Red fascism

Red fascism is a term equating Stalinism and other variants of Marxism–Leninism with fascism.^[1][2] 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.

Use of the term

By the anti-Stalinist left, mid-20th century

Use of the term "red fascist" was first recorded in the early 1920s, in the aftermath of both the Russian Revolution and the March on Rome, for instance by Italian anarchist Luigi Fabbri who wrote in 1922 that "Red fascists" is the name that has recently been given to those Bolshevik communists who are most inclined to espouse fascism’s methods for use against their adversaries."^[3]

In the following years, a number of socialists began to hold the view that the Soviet government was becoming a red fascist state. Bruno Rizzi, an Italian Marxist and a founder of the Communist Party of Italy who became an anti-Stalinist, claimed in 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]".^[4]

While primarily focused on critiquing Nazism, Wilhelm Reich considered Stalin's Soviet Union to have developed into red fascism.^[5]

The term is often attributed to Franz Borkenau, a key proponent of the theory of totalitarianism (which posits that there are certain essential similarities between fascism and Stalinism). Borkenau used the term in 1939.^[6] Otto Rühle wrote that "the struggle against fascism must begin with the struggle against bolshevism", adding that he believed the Soviets had influence 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.^[7][8]

Kurt Schumacher, who was imprisoned in Nazi concentration camps, but survived WWII to become the first post-war SPD opposition leader in West Germany, described pro-Soviet communists as "red-painted fascists" or "red-lacquered Nazis".^[9][10]

Similarly, the exiled Russian anarchist Volin, who saw the Soviet state as totalitarian and as an "example of integral State capitalism",^[8] used the term "red fascism" to describe it.^[11]

In the US, 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".^[12][13] In the same period, the term was used by the New York intellectuals, who were left-wing but sided against the Soviet Union in the developing Cold War.^[14]

In the political mainstream in the Cold War

The term "red fascism" was also used in America during and leading up to the Cold War as an anti-communist slogan. 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".^[15] 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.^[15]

After the war, in 1946, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover gave a speech in which he said:

Hitler, Tojo, and Mussolini brands of Fascism were met and defeated on the battle fıeld. All those who stand for the American way of life must arise and defeat Red Fascism in America by focusing upon it the spotlight of public opinion and by building up barriers of common decency through which it cannot penetrate.^[16]

The speech was reprinted in December 1946 in the Washington News Digest, and Hoover also entitled an article “Red Fascism in the United States Today” in American Magazine in February 1947.^[16]

Ukrainian writer Ivan Bahrianyi in 1946 in pamphlet Why I am not going back to the Soviet Union wrote about Holodomor, repressions of Ukrainian intelligentsia, Soviet politic of Russification and conception of the Soviet people:

Тим терором російський червоний фашизм (більшовизм) намагається перетворити 100 національностей в т.зв. "єдиний радянський народ", цебто фактично в російський народ.^[17]

With this terror, Russian red fascism (Bolshevism) is trying to turn 100 ethnic groups into the so-called "single Soviet people," that is, in fact, the Russian people.

Jack Tenney, an anti-communist politician who chaired the California Senate Factfinding Subcommittee on Un-American Activities published a report entitled Red Fascism in 1947, which drew on the popular anti-fascism of the war years to portray the Soviet Union and domestic Communism as similar to the Nazis.^[18] The same year the term was used by politicians Everett Dirksen and Henderson Lovelace Lanham.^[19]

Post-Cold War and contemporary

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.^[20][21]

Chinese dissident Yu Jie has used the label "Chinazi" — a combination of the words "China" and "Nazi" — to compare the government of China to that of Nazi Germany.^[22][23] The label was also frequently used during the Hong Kong protests against the Chinese government,^[24][25] contending that the People's Republic of China is turning itself into a fascist state.

See also

• Comparison of Nazism and Stalinism
• Definitions of fascism
• Fascist (insult)
• German-Soviet Axis talks
• Horseshoe theory
• National Bolshevism
• Neosocialism, a 1930s political faction in Belgium and France
• Revolutionary Feudal-Totalitarianism
• Social fascism
• Tankie

References

1. Maddux, Tomas R. (1 November 1977). "Red Fascism, Brown Bolshevism: The American Image of Tolatitarianinsm in the 1930s". The Historian. Informa UK Limited. 40 (1): 85–103. doi:10.1111/j.1540-6563.1977.tb01210.x. ISSN 0018-2370. Retrieved 9 January 2020.
2. Adler & Paterson 1970, p. 1046.
3. Fabbri, Luigi (1922). The Preventive Counter-revolution. Kate Sharpley Library. p. 41.
4. Gregor, A. James (1974). The Fascist Persuasion in Radical Politics. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press. p. 193.
5. Corrington, Robert S. (2003). Wilhelm Reich: psychoanalyst and radical naturalist (1st ed.). New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. p. 126. ISBN 0-374-25002-2. OCLC 51297185.
6. Dullin, Sabine; Pickford, Susan (2011-11-15). "How to wage warfare without going to war?. Stalin's 1939 war in the light of other contemporary aggressions". Cahiers du monde russe. 52 (2–3): 221–243. doi:10.4000/monderusse.9331. ISSN 1252-6576. Retrieved 2021-08-26. the Austrian historian and sociologist Franz Borkenau, himself a former Communist, published The Totalitarian Enemy on December 1, 1939 (London, Faber & Faber, 1940), writing the work after the shock of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact and the start of the war... For Borkenau, the pact clarified the situation and the parties present brought out the underlying similarities between the German and Russian systems, which he described as "Brown Bolshevism" and "Red Fascism," thereby increasing the war's legitimacy in defending freedom.
7. Rühle, Otto (1939). "The Struggle Against Fascism Begins with the Struggle Against Bolshevism". The American Councillist Journal - Living Marxism. 4 (8).
8. Memos, C. (2012). (PDF). Anarchist Studies. 20 (2). Archived from the original (PDF) on 2020-12-06.
9. "Left Fascism". Tablet Magazine. 2020-10-01. Retrieved 2021-08-29.
10. Lüthi, Lorenz M. (2020). Cold Wars: Asia, the Middle East, Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. p. 421. doi:10.1017/9781108289825. ISBN 978-1-108-41833-1.
11. Avrich, Paul (1988). Anarchist portraits. Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press. p. 132. ISBN 978-0-691-00609-3. OCLC 17727270.
12. Thomas, Norman (March 16, 1948). "Which Way America—Fascism, Communism, Socialism or Democracy?". Town Meeting Bulletin. Vol. XIII. pp. 19–20.
13. Adler & Paterson 1970, p. 1046, footnote 4.
14. Wald, Alan (2000). "Victor serge and the New York Anti‐Stalinist left". Critique. Informa UK Limited. 28 (1): 99–117. doi:10.1080/03017600108413449. ISSN 0301-7605. S2CID 152152043. the prevailing anti-Stalinism of most of the New York writers overwhelmed their other concerns... they consciously chose to ally with the "West" as the lesser of two evils locked in struggle in the "Cold War." The "West", of course, was their euphemism for imperialism, which had now become an acceptable ally against what they called "Red Fascism."
15. "Editorial: The Russian Betrayal". The New York Times. September 18, 1939.
16. Stephen M. Underhill (2017). "Prisoner of Context: The Truman Doctrine Speech and J. Edgar Hoover's Rhetorical Realism". Rhetoric and Public Affairs. Michigan State University Press. 20 (3): 453. doi:10.14321/rhetpublaffa.20.3.0453. ISSN 1094-8392. S2CID 148824916.
17. Багряний І. На новий шлях. Чому я не хочу вертатися до СРСР?. — К.: «Українська прес-група», 2012. — 112 с. — (Бібліотека газети «День»; серія «Бронебійна публіцистика»).
18. Geary, Daniel (2003-12-01). "Carey McWilliams and Antifascism, 1934-1943". Journal of American History. Oxford University Press. 90 (3): 912–934. doi:10.2307/3660881. ISSN 0021-8723. JSTOR 3660881. In the postwar period, Tenney s language of "red fascism," which identified fascism with the domestic progressive agenda and denounced it as a Communist plot, would supplant McWilliams's equation of fascism with American political repression, class inequalities, and racism. Not only right-wingers such as Tenney but Cold War liberals as well identified fascism with an oppressive totalitarianism common to the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany and absent from the democratic society of the United States.
19. Ivie, Robert L. (1999). "Fire, Flood, and Red Fever: Motivating Metaphors of Global Emergency in the Truman Doctrine Speech". Presidential Studies Quarterly. Wiley, Center for the Study of the Presidency and Congress. 29 (3): 570–591. doi:10.1111/j.0268-2141.2003.00050.x. ISSN 1741-5705. JSTOR 27552019. Retrieved 26 August 2021.
20. Sternberg, Ernest (7 January 2009). "A Revivified Corpse: Left-Fascism in the Twenty-First Century". TELOSscope. TELOS Press. Retrieved 15 November 2017.
21. Murphy, Paul Austin (July 2013). . New English Review. Archived from the original on 3 August 2018. Retrieved 3 August 2018.
22. [Nazi China #Chinazi | Yang Jichang]. 眾新聞 (in Chinese (Hong Kong)). Archived from the original on September 4, 2019. Retrieved September 5, 2019.
23. VanderKlippe, Nathan (August 29, 2019). "In Hong Kong, protesters employ Nazi imagery as demonstrations erupt again". The Globe and Mail.
24. Wong, Chun Han (September 30, 2019). "Hong Kong Protesters Taunt Beijing in Bid to Spoil Communist China's Birthday". The Wall Street Journal. ISSN 0099-9660. Retrieved April 19, 2020.
25. "Protesters drop Nazi term after Western input - RTHK".

Bibliography

• Adler, Les K.; Paterson, Thomas (1 April 1970). "Red Fascism: The Merger of Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia in the American Image of Totalitarlanism, 1930's–1950's". The American Historical Review. 75 (4): 1046–1064. doi:10.2307/1852269. JSTOR 1852269 – via JSTOR.