Jewish professor at once conservative Dartmouth wrote “Antifa Handbook,” explicitly advocates knives, guns and violence

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Irish dad, so not totally ugly, but jewish mother: Mark Bray, author ofThe Antifa Handbook and firm advocate of abolishing the police

The Historian Who Wrote the Antifa Handbook Defends Fighting Violence With Violence

Trump has branded the radical left antifa movement a terrorist organization, and many think it has gone too far. But historian Mark Bray, who has studied it, says violence can be justified when battling fascism

White supremacists, neo-Nazis and other protesters at the August 12, 2017 rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, which quickly morphed into a violent confrontation with hundreds of antifa activists.
White supremacists, neo-Nazis and other protesters at the August 12, 2017 rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, which quickly morphed into a violent confrontation with hundreds of antifa activists.Credit: Chip Somodevilla / Getty Images
Last May 28, three days after a police office killed George Floyd in Minneapolis, an angry mass of protesters stormed the headquarters of the force’s Third Precinct. “We have to move, we have to move,” an officer was heard urging on the police radio, at 9:53 P.M. Immediately afterward another panicked officer said the door had been breached: “they’re breaking in, they’re breaking in.” Some 10 police vehicles abandoned the station under a barrage of stones, glass bottles, firecrackers, boards – whatever the demonstrators could lay their hands on.

A few minutes later, after dozens of armed police officers had regrouped at a distant, safe meeting point, a short announcement that no one had been prepared for came over the police radio: “The station is on fire.”

Two days later, President Donald Trump singled out those whom he held responsible for the wave of violence and arson that swept through dozens of large cities in the country in the wake of Floyd’s killing. “The violence and vandalism is being led by antifa and other radical left-wing groups who are terrorizing the innocent, destroying jobs, hurting businesses and burning down buildings,” Trump stated in a speech at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The president also declared that “the United States of America will be designating Antifa as a terrorist organization” – ignoring the fact that the United States does not officially designate domestic organizations as “terrorist” entities.

In an interview with CNN, U.S. Attorney General William Barr joined in by describing antifa activists as dangerous terrorists. “I’ve talked to every police chief in every city where there’s been major violence, and they all have identified antifa as the ramrod for the violence,” Barr asserted. “They are flying around the country… we see some of the purchases they’re making before the riots, of weapons to use in those riots. So, we are following it.”

One person who is not impressed by these statements is Mark Bray, a historian at Rutgers University in New Jersey.

“I think that burning down the police station in Minneapolis was a righteous thing to do,”

he tells Haaretz in a phone conversation. “It was a facility that facilitated the killing of Black people, and the police as an institution are a racist institution, so burning down their police stations is a good thing to do, to stop them from killing Black people and brutalizing poor and homeless people.”

The 38-year-old professor is the person who is perhaps most identified with the activists of the radical left-wing movement antifa – short for antifascist. He’s an esteemed scholar who has studied the rise of extreme right-wing movements in Europe in the 1920s and 1930s. Three years ago he published “Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook,” thereby becoming the author of the ethical code, as it were, of the thousands of young people who form in organized groups, armed with clubs and firearms, ready to clash at any given moment with extreme right-wingers and exponents of white supremacy – fascists, in Bray’s terminology.

The first half of the book is devoted to a historical analysis of fascism; the second offers an ideological defense and moral justification for those who view violence as a necessary mode of action in the civil struggle to curb nationalist right-wing movements that smack of fascism.

“Antifa is not an organization,” he explains. “Just like there are feminist organizations, but feminism itself is not an organization, so antifa is a kind of politics, or an activity of revolutionary opposition to the far right, and there are well-organized groups in the U.S. and elsewhere who carry out that politics.” And in this case, political protesters are often accompanied by violent, local anarchist cells, whose repertoire includes torching vehicles and police stations.

Mark Bray.Credit: Dartmouth College / Eli Burakian

Bray’s book was published immediately after the violent demonstration, in August 2017, by a coalition of radical right-wing organizations, supporters of white supremacy, held in Charlottesville, Virginia. That event quickly morphed into a violent confrontation between hundreds of radical antifa activists and rampaging groups of skinheads and other white supremacists, wrapped in Nazi flags, and making no secret of their hatred of Jews. The clashes reached their tragic conclusion in a car-ramming attack by a right-wing supporter against left-wing demonstrators, killing a young woman and injuring dozens.

Within a few days of its release, the book became a best seller and Bray was an in-demand interviewee. Not only did Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, where he was teaching at the time, not dissociate itself from the book, he recalls, but the PR department aided in its promotion by coordinating media interviews for him and helping him prepare for them. Following Bray’s appearance on “Meet the Press” shortly after the book came out, however, right-wing organizations stepped up their pressure on the university to fire him.

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“As an institution, we condemn anything but civil discourse in the exchange of ideas,” the president of the college, Philip J. Hanlon, asserted in a statement . “The endorsement of violence in any form is contrary to Dartmouth values.”

In response, more than 100 Dartmouth faculty members signed a letter in Bray’s defense. “Professor Bray was exposed to violent threats,” they wrote, noting that the college had “endorse[d] the mischaracterization of his position and the implied attack on his scholarly standing.”

Bray, it’s important to note, does not disavow the use of violence as a central element of the movement’s ideology. “The job of the anti-fascist is to make [fascists] too afraid to act publicly,” he writes in the “Anti-Fascist Handbook.” And also, “You fight them [the fascists] 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.”

You are still upset that the college depicted you as supporting the use of violence, yet you yourself admit that violence is often unavoidable in the struggle against fascism.

Bray: “To me, his [Hanlon’s] comment was like saying that surgeons are people who cut people with knives, without explaining why they do it, the context they do it in and their purpose in doing it. It’s a mischaracterization to portray me as just an inherently violent person. So yes, I never claimed to be a pacifist, and I haven’t made any claims to disavow antifascist violence, because I don’t, but the context [of] my remarks matters.”

Maybe it’s preferable to allow the public to be exposed to the fascists’ dangerous positions and thereby to allow the state to keep them under supervision, rather than letting their actions take place in the underground, far from the eyes of the public and of the law enforcement authorities.

Armed members of the 'Proud Boys' attend a '2nd Amendment' rally at the Michigan Supreme Court Building in Lansing, Michigan, U.S. September 17, 2020.
Armed members of the ‘Proud Boys’ attend a ‘2nd Amendment’ rally at the Michigan Supreme Court Building in Lansing, Michigan, U.S. September 17, 2020. Credit: REBECCA COOK/ REUTERS

“I’m a historian, I’m a professor, specifically of modern European history, and among the topics that I teach are the Holocaust and Nazism, but I also include lessons about far-right groups today. It’s very important for me to have my students understand Nazi ideology, to read primary sources from Nazis, to read what Hitler had to say, to watch clips of what he had to say, to read manifestos from the Golden Dawn in Greece today, from other groups.

“The idea is that you learn about these heinous ideas in historical and political context,” he continues. “You inform people, not on the terms set forth by Nazis, but on the terms set forth by anti-racist and antifascist educators. If you allow these far-right groups to speak for themselves without context, plenty of people will hear it and think it’s ridiculous, but some people won’t think so. There are many examples of small, far-right fringe groups whom everyone laughs at, suddenly growing in times of crisis. That’s a risk that’s not worth taking.”

When the professor speaks about refusing to give a say to people who cast doubt on the humanity of Jews and other minorities, he does so not only as a historian or as an ardent supporter of antifa, but also from his biography: He grew up in northern New Jersey, the son of a Jewish mother and a Christian father from Ireland.

Bray: “My maternal grandfather immigrated to New York from Knyszyn, Poland in the early 1920s to avoid conscription. He became a tailor and years later moved to Rochester, New York where he and my maternal grandmother opened a men’s clothing shop. Basically the entire Jewish population of Knyszyn was murdered by the Nazis during the war including his relatives who stayed behind. I’m not sure exactly how many relatives died.

“I travelled to Knyszyn in 2014 to visit the Jewish cemetery there (which had not been properly maintained). It was appalling to see how many white power symbols (like the Celtic Cross) could be found around Poland, particularly in areas that used to be ghettos. My maternal grandmother came to the U.S. from Ukraine as a small child sometime around 1905. Likely some of her relatives were killed [in World War II]. My father’s parents came from Ireland (hence Bray).

But culturally I have always felt closer to my Jewish ancestry since I went to Hebrew school in a Reform synagogue and had a bar mitzvah.”

As to the Holocaust, he writes in his book: “The slogan ‘never again’ requires us to recognize that if we are not vigilant it could happen again.”

Don’t you think there is something problematic about the comparison you draw between the rise of the extreme right in the United States and what happened in Nazi Germany?

“I bring up Hitler in large part because it’s the simplest and most concise way, particularly in the American context, to get across the potential dangers of fascism. The point is not necessarily whether a particular far-right group will gain power and murder millions of people. But even in the case of the Golden Dawn in Greece, they have brutalized and killed immigrants and non-ethnic Greeks. Or look at the violence of CasaPound in Italy and [President Jair] Bolsonaro’s supporters in Brazil. Even if that level of violence is nowhere on the scale of the Third Reich, it still justifies organizing against it and taking whatever means are necessary to prevent it.”

An anti-fascist protester holds a flag on the Christian Science Plaza, Saturday, July 11, 2020, in Boston.
An anti-fascist protester holds a flag on the Christian Science Plaza, Saturday, July 11, 2020, in Boston. Credit: Michael Dwyer,AP

Asked to rank Trump in comparison to the most dangerous leaders of the 20th century, Bray says that his politics is not fascism of the sort practiced by Hitler or Mussolini, though the American president is a “very dangerous leader.” Of Trump’s supporters he says, “We’re at a context now where the ‘traditional’ America imagined by many Trump supporters as being white, Christian and heterosexual, is – through demographic changes, through cultural changes – disappearing before their eyes. They’re terrified and angry, and they worship guns, so that’s certainly a volatile mix.”

Even as Bray speaks of the need to curb Trump and his extremist supporters at any cost, increasing voices in the United States are arguing that antifa is playing into Trump’s hands and could end up helping him, indirectly, to remain in power.

Trump uses antifa to incite fear,” the Atlantic magazine headlined a news article, in June. Peter Beinart, a journalist who can hardly be suspected of backing Trump, warned as early as September 2017 – also in the Atlantic – about the considerable political danger latent in antifa. “[Antifa] may consider themselves fierce opponents of the authoritarianism growing on the American right. In truth, however, they are its unlikeliest allies,” he wrote in an article titled “The Rise of the Violent Left.” Thus, “Trump supporters and white nationalists see antifa’s attacks as an assault on their right to freely assemble, which they in turn seek to reassert. The result is a level of sustained political street warfare not seen in the U.S. since the 1960s.” According to Beinart, “In the name of protecting the vulnerable, anti-fascists have granted themselves the authority to decide which Americans may publicly assemble and which may not.”

Says Bray:

 

“I’m an anarchist, I’m a police abolitionist, so I never trust the police.

I don’t think that hierarchical forms of social organization are just.” We need to bear in mind, he adds, that “Hitler, Mussolini and others like them came to power not by launching a revolution against the state but by working within the state apparatus to gain power.” Accordingly, “from the militant, anti-fascist perspective, this historical viewpoint is part of the argument against trusting the state and the police.”

Isn’t there a problem with attempting to cope with violence by means of counter-violence?

“Historically, the people being attacked [by fascists] are on the margins: migrants, ethnic minorities, queer and transgender people who usually don’t have a ton of sympathy from the mainstream. If members of the Proud Boys [an extremist neo-fascist group] beat up a trans sex worker, most Americans wouldn’t bat an eye these days. Such people have so few options that self-defense under these circumstances is a legitimate response. The question becomes: How bad does the threat have to be for this kind of opposition to be legitimate? The antifascist argument, which I agree with, is that you use whatever methods you can to prevent the violence from growing, and sometimes that entails a kind of preemptive self-defense.”

As examples, he cites antifa action that put a stop to the activity of the extreme right in Denmark in the 1990s, while in the United States there were “big stars of the far right” such as Milo Yiannopoulos and Richard Spencer, who in the wake of antifa activity became outcasts and disappeared from the scene.

Aren’t you concerned that the continuing demonstrations against police violence will ultimately help Trump portray himself as the person who will make America’s streets safe again?

“First of all, according to the polls, he is losing. Second, the polls also indicate that most Americans are sympathetic to the protest in general, if not always necessarily to the property destruction that has accompanied it. It’s also worth noting that right-wing, fascist politics always benefits from any kind of resistance. Even in the U.S. context, you could see the eight years of Obama in power as being perhaps the most important context and impetus for Trump’s victory in 2016, as a kind of backlash against a Black president.

“I understand the notion that property destruction gives Trump an argument about law and order, but I think he would make that argument even if there wasn’t property destruction. The other thing is that large social upheavals tend to include property destruction – it comes with the territory.”

 

1 Comment

  1. Bray, whom I consider to be a Jew despite his White father, bases much of his argument on the Holocaust, which he takes to be an established fact. But is the Holocaust an established fact?

    What is an established fact? It is a proposition that has no contrary evidence, I submit. Consider the proposition, “Lincoln was president when the Cicil War broke out.” How much contrary evidence exists here? None. Therefore it is an established fact.

    Now then, Holocaust Revisionism, which began in earnest in the ’70s with _The Hoax of the 20th Century_ by Butz, and has been added to since then by works of several other scholars, amounts clearly to being contrary evidence to the Holocaust.

    It follows that the Holocaust is not an established fact, because there exists too much contrary evidence.

    I personally think the Holocaust is a Jewish fiction. I do not think that it happened. But I do not claim this to be more than an educated opinion, as opposed to knowledge. What I claim to know with certainty is that nobody _knows_ that the Holocaust happened! I clain to know with certainty that the Holocaust is not an established fact.

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