I am ANTIFA. Or so says President Donald Trump, branding me and millions like me as terrorists in the same breath he decries “fake news” and “radical left” bogeymen.

It’s a label that stings not because it’s novel — God knows we’ve heard worse — but because it erases the very soil from which it springs. Let me tell you who I really am, before the algorithms and outrage machines bury the truth.

My father fought in World War II. He was one of the Diggers who stormed the beaches, dodged the shells, and stared down the abyss in places whose names still echo like ghosts: Tobruk, El Alamein, New Guinea. When the war spat him out, he landed in a Soldier Settlers camp on the dusty fringes of rural Australia – a patchwork of tin shacks and hopeful paddocks where broken men tried to stitch lives from the scraps of peace. Everybody’s father there had fought. The camp was a republic of the scarred: limps from shrapnel, coughs from gas, eyes that flickered away when thunder rolled like distant artillery.

Nobody talked about the war. Not really. The soldiers wore their deep wounds like second skins – visible to all, but spoken of in silences around the communal fire, or in the way a man’s hand trembled pouring tea. Their lives were irrevocably changed, folded and refolded like old maps no longer leading anywhere familiar. But they carried on. They planted crops in unforgiving soil, raised kids who knew the taste of damper bread and the sting of billy tea, and built a world where freedom wasn’t a slogan but a hard-won breath.

We’d eventually learn, piecing it together from half-heard stories and library books, that they weren’t just fighting other armies. They were battling ideals – the poison of fascism that choked Europe, Asia and beyond. Ideals that promised order, but delivered ovens and gulags, that crushed the human spirit under the boot of blind obedience. My father and the thousands around the world — allies from every corner of the globe — were the antidote. They were anti-fascists, plain and simple. Not with hashtags or headlines, but with bayonets and bullets, with the sweat of reconstruction and the vigilance of survivors. And so were we, the children, schooled in the camp’s unspoken creed: Guard the light. Question the shadows. Forgive the man, but never the machine that marched him to madness.

As scarred as those soldiers were, something extraordinary happened in that camp. Former enemies — Germans, Italians, even Japanese migrants fleeing their own ruins — washed up on Australian shores, seeking the same fragile peace. Friendships formed over shared fences and shearing sheds. My father put it to me one evening, his voice like gravel from years of unspoken grit: “Michael, I forgave the enemy the day the war ended. The ordinary bloke on the other side? He was just like me – sent to die for a lie. But not the government that shipped us off like cannon fodder. And never the belief that drove those governments to war. That’s the real enemy. That’s what we fought.”

That forgiveness wasn’t weakness; it was the ultimate defiance of fascism’s divide-and-conquer rot. It built bridges where bombs had fallen. It echoed the Nuremberg trials, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the quiet revolutions of decency that followed. Anti-fascism wasn’t a club or a costume – it was the air we breathed, the legacy etched into every settler’s callused hand.

Yet now, in 2025, Trump tells me — and millions like me — that I belong to a terrorist organisation. ANTIFA, he calls it, a shadowy cabal of chaos when, in truth, it’s the ghost of that very fight: a refusal to let authoritarianism creep back in, disguised as populism or “America First”. As a result, I see good people — everyday folks with “settler blood in their veins” — being abused on social media. Labelled “warmongering ANTIFA bastards” for daring to call out lies, for marching against wars and white nationalism, for remembering that fascism doesn’t die, it just rebrands.

I seem to have missed something. What changed? The weapons? No – the ideals are the same: the cult of the strongman, the demonisation of the “other”, the march toward unchecked power. The difference is the battlefield. It’s not Normandy or the Pacific; it’s Twitter feeds and town halls, where words are the new frontlines. And the soldiers? We’re still here, the children of those camps, scarred by our own wars — of inequality, climate denial, eroded truths — but carrying on.

Trump’s slur isn’t just an insult; it’s an erasure. It paints the anti-fascist as the fascist, the defender as the destroyer. But history doesn’t bend that way. My father’s forgiveness teaches me to pity the man behind the microphone, twisted by his own government’s machine. Yet it also demands I fight the belief that fuels him – the one that whispers war is glory, division is strength and truth is optional.

So yes, Mr. President, call me ANTIFA. I’ll wear it like my father’s medals: not for the shine, but for the weight. Because in the end, the real terrorists aren’t the ones who remember the war. They’re the ones who want to start another.

Republished from The Australian Independent Media Network, 19 September 2025

The views expressed in this article may or may not reflect those of Pearls and Irritations.