"THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA will be designating ANTIFA as a Terrorist Organization," US President Donald Trump announced on Twitter last Sunday. Trump and many other US officials, including FBI Director Christopher Wray, argue that this radical left-wing movement is partly behind the violence and riots that resulted from protests over the brutal police murder of African-American George Floyd in Minneapolis.

Since Trump's threat to designate Antifa terrorist organization, which legal experts generally consider frivolous and legally unenforceable, the term Antifa has reached Croatia - more precisely, it reached Hloverka Novak Srzic, who praised the beauty of Makarska on Facebook" despite antifa chaos and viruses," even though she posted a photo of Mozambique instead of Makarska.

Parallel emergence of neo-Nazis and Antifa

The name Antifa is an abbreviated version of the term anti-fascism or anti-fascists. This movement or subculture - or, more precisely, counterculture - has been present in Western Europe, and then also in the United States since the 1970s and 1980s. The modern anti-fascist movement emerged at the same time as the modern neo-Nazi movement in Europe and North America, primarily in the form of a subculture of the so-called skinheads, or their neo-Nazi wing.

But Antifa has its roots in the original anti-fascist movement, which fought against the original Nazis and fascists in the 1920s and 1930s on the streets of Germany, Italy, and other countries. With the outbreak of World War II, these anti-fascists, who were mostly, but not exclusively communists, launched an armed partisan struggle throughout occupied Europe, including the so-called Independent State of Croatia.

But that is, of course, history. What do young men and women we can see in the streets dressed in black from head to toe, with batons, even helmets, and shields, who throw Molotov cocktails, bricks and firecrackers, fight with the police and right-wingers, who smash shop windows and burn buildings and cars - sometimes police and corporate, but sometimes those of ordinary citizens and small business owners, have to do with the original anti-fascists?

The overlap of anarchists and the Black Bloc

According to the principles of the Antifa movement, they are fighting contemporary fascism, just as partisans and left-wing radicals did before and during World War II. Their tactics and goals largely stem from another, broader movement - the anarchist and anti-globalist movement which started twenty years ago with violent protests against the G7 and G20 summits, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, among others.

Just like them, Antifa opposes fascism, nationalism, racism, sexism, homophobia, as well as capitalism, social inequality, and the destruction of the environment for profit. In fact, the anarchist Black Bloc, which drew particular attention with riots during the G20 summit in Hamburg in 2017, is almost identical to Antifa, and a lot of their members are probably also members of Antifa.

In the same year, Antifa gained attention in America with their violent protests. The fact that 2017 was also the first year of Trump's term is, of course, not coincidental, just as it is no coincidence that the so-called alt-right, which often flirts with neo-Nazism, experienced an incredible rise during the 2016 election campaign and after the elections.

2017 will be remembered by several dramatic Antifa and alt-right clashes: a clash over a lecture by the right-wing provocateur and alt-right favorite Milo Yiannopoulos at the University of Berkeley in February, which was eventually canceled (the conflict had a repeat in April), and a march of the alt-right, or neo-Nazis and related right-wing extremists, in August in Charlottesville, Virginia, where clashes with Antifa and other left-wing anti-protesters escalated when a far-right extremist drove his car into a crowd of anti-protesters.

"Punch a Nazi"

The same year, a sudden attack of a masked member of Antifa on one of the leaders of the alt-right and white nationalist Richard Spencer became a meme called "punch a Nazi." The attack also launched a widespread debate over whether resorting to violence is a legitimate means of fighting the Nazis and right-wing extremists. Antifa believes that it is. Antifa considers the violent fight against the fascists and those they perceive as fascists, as well as against the police and other representatives of the "power structure" to be self-defense.

"The argument is that militant anti-fascism is inherently self-defense because of the historically documented violence that fascists pose, especially to marginalized people," Mark Bray, a history professor at Rutgers University and author of Antifa: An Antifascist Handbook, told the New York Times.

However, many members of Antifa extend the notion of anti-fascist self-defense to the deplatforming of intellectuals and organizations whose messages they consider dangerous for disadvantaged and discriminated minorities. In its extreme version, it results in brutal attacks on journalists, authors, and activists with whom they disagree. Such a stretched understanding of anti-fascism is inevitably in conflict with the principles of freedom of expression, organization, and gathering, which form the basis of liberal democracy.

Revolutionaries who reject the principles of liberal democracy

But that is the problem, according to the critics of this radical movement - Antifa does not believe in a liberal democracy, but it ultimately wants to replace the existing economic and political system with a radical alternative - communism or anarchy.

"These are self-described revolutionaries. They have no allegiance to liberal democracy, which they believe has failed the marginalized communities they're defending. They're anarchists and communists who are way outside the traditional conservative-liberal spectrum," Bray explains for the Vox portal.

At the same time, it is difficult to speak precisely about the goals and methods of Antifa, or about its involvement in the current riots in the United States, for the same reason why we do not know how powerful this movement is - there is no unified organization or a leader. Antifa is a set of informal, autonomous local cells with no leaders and no hierarchical structure. However, according to the Washington Post, even in their largest operations, they managed to gather only a few hundred members from all over the country. Furthermore, it is obvious that their strongest bases are in California and Oregon. Bray also believes that Antifa as a movement is simply too small and too poorly organized to be able to lead the current protests.

Right-wing violence is still more prevalent than left-wing violence

Much of their activity, just like with the far right, is concentrated on the Internet. Online, they monitor the activities of their ideological opponents and try to expose extreme right-wingers, often publishing their personal data in the process. However, it seems that at least some of them see the protests as an opportunity for a violent showdown with the system they oppose.

Such violent methods then become the basis for equalizing the extreme left and the extreme right. Whether that equalization is justified or not remains something that people on opposing political spectrums will find difficult to agree on. However, in this case, it is good to keep the hard data in mind, such as data on terrorist and extremist attacks in the United States. According to the University of Maryland records, from 2010 to 2016, 53% of such attacks were carried out by religious extremists, 35% were carried out by right-wing extremists, and only 12% by left-wing or green extremists. It is therefore quite ironic that Trump and his supporters want to designate Antifa a terrorist organization when they haven't done that for much more dangerous and better organized extreme right-wing organizations.