This might seem like a ridiculous question but, exactly what do you consider fascism?
Marches of masked men with flags bearing nazi symbols?
Perhaps you have heard of deployment of military inside the country used for oppression?
Seizing people without hapeas corpus? And then deporting citizens without any criminal record at all?
The military is deployed inside the country, if only law enforcement officers were conducting the same work would antifascism think it was a job well done?
And therefore, exactly what do you consider fascism? Hence my question.
I am also an engineer: One that sees poorly defined requirements, and not a fan of authoritarianism.
How do you define a fascist? I'd say followers of fascism are fascists. Perhaps you think only the ones in power, actually doing the fascism, count as fascists. That would be a mere semantic difference.
I suppose you can pick your poison, either condemn an innocent so no guilty escape or the opposite. But in that condemnation I often see: authoritarian political ideology that seeks a centralized, dictatorial government, suppresses dissent and opposition, rejecting liberal freedoms. And they self identify as antifascism. Its not a new thing, “horseshoe theory” has been around for ages.
I think we can collectively do better in combating trends towards fascism and its ilk than that. But not without understanding the problem, and the context in which it rests.
Killing people is bad, but Adolf Hitler is bad. So is it okay to kill Adolf Hitler, or would that make you as bad as him?
What if you were sent back in time, to before he did the bad things?
This is the extreme version of the "antifascist is fascist" debate. In the current time most of the bad people are not Adolf Hitler and we don't kill them and we aren't even 100% certain they'll be bad because we don't have time machines (only pattern recognition), but the same moral quandaries apply mutatis mutandis.
Some questions don't have simple answers. And it's better to at least acknowledge that, than to assert a particular simple answer, as a defense mechanism to allow yourself to continue believing there is always one.