Posted on 06/03/2020 10:41:50 PM PDT by Olog-hai
After Donald Trump claimed most protesters in the US were “antifa,” Germany’s Social Democrats rushed to declare solidarity with the movement. But which movement? And why did other politicians object?
Quite a few people, not least the President of the United States, seem a little confused as to precisely what “antifa” is. Unlike many of the gaps in Donald Trump’s knowledge, there are some reasonable historical justifications for this particular confusion.
In Germany, politicians and the public have been wrestling with the term for around a century now — without coming any closer to an uncontested definition.
What the word means is simple enough in German. Antifa is short for antifaschistisch, or anti-fascist. In the most literal sense, one might hope this label could apply to almost all modern German people and politicians. But does antifa refer to all those opposed to fascism, or does it refer only to black-clad anarchists and leftists staring down German police in the streets? The last large-scale German confrontation involving antifa protesters was in Hamburg at the 2017 G20 summit… […]
Donald Trump’s bids to reclassify the US’ far newer and equally disparate antifa groups as terrorists have prompted political debate in Germany before, but not to quite the extent seen this week.
Leading Social Democrat Saskia Esken set the ball rolling, responding to the threat from Trump by describing herself in a short tweet as: “58 and Antifa. Obviously.” One of the SPD’s accounts responded to Esken with a nod to the party’s age, writing: “157 and Antifa. Obviously.”
While several others in the SPD followed this online template, politicians of other stripes criticized Esken sharply. …
(Excerpt) Read more at dw.com ...
I read an excellent book about the first political prisoner concentration camp (1933) at Dauchau. The population was all Jews and Communists. The book is titled “Hitler’s First Victims: The Quest for Justice” by Timothy W. Ryback. Josef Hartinger was a German prosecutor, and he risked everything to bring justice to the victims of the first killings when the camp opened. Needless to say he wasn’t a popular man.
“God does not exist. Religion in science is an absurdity, in practice an immorality and in men a disease.”Impossible for fascism to not be a variation of communism, since it was started by a communist.
“What does ‘social justice’ mean? It means work guaranteed, fair wages, decent homes; it means the possibility of continuous evolution and improvement. Nor is this enough—it means that the workers must enter more and more intimately into the productive process and share its necessary discipline. … As the past (19th) century was the century of capitalist power, the 20th century is the century of the power and glory of labor.”
“(I)n the world’s social revolution that will be followed by a more equitable distribution of the earth’s riches, due account must be kept of the sacrifices and of the discipline maintained by the Italian workers.”
— Benito Mussolini
Thanks. I hadn’t seen that quote anywhere before.
You’d think he was still a Marxist from those words. It’s all Marxism.
And those date to his time in power as a fascist, save the last one when he was the puppet leader for Nazi Germany as head of the Italian Social Republic.
OK. But who is the true author?
>>>Trump’s ‘antifa’ accusations spark debate in Germany, the movement’s birthplace<<<
Democrat’s ‘NAZI’ accusations spark debate in Germany, the movement’s birthplace
“Hitler’s First Victims: The Quest for Justice”
Thx. I’ll check that out. Brave man.
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