Antifa Quotes

“The tragic irony of modern anti-fascism is that the more successful it is, the more its raison d'etre is called into question. Its greatest successes lie in hypothetical limbo: How many murderous fascist movements have been nipped in the bud over the past 70 years by antifa groups before their violence could metastasize? We will never know--and that's a very good thing indeed.”
― Mark Bray, Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook

“Anti-fascism is many things, but perhaps most fundamentally it is an argument about the historical continuity between different eras of far-right violence and the many forms of collective self-defense that it has necessitated across the globe over the past century.”
― Mark Bray, Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook

“You fight them by writing letters and making phone calls so you don’t have to fight them with fists. You fight them with fists so you don’t have to fight them with knives. You fight them with knives so you don’t have to fight them with guns. You fight them with guns so you don’t have to fight them with tanks.”
― Mark Bray, Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook

“When we speak about fascism, we must not drift too far away from thinking about the people who collected the hair, the gold teeth, the shoes of those they exterminated. When we speak about anti-fascism, we must not forget that, for many, survival was the physical embodiment of anti-fascism.”
― Mark Bray, Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook

“The job of the anti-fascist is to make [fascists] too afraid to act publicly and to act as volunteer targets for their hate and attacks which might keep them from thinking about burning down the mosque in their neighborhood.”
― Mark Bray, Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook

“We should be warier of those who are truly neutral toward fascism than those who honestly espouse their opposition to racism, genocide, and tyranny.”
― Mark Bray, Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook

“Undoubtedly street blockades and other forms of confrontational opposition can be very useful against any political opponent, but once far-right formations have managed to broadcast their xenophobic, dystopian platforms, it is incumbent upon us to drown them out with even better alternatives to the austerity and incompetence of the governing parties of the Right & Left.
On its own, militant anti-fascism is necessary but not sufficient to build a new world in the shell of the old.”
― Mark Bray, Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook

“Rationality did not stop the Fascists or the Nazis.”
― Mark Bray, Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook

“Fascism and Nazism emerged as emotional, antirational appeals grounded in masculine promises of renewed national vigor.”
― Mark Bray, Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook

“Despite the popular perception that race is “natural” or “timeless,” the biological notion of race is a modern European invention. When race was invented, however, it was invented as “the child of racism, not the father,” as Ta-Nehisi Coates points out, and “the process of naming ‘the people’ has never been a matter of genealogy and physiognomy so much as one of hierarchy.”442 Whiteness has never existed independent of its location at the top of the racial hierarchy. Thus, as Joel Olson explained in The Abolition of White Democracy, “ ‘White’ or ‘Caucasian’ is not a neutral physical description of certain persons but a political project of securing and protecting privileges…”
― Mark Bray, Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook

“While one should always be wary about painting large groups of people with a broad brush, it is clear that ardent Trump supporters voted for their candidate either because of or despite his misogyny, racism, ableism, Islamophobia, and many more hateful traits. There is certainly a significant difference between “because of” and “despite” in this context, and sensitivity to the difference should attune us to the importance of mass organizing, which can divert potential fascist-sympathizers away from the Far Right. It is always important to distinguish between ideologues and their capricious followers, yet we cannot overlook how these popular bases of support create the foundations for fascism to manifest itself.”
― Mark Bray, Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook

“Liberal pundits fail to fully grasp the importance of movement infrastructure because their opinion-manufacturing profession ascribes supreme importance to the communication of ideas in abstraction.”
― Mark Bray, Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook

“The slogan "never again" requires us to recognize that if we are not vigilant it could happen again. Preventing that from happening, anti-fascists argue, requires us to break anti-fascism out of its historical cage so that its wings can spread out across time and space.”
― Mark Bray, Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook

“Fascism is not to be debated, it is to be destroyed!” —BUENAVENTURA DURRUTI”
― Mark Bray, Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook

“Without in any way diminishing the horror on the Holocaust, to a certain extent we can understand Nazism as European colonialism and imperialism brought home. The decimation of the indigenous populations of the Americas and Australia, the tens of millions who died of famine in India under British rule, the ten million killed by Belgian king Leopold's Congo Free State, and the horrors of transatlantic slavery are but a sliver of the mass death and societal decimation wrought by European powers prior to the rise of Hitler. Early concentration camps (known as "reservations") were set up by the American government to imprison indigenous populations, by the Spanish monarchy to contain Cuban revolutionaries in the 1890s, and by the British during the Boer War at the turn of the century. Well before the Holocaust, the German government had committed genocide against Herero and Nama people of southwest Africa through the use of concentration camps and other methods between 1904 and 1907.”
― Mark Bray, Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook

“Of all recent social struggles, anti-fascism faces perhaps the most difficult road toward establishing itself as an extension of over a century of struggle against white supremacy, patriarchy, and authoritarianism.”
― Mark Bray, Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook

“Frame anti-fascism in terms of working-class self-defense.” —KIERAN, MINNEAPOLIS”
― Mark Bray, Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook

“one cannot be balanced when writing about fascism, there is nothing positive to be said of it.” 19 We should be warier of those who are truly neutral toward fascism than those who honestly espouse their opposition to racism, genocide, and tyranny.”
― Mark Bray, Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook

“Individuals watching Yiannopoulos on YouTube do not have the same political potential as when they are physically grouped.”
― Mark Bray, Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook

“This chapter briefly analyzes five lessons that many antifascists draw, or, I believe, should draw from history.”
― Mark Bray, Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook

“The injuries inflicted upon Mosley’s right-hand man, Jeffrey Hamm, bear this out. He had his jaw broken at the “battle of Brighton”; he was knocked unconscious by a flying brick as he addressed a meeting in London; and 43 Group commandos, formerly of the Royal Marines and paratroops, assaulted him at his home even though he had a former Nazi SS paratrooper for a bodyguard.144”
― Mark Bray, Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook