The word exchange was less dialogue than duel. Weeks later, Lila was sipping coffee in a cluttered apartment with posters of Emma Goldman and Audre Lorde taped to the wall. “People keep asking if I’m ‘in Antifa,’” she said, rolling her eyes. “That’s not how it works. You don’t sign up. You just don’t stand by when fascists march.”
Her definition carried the weight of street experience. For her, Antifa wasn’t an organization; it was a stance. But she admitted the word scared off friends. “It’s easier for them to believe I’m part of some secret network than to believe I just don’t want Nazis shouting in my park.” “Words stop being warnings when they turn into weapons,” she added.
Weapons, of course, were part of the words’ birth. In 1932 Rome, the blackshirts filled the streets, their torches staining the air. The word “fascist” then was not a metaphor but a party card carried proudly. Mussolini himself wore the name as branding, pulling from the Roman fasces, a bundle of rods bound around an axe—unity through discipline, power through violence. By the time American newspapers picked it up, the word was already shorthand for jackboots and torchlight parades.
Antifascists rose in direct response. Spanish anarchists, German communists, Italian partisans—they fought street battles against blackshirts and brownshirts under banners that read Antifaschistische Aktion. The red-and-black flag they carried has been resurrected in American protests today, often without knowledge of its lineage. In their time, both words were claimed as badges, not insults. Only later did they drift into slurs.
Dennis, the welder in Portland, knew none of that history when he first shouted “fascist” at a police line during a protest. “It just came out,” he recalled later. “I saw the shields, the way they moved as one, like a wall. It looked like the history books.” He laughed, embarrassed, then added, “Or maybe it just felt good to say it.” For him, the word was a shout of anger.
Tom, by contrast, wore resignation. He explained that he no longer used either word in class. “I’d rather have them argue about policies than play word tag,” he said. But when a student scrawled “FASH” in Sharpie on a bathroom stall, he paused. “I knew they didn’t mean Mussolini,” he said. “But I couldn’t shake the image of the torch parades.” Anger and resignation—two faces of the same imprecision.
Politics hardened the blur. In 2020, Donald Trump tweeted that the United States would designate Antifa a terrorist organization. No such designation was legally possible—it was performance, not policy—but the tweet lodged in millions of minds. People came to believe there was a central Antifa office somewhere sending out orders. The fiction shaped politics more than the fact ever could. “Say Antifa and half the country sees anarchists with firebombs,” one observer remarked. “Say fascist and the other half sees stormtroopers. Both sides feel justified, neither side listens.”
It was not always so murky. In World War II, Americans knew exactly who the fascists were: Germans, Italians, and their allies. Antifascism was the national creed; Roosevelt himself used the word. “We must be the great arsenal of democracy,” he declared, casting America’s fight as not just military but linguistic. To be antifascist was patriotic. The Cold War scrambled that clarity. “Fascist” became a cudgel wielded by communists against the West, while U.S. politicians avoided the term lest it blur the line with allies in Franco’s Spain. By the 1980s, Reagan’s America had largely retired the label. It returned only in protest chants and campus debates.
Marta, who had listened quietly in the Portland bar, finally offered her own definition.