The fight against fascism, then & now: 80 years after the defeat of Nazism

Transcript:

Radhika Desai:

Hello everyone and welcome to another International Manifesto Group webinar. As you know the In International Manifesto Group is a is an international discussion group which is socialist and anti-imperialist. And today we are going to commemorate 80 years of the defeat of Nazism with our webinar. I’m Radika Desai I’m the convenor of the International Manifesto Group and your moderator today. Please also check out the International Manifesto Group at www.internationalmanifesto.org. Consider reading and signing our manifesto, check out our activities, consider donating and please also help us by spreading the word about our work sharing our videos and our website.

Today’s webinar is entitled “The Fight Against Fascism Then and Now, 80 Years After the Defeat of Nazism,” and I am sorry to say that although I wish we were merely commemorating a very important event this webinar is much more than a commemoration. It has to be, because fascist or fascist-like forces are becoming increasingly visible in many countries in the capitalist world, both in first world and third world countries and it is increasingly also an important factor in international relations.

So, we have an array of very knowledgeable and thoughtful speakers lined up for today. But before we go to them, I’d like to offer just a few thoughts on the subject to frame the issue. Bourgeois ideology tells us and essentially holds the view that fascism, I mean it essentially exceptionalizes fascism. Fascism occurred back in the 30s, it can never occur again; it was about – you know – antisemitism, etc. So, every effort is made to exceptionalize it and to some extent I would say that there are many Marxists who also accept this view. But really, if we were to interrogate it more realistically, in a more historically accurate fashion, would we find that this is so? And this raises the question how do we understand fascism?

Now, it’s also the case that a lot of the Marxist literature much of which is worth reading, so this is not me dismissing it, but in much of the Marxist literature it is regarded as something that accompanied monopoly capitalism which we can say kind of started roughly in the late 19th early 20th centuries. And many accounts of it, Daniel Guérin’sⁱ comes to mind, emphasize the difference between competitive capitalism and monopoly capitalism in order to underline why fascism is specifically characteristic of the age of monopoly capitalism. Poulantzas, whose work I found very useful, considered it an exceptional form of bourgeois rule alongside dictatorship and Bonapartism, the implication being that liberal democracy is the normal form of bourgeois rule.

However, in my own work on fascism which has been driven in large part with trying to understand the character of Hindutvaⁱⁱ in Indian politics has of course driven me into a lot of the literature on fascism in Europe to try to understand it more accurately so as to see if it applies to India or not. And what I feel I must conclude is that fascism is connected with the advent of the mass franchise, rather than necessarily a monopoly stage of capitalism per se. It is a form of authoritarianism adapted to the era of the mass franchise. That’s why the first fascisms occurred so soon after the introduction of the mass franchise in a politically consequential fashion.

So, although Germany had a mass a male adult franchise you know going back to the latter part of the 19th century, these elected governments only began to wield real power in the Weimar era. That’s one element; and that’s why they are adapted to the era of the mass franchise. In addition to violating the liberal constitution, in addition to doing all sorts of unconstitutional illegal things, fascism speaks in the language of working people and socialism, and it organizes – it’s reliant on organizing many of these people, or at least the lumpen proletariat – in organizations that are able to exert para-state violence. And a third characteristic, therefore, is that it acquires an autonomy from the very bourgeois forces that initially resort to them in order to preserve their rule.

And this becomes very clear if we think of Marx’s description of the activities of society of December the 10th under Louis Napoleon you know who used the society in order to get himself elected. And it’s worth recalling Marx’s description very briefly. So, Marx says the following; so at one place he says “Bonapart knows how to pose as the chief of the society of December 10th as the representative of the lumpen proletariat to which he himself, his entourage his government and his army belong and whose main object is to benefit itself,” and he goes on to say, Marx goes on to say “He confirms himself as the chief of the society of December 10th with decrees without decrees and despite decrees.”ⁱⁱⁱ

And then he further continues in a very remarkable passage, he says “The French bourgeoisie balked at the domination of the working proletariat; it has brought the lumpen proletariat to domination, with the Chief of the Society of December 10 at the head. The bourgeoisie kept France in breathless fear of the future terrors of red anarchy – Bonaparte discounted this future for it when, on December 4, he had the eminent bourgeois of the Boulevard Montmartre and the Boulevard des Italiens shot down at their windows by the drunken army of law and order. The bourgeoisie apotheosized the sword; the sword rules it. It destroyed the revolutionary press; its own press is destroyed. It placed popular meetings under police surveillance; its salons are placed under police supervision.”^iv And Marx goes on in this way and clearly demonstrating a really sharp understanding of how when you employ such an alien force to reinforce your rule your control over it is limited at best.

So, if you look at it from this point of view the post-fascist era, the three or so decades after the end of the second world war, in which Russian and Chinese forces were so critical to the defeat of fascism. We were looking at an exceptional period in which the working classes of the west, the Soviet Union, Chinese forces had not only helped defeat the illiberal option that existed within the capitalist world and was part of this inter-imperialist conflict, but also gave rise to the three post-war decades exceptional form of capitalism which was heavily reformed and by permitting a very substantial concessions to the working classes, they seem to create the impression that liberal democracy and capitalism were compatible. And even then, we know that the capitalist governments of the West tolerated and indeed supported the persistence of many Nazi forces in the government apparatuses of the post-world war period. Internationally, as Gabriel Rockhill and others have shown, fascist forces were part of the creation of NATO. So, despite these heavy reforms, fascist forces were definitely present and of course now that that reform period is behind us, now that capitalism seeks to exercise its domination without such material concessions to working people, it is no wonder that we are seeing forms of fascism reemerge.

So, without going into further detail, let me just say that therefore this forces us to conclude that fascism has to be regarded as an ever-present possibility in capitalism per se not even necessarily in monopoly capitalism. Although, without doubt under monopoly capitalism given the even smaller size of the capitalist class it becomes even more necessary, and it implies that the existence of liberal democracy and capitalism or the compatibility between liberal democracy and capitalism is very low indeed. So, with this let’s go to our speakers. Our first speaker is Dr. Oleg Barabanov and Oleg is the program director at of the Valdai Discussion Club^v and he’s joining us today from Moscow. So, Oleg please go ahead.

Oleg Barabanov:

Thank you very much Radhika for the invitation. It’s a pleasure for me to be here. It’s not my first time at the International Manifesto Group webinars and here we discuss the event which is sure very important for contemporary Russian politics, because all the policy of historical memory, let’s say, of the Kremlin of Vladimir Putin is strongly focused on the victory in the second world war. Or as we name the Russian German front of the second world war, the Great Patriotic War in Russia. And the commemoration like military parade like other memorial meetings and demonstrations became for now one of the major parts of the official domestic policy but also accepted by a larger part of the society. I would like to say it’s also interesting that in the Soviet times there were no such tradition like military parades on May 9, the day of victory for Russia, because it’s just to say what is the difference between two dates of commemoration, May 8 for Europe, for the whole world and May 9 for Russia. Because the final armistice the ceasefire the capitulation of Germany entered into force at the late evening of May 8 according to Berlin time, but for Moscow time it was already May 9. So, for Russia when the Soviet army was doing its job, their daily timetable in Europe was done according to the Moscow time, not to the local time Berlin time. And so, for Russia the main date is May 9 not May 8.

And now we see also mainly in Central and Eastern Europe the politicization of two dates. If you select May 8, it means that you are more or less pro-European, pro-democratic and if you select May 9, it means that you are a Putinist and something like this. But let me repeat, because in the Soviet time there were no such traditions like a yearly military parade on May 9 in the Soviet Union. Because the main military parade of the USSR was done at another date: November 7, which was the date of the October socialist revolution of 1917. And only for some jubilee years like 1965, 1985 there were military parades on May 9. And it means that it was not a Soviet tradition, but it became a post-soviet tradition started not by Vladimir Putin, but by Boris Yeltsin in 1995 another jubilee date of the of the victory, when he organized the military parade and there was a special federal law that proclaimed that military parades should become yearly in the Russian Federation. So, the one was done this year as well.

Before the parade there were maybe the most massive drone attack on Moscow by the Ukrainian armed forces. It was a total chaos in all Moscow airports for May 6, May 7, May 8. So, the Ukrainians showed their strength in the air and unfortunately Russian anti-air defenses were not able to protect the city, but for May 9 it was all more or less quiet around Moscow. Maybe it was some shadow agreement between the Ukrainians and the Russians not to send drones exactly during the time of the parade, but who knows. And the specificity of the current parade is strongly connected with the conflict with Ukraine for sure. And there were many speculations few months before that the military conflict could be ended by May 9. So, Donald Trp wanted to stop it by Easter, so April 20; many in Russia were thinking that it will be stopped by May 9, and nothing happened. So, some people in Russia were expecting that the traditional historical memory day, the day of the victory in the Great Patriotic War could be connected with the great of stopping of hostilities now, but it doesn’t happen.

But now we’ve seen a few days ago direct negotiations started in Istanbul between the Russians and the Ukrainians without much success for now, but let’s see what happens. So, for the Russian society it’s for sure a very important commemorative date. It’s a very active instrument in constructing policy of historical memory for the Kremlin, for Vladimir Putin personally. But also, Radhika if you allow me a couple of minutes more, I’d like to react to your introduction. What is the fascism now? Is it specific or Nazism? Is it specific only for Hitler for Germany of those years, or is it general and could be applied to ultraright forces now?

Also, another thing is how easy it became to blame your opponent as a fascist. For example, in this conflict both the Russians and the Ukrainians we blame each other as fascists almost every day. And in the Israeli Palestine conflict now with all that tragedy of Palestine that we see, many people very easily now blame the Israelis as the fascists. Is it correct? I don’t know. And generally, if you look at the ultraright arena is Donald Trump a fascist, or no? Is somebody else, maybe Nigel Farage in the UK fascist, or no? So, the question is that we very easily use the term fascist for everybody we don’t like. But what are the criteria? What are the reasons to nominate some phenomenon or some person as a fascist objectively not as a kind of blaming? It’s a very difficult question for me. But thank you for your introduction on this. Thank you, Radhika.

Radhika Desai:

Thank you so much, Oleg. Those were very important remarks, and we really appreciate it and I’m sure there will be questions and answers later. I should have mentioned earlier that after the speakers are done, we will have at least some time for questions and answers. Okay, so our next speaker is Professor Cheng Enfu. Since it is very late in Beijing right now, he has sent a recorded video which we will show now, so please wait.

Cheng Enfu:

Distinguished experts and scholars, good day. This meeting is convened at a highly opportune moment. The year 2025 marks the 80th anniversary of the end of World War II and the victory of global anti-fascist war. The Second World War launched by the two imperialist fascist states Japan and Germany, inflicted unprecedented casualties and immense material destruction upon the world. On September 18th, 1931, the Japanese army deliberately orchestrated a military invasion northeast China marking the beginning of Japan’s 14-year full-scale war of aggression against China. This event also signified the start of China’s and the world’s resistance against fascism. China served as the primary force in the eastern front while the Soviet Union was the principal force in the western front. Both nations suffered tens of millions of casualties far exceeding those of any other country, which is a historical fact that must not be erased or distorted by the West. The painful lesson of this 14-year global war must be remembered, and such a historical tragedy must never be repeated. However, the reality is that although the fascist regimes of Germany Italy and Japan were defeated after World War II fascism itself did not vanish. Entering the 21st century the ideological remnants of fascism in these countries have merged with neo imperialism, neo hegemonism, neo colonialism, neo racism and neoliberalism. As Samir Amin^vi pointed out in his 2015 essay,^vii this fusion has given rise to a protofascist resurgence which has remerged re-emerged in the West in the East and in the Global South. Amid a protracted structural crisis of global capitalism, neofascism has gained alarming moment particularly in the US and other Western states. With the spectre of war once again looming over multiple regions leftist scholars and political parties worldwide, global south countries and all peace-loving people have a duty to unite in resisting the threat of neofascism. Together we must advance the construction of a shared future for humanity and strive to build a better world for all. To that end I have recently authored a comprehensive research paper. Below I will share with you four key arguments from that paper albeit with varying levels of detail.

The first point I talk about in in my paper is the manifestations of the rise of neofascism. The first of such manifestation is the integration of neofascism with neoliberalism. In 2018, Henry Giroux^viii argued that fascism has long merged with neoliberalism, giving rise to a distinct political economic formation: Neoliberal fascism. He noted that neoliberalism’s hatred for democracy, the common good and social contract has unreleased elements reminiscent of classical fascism, such as white supremacy, ultra nationalism, violent misogyny and anti-migrant hysteria. Neofascism in turn facilitates neoliberalism’s global expansion through authoritarianism and violence, creating conditions for its dominance. Thus, neofascism as a hybrid of neoliberalism has already risen aggressively and runs rampant worldwide.

The second manifestation of the rise of neofascism is totalitarianism and authoritarianism in politics. The United States despite being a developed capitalist country, functions as the most authoritarian monopoly capitalist dictatorship among its peers.

The third manifestation is the rule through violence and terror. Both classical and neofascism are inherently tied to violence and terror. Tactics such as violent suppression, assassination and mass surveillance are wielded by monopoly capital not only against working class leftist activists and oppressed nations, but also against dissenting voices within the bourgeoisie itself. Let’s look at a series of examples: The UK miner strike in the 1980s, the Occupy Wall Street movement in 2011 and France’s Yellow Vest protests in 2018. All were crushed by state sanctioned police and military brutality.

Beyond overt repression, assassinations and covert terrorism remain key tools of neofascism. Western states have a long history of poisoning and assassinating socialist and leftist leaders such as Cuba’s Fidel Castro and Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez and Nicholas Maduro. In 1986, Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme was assassinated after challenging monopoly capital’s interests by proposing a worker’s fund to buy corporate shares, a policy that was subsequently abandoned. Multiple leaders of the Occupy Wall Street movement died under suspicious circumstances; their cases left unresolved. After 911, the US Patriot Act legalized mass surveillance of citizens’ calls and emails, while the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act permits warrantlessly spying on foreign targets. The US even brazenly monitors foreign leaders as revealed by numerous leaks. The 2022 Nord Stream pipeline sabotage and Western opposition to a UN investigation exposes the real perpetrators. In September 2024, Israel remotely denotated pagers and radios in Lebanon killing and injuring thousands of civilians, showcasing state terrorism against civilian infrastructure.

The fourth manifestation of the rise of neofascism is expansionism in foreign relations. Fascism has always been linked to militarism and expansionism seeking so-called living space through aggression. Neofascism employs coups, military strikes and financial plunder to invade and exploit other countries.

The fifth manifestation of the rise of neofascism is ultra nationalism and racism toward other peoples. The current US support for Israel’s war in the Middle East serves as clear evidence of this tendency. Within Ukraine the United States has established 15 biological labs conducting research on pathogens causing plague, anthrax, tularaemia, cholera and other deadly diseases. The purpose of developing these biological weapons is clearly for actual or potential deployment in warfare which would inflict massive harm and potentially devastating consequences upon specific ethnic groups and races.

Now, the second point that I talk about in my paper is the causes behind the rise of neofascism. The first cause is the pervasiveness of neoliberal theory and policies. Academic circles widely acknowledge that the failure of neoliberalism has created favorable social economic conditions for the resurgence of fascism. However, the rise of neofascism is not solely attributable to neoliberalism’s failures but is equally indebted to its global dominance. At their core both fascism and neoliberalism serve as instruments of monopoly capital. Fascism as a terroristic dictatorship that replaces democracy with totalitarianism and which is anti-communist, antisocialist and anti-democratic, represents the most extreme form of bourgeois class rule.

The alignment of class interests has made neofascism particularly appealing to monopoly capital, earning it implicit support for neoliberalism which represents those very interests. Milton Friedman once lauded Chilean dictator Austo Pinochet for implementing neoliberal policies crediting him with creating a quote unquote “economic miracle.” Similarly, Frederick Hayek dedicated his book The Constitution of Liberty to Portuguese dictator António de Oliveira Salazar, writing “This introductory essay on new constitutional principles may assist you in designing a constitution resistant to the abuses of democracy.” These endorsements from leading neoliberal thinkers reveal the ideological kinship and mutual reinforcement between neoliberalism and neofascism, a fundamental ideological driver of neofascism’s resurgence. Other causes include the need to suppress socialist movements’ need to divert attention from social contradictions and the need to preserve white supremacist hegemony.

The third point in my discussion is the war threat posed by neofascism. The rise of neofascism has not only exacerbated global polarization, the regression of democratic freedoms, but has also cast a shadow of war over an already turbulent world. History demonstrates that rampant fascism inevitably leads to armed conflict. Since 2022, regional wars instigated by Western powers including the Russia Ukraine conflict and the Israel Palestine conflict along with military provocations in the South China Sea and Taiwan region of China have all revealed the bellicose nature of neofascism. Should the United States initiate direct warfare against Russia and China, a world war would become nearly inevitable. Regrettably, the United Nations capacity to maintain peace and prevent wars has been significantly weakened due to obstruction by Western countries. Therefore, warnings from leaders like Russian President Vladmir Putin about being one step away from a new world war are by no means alarmist rhetoric.

We must recognize and address three critical war related issues. Number one, the breakdown of power balance among major capitalist countries. Number two, the profound structural crisis of global capitalism. The US has not only launched trade wars through tariffs but also demonstrates both subjective intent and objective need to resort to warfare as relief. Number three, the impotence and dysfunction of international governance mechanisms as recently evidenced by India’s military strikes against Pakistan.

And the last point I want to share with you here is the global response to neofascism. Against the backdrop of profound changes and seeing the century the accelerated rise of neofascist forces in Western countries demands our utmost vigilance. The world now faces unavoidable choices: Peace or war; multipolarity or hegemony; democracy or authoritarianism; cooperation or sanctions. As we confront these critical questions, we must remember prejudice and discrimination, hatred and war only bring disaster and suffering. Mutual respect, equality, peaceful development and shared prosperity represent the right path for humanity. Facing the threat of neofascism, all peace-loving forces across the world must unite in resolute struggle. Just as the victory over fascism 80 years ago ushered in a new high tide for global socialist and national democratic movements, today’s triumph over neofascism will undoubtedly open a new era of building a community with a shared future for humanity and peaceful development. That’s all for me. That’s all I want to talk about here today. Thank you very much.

Radhika Desai:

Thanks to Professor Cheng Enfu for his really very wonderful eagle-eyed survey of current developments regarding fascism around the world. Okay, our next speaker is Paweł Wargan. Pavel Wargan is the political director of the Progressive International, Pavel, please go ahead.

Paweł Wargan:

Thank you. Thank you, so much Radhika. Thank you for convening this talk which I think is hugely important because there’s a tectonic and civilizational struggle taking place over the meaning of victory day. And I think that struggle is as much about the past as it is about the future. And I’ll say a little bit more about that later. You know the West basically since the end of the war has been engaged in what might be the most consequential campaigns of revisionism ever undertaken. You know it’s turned completely on its head notions that were common sense even in the West at the end of the war. If you look at polling that was carried out in France in 1945 the vast majority of people recognized the singular contribution of the Soviet Union to victory. And if you look at more recent polling today that has completely flipped with the United States taking the dominant role and the Soviet Union being recognized as a as a minor contributor. So, it has reversed basically parts of that historical narrative. And the primary story that’s being told is of course about the role of the Soviet Union defeating Germany, but it’s not the only part of the kind of campaign of revisionism and I I’ll say more about that later.

Now among comrades, we know about the contribution of the Red Army. It defeated over 600 German divisions which is multiples what was defeated by the rest of the Allied powers it eliminated 3/4 of German military equipment. It killed 3 million German soldiers, 4 million were wounded, 3 million were captured; Auschwitz was liberated by the Red Army, Berlin was taken by the Red Army. And there’s this kind of pernicious narrative that the Soviet Union was unprepared, which really collapses when you go back into the documents of the Soviet leadership from the 1930s. You know, you read I think it was the 17th party congress in 1934 when Stalin says explicitly that another imperialist war is on the horizon and it is going to be led by Germany; and it is going to be primarily an assault on the Soviet Union. And in fact, you can consider the entire imperative, the entire impulse for industrialization that took place at that time with the five-year plans as being part of a process to develop defensive capacities within the state to protect against an existential war from imperialism, which was very clear would come at some point. And if you read the diaries – it’s very interesting to look at the diaries of the Nazi leadership from the start of operation Barbarossa, the start of the invasion – you already see that those strategies bore fruit. You know, Joseph Gobles writes in in September 1941 he says: “We calculated the potential of the Bolsheviks in a completely erroneous way,” this was about two months after the start of the invasion three months. In November later that year, Hitler says: “How can such a primitive people manage such technical achievements in such a short time?” And this was of course in response to the reports that were coming in from the front where German troops had discovered massive Soviet steel works. They discovered extensive networks of railway lines that hadn’t featured on German maps, they were stunned.

But we also we also know that the Soviet Union bore the overwhelming brunt of that war. You know, Hitler considered the Slavic people just like the Jews the Roma the Cinti and the other oppressed groups as a subhuman category. And Hitler said explicitly that the war on the eastern front would not be the same as the war on the western front. It would be a war of annihilation; it would be a war waged through genocide. And we can see that, you know, look at the prisoner of war camps. You have reports from the diaries of prisoners of war from the Western allied powers from the United States from Britain who were separated by a fence from Soviet troops who were held in conditions which were no different from those of the extermination camps and the and the and the other concentration camps around Europe. 3 million Soviet prisoners of war were killed in German camps through starvation, through exposure, through forced labor, through summary executions. In Leningrad you had a siege lasted almost 900 days and claimed about one and a half million people, which was I think a little over a thousand per day. And it was more loss of human life than the combined wartime death toll suffered by Britain and the United States in a single city in the Soviet Union. The Germans through brutal, brutal methods exterminated roughly a quarter of the population of Belarus and in total 27 million people were killed by the Germans; and that memory is being attacked now.

And so, I want to focus on three particular lines of attack, on three forms of revisionism that we see taking place across the West. And the first is the attempt to sever Nazism from its colonial roots. To pretend that what Hitler did in Eastern Europe is not what the European powers had done throughout Asia, throughout Africa, throughout the Americas for many centuries. And in fact, Germany refuses to admit this, but we know that Germany itself was responsible for the first genocide in the 20th century against the Herero and Namba people in modern day Namibia. And it was there in fact, that the very first use of the term concentration camp was recorded in official German documents. And these were camps in which the colonized were subject to torture, to starvation, to slave labor, to medical experimentation and of course to extermination; a direct blueprint and predecessor of what came after.

And Hitler was deeply inspired by that legacy, of course not only by the legacies of the maritime colonial powers of Britain and Belgium and Spain and France and so on, but in particular of the settler colonial project in North America. You know he said he admired how the United States had managed to exterminate its native people, and how it managed to keep the remainder, as he said, “kept in a cage.” He admired the very strict regime of racial segregation that the US had implemented. There’s a great book called Hitler’s American Model,^ix which looks in a lot of detail at how the Nuremberg race laws were directly based on the Jim Crow regime in the United States. And German scholars, German jurists spend extensive time in the United States studying those laws and planning for their application back in Germany. And other German officials were explicit about their intentions. You know, Herman Göring said that in the interests of the German economy all the newly occupied territories on the Eastern Front will be treated as colonies and will be exploited using colonial methods; this was an order. And so, the German war on the Eastern front, like the Japanese war in China was very clearly part of the broader European colonial tradition. It brought the strategies and technologies that had been honed in the colonies, in the peripheries back to the old continent.

There’s another dimension here which I think is relevant about colonialism in the war. Because it was the very fact of the existence of colonialism that made what was fundamentally a European war into a world war, right? The rest of the world wouldn’t have been dragged into either side in the war, if it was not for the fact of you know the subjugation of the peoples of India, of Africa, of Asia, and to a lesser extent also Latin America because it was less involved in in direct fighting. But it was, you know, the war that brought starvation to Bengal in the 1940s. Direct British policy that killed what 3-4 million people at that time.

So that’s one instrument of one tool one vector of revisionism the attempt to sever Nazism from its colonial roots. The second is the attempt to disconnect fascism from its capitalist roots. And if you look at the German economy in fact, both in World War I and World War II, you see that the underlying motor force was a profound crisis of profitability. Germany unlike the other European colonial powers was late to the scramble for colonies. It didn’t have many colonial possessions, but it had a very developed and advanced industry that was growing and that needed an outlet. And that outlet couldn’t be satisfied domestically in particular after the conditions imposed on Germany after World War I. So, it needed to seek an outlet. It needed to seek an outlet for its investment, needed to seek new markets. It needed to seek new resources. It needed to seek new labor. And if you look at the promise the promise of Lebensraum, of living space for the German people, it wasn’t just that German settlers would acquire land in the east to live on, it was really a promise of those markets, resources and labor for German monopolies. And so, for Germany, maybe to attempt an answer to Oleg’s question about what fascism is, war was a strategy fundamentally of primitive accumulation and fascism was its organizing ideology which helped secure by force the organization of the entirety of German society for violence.

And this is where we come to the third and I think the most consequential strategy of revisionism. You know, the most consequential battleground, which is the attempt to equate communism with fascism. In fact, you know, in my native Poland this form of revisionism is basically mandated by law. There’s legislation that puts fascism and communism on equal footing but if we look at the Soviet economy compared to the Nazi economy, it was a fundamentally different orientation. It was an economy that sought to direct its productive forces towards development, towards literacy, towards education, towards healthcare. And the entire state building project was directed at dismantling the divisions of class, at weakening the tensions of ethnicity, of nation within what we might call today a plurinational state. And the Soviet people, having seized that state were now the subjects of its history. And they carried with them a very different subjectivity into war. And you can really you know really that really comes across when you read the diaries of German soldiers and compare them with the diaries of Soviet soldiers. There’s a dignity there’s a heroism there’s a there’s a purpose to the Soviet struggle that is entirely lacking in in in the German army.

And so I said at the start that I think this is as much a battle as about the past as it is about the future and I think that’s the case because the battle to erase Nazism in particular Nazism’s colonial inheritance has in a sense, as Radhika was saying at the beginning, freed the rest of the Western world from the burden of its own past. If Nazism was the singular crime, and in some countries that position is now legally mandated, in Germany Holocaust exceptionalism is you know written into legislation, then it stands apart from the extermination of the Native Americans, the genocide in the Belgian Congo, the many genocides in British India and so on and so forth. And that removal of Nazism from its own history has allowed that history to carry on largely uncontested in the West. You look at France and Algeria after World War II France was operating concentration camps for Algerian revolutionaries. Several million were killed. The US’ actions in Korea, a quarter of the population killed in a bombing campaign that destroyed nearly every building in the country in the north. You look at the British in Kenya. You look at the US again in Indonesia and Vietnam and Guatemala. You look at Palestine today. Every one of these was a brutal assault by imperialism backed by the repression of opposition forces back in the metropoles back in the US and in Western Europe that served the agenda of imperialist accumulation.

Maybe one more point I’d like to make which I think we haven’t adequately contended with, which is a point that Radhika made at the beginning, and that is the absorption of fascism, the direct absorption of fascism into NATO. Not only the absorption of fascism’s fundamental anti-communist mission but also the absorption of individuals. What does it mean that Hitler’s chief of staff became the chairman of NATO’s military committee? What does it mean that Erwin Rommel’s chief of staff became the commander-in-chief of NATO forces in central Europe? There’s a whole list of Nazi figures who joined not only very high positions within NATO, but also within the US security apparatus after the war and the effects are very plain to see. NATO has repeatedly repurposed fascism in a war against socialism in the purpose of socialist containment from the very beginning. In Italy we have seen the massive, massive support of reactionary right-wing forces who waged a long-standing and clandestine war against communists who were hugely popular on the back of the victory in the Second World War. You see NATO’s support of Portugal, which was a founding member under a fascist dictatorship, but in particular NATO’s support of Portugal’s colonial wars in Africa. And of course, this extends all the way to its support for Israel and Ukraine today. So, if we can’t reclaim that memory the memory of Victory Day, the memory of who actually contributed to it, of what the underlying reasons for the emergence of the Nazi regime were, then I think we laid the ground for the same crimes to be repeated again and again, except this time under the banner of democracy and freedom.

And if I can end with just a short quote. I came across this quote earlier this year, I think it’s a very powerful one about the soldiers of the Red Army. And the quote is here: “And yet, under their slovenly and anarchical appearance, it was easy to see in them, in each of those rough and open faces, the good soldiers of the Red Army, the valiant men of the old and new Russia, gentle in peace and fierce in war, strong from an inner discipline born from concord, from reciprocal love and from love of their country; a stronger discipline, because it came from the spirit, than the mechanical and servile discipline of the Germans. It was easy to understand, living among them, why this former discipline, and not the latter, had finally triumphed.”^x and that is Primo Levy who was an Italian prisoner at Auschwitz who was liberated at the end of the war. So, I’ll end there. Thank you so much, Radhika.

Radhika Desai:

Thanks a ton, Paweł. That was an absolutely wonderful presentation connecting I think fascism with imperialism in a very full and rounded way, and I think we need to do it, I think we don’t sufficiently understand the influence of fascism in the international relations of our world which is absolutely profound. After all, a whole world war was fought on its basis but in ways that we don’t fully understand thanks to the efforts of the bourgeois media. Thank you so much, and we will now go to our next speaker. Lotte Rørtoft-Madsen is the chair of the Danish Communist Party. So, Lotte I hope you are able to unmute and join us shortly.

Lotte Rørtoft-Madsen:

Thank you, Radhika. Thank you for inviting me to this webinar. I will focus my contribution on two subjects. One, the Danish resistance movement during World War II and the lessons we draw from it. And two, the fascist worm which is gnawing today worldwide. First some words about the Danish resistant movement and its lessons. Denmark was under Nazi German occupation from April 1939 until May 4^th, 1945. The Danish government up to and during the first years of the occupation pursued a policy of collaboration with the occupiers. Attempts to protest the occupation were harshly crushed. The Social Democratic prime minister issued a statement calling sabotage against the Nazis acts of treason. Unemployed workers risked being sent to Germany to work for the Nazi war machine with the complicity of parts of the trade union movement. In June 1941 when the German operation Barbarossa against the Soviet Union began, the Communist Party was banned and declared unconstitutional. At that time the party was actually represented in the parliament. Nevertheless, communists were arrested and imprisoned and sent to concentration camps in Germany and Poland. The policy of collaboration from the ruling classes seemed unbreakable.

But in September 1943, the Freedom Council was formed by representatives of the main illegal organizations as a coordinating body for the resistance struggle during the occupation. Thus, 1943 became a turning point in the resistance movement as the hitherto sporadic acts of protests and sabotage now became coordinated. Popular uprisings and strikes became widespread. The Freedom Council was the closest Denmark came to an alternative government during the occupation in World War II. It was created upon the initiative of the communist party as an attempt to rally different popular classes and strata and different national political forces around the sole aim of ousting the occupiers. It was a concrete expression of the strategy for creating broad popular fronts and alliances led out of the seventh congress of the Communist International in Moscow in 1935. This strategy has been and is heavily debated. Some call it proven that in the fight against fascism you call for broad popular anti-fascist fronts. From our experience we must say the successes of the Danish resistant movement against Nazism and German occupation is born out of the strategy for creating broad popular fronts and alliances. Had it not been for the unified Danish resistance movement, Denmark would not have qualified as an ally after World War II. And in that movement the communists played a leading unifying role. Unfortunately, the Danish working class and the communists did not succeed in harvesting the results of the resistance movement after the war in building a new alternative society. But that’s another story which I will not look into today.

This policy of alliances based on the working class and honest national political forces and not bourgeois governments was in fact continued after the war in Denmark, namely in the struggle of the Danish people against the European common market; today the European Union. On the initiative of the communist party in 1971 the popular movement against this supranational imperialist block was formed. Due to this powerful movement, the ruling classes of our country have been forced to carry out nine referenda on European Union matters, three of them were won by the people. Most importantly the popular vote against the Maastricht Treaty in 1992 and against Denmark joining the Euro in the year 2000. These are all results which are basically obtained through the policy of popular fronts and alliances with the communists at the core. It’s all about how to gain strength and create mobilization. So, we learned that to get rid of fascism we must take the struggle in our own hands and create these broad alliances and not rely on bourgeois governments. These lessons can be different in other parts of the world, but I think this lesson is general for many of us who are struggling in the West and it’s really important today where the fascist worm is gnawing in many countries.

The anniversary of the victory 80 years ago was commemorated a few days ago also in Denmark. The Danish elite, the government, the mainstream media, and the ruling classes excluded in the most tactless way the Russian representative from taking part in the official celebration. In their opinion, fascism today lives and thrives in the East and not in the West. This Russophobia and Cold War anti-China attitude seeks to spread confusion about what fascism really was then, and what it is today. Earlier I emphasized the struggle for national sovereignty and democracy, and I did it with a purpose, because I think that this question the national question is among the factors that can pave the way for fascism today if the communist and progressive forces don’t address it. Please bear in mind the words of the famous Bulgarian communist Gorgi Dimitrov 90 years ago where he exposed the class roots of fascism and the source of its influence on the masses. Among those were that and I quote: “Fascism acts in the interests of the extreme imperialists, but it presents itself to the masses in the guise of champion of an ill-treated nation, and appeals to outraged national sentiments.”^xi

In general, we have to have a clearcut understanding about fascism today and I think that one thing we must bear in mind is that fascism is diverse, it adapts. Fascism adapts it demagogy to the national peculiarities of each country and even to the peculiarities of the various social strata in the in one and the same country. Therefore, I see the need of dealing with the concrete conditions in every country and at the same time not forget the common features of fascism. And I would like to mention three common features of fascism. It appeals to the most urgent needs and demands of the people. Two, it approaches them with an anti-capitalist demagogy, taking advantage of the deep hatred of the working people against the plundering bourgeoisie, the banks, the monopolists, and financial magnates. And three, it speculates with the profound disillusionment of the people in bourgeois democratic governments. Also today, when the fascist worm is gnawing almost everywhere and undemocratic and even fascist movements and parties are emerging and are gaining influence. In some places they’re even in power or close to power or are actively eroding the bourgeois democratic system from within. They exploit the decline of the labor and trade union movement. They exploit the growing resentment of political elites and the loss of trust in bourgeois democracy.

Bourgeois democracy is in crisis and is becoming increasingly dysfunctional. The working class and people are deprived of virtually any real influence of the development of society. The fascists also appeal to feelings of abandonment worthlessness despair and alienation, and they promote bizarre conspiracy theories. But above all they promise revenge on a ruling class that has betrayed the working class and the nation. Ideologically, fascism today preaches dark enlightenment and struggles against what it calls Cultural Marxism. Fascism targets the working class, but represents the most reactionary, most chauvinistic and most imperialist elements of finance capital and aims at establishing its open terrorist dictatorship. And I think we should not forget that. Thank you for listening.

Radhika Desai:

Thanks so much, Lotte. That was really also a very important and interesting set of reflections on both the domestic politics of fascism and of course the regional European level politics. So, thank you so much. We will now turn to our next speaker, which is Andrew Murray. Andrew Murray is with the Stop the War Coalition and writes very frequently for the Morning Star. So, Andrew please go ahead.

Andrew Murray:

Thank you, Radhika. And thank you comrades for the invitation to join you today. Since we’re marking the 80th anniversary of the end of the war in Europe, I’d like to start by sending particular solidarity greetings to all comrades here from China and Russia. I would rather say China and Soviet comrades, but here we are. And those two states, two peoples bore the brunt of that struggle. Now, today we regard the Second World War predominantly as an anti-fascist war and of course that has a substantial degree of truth in it, as we’ve already heard. However, I want to look at this more specifically from the point of view of the conduct of the British ruling class, of British imperialism at the time, and it’s distinctly not anti-fascist orientation, because I think that has some relevance for both world politics today and for the question of whether we are talking about a revival of fascism now. Paweł underline very usefully some of the revisionism that goes on regarding the war and there are also of course other examples which are perhaps better described as myths, which are particularly deeply baked into Britain’s political culture. Britain of course is seen as a “good guy” in the war and that is more or less where it ended up no thanks to its own efforts, but it conceals a lot of complexity.

The first myth perhaps is that Britain had very little or limited responsibility for the war and that its mistakes were largely those of what’s called appeasement. In fact, while Britain was not of course a fascist state in the 1930s, or so far ever, it nevertheless went into the war at the helm of an empire that held hundreds of millions of people in conditions of extreme authoritarianism buttressing official racism. If it’s true, as Powell and others have outlined, that Nazism represented the return of colonial methods to Europe, the British Empire also represented to some extent the export of fascist measures of rule to the colonies. And Britain’s foreign policy was not based on being rather weak-minded and almost pacifist and failing to stand up to Hitler, it was dominated by the twin priorities of defending a massively overextended colonial empire against all-comers and on diverting Nazi Germany against the Soviet Union. These were its objectives, and they led of course to the sacrifice of Czechoslovakia. And they persisted even after the outbreak of war, when as we know the British and French military took no measures at all against Nazi Germany to assist Poland, the ostensible reason for declaring war. And yet Operation Pike^xii was developed, which was to launch an assault on the oil industry in the Soviet Union instead to further anti-Soviet imperialist objectives.

The second myth is that Churchill was even if conservative, a profoundly anti-fascist politician. This is not true either. He was on the record as being a great admirer of Mussolini and in the Spanish civil war he was more inclined to support Francoism than the republic, and throughout the Second World War there are numerous examples of his extreme racism with regard to the Indian people. Of course, it was Indian and other people, and there is of course his willingness to buttress authoritarianism in Greece in the face of a popular movement of resistance led by the communist party. Of course, Churchill was anti-Nazi because of the threat Nazism posed to the British Empire, and admittedly because of some of its excessive measures; excessive by any standards. But Churchill was not motivated by anti-fascism and the British war strategy was not conceived by the ruling class as a war for democracy, it was again a war dictated by imperial strategy, by hanging on to colonial possessions particularly in Asia. And in the Asian theater of war. Military priorities were dictated not by assisting the Soviet Union or the popular struggle against the Nazis in Europe, but by advancing British military in North Africa, the Balkans and elsewhere, where it met British imperial interests. And as the war ended, there was another military plan, Operation Unthinkable,^xiii which was actually to mobilize British and American forces and reconstituted German forces, almost before Hitler was cold in his grave, to go to war against the Soviet Union. I mention all this because the war was a complicated war, there is no such thing as a pure war. They’re always crosscutting interests, different class interests involve different perspectives, but the idea of British imperialism fighting a pure anti-fascist war is, I believe, a myth.

It’s even clearer if one looks at the war in Asia, where there was the mighty struggle of the Chinese people against Japanese aggression but there was also basically an inter-imperialist conflict between the defensive powers, the colonial powers, Britain, France and the Netherlands and the expanding power of Japan and of the USA. And the war ended with British imperialism hiring the troops of Japanese imperialism to reimpose the rule of French imperialism on the Vietnamese people. So again, as we mark the end of the war, these complexities have to be acknowledged, and I think there is some relevance to the world today.

Of course there’s no time to go into a full review, but we see how British imperialism has over the last three years played arguably a leading role in the world in trying to prolong the conflict in Ukraine, to obstruct any possible moves towards peace, to advance a very bellicose policy. We also see it in the fact that there is even now a disagreement between the British government and the Americans, and the American government, the Trump administration is saying Britain should concentrate its military efforts on Europe. And Britain is sending one of the two aircraft carriers in the British Navy to the Far East as part of provocations directed against China, asserting British imperialism’s continued aspiration to play a global role.

Now whether we are seeing fascism now or some variation of right-wing authoritarianism, we can be sure of one thing, I think, that this phenomenon arises from similar roots as in the 1930s, that is to say the deepening economic crisis since 2008 and the bankers crash, from which the British economy and others have never really recovered; a generation of stagnant and falling living standards for the working class, the degradation of public services. All of this fuels the discontent. And if we look at the rise of the far-right parties across Europe, at the phenomenon of Trump in the USA, really these were if not negligible, at least very much reduced before 2008. They are a product of economic crisis in a number of capitalist countries and also of a globally sharpened competition with the anxieties of American imperialism and its allies being driven by the rise of China as now a great socialist power.

So, we have to look at it in that context, and I think we have to be cautious in how we relate fascism to other political phenomenon that we are seeing over the last 20 years. We’ve seen a series of aggressive neocolonial wars, I’m thinking of obviously Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, primarily. These have all been launched by forces that are broadly generically described as centrist liberalism, and it’s also centrist liberalism whose failures and bankruptcies have domestically, in clinging to zombie neoliberalism, powered the rise of the far-right. And, of course, although it is only demagogy to a large extent, parties like Reform UK, politicians like Trump pose as peace lovers, as being definitely less aggressive than the neoconservatives and neoliberals who proceed them, who have authored all these wars and who continue – Starmer, Macron, Merz now in Germany – in the vanguard of trying to prolong the conflict in in Ukraine. So, we have to be cautious I think of reading over strategies from the 1930s to today. Of course, our Danish comrade is absolutely right to raise the importance of alliances based around the working class with communists playing the leading role, as to the extent of their capacities. But we also have to acknowledge that it is the liberals who would perhaps under some circumstances be seen as our allies, who have hugely discredited themselves with the popular masses of people, and whose policies have led to war and social misery.

And I think also, while it’s absolutely right to remember the popular front strategy and its vitality and the gains it registered at the time, we also have to acknowledge that its initiation by the communist movement in the 1930s led to something of a reduction in emphasis on the anti-colonial struggle across the world at the time. And while that of course is a matter of historical debate, I think the centering of the struggles of the Global South and of the role of the People’s Republic of China in resisting the rise of the far-right is important. And it’s also important not to allow anti-fascism to be mobilized against anti-imperialism as has happened in sections of the Left over this century where the centrists dubbed somebody, whether it’s Saddam Hussein or Slobodan Milošević or Bashar al-Assad as the new Hitler and elements of the Left then say we have to support these wars, because we are fighting against fascism, and therefore anti-fascism gets perverted into fighting anti-imperialism. We have to emphasize absolutely, that fascism is an expression of the imperialist world system and any ally against imperialism is our ally against fascism today. Thank you, comrades.

Radhika Desai:

Thanks so much, Andrew. That was, really again, another really fascinating connection between fascism and imperialism, this time from the perspective specifically of the British Empire. It certainly makes a lot of sense to me, because it just occurred to me a month or two ago that the reason why the term World War was used is because of the very fact that, as Lenin emphasized, the whole world had been taken over by the European powers and the various offshoots and so on, which meant that if they went to war with one another, the whole world would be willy-nilly involved with it, hence the term World War. At least that’s a thought that occurred to me. But anyway, thank you so much. That was really important also to emphasize the misuses of the term fascism in misdirecting the Left today. Our next speaker is Kit Klarenberg. Kit is an investigative journalist, and you can unmute yourself here, so please go ahead.

Kit Klarenberg:

Hey, thank you, first for having me on this panel; it is an honor and a privilege. At the risk of reiterating things that have been said by previous speakers including Paweł and Andrew, I think that there has been to a remarkable degree a very successful war on history waged by Western powers ever since World War II ended. And they’ve been incredibly effective at distorting the causes of the war and the fact that far from a historical aberration, the Nazis were a rather mundane expression of capitalism and Western imperialism, except their targets were not the Global South.

I think that as well in recent years that there has been a perverse and again highly successful effort to conflate communism and Nazism with nowhere near enough push back, really. In 2009, for instance, the European Parliament instituted an annual commemoration to mark the European Day of Remembrance for Victims of Totalitarian and Authoritarian Regimes, which not only conflates Nazism and Communism, but makes victims of Wehrmacht and SS collaborators, and Holocaust perpetrators in Central and Eastern Europe. And over the past decade particularly, ever since the Ukraine proxy war erupted in February 2022, we have seen efforts to lay blame for World War II at the feet of the Soviet Union, or Russia by dint of the Molotov ribbon top pact. Of course, absent from any consideration of why and how that pact came to be, was the refusal of Western powers to strike up defense or non-aggression agreements with the Soviet Union despite concerted efforts by Stalin and his government to do so throughout the 30s, because, as Paweł pointed out, they well understood that a new war was in in the offing.

Andrew said Britain was not a fascist country, I might beg to differ, when the British League of Fascists was launched in Britain, the British government ordered Special Branch, which is Britain’s political police, not to investigate or infiltrate the group, because they saw them as counter subversive. They viewed them as an important ally against the true enemy, which was anarchism and communism. But another component of this, which I have recently written about for my website, I’m afraid is a completely forgotten and obfuscated and concealed aspect of World War II’s history. It is the fact that that throughout the 1930s but particularly during 1939 in the months leading up to Nazi Germany’s invasion of Poland, Britain was engaged in a concerted effort to forge a global political and economic partnership with Nazi Germany. They were making overtures via back channels making wide ranging offers of cooperation and collaboration. You know, appeasement is viewed in the mainstream as this well-meaning but ultimately catastrophic and misguided policy to avoid another global conflict for peace’s sake and under this mainstream reading Munich in 19 September 1938 at which a large chunk of Czechoslovakia was unilaterally handed over to Nazi Germany by Western powers, this was meant to represent the kind of apex, the pinnacle of appeasement; and it is frequently cited today in order to in order to keep the Ukraine proxy war going. There was a chorus of allegations of appeasement and references to Munich when Trump was talking about cutting a deal with Russia to end the nightmare in Donbass, but in reality Munich from the perspective of the British government at the time was just the first step towards a global partnership with Nazi Germany, and I would I would urge viewers to read my investigation in full because this is a history which literally nobody knows. It is spelled out in really quite shocking detail in the papers of Herbert von Dirksen^xiv who was Nazi Germany’s ambassador to London in the 18 months prior to World War II. The content of those papers was found by the Red Army in a castle that Dirksen spent most of World War II residing in, and it is based on memos and telegrams which were never intended for public consumption. Britain was willing to make massive concessions to Germany. They were willing to hand over the entirety of the Balkans to Nazi German domination.

Of course, another forgotten aspect of World War II is the war of annihilation fought against Yugoslavia, primarily its Serb population, and the righteous victory of the partisans who defeated more Nazi divisions than the US and Britain fought combined without an air force or tanks at their disposal. So, the details are quite shocking and as Dirksen lamented following the outbreak of war, he said the tragic and paramount thing about the rise of this conflict is that Germany demanded an equal place with Britain as a world power and Britain was in principle prepared to concede. But whereas Germany demanded immediate complete and unequivocal satisfaction of her demands, Britain although she was ready to renounce her eastern commitments, in other words shred her pledge to defend Poland in the event of Nazi invasion, and to discuss genuine world political partnership with Germany, Britain wanted this to be done only by way of negotiation and a gradual revision of policy. So, it was a matter of time – we are getting into the realm of speculation – whether perhaps, if Hitler hadn’t been in such a hurry, what the world might look like now, had Britain and Nazi Germany joined forces as was being planned in the leadup to World War II.

So, I think that yes that the battle against fascism never ended. I think the collapse of the Soviet Union. which of course the West supported by supporting ultra-rightist forces within the Warsaw pact and the Soviet Union, many of these individuals remain influential in the politics of these countries to this day and are one way or another embroiled in the Ukraine proxy war. The end of the Soviet Union meant the end of any perceived necessity to present a liberal democratic face to the world. And I think it has been the past 30 well the past 35 years have been a story of the thin veneer of western civilization cracking and the mask coming off with ever increasing rapidity and it’s very important to fight back against this.

Paweł referenced how the Nazis seriously underestimated the Soviet Union and were shocked that these savages were capable of technological achievements. It is very clear based on leaked documents I’ve reported on for the for the Greyzone that the Russians are viewed as backwards and incompetent or were prior to the outbreak of proxy war seen by the British as backward savages. We’ve heard Russians universally referred to as orcs. NATO published a paper on quote unquote humor in online warfare, which advocated mockery of the Russians in order to manufacture public consent for keeping the war going, because if the Ukrainians are fighting the embodiment of incompetence and backwardness, well then, they can easily win as long as we just keep sending them more money and more weapons. And we can see the absolutely devastating result of these enduring delusions that Russia can be subjugated and can be broken up into pieces, which is what these people have want and successive British American and other Western powers have wanted ever since 1917, if not before.

Radhika Desai:

Wonderful, Kit. Thank you, again another very important perspective on why we should see the Second World War as a continuation of the inter-imperialist crisis that began in 1914. So, thank you very much. We have two more speakers; the next speaker is Lyudmilla Bulavka. Lyudmilla is a philosopher, a profound scholar of Soviet history and culture and she’s a professor at Moscow State University. Lyudmilla, please go ahead.

Lyudmilla Bulavka-Buzgalina:

First of all, my great thanks to Radhika and your comrades for participation in this very, very important seminar. It is very actual, because now we are living in the situation of in the renaissance of neofascism. Maybe seven eight days ago I saw the group of Tomáš Kraus^xv published manifest against the discrimination of victory Soviet Union in the Second World War and there are many reactions, and your seminar is very, very important. I hope this line will continue in future. My little speech is called “Socialism and Fascism are Dialectics of Antagonism.” The topic of fascism is not abstract for me I grew up of this topic since childhood. My father was born in Belarus. When the war began, Nazis were stealing children to Germany, and he ran away with little boy Jewish boy. Later he was sent to the front there he participated in storming Königsberg and ended up in hospital. In May of 1945, he was only 17 and half years old at that time, this is very, very young. He hardly talked about the war, but sometimes in the night I hear him talk to my mother. When we were children, we sometimes heard parents talk about it with him.

The main problem, one question I have, is what problem does the topic of fascism pose today? For many years western liberalism has been actively promoting equality between fascism and social, socialism and fascism. The technology of this propaganda has several stages. The first step, the main essence that is historical practice is eliminated from the content of this concept. It’s very dangerous step, very dangerous. As a result, the concept of socialism and fascism turn in for abstractions and now they have one name. No socialism and fascism, but one name: Totalitarian system. According to this, the Second World War is no longer a war between socialism and fascism, no, no, no. Now the war is a war between the two totalitarian systems. For this reason, the Soviet Union cannot give Germany a historical and moral account. Germany’s totalitarian system, Soviet Union is totalitarian system. And then we hear Germany had Nazism and concentration camps, the Soviet Union had Stalinism and gulags. Seems to me both systems are criminal systems, and the question of morality is absent in this war between two criminal systems. Western liberalism went even further, when it claims that fascism arose in general as reaction of Europe to Soviet communism. Oh, communism is the reason of heinous fascism! And if there had been no October Revolution in Russia, then there would have been no Fascist revolution. October Revolution is the reason for communism and communism is reason for fascism.

And all these actions have one main goal, the discreditation of the victory of the Soviet Union in the fight against fascism. But it is very important that this is not only a military victory. This victory of the Soviet Union is not only military victory, it is first of all a socialist victory in the struggle against fascism, because in this war Soviet Union have as the main principal socialistic internationalism. Many peoples not only Soviet Union, but in Yugoslavia, in Greece and other countries participate in the anti-fascistic struggle. This this is precisely why this socialist victory over fascism was possible only thanks to socialist internationalism. And this victory, it’s very important to emphasize, that this war, this was a victory of the new human being over fascism. Where did this new human being come from? This new human being was generated by the very essence of socialism, because of the main idea of socialism, not religion, not nation’s idea, and not political idea. And the question is, what idea was the basis of socialism? The main idea of socialism of overcoming alienation is a way to move from the realm of necessity to the realm of freedom. And this transition is the essence of communism as movement in which class contradictions are removed in the contradictions of the culture. Antagonistic class contradictions become contradiction of the world of culture. For example, the contradictions in communism are not classic socio-political contradictions between the personality of difference tendency in the world art, in the culture, etc.

But Soviet society paid a high and tragic price for this victory, because Soviet people had a war on the two fronts, against Nazism and against Stalinist bureaucracy. It is very, very important and interesting that when the war ended Stalinism said the Soviet people are heroic, but Stalin became the symbol of victory. Heroism to the Soviet people but victory to Stalin. Stalin became symbol of victory. But the principle of Symbols is they cannot change. Symbols cannot change; religious, political symbols do not change. Stalin did not change this symbol of victory of socialism in the future. This is typically Stalinist method. A victory was alienation from Soviet peoples and western liberalism will comment on this victory.

The contradictions of modern capitalism create the preconditions for the development of already brown project. Now we have many preconditions of restoration of fascism. Now we have next wave of Neofascism, because fascism in Germany in 20th century is based on the atomistic individual. Today we have a new situation. Today the individual is not just a private individual, today the individual is a function of capital, a market function, function of social networks, of technology. Human beings are not subjects. Human beings operate only on function, function, function, and this alienation is very good base for fascism, because the individual function does not include celebration or social creativity, no.

And today, capitalism even changed the essence of culture. Culture used to be the fear of alienation, but today culture has become an industry who produces many, many, many different forms of alienation. This is very important, it is very, very dangerous, because what is fear can be alternative to world of alienation. Religion is business, real market is business, politics is business; Business, business, business and culture is business and morality is business. We have no sphere that can be an alternative to the world of alienation, and it’s very, very complicated situation and result of all this is growing conservative trend.

And here I want to remember the words of Alexander Buzgalin,^xvi he said theory and practice of sovereign conservatism integrated with anti-Marxism naturally lead to an apology to fascism. Conservatism with anti-Marxism with individual function is the road to the apologism of fascism. So, what can we do? I think is it is not enough to simply denounce fascism, it’s not enough. We must organize historical education to young people, it is necessary, and we must participate with young people in different practice for solving different social problems and the main alternative to fascism is communism. Communism not as political system, but as movement as a specific type of movement, social movement, where we can move from a world of alienation to a world of freedom. I think this is a very, very difficult task for us, but we must solve this problem.

Radhika Desai:

Thank you, very much. Thank you so much, Bulavka, this was great, and I think a very important philosophical reflection on the project of the Soviet Union and how it was central to the war and to winning the war. So, thank you so much, Lyudilla, that was great. Our next and final speaker is Professor Richard Sakwa. Richard is a professor Emeritus of Russian and European politics at the University of Kent, of course he continues to write, and he’s just had a couple of books published in the last year, so Richard, please go ahead.

Richard Sakwa:

Hello, thank you for this discussion. We’ve had a lot of talk about the memory wars, the war over history and so on. I just wanted to start by saying that this is a very personal thing for a vast number of people across the world in Eastern Europe. I’ll just give a couple of cases, because obviously we’ve been talking about the 80th anniversary of the end of the war and I’ll read a little news notice. Latvian police detained eight people and opened 67 administrative cases during May 9th events marking the 80th anniversary of the victory over Nazi Germany. According to local media the authorities have cited the use of banned Soviet symbols, Russian wartime songs, flower tributes in the colors of the Russian flag; that was in Latvia. In neighboring Lithuania authorities in Vilnius installed a garbage bin labelled for carnations, candles and Soviet nostalgia where people typically left tributes for May the 9^th. The Vilnius mayor said the gesture was aimed at those nostalgic for times alongside the Russians. Now the question then is how did it come to this? It’s really an astonishing turnaround. Just at the 50th anniversary we had British forces joining with the Soviet Union in marking the end of the war, the 60th year anniversary as well. So how can we understand it? Is it really fascism?

Now clearly something is on the march. Some beast slouching towards Bethlehem is once again out there. Of course, it takes many different forms. One of them today is technofascism or techno feudalism, as some people call it, the way in which we have the extraordinary inequalities of wealth, which then takes pathological forms in the way that a certain elite in the United States but not only there, have adopted a type of apocalyptic end times, which is of course one of the classic features of fascism, who are now building bunkers to survive the end times, going to Mars to try to escape the damage that they have done and so on. So, some of the way of thinking, if we look at the recent attempts to dismantle the administrative state, one of the achievements not just of post-war social democracy, of the New Deal, but even a whole century of inclusion in certain ways of social achievements into the existing modern state. So, how do we understand these last 80 years?

I’ve been arguing for some time that after 1945, and building on earlier things which we’ve heard about, but certainly after 1945, a particular military ideological complex took shape. I call it the Political west. It’s in particular obviously focused on the Atlantic power system, NATO, European Union and many other ideological elements involved in it. This Political west was shaped by the Cold War, shaped by some of what the earlier speakers said, shaped by the struggle against the Soviet Union, but not just the Soviet Union as a geopolitical formation, but also as an ideological one as a challenge to capitalism as an alternative model of world order. In other words, this Political west internalized a particular way of dealing with a challenge, both geopolitical and ideological and of course at the deep profound cultural level as well and in shaping behaviors, as we see in now banning memorialization of the end of the Second World War. So, this Political west is the manifestation of a particular vision of space as not just a territory but also a formation. I mean we can say it’s just one aspect of it. We’ve talked about the civilizational colonial west going back 500 years.

But how then do we understand the spatiality of what we’re talking about of this particular formation? Now it’s an issue which we could go back, I don’t want to go into details now, but just to suggest that those debates which took place in Germany after the end of the First World War are exceptionally enlightening in examining how this Political west space is shaped today. And I just very briefly refer to a fundamental debate which has echoes for the last hundred years, echoed across the ages. And I’ll just mention two figures at the heart of these two models, how we could have lived how the end of the Second World War could have been shaped, how the end of the Cold War 1989 could have been shaped. And the two people I want to mention are – the first one not very well known but who should be better known – a fellow called Otto Hintze,^xvii a historian of the late 19th century. He argued in the early 1920s for a pluralistic horizontally organized space in Europe, some sort of attempt to overcome the logic of the First World War that conflict between the Great Powers. Let us build a new Europe, he said. Well, I won’t go into detail on that, but just to say he was countered by a person far better known, Carl Schmitt^xviii. And Carl Schmitt, of course a legalist authoritarian and who argued in favor of a more hierarchical order. Now why I mention this is because in a very peculiar way the Political west with its vision in particular articulated in the European Union in its early days as a peace project, as subsidiarity and so on. The paradox of our times today is that this Political west instead of taking that pluralistic, that more open-minded approach of Otto Hintze and so many others, Karl Polanyi^xix and many, many more, but instead it has taken and assumed the spatiality outlined by Carl Schmitt. Now that is what I mean in brief.

I can’t go into the detailed argument now, but what I’m suggesting is that our spatiality, our political west as it now exists has incorporated precisely, let us call it protofascist sort of elements. That authoritarianism, that Schmittian distinction between friend and foe that is the dominating divide, the defining feature of sovereignty which is all very regressive. It’s all authoritarian. It’s all deeply disturbing. This, in short, I’ve argued that this Political west in built by the logic of the Cold War after the end of the Cold War in 1989 reproduced the Cold War instead of ending it. It has now incorporated the logic of Cold War, and worse it has reincorporated, as some of our earlier speakers have suggested, that is NATO and so on, reincorporated certain fascistic, protofascist and genuinely fascistic features. In other words, intolerance, hierarchy, pluralism to be sidelined and of course today we’re meeting on a day, when certain features of that type of spatiality are very much in sight.

Of course, the elections in Romania today are a classic example of one of those features of the Political west. The way that after 1989 it radicalized to make democracy subordinate to the power system, rather than an expression of genuine popular concerns and a way of mediating conflict in in classic liberal democratic theory. So, one of the key features of the Political west is obviously therefore democratism, where democracy is subordinated to the power interests of that this Political west of that “Großraum”^xx as Schmitt would call it. So, of course democratism we see that in Romania today, the cancellation of their election, which held in November, December was cancelled because it got the wrong result. And of course, we’ve seen those so-called firewalls, which of course should be contested politically, not administratively.

Another feature, of course, is rampant militarism. Europe is now setting off on the path of remilitarizing itself at a complete abdication of political responsibility, at a time of deep economic and social crisis, of declining living standards, decreasing longevity, which is quite extraordinary. We have had all the achievements of the first 30, 40 years after the Second World War of social democratic inclusion. Then the second 30, 40 years were the neoliberal destruction of all of that, we’ve now entered into a third post-war phase again, maybe we could call it elements of proto fascism there certainly authoritarianism, but remilitarization of Europe is really one of the most frightening features of it all. The third feature is the homogenization of political space the reduction of pluralism classic Carl Schmittian way, friend and foe. We’ve identified the foe to be attacked, not politically but administratively and indeed militarily, ultimately. It’s a catastrophic denouement, if you like, of an 800year cycle of the Political west’s trajectory. Of course, it’s got huge global implications, which some people have mentioned.

My final point is about what is astonishing about all of this, the way that at the moment the United States with the Trumpian disruption, or what you want to call it. It’s a type of triple defection, which opens up political space, paradoxically. What are the triple defections? First Trump is defecting from its own Political west which the United States did so much to create. Washington elites are clever. They know when there’s a failing project and they can see that this Atlantic system is sinking. It has smashed itself against Russia in the Russo-Ukrainian war. It has discredited itself in so many campaigns. The bombing campaign against Serbia 1999 and the other incidents mentioned earlier. So that’s the first potential defection.

The second defection the United States is from the from the international system that United States helped establish in 1945. What I have in mind there is the United Nations-based system of international law. It’s been potential for a long time the so-called rules-based order, it’s been based on double standards and hypocrisy. But now the United States is planning to leave the World Health Organization, UNESCO and so much more, to cut its subscription to the United Nations by 2/3 is the plan at the moment, potentially and so on. So that’s the second potential of defection in in motion at the moment.

The third defection is from the United States own constitutional order. Steve Bannon says the United States will find or what the Trump administration will find some workarounds to overcome that two-term limit in the United States. So, we’re living at a historical moment, in short, which I think we’ve had in my view a fascinating discussion so far, which has highlighted so many fundamental issues as the United States moves from empire to great power it opens up possibilities and of course we’re seeing mobilization in the world majority with BRICS and so on out in the world outside. So, I think as we’re meeting on the 80th anniversary of the end of the Second World War, I believe we’re entering into a whole new epoch at the moment, which I think discussions of the sort we’ve had this afternoon is fundamentally important in trying to make sense of it. So, thank you.

Radhika Desai:

Thank you, very much. Richard, that was a really, really great reminder, as you say, of these three defections that seem to reveal that the so-called 30 years crisis, shall we say, that provided the opening for the United States to step onto the world stage, that period may have come to an end in some respects, at least that’s what I read from your three defections analysis which is really quite fascinating. Okay, it’s either that these speakers have been so good that I simply haven’t had the nerve to interrupt them, or it is that I’ve been a very bad chair. But either way we have limited time for discussion. But I think we can give it some 20 minutes, if you like. So, I already see one hand up I think you will be able to find your raise hand function somewhere along the bottom of your Zoom screen I have mine in my react button which has a little heart-shaped icon. So, I see there are two people who have questions already I will take two or three questions. If there are three, I’ll take three. Then I will give all the speakers a chance to both respond to the first set of questions and respond to each other if they would like and then that may be all we can take. In fact, I’m seeing five questions I think I’m going to just take them all and just have one round of question and answer I will not be able to take any more. So, and I’d like to request the people who are posing questions to be very brief and to the point, no more than about a minute each please and then we’ll go to the speakers, okay. So, on please go ahead.

Ion:

Good morning, I am very fascinated with the discussion today have been watching it with interest and one thing that came to mind as one of the speakers mentioned the polls in Europe says days and the polls we as a society depend more and more on polls and those are run by private companies of private interests and instead of having referendums through a government machine that is controlled by a democratic system. So, I think that is a major flaw for the last speaker mentioned deflection from the democratic system to technocracy and that is precisely what polling systems are. It’s a new technology and it’s the technocrats are managing it in a way to deflect our thinking and tell us that people think this because our poll says that, but that’s not for sure because we don’t we don’t have control over it. So, I’d like to know what they think about legislation by referenda, if that is the salvation of socialism

Radhika Desai:

Great, Ion. Thank you so much, polls and referenda, that’s the question. Okay, Guy, please go ahead.

Guy:

So, my question will just be if you have any thought regarding Venezuela initiative at creating a world congress against fascism. We’ve had a relatively good start, especially when it included the now fallen apart the Syrian Arab Republic. So, I just thought regarding this initiative and if it is a good direction, that we have states that are starting to be more directly open at citing fascism as an actual threat right now.

Radhika Desai:

Lovely and to the point. Thank you very much. John Warren, please go ahead.

John:

Yeah, I just wanted to say thank you very much to everybody, but also ask where we are now? Because, I live in Moscow and I’m not sure how many others except for Bulavka live in Moscow as well, but I am British, I’ve lived here 35 years, and I don’t think that anywhere in Europe is relatively that safe and I just wanted to know what our speakers thought about where we’re going with all of this. Thank you.

Radhika Desai:

Great, thank you so much. John Lynn Segal, please go ahead.

Lynn:

Can Russia broker a fair Palestinian deal?

Radhika Desai:

Thank you, to the point, very good and finally Simon please go ahead.

Simon:

I just wanted to know whether this sort of insistence on purity, which is visible in other political projects, which often pose themselves as in some ways even progressive alternatives, can be seen across especially the West has fascistic elements to it.

Radhika Desai:

So, without further ado. I’d like to go to the speakers who are left. I know that Andrew has had to leave, and Professor Cheng of course isn’t here. So, I will go to Oleg, then Paweł, Kit, Lyudmilla, and Richard in that order. So, Oleg if you’re still here would you like to respond?

Oleg Barabanov:

Okay well let me let me react to the questions and to brilliant presentations of my colleagues, the speakers, because I don’t have specific answers to many questions and I in fact have two rhetoric questions without answers. The first rhetoric question, which was raised by some speakers, where is the connection between let’s say typical neoliberal imperialism and fascism? Let me reformulate it, what is worse and who is worse, Donald Trump or Kirst Starmer or Emanuel Macron? And in that sense, Radhika you know my views quite well, for a long time I have a great sympathy to the left. But one of my points is to win over neoliberal imperialism there will be necessary maybe unfortunate union between the non-systemic left and non-systemic right in that sense for me Macron and Starmer are much worse than Trump, because Trump is breaking the western neoliberal system, which I think is good for the left as well. Sure, he is not a person to praise, but still.

And my second rhetoric question is connected to Bulavka presentation and I totally agree with her, because sure the Soviet Union no doubts made great efforts to win over German Nazism in the Second World War. And sure, the Stalinist system was not a good one, strictly speaking, and was not that ideal of socialism that many of us have in our hearts. But from that saying and we within Russia we understand it maybe better than abroad, but saying that there is just one small logical step to the point of the Ukrainians of the Estonians and others that there is no difference between Stalin and Hitler and there is no difference between the Soviet Union and the Nazi Germany, because one totalitarian dictator fought another totalitarian and so how to overcome this – unwelcome for me – but small logical step. I just don’t know, so no answers but more questions, thank you.

Radhika Desai:

I think there are of course many of us who have lots more questions, so thank you again. I will now go to Paweł Wargan.

Paweł Wargan:

Thank you, I don’t know that I have clear answers to any of the questions. I mean I’ve been thinking throughout today, throughout all the interventions also about Oleg’s initial question or provocation, where do we situate fascism? Where is the fascist subject? And also, the question about purity, you know. I’m very wary of attempts to develop checklists of what fascism is and isn’t. And I agree in that sense with Andrew and Lotte, that we have to look for forms of fascism that correspond to the circumstances of the economic system, the state, the geography in which it emerges. And I think to say that something is or isn’t a fascist isn’t a dialectical position. And the way I’ve been kind of mulling over this over the course of this discussion today, I think Marxism as a as a science lends itself very well to methodologies from the sciences. And there’s, if I may do a detour slightly, there’s a concept, a notion in quantum physics of particles as being actually instantiations of fields in moments where they become disturbed, right? But in fact, they exist as fields that are indivisible in all directions in all places at all times. And I think we can think of fascism in a similar way as something that’s threaded through the entire fabric of capitalism and that is instantiated in moments of crisis in very different ways. And there’s a continuum of oppression that runs from the enclosure to the concentration camp and sometimes it appears in the forms of police batons. Sometimes it appears as a prison boat for refugees, which we see in the United Kingdom now and sometimes it appears in much more pernicious and much more violent forms. But the there is a continuum and a kind of a fabric of fascism that runs through the entire capitalist project and its instantiation appears in moments of crisis. And so we try to look in the past for specific things for aesthetic symptoms of what fascism was, for particular narratives, or particular language that’s used around it, but in fact it is always a response to the particular form of crisis that emerges in capitalism, and I think it’s more helpful to think about it in that way.

Radhika Desai:

Great, thanks so much Paweł. Next, I have Lotte.

Lotte Rørtoft-Madsen:

Yes, I think I want to continue a bit where Paweł stopped. I think that when dealing with the concept of fascism, it is important not to deal with persons, but with systems, with organizations, with institutions, with the question of state power. I know, that in the 1930s and in Germany there was a German concept called “Gleichschaltung.” It means that you from within adapt and reorganize the bourgeois republican system in a way that at the end you have created a new kind of system and taken the power. And in that sense, you have a fascist state apparatus in your hands, and I think that’s different from a fascist movement operating on the streets. It’s different from nurturing fascist sentiments or ideologies. All this should be analyzed differently, according to whether something is political, something is ideological, something is economical, something is connected with the state’s power and the political power, and I think it’s important not to link fascism to persons, but to the system and to the institutions.

John Warren asked where we are now, and I think this question was not concretely, in which city do we sit, but where are we in the fight against fascism. And I think we are in a crucial moment, because we’re trying to grasp where we are and to find the features of the fascism of today in order to see it, to analyze it and then to find out the ways of struggling against it, because that’s the real issue. The strategies we have to adopt, to develop of today can be inspired by the past but cannot repeat the past. Thank you.

Radhika Desai:

Okay, thank you very much. I have Lyudmilla next. Lyudmilla would you like to respond in any way?

Lyudmilla Bulavka-Buzgalina:

I want to thank you very much for this dialogue. I think this webinar have potential to development in future for development of dialogue of this problem. My dream is an organized anti-fascistic front but today is not necessary. Today it’s more important to organize alternatives to fascism, because saying fascism is bad, is bad, is bad is not an effective position. We must organized social creativity like us sphere of living education, culture and etc.

Radhika Desai:

Thank you so much, thank you for being here. And finally, Richard, we’re giving you the final word, so please go ahead.

Richard Sakwa:

Yeah, just responding to the question from Lynn about Palestine. I mean obviously one doesn’t know what may happen, but I will say contextualize it that the larger issue is the emergence of multipolarity, which is beginning to set up a different type of dynamic, where Middle Eastern or West Asian issues have been dominated by a particular complex of powers, not just the United States but its allies, United Kingdom and so on. And now there are new actors, where we’re going to see China emerging as a broker between some conflict in in West Asia and so on. So, that’s my first point.

My second one is that the question John asked, you know where are we going? Well, I’d say three things. Well, my second point is that in 1989 the Eastern European countries had a negative revolution. It was entirely negative, again I could try to develop that argument elsewhere, but simply to say the logical conclusion of that is where we are today, where the Eastern Europeans have reincorporated inside themselves a logic of historical revisionism. We’ve talked about the equivalence theory and all of that is almost inscribed in the DNA of what happened earlier and that is catastrophic. And the worst thing, of course, now is that we’ve seen the East Europeanization of the European Union as a whole in all sorts of ways, both in personnel but above all in ideology and militancy and militarism and so on.

My third point is that you know I’ve talked about a Political west, the post 1945 particular geopolitical, geoideological, geoeconomic formation, but I’d also say from touching base with some of the earlier discussions is that there’s also a civilizational west, this 500 years of the dominance of the civilizational west has been colonialist, imperialist, militaristic, genocidal from the very beginning. I mean just ask the Aztecs and the Inca; greedy and exploitative. Then of course slavery emerged out of that. But I don’t want to end on that note.

My final point is to say this is accompanied by a third level. There’s a political west, there’s a civilizational west, there’s let’s call it a cultural west this goes way back to Greek or Roman Judeo-Christian and of course the axial age which was not exclusive. It was closely connected, astonishingly we have more and more information, with the huge Indian civilization and of course the Sinic civilization in all sorts of ways. In other words, this gave rise to let us say what we are engaging in tonight, and that is an example of high modernity, of open dialogue, of discussion, of rationality, of truth seeking, all those things, which I think we have to hang on to and not allow them to be subverted by you know deathly pessimism; which of course is a symptom of fascism. Pessimism and you know even suicidal thoughts and so on. And this high modernity, we have to fight for this creative space. We see in education, universities, everybody is under attack, the mass media is totally shameless in its disinformationational aspects. And yet there is this other element, this third level, this is where we are. So, that future we have to fight and defend and extend it and that is the greatest response to all those awful things going on. Thank you.

Radhika Desai:

Thank you so much, Richard. And I think on that note we will a wonderful webinar. On that note we’ll have to bring this webinar to an end. Thank you all. Please, if you like this discussion, please share it with everyone. Please let people know about the International Manifesto Group and to all the speakers you have just given us so much to think about. So, thank you very much for that and we will see you all I’m sure before too long in some other webinar in some or other combination. So, thanks very much and goodbye. Thank you very much.

Footnotes