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AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. Im Amy Goodman, with Juan Gonzlez.

JUAN GONZLEZ: President Trump is facing widespread criticism for his latest comments on the deadly white supremacist protest in Charlottesville, Virginia. Speaking at Trump Tower Tuesday, Trump said the violence was in part caused by what he called the "alt-left."

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: OK, what about the "alt-left" that came charging atexcuse me. What about the "alt-left"? They came charging at the, as you say, the alt-right? Do they have any semblance of guilt? Whatlet me ask you this: What about the fact they came chargingthat they came charging with clubs in their hands, swinging clubs? Do they have any problem? I think they do. So, you know, as far as Im concerned, that was a horrible, horrible day. Wait a minute, Im not finished. Im not finished, fake news. That was a horrible day.

REPORTER: Mr. President, are you putting what youre calling the "alt-left" and white supremacists on the same moral plane?

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Im not putting anybody on a moral plane. What Im saying is this: You had a group on one side, and you had a group on the other, and they came at each other with clubs, and it was vicious, and it was horrible, and it was a horrible thing to watch. But there is another side. There was a group on this sideyou can call them the left, youve just called them the leftthat came violently attacking the other group. So you can say what you want, but thats the way it is.

AMY GOODMAN: President Trumps comments were widely decried. Former Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney tweeted, "No, not the same. One side is racist, bigoted, Nazi. The other opposes racism and bigotry. Morally different universes," unquote. Earlier this week, Cornel West appeared on Democracy Now!. He painted a very different picture of Charlottesville than President Trump, saying anarchists and anti-fascists saved his life.

CORNEL WEST: Absolutely. You had a number of the courageous students, of all colors, at the University of Virginia who were protesting against the neofascists themselves. The neofascists had their own ammunition. And this is very important to keep in mind, because the police, for the most part, pulled back. The next day, for example, those 20 of us who were standing, many of them clergy, we would have been crushed like cockroaches if it were not for the anarchists and the anti-fascists who approached, over 300, 350 anti-fascists. We just had 20. And were singing "This Little light of Mine," you know what I mean? So that the

AMY GOODMAN: "Antifa" meaning anti-fascist.

CORNEL WEST: The anti-fascists, and then, crucial, the anarchists, because they saved our lives, actually. We would have been completely crushed, and Ill never forget that.

AMY GOODMAN: To look more at the anti-fascist movement, known as antifa, were joined by Mark Bray, lecturer at Dartmouth College. His new book, Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook.

First, pronounce it for us, Mark, and then talk about antifa.

MARK BRAY: Yes, well, its pronounced on-tee-fah. The emphasis is on the first syllable, and its pronounced more on than an, so on-tee-fah. Its commonly mispronounced. But antifa, of course, is short for anti-fascist.

And, you know, President Trumps comments that the altquote-unquote, "alt-left" and alt-right are equivalent moral forces is really historically misinformed and morally bankrupt. The anti-fascist movement has a global history that stretches back overabout a century. You can trace them to Italian opposition to Mussolinis Blackshirts, German opposition to Hitlers Brownshirts, anti-fascists from around the world who had traveled to Spain to fight in the Spanish Civil War. More recently, modern antifa can largely trace its roots to the anti-fascist movement in Britain in the 70s, and the postwar period more generally, that was responding to a xenophobic backlash against predominantly Caribbean and South Asian migration, also to the German autonomous movement of the 80s, which, really, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, had to respond to a really unprecedented neo-Nazi waveunprecedented in the postwar period, of course.

And then, in the United States, we can look at anti-racist action in the 1980s, 1990s and the early 2000s, which took some of these methods of confronting neo-Nazis and fascists wherever they assemble, shutting down their organizing and, as they said, going where they go. Today, in an article I wrote for The Washington Post called "Who are the antifa?" I explain this and show how todays antifa in the United States are really picking up the tradition where these groups left off. And their movement has really accelerated with the unfortunate ascendance of the alt-right following President Trump.

The other minor note I want to make before we continue is that antifa is really only one faction of a larger movement against white supremacy that dates back centuries and includes a whole numberthere are a whole number of groups that fight against similar foes, sometimes using the same methods, that arent necessarily anti-fascists. So, its important not to subsume the entire anti-racist movement within this sort of one category.

JUAN GONZLEZ: And, Mark Bray, in your bookand I want to quote a few lines from ityou say, "Most people have an 'all-or-nothing' understanding of fascism that prevents them from taking fascists seriously until they seize power. ... Very few really believe that there is any serious chance of a fascistic regime ever materializing in America." And Im wondering about that and the importance of understanding that concept of yours, for those who are looking at whats happening today in America.

MARK BRAY: Right. So, the way people understand fascism, or the way theyve been taught about it, is generally exclusively in terms of regimes. So, the thought goes, as long as we have parliamentary government, were safe. But we can look back to the historical examples of Italy and Germany and see that, unfortunately, parliamentary government was insufficient to prevent the stopto prevent the rise of fascism and Nazism, and actually provided a red carpet to their advance. So, because of that reason, people think of fascism in terms of all or nothing, regime or nothing.

But we can see in Charlottesville that any amount of neo-Nazi organizing, any amount of a fascist presence, is potentially fatal. And, unfortunately, Heather Heyer paid the price for that. So thats partly why anti-fascists argue that fascism must be nipped in the bud from the beginning, that any kind of organizing needs to be confronted and responded to. Even if, you know, people are spending most of their time on Twitter making jokes, its still very serious and needs to be confronted.

AMY GOODMAN: Can youcan you talk aboutI mean, very interesting, during the South Carolina protests against the white supremacists, there were flags of Republicans in Spain fighting Franco.

MARK BRAY: Right. So, one of the most iconic moments in anti-fascist history is the Spanish Civil War, and, from an international perspective, the role of the International Brigades, brave anti-fascists who came from dozens of countries around the world to stand up to Francos forces. Franco had the institutional support of Nazi Germany and Mussolinis Italy, whereas the Republican side really only had support of the Soviet Union, which, as I discuss in my book, had a lot of problematic aspects to it. So, if we look at the role of the International Brigades, we can see that anti-fascists view their struggle as transnational and transhistorical. And so, today, if you go to an anti-fascist demonstration in Spain, for example, the flag of the International Brigades, the flag of the Spanish Republic is ubiquitous. And these symbols, even the double flags of anti-fascism that people will frequently see at demonstrations, often one being red, one being black, was originally developed as a German symbol, which, in its earliest incarnation, dates back to the 1930s. So, its important to look at antifa not just as sort of a random thought experiment that some crazy kids came up with to respond to the far right, but rather a tradition that dates back a century.

JUAN GONZLEZ: You also talk, in your examples, of other countries, not only the period of the 1930s and 40s, but more recent periods, in England in the 80s, and in Greece, as well, even more recently, and the importance of direct action by anti-fascists to nip in the bud or to beat back the rise of fascist movements.

MARK BRAY: Right. So, part of what I try to do with my book, Antifa, is draw certain historical lessons from the early period of anti-fascist struggle that can be applied to the struggle today. One of them is that it doesnt take a lot of organized fascists to sometimes develop a really powerful movement. We can see that recently with the rise of Golden Dawn, the fascist party in Greece, which, prior to the financial crisis, was really a tiny micro-party and considered a joke by most. Subsequently, they became a major party in Greek politics and a major threat, a violent, deadly threat, to migrants and leftists and people of all stripes across Greek society. This was also true back in the early part of the 20th century, when Mussolinis initial fascist nucleus was a hundred people. When Hiller first attended his first meeting of the German Workers Party, which he later transformed into the Nazi Party, they had 54 members. So, we need to see that theres always a potential for small movements to become large.

And one of the other lessons of the beginning of the 20th century is that people did not take fascism and Nazism seriously until it was too late. That mistake will never be made again by anti-fascists, who will recognize that any manifestation of these politics is dangerous and needs to be confronted as if it could be the nucleus of some sort of deadly movement or regime of the future.

AMY GOODMAN: I wanted you to talk, Mark Bray, about the presence of Stephen Bannon and Sebastian Gorka and Stephen Miller in the White House and what that means to antifa, to the anti-fascist movement.

MARK BRAY: Right. Well, the other side of it is its not just about how many people are part of fascist or neo-Nazi groups. Its also about the fact that far-right politics have the ability to infiltrate and influence and direct mainstream politics. And we can see that with the alt-right. The alt-right is not really actually a lot of people in terms of numbers, but theyve had a disproportionate influence on the Trump administration and certain aspects of public discourse. So, the presence of Bannon and Gorka and Miller in the White House really just gives some sort of a hint as to why it is that Trump yesterday basically said there are good people on both sides of this conflict, that Friday night, when there were neo-Nazis wielding torches in Nazi style and they attacked nonviolent UVA student protesters, that he said, "Oh, well, you know, these are good people."

So, part of it is the organized street presence, but, as we saw, by confronting the organized street presence in Charlottesville, this created the question of just how bad these people are, becauseyou played earlier, Mitt Romney condemned the fact that there could be blame ascribed to both sides. Well, prior to Charlottesville, that was the dominant media narrative. Most mainstream media was saying, "Oh, well, we have, quote-unquote, 'violence' on both sides. Hands up. Whos to say whos right or wrong?" But by confronting this, by putting it in the spotlight, by shining a light on what these people really think, its shifted the public discourse and pushed back the ability of some of these alt-right figures to try and cloak their fascism.

JUAN GONZLEZ: And what do you say, for instance, to those who maybe are opposed to the viewpoints of the white nationalists and white supremacists, but also attempt to condemn any attempts to shut themshut them down or not allow them to speak? Orand, obviously, the American Civil Liberties Union fought for the right of the Charlottesvillethe white nationalists to have their rally in Charlottesville.

MARK BRAY: Right. Well, the question of how to combat fascism, I think, always needs to come back to discussions of the 1930s and 1940s. So, clearly, we can see that rational discourse and debate was insufficient. Clearly, we can see that the mechanisms of parliamentary government were insufficient. We need to be able to come up with a way to say, "How can we make sure never again?" By any means necessary, this can never happen again. And the people back there who witnessed these atrocities committed themselves to that.

So the question is: OK, if you dont think that its appropriate to physically confront and to stand in front of neo-Nazis who are trying to organize for another genocide now, do you do it after someone has died, as they just did? Do you do it after a dozen people have died? Do you do it once theyre at the footsteps of power? At what point? At what point do you say, "Enough is enough," and give up on the liberal notion that what we need to do is essentially create some sort of a regime of rights that allow neo-Nazis and their victims to coexist, quote-unquote, "peacefully," and recognize that the neo-Nazis dont want that and that also the anti-fascists are right in not looking at it through that liberal lens, but rather seeing fascism not as an opinion that needs to be responded to respectfully, but as an enemy to humanity that needs to be stopped by any means necessary?

AMY GOODMAN: This is Part 1 of our conversation, Mark Bray. Well do Part 2 and post it online at democracynow.org. Mark Bray is the author of a book that is coming out in the next few weeks called Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook. He is a lecturer at Dartmouth College.

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Antifa: A Look at the Anti-Fascist Movement Confronting White Supremacists in the Streets - Democracy Now!