The Inverted Red Triangle Was Used By Antifascists, Borrowing From The Nazis

What’s galling isn’t only that the Trump campaign bought Facebook advertisements using an old Nazi symbol for communists, socialists, and other antifascists but that the antifascist response to it has been historically disingenuous. It took me all of maybe five minutes on Google to find that one variant or another of Antifascist Action engaged in “reclamation of the red triangle symbol used by the Nazis to label communists” and maybe two more minutes to find that the Union of Persecutees of the Nazi Regime, an antifascist organization founded in 1947 which “emerged from victims’ associations”, had “adopted” as its symbol “the ‘red triangle’, the sign sewn on the concentration camp uniforms of political prisoners”.

(The symbol also appears on “many postwar memorials to the victims of the Nazis”.)

On such monuments, typically an inverted (point down, base up) triangle (especially if red) evokes all victims, including also the non-Jewish victims like Slavs, Poles, communists, homosexuals, Roma and Sinti (see Porajmos), the handicapped (see Action T4), Soviet POWs and Jehovah’s Witnesses.

None of this is to say that the Trump campaign isn’t full of shit here, or didn’t know exactly what nasty shit they were doing; it’s not a widely-used symbol of “antifa”, but to say that it isn’t one at all only erases these early antifascists, many of whom were actual victims and persecutees of the actual Nazi regime, which seems counterproductive and unfair. This sort of reappropriative reclamation of language or symbols by persecuted groups has a long and storied history—including, most (in)famously, the pink triangle by LGBTQ communities —and the inverted red triangle was part of that

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Addenda

1. I don’t want to go overboard here, because the proportionality of offenses is nowhere near equal. Being such a minor symbol in present day means the Trump campaign had to go out of their way to choose this rather than, say, the Iron Front. They knew they were choosing the symbol given by the Nazis to various classes of “political prisoners”. I’m just saying let’s not erase that those very persecutees then went on to reclaim the symbol as one of pride, as if to say, “You’re damn right the Nazis thought of me as an enemy of the state.”

2. Google image search is useless right now because of this news story, but prior to today a search for antifa symbol would have netted you a bunch of red/black flags and the Iron Front. They really did have to go out of their way to select the inverted red triangle.

3. Somewhat astonished to see something just now in The Washington Post story on this.

   Although certain symbols the Nazis deployed have been reclaimed, including the pink triangle used in concentration camps to label gay inmates, the red triangle has not been recast in a similar way, said Jacob S. Eder, a historian of modern Germany at the Barenboim-Said academy in Berlin.

   It literally was. At least as early as 1947. By actual persecutees of the actual Nazi regime.

4. Someone will argue he’s a historian of modern Germany. Thing is that group is still around, today, with its inverted red triangle. You can read about its history and its symbol (Google-translated link).