... But also, there's no organization called antifa, and no antifa members. It's an accusation levied against people the right wing wants to call terrorists.
> But also, there's no organization called antifa, and no antifa members
Left wing extremist groups absolutely exist. The fact that they don't go around wearing matching uniforms with the letters ANTIFA on them doesn't change that.
Your demand for an exact membership list is simply not how extremist organizations work. Terroristic groups have always been fairly amorphous.
Are you going around planning terrorist attacks, vigilante violence, sabotaging critical infrastructure in groups or consistently materially supporting those who do? If so then yes.
If you aren't doing anything even close to this then no you wouldn't be.
You're missing the distinction between individual action (however abhorrent) and an actual terrorist organization. Organizations fund, cultivate, and organize attacks, as opposed to lone wolf terrorists, and therefore are much greater threats.
Timothy Mcveigh (and Terry Nichols) weren't members of a terrorist organization, but they were terrorists. Meanwhile, the ku klux klan has actual initiations, membership, and organizational structure. As do Isis and al qaida.
Yes you are you left out the rest of the sentence:
> … and an actual terrorist organization.
A group is not “an actual terrorist organization”. You’re trying to say all groups committing a crime against the government are actual terrorists organizations, and they all belong to the same organization, Antifa. That’s not the case. If that’s the case then MAGA is also a terrorist organization — at least they have a clear leader.
> You’re trying to say all groups committing a crime against the government are actual terrorists organizations
No, I only said that the ones that are committing terrorist attacks, or similarly serious vigilante violence or sabotaging critical infrastructure in groups are.
Mere "crimes" aren't the same as targeting a powerplant for example.
They said Good and Pretti were domestic terrorists, they were summarily executed, so not really the line you think you're drawing. NSPM-7 makes "politically motivated trespass and civil disobedience" a terrorist act. So it's not like all you have to do to avoid being labelled a terrorist is to just not blow up a power plant. Helping someone ICE knocked down during a protest is enough.
> so not really the line you think you're drawing.
It actually is a pretty good line. I am sure there are some edge cases, but the vast majority of designated terrorist organizations did more than enough to deserve being put on that list.
Yes, I am sure there is "Insert random one off exceptions here" or grey areas, but they would almost certainly win their court cases through the legal system, most of the time the world is pretty good at figuring out who the terrorists are.
Additionally, no, neither Good and Pretti were ever charged with terrorism. You can have your opinions on unfortunate incidents of use of force or officer training failures or about any overly zealous bad apples in our law enforcement personel, but when it comes to official designations the law is actually pretty reasonable here.
Like the anarchist groups that dress in all black and attack people/infra/stores in the middle of the night during riot?
Its hard to say, because political violence is a spectrum and the border is very blurry between being an organized violent rioter and someone engaging in terroristic activities. Both are bad in their own way.
But fundamentally there doesn't seem to be a huge categorical/technical difference between violent rioting and "terroristic" activism other than that terroristic attacks are simply the more serious/worse version of political violence.
EX: Once it gets to the point of targeting actual critical infrastructure, we can call that terrorism, and just getting into a fist fight at a roudy protests wouldn't be (even though both are technically political violence).
That being said, serious riots can cause a lot of damage and even kill people, but the blame is more collectively spread out towards a large group of people, as opposed to a few small groups causing the large amount of damage.
I don't go around dressed in black with anarchist symbols and wearing a mask, attacking people or destroying stores at riots in the middle of the night, no.
I generally stay away from that type of stuff and instead support non-violent, political change that happens within the system and I think those destructive groups are engaging in ineffective and bad tactics.
That's not true. Black Panther was a group. CNT was a group. Even on the other side of the spectrum, KKK and Boogaloo Boys are groups. They all have a name, membership, and identification.
There's no "antifa" organization because antifascism is a concept with different branches of thoughts and practices. Calling antifa an organization is akin to calling "science" an organization. Sure a dictator can arrest millions of people of the "science" terror organization and jail them for their dangerous subversion, but that doesn't make the "science" organization any more real.
> If so, why carry those flags and bandanas on their faces?
The flag just symbols that this person is against Nazis. Nothing more, nothing less.
It can be held by anyone. Here in Germany, we have (amongst others, just a list of what I have seen) religious Christians (often of Lutheran Protestantism), Marxists, Leninists, Stalinists, other denominations of Communists, Anarchists, Greens, Social Democrats, Antiimperialists, Zionists and sometimes even the occasional Conservatives showing up under the Antifa banner.
People sharing similar values does not make them an organization. “Why do they wear masks?” because they don’t want nazis to interfere with their jobs, friends and families? You’re asking questions there are very obvious answers to. Seems like a disingenuous comment or you’re unable to do the most basic research
> Why do so called anti fascists act fascistically
Because anyone call themselves anti-fascist, doesn't make them so. While most people who are, well, not fascists probably don't wear or care about the label. You basically confirmed the point of the comment you replied to.
> I’m sure there are supremacists “organizations” that are also hard to pin down.
You mean the ones that aren't organizations? Let's say all the people who are racist in the world, are they an organization? Even all the people who really hate the same "race", if that's all they do, does that make them an org? Is everyone making inane arguments be part of a global group of people working in concert trying to diminish the cognitive capacity and level of discourse in society?
