Antifa

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Grammarist

Antifa is a word that originated in the time before World War II, but has enjoyed a surge in usage today. We will examine the definition of Antifa, where it came from and some examples of its use in sentences.

Antifa describes a movement or group that is opposed to fascism. Generally, it is a political movement that fights fascism through protest, sometimes resorting to violent methods. Someone belonging to an Antifa movement is usually considered militant or extreme, as he often also opposes nationalistic concerns and is willing to destroy property or injure people in order to get his point across. Antifa is not one specific organization, but a descriptor of people and organizations who oppose fascism. The term Antifa and the movement began in pre-World War II Germany as a way to fight Nazism. Trade unions and Communists led the Antifa movement, which persisted through World War II and after. Antifa is an abbreviation of the German words Antifaschismus, meaning anti-fascism, and Antifaschistisch, meaning anti-fascist. Note that according to the Oxford English Dictionary the word Antifa is capitalized, though it is often seen rendered with a lowercase as in antifa.

Examples

Antifa outnumbered white supremacists during a protest in front of the White House which saw the two rival groups hurl slogans at each other before being escorted away by the police. (The Independent)

That much is made apparent by what appears to be an environmentalist version of Antifa working within the framework of a self-described “digital community center for anarchist, anti-fascist, autonomous anti-capitalist and anti-colonial movements” known as It’s Going Down. (The Washington Examiner)

“While we’re not investigating antifa as antifa—that’s an ideology and we don’t investigate ideologies—we are investigating a number of what we would call anarchist-extremist , where we have properly predicated subjects of people who are motivated to commit violent criminal activity on kind of an antifa ideology,” Wray told members of the House Homeland Security Committee. (Newsweek Magazine)