Comment by jMyles
9 hours ago
The difference is that North Korea is a place, with an organization that claims to be its government. You can point to it on a map.
Antifa is an adjective that people with no connection to one another self-apply. I'm antifa, and I imagine you are too, but it doesn't mean that we've ever met or coordinated with one another in any meaningful way.
The word "antifa" is basically meaningless altogether, since virtually every person since the end of WW2 claims to oppose fascism.
Antifa is also a noun describing a group of people.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antifa_(United_States)
Who is in that group?
Everyone who declared themselves to oppose fascism
But it's not about meanings of words with these people. It's about exercising power. Facts and logic don't matter.
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Wikipedia doesn't use the phrase "group of people", and cites a symposium as a source for the assessment that "it is a highly decentralized array of autonomous groups in the United States," so, I'm not sure this advances the discussion.
It's obvious that the vast, overwhelming majority of people consider themselves anti-fascist. So I really don't think it possible for this term to ever actually describe a particular group of people, excluding other groups of people.
These attempts to shoehorn the word "antifa" into some kind of distinct organization seem like they are just a lingual change to make it more difficult to use this phrase, or more difficult to advance critiques of fascist tendencies wherever they may appear.
This is evasion; in common use it's a noun not an adjective and refers to specific loosely knit movement, with a few organized groups in it. It's like a riotous far right group called itself patriots and said well if you're against them you must be country-hater.
Their real views and goals have little to do with any kind of "fascism" and is just violent leftism. And as much as i dislike fascism (actual, not whatever Teen Vogue doesn't like), I personally think Marxism is the worst ideology invented, so if eg rose city antifa was fighting some actually grotesque organization like aryan brotherhood, instead of whoever they usually fight, id grudgingly consider the latter to be a lesser evil.