“Those who ignore history are doomed to repeat it” is a phrase that has come to define the news cycle more and more as of late.
For example, if you’re wondering where “Antifa” (an ironically named group of people) got the inspiration for their coat of arms, one need search no further back than 1930s Germany.
The logo to the left of this article’s headline is the 1932 flag of the German Communist Party’s paramilitary wing. Look familiar?
To the right is that of “Antifa”, a terrorist organization that claims to take a stand, both verbally and physically, against those they perceive as “Nazis”; the main rival to the Communists in Germany at that time.
However, as there are conveniently no jackbooted Nazis to fight in America today, Communist sympathetic Antifa members happily settle for harassing and assaulting anyone who thinks differently than they do.
Despite calling themselves enemies of fascists, the way Antifa conducts itself is eerily reminiscent of the demons they claim to be combatting.
While the comparison of one’s political rivals to Hitler inspires unoriginal boredom, this is a comparison worth analyzing.
One only need to briefly study the violent history of Hitler’s “Brownshirts” and the role they played in the Nazi Party’s rise to power to connect the disturbing parallels between the “SA” and Antifa today.
The “Sturmabteilung” (Storm Detachment) also referred to as the SA or “Brownshirts” due to the color of their uniform, became the first paramilitary wing of the Nazi Party in the 1920s.
Their initial function was to disrupt meetings and rallies of rival political parties, provide protection detail for Nazi rallies, intimidate racial minority groups and eventually organize violent and destructive riots or “demonstrations” as CNN would likely refer to them.
If one were to view the footage of the 2019 Trump Rally in Minneapolis, you would see Antifa members taking to the streets to openly assault Trump supporters walking to their cars following the rally.
The City Police present were specifically told not wear their uniforms and not arrest trouble makers by Mayor Jacob Frey, effectively castrating police protection and giving Trump supporters over to an angry mob.
These tactics would have been openly celebrated by Adolph Hitler had he been a witness. In a letter that Hitler wrote to one of his top SA leaders, Franz von Salomon, who controlled the SA from 1926 to 1930, he explains how he wanted his Brownshirts to conduct themselves.
In the letter, the future Fuhrer writes, “The work should be carried out not in secret but in mighty mass processions…through the conquest of the streets. We have to teach that the future master of the streets is National Socialism, just as one day it will be the master of the State.”
It appears Antifa leaders are taking a line directly from Hitler himself in how they have been organizing as of late.
Hiding behind the veil of racial inequality by partnering with black hate groups like BLM, these Neo-Marxists are restocking the fires of class struggle and using violent mass protests in a literal “conquest of the streets” to neutralize police presence.
Once the Brownshirts had effectively recruited enough members (boasting over three million at their height) they effectively ended local and state police. Initially, they offered to “supplement” local police forces but very quickly usurped their authority altogether, effectively disbanding any kind of politically neutral constabulary through overwhelming numbers and mob violence.
Today, through very similar methods, we are seeing major US city officials being bullied by Democratically funded Antifa and BLM groups. Through violent street “demonstrations”, they are demanding the defunding of police forces, openly burn down police precincts, and are now even going as far as to declare “autonomous zones” such as what we are seeing in Seattle.
We are also seeing in these “autonomous zones” a complete dissolution of police presence which has been replaced with roving gangs of their own violent constituents, some even going as far as to demand “protection” money from the few businesses that still exist within the zone.
Hitler also sought to “unify” the press by using his Brownshirts to intimidate and smash the publishing houses of editors that dared print any sort of “dissent.” He also allowed journalists to be openly targeted by his SA.
While mainstream media has been all but complicit in the Left’s narratives, we have even seen some CNN anchors targeted at a recent riot in Atlanta over another officer involved shooting.
Independent journalists and news outlets are ruthlessly targeted, by comparison, and often find what few police present are actively avoiding intervention on their behalf for fear of the mob or to obey orders from complicit shills like Mayor Frey and Governor Walz.
Even our cousins to the north are seeing the fallout from Antifa terrorist tactics. An independent Canadian journalist and filmmaker, Dan Dicks, was openly assaulted by Black Lives Matter “demonstrators” in Vancouver just last week. He was called a “white-supremacist” simply by passively filming the protest as a white man.
He was then continually shoved and pelted with projectiles. The numerous assaults occurred on camera, in front of police, with dozens of onlookers and not a single arrest was made… other than his own for “disturbing the peace.”
And the more unchecked violence these groups are allowed to commit, the more obscene it will become.
Similar to the mindless rioting and looting we’ve witnessed in Minneapolis, Seattle, and other Democrat controlled cities, the Brownshirts in 1938 conducted a violent riot of their own to further display a show of strength and foment racial tensions.
German Diplomat, Ernst vom Rath, was allegedly murdered by Polish Jew, Herschel Grynszpan. In response the Brownshirts were used for “demonstrations” protesting the outrage of the murder and to sew further fear into the Jewish business community in what is to this day still referred to as the “Crystal Night” due to the sheer amount of crystal and glass that was shattered in that one night.
In the riots that followed, members of the SA vandalized the storefronts of over 7,000 Jewish businesses and stores, Jewish homes were looted and ransacked throughout the country, and some 200 synagogues were burnt. Many Jews were beaten to death and more than 30,000 Jewish men were arrested and taken to concentration camps.
Even the composition of Antifa today is similar to that of the Brownshirts. Rudolph Diels, one of Hitler’s first Gestapo Chiefs, estimated that at least 70 percent of new SA recruits were former communists, a number that would not be hard to believe of Antifa membership given their strong affection for openly socialist and pro-marxist candidates like Bernie Sanders.
A very large percentage of those Communists were also among the poor and the unemployed. The years following WWI saw great hardship and unemployment for many German citizens which drove them into the arms of Communism.
Similarly today, the U.S. has more than 40 million unemployed Americans due to Covid lockdown measures. Many of them are also college graduates who now have a crushing amount of student loan debt, no job or means of obtaining one, and likely an obscure degree. These are ideal conditions for a violent Marxist group like Antifa to swell their ranks with young, angry recruits.
The endgame for Antifa remains to be seen by the Democratic Party. Hitler eventually turned on his Brownshirts once they had fulfilled their usefulness. By 1933, the Nazis evolved from an extremist political party to the unquestioned body of government.
The Brownshirts were no longer needed for their original purposes: the acquisition of political power, mob like suppression of the enemies of the Party and the neutralization of state and local police forces.
They had now become a liability and cause of hatred for the German people towards the new Nazi Party. Political rivals had also risen up in the SA among leaders who expected Hitler to appoint them to a position of power within the new Nazi regime.
To both eliminate potential threats as well as appease the German people, Hitler executed what would be known as the 1934 “Night of Longknives.” The coup ended in the murder and imprisonment of hundreds of top SA leaders, effectively ending their reign of terror and allowing Hitler’s SS to absorb the role of the police in Germany, something far more organized and terrifying.
Nazi ideology quickly became central core values of police activity. The new, enlightened and better equipped SS police forces became powerful figures not just in maintaining strict public order, but in combating “racial enemies” designated by the Nazi state.
It was in this context that “preventive police action” became a tactic that saw so many men, women and children secreted off to camps in the middle of the night.
One must wonder then, what top Democrats have in store for Antifa leadership should they somehow defeat incumbent Donald Trump and come to power in 2020 and who they will designate as the new “racial enemies” of the state…likely conservative whites who refuse to “take a knee.”
Regardless, any reasonable person can see through the lens of history that Antifa is no different than the “Nazis” and’ fascists they claim to stand against.
Both of these groups hate people based on the basis of class and skin color, hate freedom of speech, assault journalists, want their own unchecked police state, commit violence against those who disagree with them, and want to cleanse the world of diversity in thought through that same violence.
You can support my writing at: Jared Miller is creating Political Articles from a Christian Perspective | Patreon
Neat article, very illuminating. The Antifa crowd are often dangerous and have taken part in violent vigilantism on many occasions- oftentimes using tactics that are reminiscent of those that Malcolm X’s Black Panthers used. I would claim that they more resemble the Panthers than the Brownshirts.
I think your comment of “no different” is perhaps a bit exaggerated. The neat thing about weaker claims is that they are actually much easier to defend. Lets compare these three groups in more detail:
The Panthers and Antifa both promote minority rights. The Brownshirts promoted majority rights. There is one difference. Another is the Panthers and Antifa are notoriously leftist. The Brownskirts and Nazis in general were as far to the right as you can possibly get. That is two differences.
Their clothing was different, for instance – and not just the color or style. The Brownshirts had belt buckles that proclaimed “Got Mitt Uns” (“God’s with *us*”). Not to be out-God-ed (sp), we American’s changed our national motto to “In God We Trust” after our nation’s socialist roots were exposed during the McCarthy era.
The Brownshirts had a standardized uniforms and real authority eventually, in that fashion they resembled the police of today. Antifa has no actual authority, and are a loose knit activist group with a penchant for violence. There isn’t any “official antifa roster” because it is a diffuse political movement. Also, the Panthers had some Muslim influences, while the Brownskirts were about 97% Christian (more Protestant than Catholic, but only by a little bit.) That last statement is disputed, however- by Conservapedia at least. Conservapedia claims that the Nazis were atheists and doesn’t have a reference or any numbers to back that claim. Wikipedia has numbers on each denomination over the course of many years that boiled out of the 1939 German census data and other sources. So there’s that.
In conclusion, the main similarities between the two groups are that they had/have guns, were willing to use them, and had racial motivations for their activism- which was at times violent.
. But there were many differences too. Feel free to correct me if I’m wrong on any of this. I’m not perfect, but I do have a decent memory.
*The OP is correct about the censorship too, my bad; Antifa has attempted to muzzle their rivals on multiple occasions. Just like the Brownshirts in some cases, with threats- I’m not sure about book burnings though. Interestingly, the Brownshirts put a $100,000 (in today’s money) bounty on Einstein’s head, and J Edgar Hoover (the Director of the FBI for 48 years) attempted to deny him entrance to the USA. Once Einstein got in anyway- a man was caught organizing an assassination attempt on him and was only fined $6 for his crime. Possibly due to Hoover’s now-publicized agenda to smear and “neutralize” all civil rights leaders, which he pursued when he wasn’t
dressing up in drag and having one schoolboy read the Bible to him while the other gave him a different type of oral service- or amassing the world’s biggest collection of illegal porn by way of FBI “evidence review”, or trying to blackmail MLK Jr into committing suicide for Dr King’s “immoral degeneracy”.
LikeLike
Thanks for your comment. I will respond in chronological order as best I can.
1. The minority / majority rights is splitting hairs a bit. Terrorism is terrorism regardless of how big the population they are promoting is. Antifa also has a majority makeup of Whites (majority population in the U.S.) despite pushing a radical Black agenda.
2. It is a common but incorrect notion to think the Nazis of Germany were far right. Nazi stands for “National Socialism” and embraced the same leftist principles then that Antifa and Marxists still embrace today. The only distinction now is that socialists are embracing Globalism in place of Nationalism.
3. The clothing style has a historical reasoning. The brown uniforms were produced in mass for German soldiers in WWI who were still occupying German colonies in North Africa. They were then cheaply available for the poor and disgruntled socialists / communists who later filled their ranks. The Italians used black and were often called “Blackshirts.” Black is cheap and easy to find today as well.
4. Much of the German population may have identified as Protestant at that time but that does not mean Brown Shirts were. One of the primary tenants of Socialist Marxism is the complete rejection and dismantling of religion as we saw with Stalin and Mao with their coming to power.
Hitler is quoted as publicly supporting Christianity and wanting to unite Catholics and Protestant in order to merely win popular support from Christian Germans. In private, Hitler was strongly critical of organized religion. He viewed Christian tenants of compassion and charity as weakness. He often persecuted Christian churches who harbored Jews during his time in office.
Hitler also believed the core values of Nazism – nationalism, obedience and loyalty to the state – were dangerously contradicted by religious teachings. He feared that the influence of churches might undermine Nazi ideals.
5. No, Antifa does not have any *officially* sanctioned governmental power YET. The origins of the Brown Shirts (the point of my article) are frighteningly familiar, however.
Antifa members are continually funded and released or bailed out of prison by powerful political figures within our Government, Kamala Harris (current Vice President) being among them.
6. The familiar “gain power through the conquest of the streets” as Hitler instructed his Brownshirts when compared to Antifa is undeniable. The membership of Black Panthers at their height was also only about 10,000. Antifa is much more widespread, as you said, because they are not merely a fringe political group based on racial makeup.
The Brownshirts swelled to millions by the time Hitler came to power. That is something I pray we never allow to happen in this country with Antifa.
Appreciate the feedback and thanks again for reading.
LikeLiked by 1 person