If you could sit down with someone from Antifa and ask them “What is fascism? What, historically speaking, has fascism believed for the last 100 years?”, what would they say? As I have been scanning the videos of the numerous riots in which the Antifa are involved, it seems to me that the vast majority of these people do not have a good grasp of what fascism is, and is not.
Fascism, historically speaking, began in Italy during World War I and spread quickly throughout Europe afterwards (Italy, Spain, Portugal being the most notable among professing fascist states). Although fascism is normally classified as “right wing” because of its hypernationalsm and racism, I see it as left wing due to the fact that the fascist governments of Europe despised capitalism, believed that a strong central government should control all industry and commerce (a major tenet of socialism), and enforce all decrees through a police state apparatus. Historically, Mussolini, Franco, and their blood brother Adolf Hitler were actually socialists, having much more in common with the blood-thirsty Communists of Stalin’s Soviet Union than with free governments such as Great Britain, France, or the US.
In a fascist state, all views that are opposing the official state sanctified views are met with brute force. There is no freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom of conscience, freedom of peaceful assemble to ask the government for a redress of grievances. There is only the freedom of government thugs to beat you up if you differ from the party line, haul you off to prison or a concentration camp, and kill you.
What do we see of Antifa day after day? People who want to peacefully dialogue, or people who justify their use of violence and vandalism in order to crush all who dare to differ with them? Seems to me, that they are the very same brutes they claim to be against.