Saturday, 31 July 2021

Until the Collapse of the System, “Antifascism” Had Served as the Linchpin of the International Policies of the Soviet Union

Until the collapse of the entire system, “antifascism” had served as the linchpin of the international policies of the Soviet Union. For about two decades after the end of the Second World War, Moscow reiterated its “interpretation of fascism,” first fully articulated in the mid-1930s, identifying fascism the “terrorist tool” of “finance capitalism.” The singular difference that distinguished its interpretation after the Second World War was Moscow’s ready identification of any political system, any political leader, or any political movement, that opposed itself to Soviet Marxism-Leninism, not only as “capitalist,” but as “neofascist” as well. Thus, almost immediately after the end of the war, Winston Churchill, Harry Truman, and Charles de Gaulle, who warned the industrial democracies against Soviet machinations, became “neo-,” or “protofascists,” according to Moscow. To satisfy Moscow’s entry criteria into the class of “neofascisms” required only that one’s policies be conceived “capitalist,” or “anticommunist.” Thus, according to Moscow, the “McCarthy era” in the United States, with its “hysterical anticommunism,” signaled the “rise of fascism” in the Western Hemisphere.

—A. James Gregor, introduction to Marxism, Fascism, and Totalitarianism: Chapters in the Intellectual History of Radicalism (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009), 8.


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