Will we kowtow to Trump and his white nationalist base and accept only the narrowest possible meaning of anti-fascism? - “antifa,” which to millions of folks who only get information from the quasi-state-media known as the Fox News Channel has been both mischaracterized and then amplified into a scary violent army. government-recognized form of domestic terrorism.īut the fact that President Trump would take to Twitter - as he did Saturday, as more than a thousand anti-fascist demonstrators took to the streets of Portland, Oregon, in opposition to the Proud Boys and other right-wing extremists, including some in those red “Make America Great Again” hats - to condemn the anti-fascist movement raises what is becoming an existential question for America in the Trump era. It probably never would have occurred to the soldiers who charged into Nazi machine-gun fire on Omaha Beach that in just a couple of years would be born a future American president who would threaten to make anti-fascism a U.S. troops died - was horrible but there was little dissent because so few quibbled with the necessity of lifting the boot of totalitarianism off Western Europe and huge swaths of Asia, and helping to end Hitler’s death camps. Millions enlisted to fight fascism abroad and millions more sacrificed at home - rationing gas and growing “Victory Gardens” in cramped backyards. But when the sleeping giant finally woke up after Pearl Harbor, America’s so-called Greatest Generation was all in. cause even in early 1941 - when Adolf Hitler’s troops occupied most of Europe and were raining down bombs on London.
The hard work of anti-fascism wasn’t a super-popular U.S. It seems like if you were truly sincere about the whole “Make America Great Again” thing - that is, if it weren’t just a campaign slogan that jibes with your xenophobic branding and can move tens of thousands of red hats at $25 a pop - then one might actually want to celebrate America’s first victory against fascism.