Experts have told the Guardian the same anti-fascist groups the US state department recently named as foreign terrorist organizations and accused of “conspiring to undermine foundations of western civilization” barely qualify as groups, let alone terrorist organizations, and pose no active threat to Americans.
“The whole thing is a bit ridiculous,” said Heidi Beirich, co-founder of the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism, which tracks extremist movements worldwide, “because the groups designated by the administration barely exist and certainly aren’t terrorists.”
In a release put out earlier this month, the Trump administration, which has made no secret of its hatred for leftists in the US and abroad, named Antifa Ost in Germany, the Italy-based International Revolutionary Front, and two organisations in Greece – Armed Proletarian Justice and Revolutionary Class Self Defense – to its long list of designated terrorist organizations.
The four European groups, mostly protest collectives and streetfighters, find themselves in the company of the Islamic State and al-Qaida, the masterminds behind the 9/11 attacks, among others, as officially proscribed terrorist groups.
“[They] pose absolutely no threat to the US,” said Beirich. “But this isn’t really about fighting terrorism. It’s about scaring the left and shifting the discussion away from far-right terrorism, which is where most real attacks are coming from in recent years.”
Tom Lord, a terrorism researcher, co-founder of the Militant-Wire, and an expert on European extremist groups, said he was very “surprised” to see most of the groups named.
“Especially given that I had just talked to the state department about three of those organizations being rather defunct,” said Lord, “just 24 hours prior to the FTO designation announcement.”
Lord said he had anticipated Antifa Ost was on the radar of the Trump administration, who were looking to namecheck an anti-fascist organization.
“About two weeks after the FTO designation, there is to be a trial in Germany of Antifa Ost,” Lord said. “The trial has to do with what Germany’s authorities in the east of the country are calling the ‘Hammerbande’ or ‘hammer gangs’.”
Members of Antifa Ost are accused of attacking neo-Nazis in eastern Germany, often using store-bought hammers, as well as other acts of violence against the far-right scene in the country. Sometimes, Lord said, that includes using rudimentary incendiaries.
Authorities also accused Antifa Ost members of attacking neo-Nazis with hammers during a 2023 gathering in Budapest to commemorate the Third Reich, which Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán – a key Trump ally and far-right leader – used as a justification for designating it as a terrorist organization in September.
“As far as Revolutionary Class Self Defense, it was mainly one guy named Dimitris Chatzivasileiadis, kind of a Gen-X, Greek leftist anarchist,” said Lord, who wrote about the arrest of the Greek militant. “He had robbed a state gambling house, a casino, and carried out some other small operations. He shot himself in the thigh, got arrested, and he was at the safe house of a buddy who was, like a karate instructor.”
Overall, Lord said, all of the named entities have never expressly made the US its main enemy.
“Greek militants are battling the Greek authorities, Italian militants are battling Italian fascists and Italian authorities, and Antifa Ost,” he said. “I talk to counterparts in German law enforcement in Dresden all of the time, and the Germans are very on top of this.”
Largely carrying financial repercussions, the FTO listing is designed to target the assets and individuals in terrorist groups from providing material support or engaging with the US banking system, denying them critical resources for carrying out attacks on Americans at home or abroad.
Part of the criteria for designation also includes being an express national security threat to the US. Except these newly named groups are not known for espousing attacks on Americans, as the state department release makes clear, they broadly malign fascists and “capitalist structures” in their home countries. Lord and Beirich said they were not aware of concrete links between any of the groups and American counterparts.
As for the growing German AfD party, the most popular far-right political power in Germany since the Nazis, it hailed the Trump administration’s sweeping terrorist designations of its political enemies at home and in other allied countries.
It is the first time “antifa” groups are named to the FTO list and comes after years of Donald Trump accusing US anti-fascist activists of being a terrorist network, financed by a cabal of leftist donors, plotting against Americans. In the US and in Europe, far-right terrorism is statistically surging. Internationalist neo-Nazis, such as American-born extremist group the Base and the active club movement, have exported violent cells and chapters all over Europe, Oceania, and North America.
In the US, during the many Black Lives Matter protests following the police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, Trump called for the terrorist designation of anti-fascists. But the organizing principles of American and international anti-fascist activism is openly decentralized and mostly unorganized. Money and financial resources are known to be scarce among activists.
One veteran anti-fascist infiltrator, who has gone undercover into violent neo-Nazi organizations in order to expose and dismantle them, said the future of anti-fascist activists since the president retook the White House – even in the face of FTO designations – is brighter than ever.
“Anybody going against Trump is considered ‘antifa’,” he said, before quipping that even “Marjorie Taylor Green is antifa,” referring to the Georgia congresswoman who has of late, publicly come up against the president.
“The need for clandestine people dressed in black, you don’t need that any more,” he said. “It’s millions of people now, fighting fascism; the things we suffered for were not for nothing, now it’s everybody.”
