Red fascism

Red fascism is a term equating Marxist–Leninist ideologies such as Stalinism and Maoism with fascism. Accusations that the leaders of the Soviet Union during the Stalin era acted as "Red fascists" were commonly stated by anarchists, left communists, social democrats and other democratic socialists as well as liberals and among right-wing circles.

Overview

In the first half of the 20th century, a number of socialists in the United States began to hold the view that the Soviet government was becoming a red fascist state. One such leader, Norman Thomas, who ran for president numerous times under the Socialist Party of America banner, accused the Soviet Union in the 1940s of decaying into Red fascism by writing: "Such is the logic of totalitarianism", that "communism, whatever it was originally, is today Red fascism".[1][2] Bruno Rizzi, an Italian Marxist and a founder of the Communist Party of Italy, claimed as early as 1938 that "Stalinism [took on] a regressive course, generating a species of red fascism identical in its superstructural and choreographic features [with its Fascist model]".[3]

Many leftists in the 1930s and 1940s became disillusioned by and estranged from the Soviet Union, condemning it for its rigid authoritarianism. Otto Rühle, a German left communist, wrote that "the struggle against fascism must begin with the struggle against bolshevism", noting the possible influence the Leninist state had on fascist states by serving as a model. In 1939, Rühle further professed:

Russia was the example for fascism. [...] Whether party 'communists' like it or not, the fact remains that the state order and rule in Russia are indistinguishable from those in Italy and Germany. Essentially they are alike. One may speak of a red, black, or brown 'soviet state', as well as of red, black or brown fascism.[4][5]

Similarly, the exiled Russian anarchist Volin, who saw the Soviet state as tolalitarian and as an "example of integral State capitalism",[5] used the term "red fascism" to describe it.[6] In a September 18, 1939 editorial, The New York Times reacted to the signing of the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact by declaring that "Hitlerism is brown communism, Stalinism is red fascism".[7] The editorial further opined:

The world will now understand that the only real 'ideological' issue is one between democracy, liberty and peace on the one hand and despotism, terror and war on the other.[7]

During the period while the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact was in force, Benito Mussolini positively reviewed Stalinism as having transformed Soviet Bolshevism into a Slavic fascism.[8] Despite ideological differences, Adolf Hitler admired Stalin and his politics and believed that Stalin was in effect transforming Soviet Bolshevism into a form of Nazism.[9] After being opponents for most of the 1930s, the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany signed the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact in 1939 and remained aligned for the first two years of World War II, until Hitler broke it by invading the USSR in 1941.[10]

In 2003, David Ramsay Steele posits that "there is a close ideological relationship between Marxism and Fascism".[11] When Nazi Germany aligned itself with Communist Russia in 1939, British journalist John Gunther happened to be working in Moscow. He wrote in his 1940 book Inside Europe that "certain shrewd observers had seen which way the wind was blowing. They had seen that Communism and Fascism were more closely allied than was normally understood."[12] In his 2008 book Left in Dark Times, French philosopher and journalist Bernard-Henri Lévy has used the term in arguing that some European intellectuals have been infatuated with anti-Enlightenment theories and embraced a new absolutist ideology, one that is anti-liberal, anti-American, anti-imperialist, antisemitic and pro-Islamofascist.[13][14]

Criticism

Since the 1930s, Marxist theories of fascism have seen fascism as a form of reaction to socialism and a feature of capitalism.[15] In addition, several modern historians have tried to pay more attention to the economic, political and ideological differences between these two regimes than to their similarities.[16] Although Michael Geyer and Sheila Fitzpatrick in Beyond Totalitarianism: Stalinism and Nazism Compared (2009) noted similarities between Stalinism and Nazism, they have also stated that "when it comes to one-on-one comparison, the two societies and regimes may as well have hailed from different worlds".[17]

A statement adopted by Russia's legislature said that comparisons of Nazism and Stalinism are "blasphemous towards all of the anti-fascist movement veterans, Holocaust victims, concentration camp prisoners and tens of millions of people ... who sacrificed their lives for the sake of the fight against the Nazis' anti-human racial theory."[18]

British journalist and Labour Party aide Seumas Milne posits that the impact of the post-Cold War narrative that Stalin and Hitler were twin evils, and therefore Communism is as monstrous as Nazism, "has been to relativise the unique crimes of Nazism, bury those of colonialism and feed the idea that any attempt at radical social change will always lead to suffering, killing and failure."[19]

See also

References
  1. Norman Thomas, "Which Way America—Fascism, Communism, Socialism or Democracy?", Town Meeting Bulletin, XIII, March 16, 1948, pp. 19–20.
  2. Les K. Adler and Thomas G. Paterson, "Red Fascism: The Merger of Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia in the American Image of Totalitarianism, 1930's–1950's", The American Historical Review, April 1, 1970, 75 (4): p. 1046, footnote 4.
  3. A. James Gregor, The Fascist Persuasion in Radical Politics, Princeton, New Jersey, Princeton University Press, 1974, p. 193.
  4. Otto Rühle, "The Struggle Against Fascism Begins with the Struggle Against Bolshevism", the American Councillist journal Living Marxism, 1939, Vol. 4, No. 8.
  5. Memos, C. (2012) "Anarchism and Council Communism on the Russian Revolution." Anarchist Studies, 20(2).
  6. Avrich, Paul (1988). Anarchist portraits. Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press. p. 132. ISBN 0-691-00609-1. OCLC 17727270.
  7. "Editorial: The Russian Betrayal", The New York Times, September 18, 1939.
  8. MacGregor Knox, Mussolini Unleashed, 1939-1941: Politics and Strategy in Italy's Last War, pp. 63–64.
  9. François Furet, Passing of an Illusion: The Idea of Communism in the Twentieth Century, Chicago, Illinois; London, England, University of Chicago Press, 1999, pp. 191–192, ISBN 0226273407.
  10. Roger Moorhouse, The Devil's Alliance, New York: Basic Books, 2014.
  11. Steele, David Ramsay (2003). "The Mystery of Fascism". Retrieved March 2, 2019.
  12. Inside Europe
  13. Sternberg, Ernest (7 January 2009). "A Revivified Corpse: Left-Fascism in the Twenty-First Century". Telos Press. Retrieved 15 November 2017.
  14. Murphy, Paul Austin (July 2013). "Red Fascism". New English Review. Retrieved 3 August 2018.
  15. Dave Renton, Fascism: Theory and Practice, London: Pluto Press, 1999.
  16. Henry Rousso, Stalinism and Nazism. History and Memory Compared, Historische Zeitschrift, 286:3, 2008, pp. 795–796.
  17. Michael Geyer and Sheila Fitzpatrick, Beyond Totalitarianism: Stalinism and Nazism Compared, New York, New York, Cambridge University Press, 2009, pp. 33–37 and 21.
  18. "Russian MPs call on world to suppress attempts to revive Nazi ideology". RT. 2010-10-24. Retrieved 2015-04-13.
  19. Seumas Milne: The battle for history. The Guardian. (12 September 2002).
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