For an evaluation of anti-fascist tactics, a closer look at this period is necessary.īray’s history begins in the interwar period. However, Bray’s history largely skims over the real inception of modern antifa - the European leftist groups of the 1960s and ’70s. This book is an important baseline for discussions of today’s headline-grabbing protests. Dartmouth historian Mark Bray’s new book Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook traces today’s transnational anti-fascist tradition all the way back to the 1920s.Īntifa is billed as both a history and a handbook, and Bray’s aim is to present an accessible genealogy of today’s militant anti-fascist movement. Prominent public intellectuals like Judith Butler have also weighed in on the usefulness of violence. Now the United States is seeing a similar wave of this European-style political street violence (and similar debates about equivalences). A Le Monde editorial called the ban a “false equivalence.” At least 76 police were injured in the melee that followed, and in the aftermath of the violent clash both the Ligue and Ordre Nouveau were subject to government bans. The Ligue and other leftist groups intended to put a stop to a rally by the extreme-right group Ordre Nouveau. ON JUNE 21, 1973, members of the French Trotskyist group Ligue Communiste locked arms and marched down a Paris street, their leather motorcycle jackets barely concealing iron bars, metal projectiles, and Molotov cocktails.

Antifa by Mark Bray