Antifascist Action

I have written several recent posts about the violent hard-left group of bully boys known as “Antifascist Action”, or AFA. The organization has a variety of manifestations in Europe and the rest of the Western world, with each chapter using the same basic logo and a name translated into the local language.

Last night a reader wrote and asked about the significance of the black and red flags in the logos.

Perhaps this is suggesting too much — but do you think there is a deliberate coincidence in the using of the blatant communist Red Flag, along with the (possibly) Islamic Black Flag for the so-called Antifascist Action brigades? Entirely black flags as depicted in the graphic are associated in my mind directly with Islam and only Islam… and solid red ones are solely and universally (I believe) associated with Communism.

The red flag is without a doubt a communist symbol, but I wrote him back and told him that I thought the black flag traditionally represents the Anarchists. If you do a Google image search on “flag anarchist”, you’ll see what I mean — a variety of similar motifs using black, often combined with red. I’ve collected a medley of them below for your enjoyment.


This sort of iconography goes at least as far back as the Spanish Civil War, as evidenced by the CNT-FAI flag shown at right. This was the flag of the Confederación Nacional del Trabajo combined with the Federación Anarquista Ibérica, that is, the Communists in alliance with the Anarchists, fighting on the Republican side in the war.
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Of course, when the CNT-FAI gained control of parts of Spain, the Communists violently suppressed their erstwhile Anarchist allies, leaving the survivors with bitter memories and an antipathy towards Stalin and the Communists. But those old quarrels have been forgotten nowadays, with the Red and the Black reunited in proletarian solidarity against all the racist hegemonic imperialistic capitalists of the Western world.

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When I went looking for more versions of the AFA logo, I noticed that the various manifestations of the group commonly refer to themselves as “Antifa”. When http://www.antifa.se turned up as the domain name for the Swedish branch of AFA, it gave me the idea of looking for other chapters by typing “antifa-dot-[country suffix]” for different countries. I discovered that there are Antifa domain names and web sites for Denmark, Germany, Spain, Switzerland, Belgium, and the United States, although the last one seems to be a mere placeholder for one of the German organizations.

Wikipedia has an entry for Antifa with a history and other information about the group.

The UK organization even has a free web-hosting service offered to branches of Antifa all over the world. Check out their list of hosted sites; you’ll see plenty of anarchist iconography with that universal red-and-black motif. England, Scotland, Germany, and the Netherlands seem to be particularly well-represented on this list, with Greece and Russia also in evidence.

Browsing through all this material is a sobering experience. It’s a reminder that the Left is extremely well-organized and interconnected, almost as much so as the Islamists.

The Counterjihad will simply have to play catch-up.