky has launched into an attack on the anti-fascist movement and argued its actions are wrong in principle and it is a “major gift to the right”.

The eminent intellectual, who is described as the father of modern linguistics, argued the movement was self-destructive and constituted a tiny faction on the periphery of the left.

Antifa, shorthand for anti-fascist organisations, refers to a loose coalition of militant, decentralised, grassroots groups which are opposed to the far-right. 

The movement, which was founded in Europe in the 1920s, has dominated headlines in the wake of a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville earlier this month. Neo-Nazis, KKK members and “alt-right” supporters clashed with anti-fascists and a woman was left dead after a car ploughed into a crowd of anti-fascist protesters. 

In the wake of the deadly violence, President Donald Trump has prompted anger for drawing a moral parity between white supremacists and anti-fascists, saying counter-protesters were as violent as the far-right and the "alt-right" groups included some "very fine" people.

Chomsky, a leading voice on the left who is famed for his critique of US foreign policy, neoliberalism and the mainstream media, has now criticised Antifa. 

"As for Antifa, it's a minuscule fringe of the Left, just as its predecessors were," the linguist and political philosopher told the Washington Examiner. "It's a major gift to the right, including the militant right, who are exuberant."

"What they do is often wrong in principle – like blocking talks – and [the movement] is generally self-destructive,” the 88-year-old told the conservative paper.

He added: "When confrontation shifts to the arena of violence, it's the toughest and most brutal who win – and we know who that is. That's quite apart from the opportunity costs – the loss of the opportunity for education, organising, and serious and constructive activism."

While many only associate the anti-fascist movement with militant direct action, it is worth noting it adopts a wide variety of tactics. This includes union organisation, migrant solidarity, public education programmes, ousting white supremacists and neo-Nazis to their neighbours and employers, and urging venues to cancel far-right events.

Chomsky, who recently left his post as Institute Professor Emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to become a laureate professor at the University of Arizona, has prompted criticism for his assessment of Antifa.

Eleanor Penny, who has written extensively on fascism and the far-right, told The Independent: "Chomsky treats the battle against fascism as a battle for moral purity than can be won when the left remain respectful, polite, and deferent."

She added: "But fascists have no interest in winning that battle. They don't care about respecting free speech or the right to a fair trial; they've openly declared their murderous intent towards people of colour (and other undesirables) and they'll pursue that goal by any means necessary. In this context, physical resistance is a duty, an act of self-defence, not an unsightly outpost of leftist moral decline."

"What's more - it works. From the Battle of Cable Street in 1936 to similar confrontations in Lewisham and Wood Green in London in 1977, physical resistance has time and again protected local populations from racist violence, and prevented a gathering caucus of fascists from making further inroads into mainstream politics."

Critics on social media argued Chomsky, who is one of the most cited scholars in history, had become less left wing in his old age and the remarks meant he had become irrelevant.

Asa Winstanley, a US journalist, said: “Sad: Chomsky comes close to Trump blaming 'both sides'; says Antifa is 'a major gift to the Right'".

“Can u believe we live in a world where Mitt Romney is left of Noam Chomsky on Antifa,” said another user.

There’s no such thing as the ‘alt-left’ and white supremacists know it

The anti-fascist movement, which is in favour of popular grassroots opposition to fascism rather than reliance on the police or the state, is not a homogenous centralised organisation. It has a long and varied history which dates back to fighting Benito Mussolini’s Blackshirts in the 1920s and then Adolf Hitler’s Brownshirts in the taverns of Munich.

In the UK, anti-fascists mobilised against Blackshirts led by Oswald Moseley, the leader of the British Union of Fascists, in Cable Street in East London in the 1930s and in many other instances.