Looking more at history of Antifa

Looking more at history of Antifa — The Monterey Herald — July 15, 2020

In her letter on Antifa, Linda Deutsch needs to dig a little deep into history. Near the end of World War II in Italy, many anti-fascist organizations rose up to fight the Nazi invasion. However, according to historian Charles F. Delzell, “A good many Fascists… came from the ranks of left-wing Marxism and syndicalism, and when the Fascist regime was overthrown in 1943-45 it was not hard for a certain number of ex-Blackshirts to swing to left-wing political extremism.” Other historians contend that this occurred because Italian Fascism was so similar to Marxism.

Mussolini was a hardcore Marxist for decades. Trotsky called him his best pupil. Although Mussolini supported Lenin’s 1917 revolution, he later criticized Lenin for not being Marxist enough, for not creating a “dictatorship of the proletariat” soon enough. By 1934, Mussolini boasted that “Three-fourths of the Italian economy, industrial and agricultural, is in the hands of the state,” an economy far more extensively nationalized than any other except Soviet Russia’s.

Antifa is violent, and spouts an ideology detrimental to true liberalism, tolerance, and equality.

–Lawrence Samuels, Carmel