Post–World War II anti-fascism
Post–World War II anti-fascism, including antifa groups, anti-fascist movements and anti-fascist action networks, saw the development of political movements describing themselves as anti-fascist and in opposition to fascism. Those movements have been active in several countries in the aftermath of World War II during the second half of the 20th and early 21st century.
Europe
The immediate aftermath of the Second World War saw Fascism and its ideological successors discredited as the ideologies of the defeated Axis powers, with the eradication of Fascist ideologies a stated goal of the victorious Allies, culminating in processes like the Nuremberg trials and de-Nazification. The onset however, of the Cold War saw the urgency attached to these goals diminish in the face of superpower competition, and anti-fascist activities becoming less prominent.File:Vlepa antify, Warszawa.jpg|thumb|An antifascist sticker in Warsaw, Poland
The appearance of rightist political parties and their upsurge since the dissolution of the Soviet Union has stimulated a corresponding growth of anti-fascist movements. In Germany Neo-Nazism was never eradicated, and former Nazis including Reinhard Gehlen and former chancellor Kurt Georg Kiesinger rose to positions of great power. The Freedom Party of Austria was founded by politicians including former Nazis in 1955. In France, where the far-right National Rally was founded in 1972.
In post-WWII Great Britain, skinheads and football hooligans often promoted vehement racism; the English Defence League was founded in 2009. The Netherlands has seen the rise of a number of rightist parties, starting with the Centre Party, then the NVU, and then the PVV with Geert Wilders and the young Forum voor Democratie. The German right has grown rapidly since the Fall of the Berlin Wall, and the far-right party Alternative for Germany was founded in 2013, followed shortly thereafter by the anti-immigrant Pegida movement.
The war ends in Italy on 2 May 1945, with the complete surrender of German and RSI forces to the Allied forces, as formally established during the so-called Surrender at Caserta on 29 April 1945, marks the definitive defeat of Nazism and Fascism in Italy. By 1 May, all of northern Italy was liberated from occupation, including Bologna, Genoa, Milan, Turin and Venice. The liberation put an end to two and a half years of German occupation, five years of war, and twenty-three years of fascist dictatorship.
The aftermath of World War II left Italy bitter toward the monarchy for endorsing the Fascist regime for over 20-plus years. These frustrations contributed to a revival of the Italian republican movement.
The liberation symbolically represents the beginning of the historical journey which led to the referendum of 2 June 1946, when Italians opted for the end of the monarchy and the creation of the Italian Republic. This was followed by the adoption of the 1948 Constitution of the Republic, created by the Constituent Assembly and representatives from the anti-fascist forces that defeated the Nazis and the Fascists during the liberation of Italy and the Italian civil war.
Italy
Today's Italian constitution is the result from the work of a Constituent Assembly formed by the representatives of all the anti-fascist forces that contributed to the defeat of Nazi and Fascist forces during the liberation of Italy.File: Bella ciao, Representative Orchestra of Serbian Guards.ogg|thumb|Bella ciao
Liberation Day is a national holiday in Italy that commemorates the victory of the Italian resistance movement against Nazi Germany and the Italian Social Republic, puppet state of the Nazis and rump state of the fascists, in the Italian Civil War, a civil war in Italy fought during World War II, which takes place on 25 April. The date was chosen by convention, as it was the day of the year 1945 when the National Liberation Committee of Upper Italy officially proclaimed the insurgency in a radio announcement, propounding the seizure of power by the CLNAI and proclaiming the death sentence for all fascist leaders.
Associazione Nazionale Partigiani d'Italia is an association founded by participants of the Italian resistance against the Italian Fascist regime and the subsequent Nazi occupation during World War II. ANPI was founded in Rome in 1944 while the war continued in northern Italy. It was constituted as a charitable foundation on 5 April 1945. It persists due to the activity of its antifascist members.
ANPI's objectives are the maintenance of the historical role of the partisan war by means of research and the collection of personal stories. Its goals are a continued defense against historical revisionism and the ideal and ethical support of the high values of freedom and democracy expressed in the 1948 constitution, in which the ideals of the Italian resistance were collected. Since 2008, every two years ANPI organizes its national festival. During the event, meetings, debates, and musical concerts that focus on antifascism, peace, and democracy are organized.
Bella ciao is an Italian folk song modified and adopted as an anthem of the Italian resistance movement by the partisans who opposed nazism and fascism, and fought against the occupying forces of Nazi Germany, who were allied with the fascist and collaborationist Italian Social Republic between 1943 and 1945 during the Italian Civil War. Versions of this Italian anti-fascist song continue to be sung worldwide as a hymn of freedom and resistance. As an internationally known hymn of freedom, it was intoned at many historic and revolutionary events. The song originally aligned itself with Italian partisans fighting against Nazi German occupation troops, but has since become to merely stand for the inherent rights of all people to be liberated from tyranny.
Germany
In 1944, after the defeat of Nazi Germany, groups called Antifaschistische Ausschüsse, Antifaschistische Kommittees or Antifaschistische Aktion, all typically abbreviated to Antifa, spontaneously re-emerged in Germany, mainly involving veterans of pre-war KPD, KPO and SPD politics as well as some members of other democratic political parties and the Confessing Church, which had opposed the Nazi co-optation of the Lutheran Church during the 1930s and 1940s. Communists tended to make up at least half of the committees.In the western zones, these anti-fascist committees began to recede by the late summer of 1945, marginalized by Allied bans on political organization and by re-emerging divisions between Communists and others and the emerging state doctrine of anti-communism in what became West Germany. In East Germany, the Antifa groups were absorbed into the new Stalinist state.
The subsequent post-war history of the anti-fascist movement in Germany includes two distinct traditions, an East German tradition and a tradition that arose in West Germany during the 1970s, both drawing inspiration from the Antifa committees and from the earlier italic=no of the Weimar Republic. According to German government institutions the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution and the Federal Agency for Civic Education, the contemporary Antifa or anti-fascist movement in Germany—the terms are often used interchangeably in German—is composed of multiple far-left, autonomous, militant groups and individuals who describe themselves as anti-fascist. According to the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, the use of the epithet fascist against opponents and the understanding of capitalism as a form of fascism are central to the movement.
According to political scientist and Christian Democratic Union politician Tim Peters, the term anti-fascism is primarily used by the far left in contemporary Germany.
In Communist East Germany, "anti-fascism" as interpreted within the Communist movement was part of the official ideology and language of the Communist state, and the original italic=no of the Communist Party of Germany was considered an important part of the heritage of the governing Socialist Unity Party of Germany; Eckhard Jesse, director of the Hannah Arendt Institute for the Research on Totalitarianism, notes that the term "anti-fascism" was ubiquitous in the language of the East German Communist party, and used to justify repression such as the crackdown on the East German uprising of 1953.
"Antifascism" in East Germany generally meant the struggle against the western world and NATO in general, and against the western-backed Federal Republic of Germany and its main ally the United States in particular, which were seen as the main fascist forces in the world by the East German Communist party. For example, from 1961 to 1989, the East German regime used the term "Anti-Fascist Protection Wall" as the official name for the Berlin Wall.
The contemporary German Antifa movement ultimately has its origins in West Germany, in the student-based Außerparlamentarische Opposition of the 1960s and early 1970s which opposed the alleged "fascism" of the West German government. The modern movement largely adopted the aesthetics of the italic=no during the late Weimar Republic, including the abbreviated name Antifa and a version of its logo, while being ideologically somewhat dissimilar.
The first Antifa groups in this tradition were founded by the Maoist Communist League in the early 1970s. Antifa women, dissatisfied with observed sexism in the movement, created the feminist offshoot Fantifa in 1985. From the late 1980s, West Germany's squatter scene and left-wing autonomism movement were the main contributors to the new Antifa movement and in contrast to the earlier movement had a more anarcho-communist leaning. The modern movement has splintered into different groups and factions, including one anti-imperialist and anti-Zionist faction and one anti-German faction who strongly oppose each other. German government institutions describe the contemporary Antifa movement as part of the extreme left and as partially violent, and Antifa groups are monitored by the federal office in the context of its legal mandate to combat extremism; the federal office states that the underlying goal of the Antifa movement is "the struggle against the liberal democratic basic order" and capitalism.