On today's special episode of Human Events Daily, Jack Posobiec delves into the TRUE untold history of Antifa. This is the first of a two-part series in which Posobiec explores the origins and evolution of this dangerous group, as well as its tactics and ideology which go back YEARS. Tune in to hear the history the Left doesn’t want you to hear! Here’s your Daily dose of Human Events with @JackPosobiec Save up to 65% on MyPillow products by going to MyPillow.com/POSO and use code PO...
- Ladies and gentlemen, welcome aboard to a special edition of Human Events.
Jack Posobiec.
We are going to do this show powered by ChargingPoint USA.
All about the history of Antifa because it occurred to me that I have written a book on the history of Antifa and it is called Antifa Stories from Inside the Black Block but it's been a while since we've really had a conversation about them and it's also been a while since I've really even discussed it because look a lot of stuff that goes on but we needed to take time and I know that we had time sort of over this Christmas break
To be able to drill down on sub-subjects that really deserve it.
And I think that the history of Antifa is something that a lot of people don't understand.
People think that it's some group that spontaneously came up in 2020, or maybe even 2016, 2017.
Folks who don't remember.
There are people even who don't remember the fact that Antifa attacked Trump's inauguration.
I was there.
I was there with my wife, who was my fiancé at the time, Tanya Tay.
I was there with my brother.
We were on the road where they stormed the highway across 395 in D.C.
All the while, their people were down on the street, smashing Starbucks, smashing windows, setting cars on fire.
All of this happened.
All of this was true.
They also went to our inaugural party, the ball called the Deplora Ball that we held the night before.
It was myself, Mike Cernovich, others called it the Deplora Ball.
And I said, well, if most inaugural balls are the day of inauguration, we should do one the night before.
So we held it then.
And we had hundreds of Antifa out in the streets, attacking people, setting fires, throwing things at our guests, throwing things at my parents, de-batteries.
Got this on video.
But people don't want to actually talk about the true history of communism, the true history that we've lived through.
And so what I wanted to do in this book was also go back to the fact that Antifa didn't even start then.
They started years and years before.
In fact, the history of anarcho-socialist terrorism Throughout the world, particularly Western Europe, Eastern Europe, and the United States, goes back to the 1800s.
We had anarcho-socialist uprisings in the United States, the Haymarket riots in Chicago, the killed police officers, the Wall Street bombing, the assassination of President McKinley that led to Teddy Roosevelt becoming our youngest president.
He was killed by an anarcho-socialist in Buffalo, New York, by the name of Leon Cholgosh.
So, this is a rich history.
But the history of communism is not taught to you.
It's not taught in schools.
It's not taught through Hollywood movies.
There's no movies about it.
There aren't any mass market books about it.
But there is Jack Posobiec.
And here's Human Events.
And we're going to tell you the true history of Antifa.
Now, the seeds of what would become the present version of Antifa Worldwide were actually planted all the way back in 1930s Germany.
Yeah, that's right.
The Weimar Republic.
The group likes to present itself as the inheritor of a tradition of fighting fascism.
But is this true?
Well, the first eponymous Antifa group was Antifaschista Aktion and it was founded by a Soviet agent and a committed Stalinist who was named Ernst Thälmann in 1932 in Weimar, Germany.
If you don't know the name Ernst Thälmann, then perhaps you haven't been studying the true history of Antifa.
Like many of the critical figures in Germany in the 1930s, he was a product of World War I, the defeat of the Kaiser, the weakening of the country's spiritual foundations, the deterioration that was the Weimar Republic.
Of course, this is the same deterioration and collapse that led to the rise of Adolf Hitler.
And Hitler's popular appeal in Germany at the time in the Weimar Republic was principally based in the widespread belief that German communists would use the economic chaos of the depression as a vehicle for taking power.
And installing a regime like the Bolshevik dictatorship that had been established in the USSR.
Whereas Hitler, at the time, was seen by many Germans as more rational and less terrifying as an alternative to communism.
This fear was then magnified by a Soviet agent who had become the leader of the Communist Party of Germany.
What was his name?
Ernst Thalmann, later the founder of Antifa.
Ernst Thalmann, working class.
Born in 1886 in Hamburg, three years and four days older than Hitler, working class upbringings, father was a coachman, tended a bar down at the docks in Hamburg.
Hamburg is a dock town, it's a city, it's a water town, a port town.
Thalmann grew up rubbing shoulders with the sort of rough types that you'd expect in both locales in pre-war Germany.
At one point, both of his parents turned to petty crime and they were apprehended, causing them to briefly break up.
So, Talman gets, is born from a broken home, poor economics, decides to join the military, gets drafted, fights in World War I. He then fled his unit in 1917, joining a pro-communist organization that later became the Communist Party of Germany.
Talman became one of these leaders because unlike many others associated with the Communist Party, certainly in the USSR and the Bolsheviks, Talman actually had a working class background.
And when you look at Lenin, when you look at a lot of these people, they don't have Trotsky, they don't have a true working class background themselves.
And that's why Lenin comes up with this phrase, the vanguard of the working class, the vanguard of the proletariat.
Talman doesn't need to be part of the vanguard.
Talman himself, he's a working class soldier, came up from nothing, decided to go into the Communist Party.
It's really through that military that gets himself up to the next level.
So he becomes the leader of the Central Party.
The most important communist in all of Hamburg.
And the Communist Party is on the rise because as the Communist Party is rising, you've also got the National Socialist Workers Party on the rise.
But both of them viewed their greatest enemy, not as one another, they viewed as their enemy, the regime.
They viewed as their enemy, the Republic.
And the ruling party of the time, The Social Democrats, the Social Democrat Party.
So in many cases, you actually saw the National Socialist Workers Party and the Communist Party working together.
That's right, working together while targeting the regime.
They held strikes together, held demonstrations together.
Oh, certainly they were rivals as well.
And certainly there was mass fighting.
But people need to understand that the actual history is far more complex than any Antifa member would have you believe today.
They would say, oh, we always opposed Hitler.
And that's all it was.
And we tried to stop him.
And we eventually didn't.
And that's the end.
Not true.
Not true.
You actually did work together.
We've got the proof.
We've got the documents.
We've got an entire book about it.
But I want to tell you, we're going to get into this in the next segment, about a group that predated Antifa.
And it was called the Red Front.
The Rot Front, aka the Red Front.
This was the original Marxist street brigade of Germany, and it was founded as well by Ernst Thälmann, all the way back in the 1920s.
Now, interestingly enough, the Red Front, Rot Front, used military terms for arranging and training its recruits.
This is back in the 20s.
So they had squads, platoons, comraderies, regiments, even.
Believe it or not, They even had a navy!
They had a paramilitary navy called the Red Navy.
This was how active this was.
And so people know, of course, about the Hitler Youth that later was established by the Nazis, but did you know that there was also a Red Youth?
I'm sorry, I don't speak German very well.
Now, it was a full-fledged political tool.
It wasn't the same clandestine operation that Antifa exists as today.
This is a huge difference.
and indoctrination and also included courses on military drill, ceremony, and fitness.
Now, it was a full-fledged political tool.
It wasn't the same clandestine operation that Antifa exists as today.
This is a huge difference, huge difference.
But it kept with that military motif and they actually had to take a vow.
Every member of the Red Front swore the following oath.
I vow to never forget that world imperialism is preparing the war against the Soviet Union.
So even they knew that the Soviet Union was the country and organization that they swore allegiance to.
Keep in mind, this is only a few years, not even a decade, since the takeover of the communists in Russia.
So communism is very new, and it feels like communism is on the upswing.
And these groups, they're funded, of course, of course, by the Soviets.
Talman himself was hand-selected Why?
by the Stalinists, he flew to Moscow, served in the honor guard at the funeral of Vladimir Lenin, and then is sent back to be Moscow's man in Germany, leads the Communist Party, sets up the Red Front fighting group, sets up all of this directly on sets up the Red Front fighting group, sets up all of this directly on Why?
Because Talman is the man that they view is going to be their candidate, not only to run for president, and he does end up running in the election against Hitler, but he is the man that they view will deliver Germany to them.
And here's the other part, because Talman knew to follow orders.
Talman never questioned his orders.
We'll get into what happened because of that.
But you can go and look at all of this.
In 1931, Talman and Hitler joining forces in an unsuccessful attempt to dissolve the Parliament of Prussia.
Moscow ordered Talman to oppose the Social Democrats even in the face of Hitler's rise.
Talman comes in third in 1932 running against Hitler and then it's Hindenburg who ends up winning.
However, just before 1933.
When Hitler is able to solidify his rule and becoming Chancellor.
That's when Antifa is finally formed.
So the Red Front gets banned at this point.
Because the Social Democrats realize that the Communists are insane and it's very easy to paint them as foreign agents because obviously they are.
So they get banned.
So Talman realizes he has to come up with something new.
A new type of group that has yet to be banned.
July of 1932.
Talman inaugurated Antifaschista Aktion Antifa.
And he knew from the start that the word anti-fascist was simply a word to get around the fact that he couldn't be called communist because the communist fighting groups had been banned.
The communist brigades had already been banned at this point.
And what did he really want?
He wanted a way So that his fighting groups could go up against the Brownshirts, could go up against the Iron Front, the Freikorps, so many of the others.
Because in Weimar Germany, Weimar Republic, Every major political group had a military wing.
So the original Antifa, the militant group wing of it, was the military wing of the Communist Party of Germany in the Weimar Republic.
And so his attempt to bring people into this was not directly targeted, and this is what people need to understand, because Antifa's propaganda Misleads about the true origins.
In November of 1931, the Communist Party newspaper printed an open address to the Nazi Party calling them the united front of the proletariat who carried out their revolutionary duty.
Just before Antifa was founded, the Communist Party held a large meeting in May of 1932 with the Nazi Party that included a Nazi speaker and hundreds of Nazi participants.
Then, in November of 1932, Nazis and Communists took part, this is after the founding of Antifa, took part in a transportation strike at the street level.
They both viewed themselves as enemies of the system.
In fact, there's a term that that arose because of this and that's called beefsteak Nazi.
And what was a beefsteak Nazi?
The idea was that you're brown on the outside, red on the inside, get it beefsteak.
So former members of The Communists who later became members of the Brownshirts.
So at the street level, you had people that were switching sides all the time because they both viewed themselves as the vanguard of the proletariat.
And these are Marxist ideals and socialist ideals.
And at some level, it's just street toughs that are looking for an excuse to fight, looking for an excuse to get rowdy.
But that's why you see this tie over.
Now, of course, there's the double flag symbol of Antifa.
Originally, it was two red flags.
Now you have a black flag and a red flag.
Originally, the two red flags were simple because this was communism.
Now you see the black flag and the red flag together.
That's the addition of anarchism to communism.
And that's what Antifa stands for today.
But remember, it was Moscow and Stalin who specifically ordered Ernst Thalmann and the original Antifa not to focus on Hitler, not to focus on the rise of the Nazi Party, but to work with him to undermine the Weimar Republic.
It was those orders that he was directly called upon to follow.
But then, of course, we know what happened.
We know that Hitler does come to power because they do destabilize the country because Antifa's purpose was the destabilization of the traditional system, or at least the established system in this case.
But who comes to power?
Not them.
They used to have a phrase for this.
They would say, first Hitler, then us.
Well, guess what?
The us never happened because when Hitler comes to power, who do you think are the very first people It's the communists.
It's the people who thought that they were working with their friends.
And Talman?
He gets dimed out by his own communist buddies.
We'll explain what happened to him in the next segment.
So, Ernst Talman.
March 3rd, 1933.
Gets arrested.
Gets imprisoned.
was informed on by his own neighbor, his own buddy, one of his other communist friends.
So he does get arrested.
And then for 11 years, Ernst Thalmann is held in prison.
He eventually gets sent to the concentration camp at Buchenwald.
Now Thalmann's wife, interestingly enough, Rosa, So his wife spends those 11 years trying to get him out.
And if folks remember, towards the end of the 1930s and certainly 1939, just prior to the invasion of Poland and the carve up of Poland by Russia, the Soviet Union, and Germany, there was an agreement signed between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany.
That was called the Molotov-Ribbentrop Non-Aggression Pact.
Believe it or not, one of the slogans during that time was Long Live Comrade Talman.
The USSR was promoting this, and Talman was seen as sort of a revolutionary prisoner.
In fact, even in the Spanish Civil War, the international brigade of the Spanish Civil War, the brigade that all the foreigners came into to support the communists, To support the anarchists when communists and anarchists and writers and journalists all arrived in Spain to fight for the communists and their failed communist takeover of Spain.
Do you know what the name of the brigade was?
Because that was fought while he was imprisoned.
The name of the international communist brigade in Spain was the Ernst Thalmann Brigade, founder of Antifa.
So you need to understand how big, how powerful he was at this time.
This guy goes on to be called a celeb, but here's the problem.
Even during, and I just want to say, oh, the honor of the communists, right?
Little bit of sarcasm there.
They never get him released.
They never even go to the Nazis, even under Molotov-Ribbentrop.
They don't ask for him to come back.
And why is this?
Because here's what happens.
When Rosa Talman is giving these letters and these these pledges and imploring the other communists to help get her husband out of jail, who's she giving them to?
Walter Ulbricht.
Now Walter Ulbricht had been sort of a number two, sort of a lieutenant.
If you know the history, Walter Ulbricht goes on to be the communist dictator of East Germany throughout the Cold War.
And Ulbricht knows that if this massive communist hero gets released, then he'll retake his position at the head of a communist party.
So what does Ulbricht do?
He ignores the requests completely.
Ignores all of them.
And so, Talman stays in jail.
He stays in jail the entire time.
This was his reward for following the orders of Stalin, for following the orders of Moscow, for following the orders of Leon Trotsky.
The founder of Antifa, where he actually kind of gets forgotten by Hitler in the midst of World War II and everything else that's happening.
But at one point, and throughout these 11 years, he's always held in solitary confinement the entire time.
Never once does Talman renounce communism.
He gets one visit with his wife later.
And there's a, there's a story, there's a rumor that she got pregnant, but she would have been her fifties.
So it is what it is like everything else in that, in that era.
But on the 18th of August, Hitler remembers him and he has him shot and killed in Buchenwald.
And so that's his reward.
Communists could have got him out.
They could have implored him.
They could have said, Hey, this is a big guy.
This is our leader.
If you want us to make this deal with you, we need him out.
They didn't care.
They didn't care at all because they saw him as a means to power and as a means to an end.
And the same thing, by the way, happened to all the original members of Antifa under Ernst Thalmann.
They were locked up.
They were sent to prisons, not always Buchenwald, but just other prisons that Hitler had established for the enemies.
Because this is what always happens to the useful idiots.
This is what always happens to the people once they've served their purpose.
And instead of working actually for the people, when you're committed to violence, when you're committed to this type of militancy, this type of destruction, that's what you get.
That is what you get for following all those orders.
You get two in the back of the skull at the express order of Adolf Hitler.
And so Antifa, which we now see today, draws on what they believe through their twisted telling of the narrative that Antifa stood up to Hitler.
And it's true that that Antifa did In a sense, rival the Nazis, but in reality, Antifa had been used by the Nazis as a destabilizing force and then as a rival, which they quickly turned on in the 1930s in order to get rid of them and then establish total power.
We see the exact same dynamic today as Antifa is used as a destabilizing force against our own current system, against our system of governance, against our police, against our businesses, as against our religions, as against our society.
Because they're used as a revolutionary force, but they're never the ones that actually attain power themselves.
Why?
Because they're the first ones that you have to get rid of.
You can't have revolutionaries in the same way that Chairman Mao ends up riling up the Red Guards and then calling in the People's Liberation Army to round them up as well.
Because you can't rile these people up and then actually put them in positions of power.
No.
You dispose of them.
You get rid of them.
So while you might think that you're throwing on the black mask, you're throwing on the black hood, and you're saving the world from the imperialists and the fascists, in reality, all you're doing is getting played.
All you're doing is getting used.
The exact same way that Ernst Thalmann was played and used his entire adult life.
By Trotsky, by Stalin, and then finally shot in Buchenwald.
And so, we'll leave you with that, because part two, we're going to explain what happened to the communists in East Germany.
