Have you ever noticed the street graffiti consisting of a letter A enclosed in a circle, or those stickers in red and black reading "antifa" around in most of Berlin? Those are the signs that anti-socials might be hanging out around you.
I started doing this profile analysis of the so-called "antifascist movement" members almost by mistake when I first settled in Berlin in 2012, and without being conscious of it I moved in a Hausprojekt Gemeinschaft in Friedrichshain. There I spent nine months observing closely the space and habits of individuals who from outside seemed harmless "alternative anticapitalist" people. At first I found they were all just like me at that time; an environmentally conscious, materially detached group of people, but they were in reality the total opposite of that. They were actually a group of welfare recipients living from the state, who would try to fabricate ideologies out of this lifestyle. This research kicked off while renting a room at the rear-house in the infamous house-collective Abstand (a former punk squat, one of the many projekthäuser from the complex of squatted houses of former West-Berlin), when I started to notice their abnormal behavioural patterns in the way I started to get to know each one of them.
These individuals were all in essence just the same, I mean that they have the same logic for dealing with life: They try to justify a seemingly irrational hate towards everything and everyone that disagrees with their political views (which consisted in a mixture of general superfluous leftist principles taken to the extreme, and an almost compulsive tendency to call people nazis). I witnessed how these individuals elaborate strict ideological statements about everything, for instance being vegan, in order to hate on everyone who isn't one. Also, they would align into feminist principles, but equally not without elaborating out of them radical statements, which often were mixed with imagery of violence and hate against those (they considered) would not agree, follow, or even oppose their radicalised views. Calling any person who questioned their principles a "fascist," seemed to me as if for these individuals it was a sort of pathological need to insult anybody who didn’t agree with them.
Anti-fascism is just a scapegoat
Being concerned about the threats that Nationalsozialismus represented to them was the raison d'être of the members of Weiße Rose during the 1940s in Germany, then why are these individuals seeing nazis everywhere although they are living in the twenty-first century? To get the answer one must take into consideration what, in psychiatric terms, a scapegoat is, how it works: When people carry within emotional issues, these issues don't wash away over time, instead they mutate becoming traits of their psychic life varying with the society they belong to. The norms also vary within the different scopes of these societies, i.e., spaces assign implicit or explicit ways of coping, i.e. norms which individuals learn in school and at home as kids. Namely, societies place expectations and responsiveness to these norms. In certain cases children are raised ignoring the nature of many of these norms, but then as adults it is only a matter of time until they realise that their childhood bubble will pop, because it doesn’t comply with reality. This reality doesn't feel good to them, they find it oppressive. Therefore, to handle the trauma of living they unite in collectives in which they manage to create a space or a room in which they can release their anti-social libido without legal repercussions. Parting from my observations in these communities I chose to call this abstract space room for ambiguities; the conceptual time/space, in which these individuals assemble together to commit crimes hidden from the judging eye of society.
From Freud to Lacan, professionals in psychology agree that the fundamental object of the "demand" is the "mother," this presupposes that most of the features in an adult’s personality and world-view are built around the lack/presence of the mother-figure. It is through this optic that I base my study upon these antifa cases. I base on a longitudinal study inside three project houses of Berlin: first was Abstand, second Supamolly, and last the Tuntenhaus to conclude that it seems as if a feminist woman who later becomes a mother, when standing on the radical side of these ideologies passes over onto her children a generalised hate towards everything which society will present to them as norms, and to society itself. Certainly everybody knows, or at least has heard about these radical feminist philosophies, in which the laws of science dictated by nature are instead seen as rules made-by-men, therefore rendered as oppressive norms dictated by a patriarchal system, meant to keep women oppressed. This is of course just radicalised nonsense, which nevertheless carries a real effect, and functions as indoctrination in the upbringing of a child, who exposed to such principles coming from his/her mother, will turn into a potential anti-social, who will be unable to adapt to society.
Dissecting the Antifa Spectrum
In places like Latin America, Asia, in Africa or the Caribbean, antifa as they exist in Europe and North America, are only spotted as typical NGO workers, meaning that this phenomenon is imported from the West. They travel through volunteering programmes, or as social-workers, and filter as vectors in what they call the Global South, where they spread corrupted ideologies among the local youth, feeding in these young minds feelings of shame towards their own culture, and of course racism.
Many of the antifa interviewed for this analysis have explicitly described to me how they would import to the Global South three main topics: Feminism, veganism and radical-left ideologies. And so, based on my observations and interviews, I managed to isolate three main sorts of antifa profiles, which usually overlap each other in a single individual.
First I will describe the veganer-antifa; individuals who are convinced that behind the food pyramid lays a fascist structure, therefore they choose to deprive themselves from essential nutritional elements for the sake of these paranoid beliefs. Most of them look like they suffer from severe anaemia. They often present erratic abnormal habits, such as smoking kitchen spices mixed with tobacco, and/or are drug-addicts. Many of them (specially the female), manifest paranoid delusions believing they have magical powers, to the point of projecting or even presenting themselves to others as witches. These individuals are at first pictured as harmless tender-hearted animal-rights advocates, who would cry at the sight of a person eating a Döner Kebab, but who would turn into a rabid pig when having his/her lifestyle put into question.
Besides thinking they are "witches," stuffing on quinoa, smoking oregano and crying about animal cruelty while high on meth, the veganer-antifa passes onto a more disturbing form when he/she finds his/her sexuality awakened.
That takes us onto the analysis of the so-called queer-antifa, who is similarly wired up in self-invented norms and policies. This sort of antifa is usually active on the internet sharing images of gore and child pornography, running blogs focused on these topics to shock children inside the so-called "dark web", just for fun. These individuals are really dangerous and a serious threat to children. The queer is very often engaged in degenerated intellectualism, they are very stubborn about gender narratives, and can very quickly elaborate a response to everything based in the same argument: They believe that sexual organs and the human reproductive apparatus is a social construction. In fact, for these individuals anything which is not inside their perspective is a social construction. Often misquoting Foucault and victims of sexual abuse during their childhood, these queer-antifa are also known for their anti-psychiatric beliefs. But let's face it: Enjoying gore is not for healthy minds, and worse! Neither it is proper to show such images to kids.
This sort of anti-social is easy to spot in Berlin; as in contrast with the veganer, who are known for wearing blonde dreadlocks, the queer-antifa usually wear bangs and/or shave one side of their heads. They are also characterised by the empty gaze of their eyes. They are very unhappy individuals, most of whom are diagnosed with borderline personality disorder. Female queers proudly exhibit cutting scars in their wrists just like a normal person would show their jewellery. Another peculiarity in the appearance of this sort of antifa is their lack of many principles of personal hygiene. Many of them usually demand to be identified as neither, or the opposite sex, choosing to be addressed as transgender, among whom I isolated two different sorts: First the trans, who in the most severe of the cases are individuals diagnosed with a psychiatric condition known as gender dysphoria, the conviction that one is born in the wrong body with the wrong set of genitals. This sort of trans is mostly born a male. The other sort of transgender is the most common one; these are young females (in lesser cases also homosexual young males), who after reading Butler, de Lauretis or Preciado decide to become what these authors define as a sexual dissident.
Furthermore, the danger that the so-called gender theory poses is not that evident in Europe where everyone is free, but only when exported to the Global South. These gender-intellectuals see no problem in getting financial support from paedophiles, for whom they would in turn work to elaborate pseudo-scientific literature fabricating consent for these deviant praxes in the Global South, disguised most of the time as post/decolonial or even as anti-racist discourses.
And last, but not least, there is the anti-deutsch: An individual who expressly hate his nationality that much he/she suffers from an urgent need to elaborate norms and personal policies, to avoid be called a fascist him/herself. They never shut up talking about Emma Goldman and Hanna Arendt (whoever they think they might be), and project themselves as an intellectual, practicing critical whiteness, although they are pretty much doing the opposite.
The anti-deutsch (as the name might suggest) hates everything about Germany. They consider everything about Germany shameful, although most of them live from the welfare of the state since the very moment they were born. Most of these individuals come from proletarian migrant families, mostly descendants of American or Canadian jewish or protestant migrants, but are nevertheless born in Germany and atheists. For this reason they believe they are always right. In relation to the antifa characteristics listed in this analysis, the psychiatric profile of this sort of antifa is that of a self-righteous member of a sect. They invest humongous amounts of energy in pretending to be "normal" hiding any trait of eccentricity, the reason why they always look just weird and uncomfortable. They apply strict policies to monitor their own thoughts and behaviour, and surround themselves with community rules, which follow no real logic, and seem to be made only to be intentionally broken. These antifa frequently enjoy exercising humiliation, and very often manifest a tendency towards sadist praxes involving minorities, which they target as inferior. This sort of antifa also presents the complete psychiatric profile of a deranged sect member.
The anti-deutsch is also a walking paradox; meaning that they will always deny what they do. Totally racist, these antifa are only able to socialise with what they call people of colour (PoC), when these PoC submit to their collectives’ parameters, which are actually meant to feed in these PoC a complex of inferiority. But so, by presenting these PoC as their friends, these antifa avoid being called a racist, showing that their friendship is only strategical instrumentation. These antifa live with the constant need of having (what they believe are) their white privileges reassured by these PoC, who tolerate being constantly humiliated because they were conditioned through emotional blackmail and tricks of affection by these antifa, the same way one would train a dog to obey.
Living from the Hartz-IV (i.e. Bürgergeld, the German social welfare), these individuals build small dysfunctional communities, which from far look normal, but which would always collapse at the end. Unable to sustain themselves on the long run, these communities are rebuilt from the debris of the former, only to repeat the same rising and collapsing process over again, without reaching or establishing any concrete stage of progress, in a continuous circus of mediocrity.
These antifa also stand behind every politically correct statement, such as #refugeeswelcome without ever considering any of the ethical implications attached to their support. They are also known for being the cornerstones of the berliner left, and engage to organise every leftish demonstration in the city: From the rising prices of the rent, to environmental concerns, and for that they exploit every political discourse they know, from feminism to racism. But since they are very pale (a neo-nazi and antifa look and behave just the same way) these "antifa" choose to use their enslaved PoC to do the representation, making them stand on a podium to complain about gentrification or car-parking in neighbourhoods where they don't even live or have "Anmeldung" by the Polizei. They contain a rabid hate against politicians like Merkel, Putin, Erdogan and even Trump, but lack self-criticism for their support to either Israel, Palestine or Kurdistan.
When abroad, these individuals frequently use ideologies to justify a lifestyle in crime: From harassment to vandalism, paedophilia and/or drugs, they rejoice with impunity and manifest no sense of guilt, that is why they travel to the "Global South," because in Europe they are under constant surveillance.
#Antifa
Who are these people?
Ismael Ogando — March 29, 2019
Images
DER SPIEGEL G20 in Hamburg:
Eine Stadt im Ausnahmezustand