This Antifa’s Family History

The poem below is painfully autobiographical. I have been pondering over the last few hours whether or not I’m right to share it, and I firmly believe I am right to do so. My siblings may disagree with my memories, but I know what I recall.

This poem has come to me after the dreadful election victory of the Far Right in Sachsen-Anhalt, and the demonstrations of black-shirted balaclava-masked Far Right thugs in England over the weekend.

Governments need to stand up to the Far Right, not ape their policies, as governments across Europe and in England are doing.

I am proof that fascism can and must be resisted.

This Antifa’s Family History

When I was a child,
My father fed me tales
Of myths and nationhood,
Took me to a monument which
Celebrated a past of emperors
And supremacists in the middle
Of a mountain, where he said
The resurrection of Barbarossa
Would herald the beginning of
A new age and a reunited nation.

A child doesn’t imagine the darkness
Underneath such fairytales, has
No understanding of the truth
Of these nationalist delusions.

Years later, I smashed up my room
In the family home after yet
Another argument about equality
And my view that true faith was
Real communism, that sharing everything
With everyone was the only way
Any society could succeed. I
Don’t think we ever really became
Close again after that, however
Much we pretended.

Years on again, after he’d died,
I discovered more unpalatable truths
About my father’s past; Condor,
Spanish Civil War, hats of war,
The wrong side of history, and
Threw out the detritus, binned any
Physical remnants of that existence,
And kept writing words to ward
Off the evil of fascism.
And thought it was done.

It wasn’t.
And now the spectre rises again.
Except it isn’t just a spectre,
And it was never gone.

07/09/2026 14:03 Norwich