Anti-fascism

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Members of the Dutch Eindhoven Resistance with troops of the US 101st Airborne in Eindhoven in September 1944.

Anti-fascism is the opposition to fascist ideologies, organizations and governments.

There is a difference between anti-fascism as a political movement, and personal opposition to fascism. In the broadest sense, an anti-fascist is anyone who disagrees with fascism or engages in anti-fascist direct action. This includes most mainstream political parties and groups in the Western world, including both leftists and moderate rightists. Anti-fascist political movements have been historically associated with left-wing movements such as anarchism, communism and socialism. However, many anti-fascists aren't associated with those ideologies. Another term for anti-fascism (or anti-fascists) is antifa.

Most major resistance movements during World War II were anti-fascist, although some people who joined the resistance weren't technically anti-fascists. In France, quite a few people who joined the Resistance against the Vichy regime came from far right nationalist and royalist backgrounds. They abandoned the Vichy regime and started fighting against the Germans when they saw that Philippe Pétain was entirely subservient to the Nazis and had no intent to stop collaboration.

Within the anti-fascism movement, there are two broad positions: militant anti-fascism and liberal anti-fascism. There's also disagreement about whether violence is justified in the struggle against fascism. Some anti-fascists believe violence is not justified, since fascists don't represent a massive physical threat in many areas. They argue that the battle should be fought intellectually.

Violence played an important role in the 1920s and the 1930s, when anti-fascists confronted aggressive far right leagues, such as the Action Française movement in France, which dominated the Quartier latin students' neighborhood. In Italy in the 1920s, anti-fascists had to fight against the violent Squadristi. In Germany, anti-fascists were in conflict with the Freikorps. Today, neo-Nazis pose a genuine physical threat in numerous areas, and have even killed people. Militant anti-fascists claim that self-defence is necessary because the state can't be depended on to defend all communities. Liberal anti-fascists, however, respond that not all neo-Nazi organisations are directly responsible for physical violence, and that engaging in physical vigilante violence provides them with a sympathy chip in that it allows them to depict themselves as the moral high ground and anti-fascism as a violent gang activity.