The Antifa: Stories From Inside the Black Bloc by Jack Posobiec, a former naval intelligence officer whose area specialization is the Chinese Communist Party. Published by Calamo Press in 2021, a publishing house that lists only seven other books besides The Antifa.
Since leaving active duty, Jack Posobiec has produced documentaries and books of analysis on Leftist organizations in the United States. The book is not framed not as an intelligence briefing or comprehensive, book-length account but as an overview. Posobiec states:
“The information contained in this book and its appendices serve only as an introductory summary of the scope and breadth of this network, which operates cells in numerous regions across Western Europe and North America, and is growing increasingly tactical.”
The Introduction of the book presents a largely perspective, one that matches the tenor of his Twitter account – the U.S. intelligence community is self-serving in their approach to public engagements – serving power above truth – and have a worldview that is inappropriately self-assured – they are blind to the negative long term impact of their support of time-bound parties over timeless verities.
The Antifa provides a broad intellectual history of the ideology, intelligence collection activities, and reportage – opening in the U.S. and then covering groups in Europe such as the Red Army Fraction in Germany amongst a few other leftist terrorist groups later shown to have been given financial support by the Soviet Union following the fall of the U.S.S.R. and brief opening of its government archives.
I’ll first present the praiseworthy elements of the book and then the blameworthy.
Creditable
Posobiec cites a good number of events and actors to legitimize the goal of the work as being an introductory summary.
Posobies writes in a shorthand about Antifa’s conceptual trajectory that is far less nuanced than Mark Bray’s Anti-Fascist Handbook – and yet his openly dismissive criticism of the illiberalism of Antifa doesn’t miss the mark. Whereas Bray, due to his political sympathies, propounds sophistries on how rights enumerated by the U.S. constitution (i.e. Free Speech) are, essentially, ‘tricks’ of the capitalist class to enforce their rule – Posobiec reports that they are out-of-power totalitarians who hope to organize themselves in such a way that they can soon restrict speech on a wide variety of topics. The efforts to indoctrinate anti-legal values – i.e. illegal migrants are legal, police are criminal, people should only be allowed to organize themselves if their goals support socialism – are covered only in brief, but the examples provided do highlight their policies.
Similarly, the section contrasting core “Boogaloo boys” values, attitudes, beliefs, and actions with those of the traditional conservatives, shows how incorrect some journalists’ assessments of them as being “creatures of the right” have been.
Posobiec’s direct account of Antifa’s intimidation and violence is both journalistic and autobiographic. As it enables to give an extended internal perspective of someone that is ‘sieged’ by a group of protestors simply for having a belief (i.e. the outcome of the elections was good) or that is giving an ‘on the ground’ account of someone within a “Cop-Free Zone” makes for compelling reading. In such instances it’s practicable to see how Antifa feeds into elements of fascism, criminality, and illicit drug culture. Posobiec’s a talented writer, so these sections on the authoritarian and anti-social elements of the Antifa worldview are presented in a manner that effectively combines the serious with the humorous.
Criticisms
While the overview given on Antifa’s positions is correct, I believe a more extended delineation of their policy positions would have been beneficial for characterizing them as militant utopians. This would have benefitted the books by not only establishing that this is a network that seeks to undermine the U.S. Constitutional order but that can also be exploited by enemies of the State.
Posobiec’s description of Antifa’s historical trajectory in the U.S. relies upon events widely covered rather than examining the period which he correctly cites as formative. In the closing chapter titled Outlook Assessment, Posobiec provides a concise and accurate history:
“The extremist movement’s growth has been fueled first by the increase in globalization in the 1990s; financial capitalism in the 2000s, and later by the spread of international populism in the late 2010s… social medial platforms have permitted the vast spread of antifascist ideology, recruitment, organization, and crowdfunding across state and international borders in ways never before possible (Posobiec 2021).
And yet in the introduction Posobiec periodizes Antifa as beginning in the 2016 campaign trail at Hilary’s DNC and Trump’s election. There is no rationale given for this claim.
Though the book describes the connection of modern anti-systemic thought and activism to CrimethInc. and Black Lives Matter, he makes no mention of the leaders within these two networks. This is important as it answers the question: “What were the groups involved in the J20 protest actions doing during the lead-up to the Battle in Seattle?”
From that vantage point, we’d see that these groups were practicing street protest tactics, engaging in training exercises for non-violent protest, and building trust with one another at various gatherings, as well as learning how to do media work, fund-raise, and network at conferences. Looking backward we see the leaders of these networks are(1) linked to the World Social Forum movement and (2) the WSF was founded to achieve goals advanced by the international communist movement generally and the Cuban and Venezuelan governments specifically, and (3) Antifa’s “seeds” were first planted at Common Ground – wherein meetings between Anarchists, ex-Black Panther Party members and other types of radicalized lead to a qualitatively different form of struggle within the U.S. and that whereas mass protests “welcoming committees” were once staged the RNC AND the DNC, now it is only the former.
Because of this short-term periodization Posobiec instead highlights efforts by the Kurdish YPG to attract ideologically-motivated volunteers to fight in Syria. While impactful, it was not formative in the same degree that Cuba’s and Venezuela’s material and organizational support have had on the contemporary U.S. left.
Another issue is that as a whole, however, coverage of activities is episodic rather than comprehensive and they are not processed in a manner for intelligence analysis.
But it does weaken the conclusion of the book.
The chapter titled Black Block as well as the Appendix contains a list of protest activities undertaken by CrimethInc. and Black Lives Matter – however the numerous in-person conventions, conferences, consultations, cultural-events, forums, encuentros, speaking engagements, etc. linked to these networks are absent. While Posobiec’s conclusion is mostly true – these were “dry runs” for Occupy Wall Street – the full scope of the sundry political networks involved in Antifa and BLM remains hidden and the full scope of activities remains correctly categorized [hybrid warfare] but poorly argued (Posobiec 85).
This is significant as in the closing chapters Domestic Terrorists and Outlook Assessment argue that the organizational trajectory of Antifa means it ought to be viewed as a greater threat to be countered through legal action. Though the purpose of this book is stated to be for introductory purposes and not to present such a “case” this closing section doesn’t feel inappropriate – the arguments themselves for this within the section aren’t bad – however the evidence cited and organized doesn’t provide sufficient cause to justify “intelligence collection, communication intercepts, and financial asset tracking and seizure”. This doesn’t mean he’s wrong, just that he’s wrapping up with a conclusion on the subject rather than an outline for how other researchers should work towards building an all-source database for use in intelligence development on this subject. Given the book’s line of argument, this is needed to achieve what is argued for in the concluding chapters.