this post was submitted on 03 Feb 2026
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Ok, but that’s the iron front logo
Pretty sure it's been used by antifascists in America for decades.
Well the anti-communist ones at least. I see it as a symbol of anarchist leftism. I guess it varies by person and how they wear it.
Idk, I think its meaning has been pretty abstracted by this point. Not unlike the floppy disk becoming the generic symbol for saving something.
For instance, I bought a two-pack of patches once, where one was a 3 arrows, and the other was a hammer and sickle.
Hell, even when it was in use by the Iron Front, the symbols meaning was varied and contested.
To some it stood for anti-fascism, anti-monarchism, and anti-Communism, to others that third arrow meant anti-capitalism.
To others still, it stood for the three areas of working class struggle: political, economic, and physical. Or sometimes even Liberty, Equally, and Fraternity, the slogan of the French Revolution
Just because you bought a package with mixed patches doesn't mean anything. Capitalists will literally sell you anything to make money.
The three arrow's origin is in the Germany of the 1930s, from the Social Democratic Party, fighting royalists, nazis and communists, as they considered them a threat to Germany.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Arrows
I'm familiar with the poster and the origins of the Iron Front. You're not adding anything to the conversation.
When you click that floppy disk in Word, do you actually think you're saving your document to an actual floppy disk? I'd certainly hope not.
You're missing the point of what I'm saying. I'm asserting that the original intent of the Three Arrows symbol is far enough removed from its modern usage that the meaning of the symbol has abstracted to a generic anti-fascist symbol.
Many anti-fascists today also use the logo of Antifaschistische Aktion, an explicitly Marxist-Leninist paramilitary group. That's the one with the two flags. Sometimes Anarchists will change the semiotics of the symbol, by making the flag in front black, to signal their specific ideological commitments.
But you don't see people coming out of the woodwork saying "Urm Akchually! That symbol wasn't originally meant to mean that". Because the symbol's meaning, like the Three Arrows, or the floppy disk, have been renegotiated as the world around those symbols has changed.
I don't think this is difficult to grasp