For the last two decades my life has been a daily struggle to raise awareness about the importance to defend justice, democracy, human rights, political inclusion, truth and freedom of speech. We all must fight evil, any kind of authoritarism, injustice, any kind of censorship, bullying, violations of human rights, humiliation, any kind of extreme speech, hipocrisy, lies and dehumanization. We must use our voice, our connection to internet to broaden our activism for what really matters. Few times in the history a human rights defender was so harmed, humiliated and bullied, but now all the world is demanding justice. Join us in this worlwide movement for justice, democracy, human rights and my political rights. This worldwide movement has became so huge, intense and prevalent in the last five years that nobody can deny its existence. Since 2020, I have a YouTube channel, here is the link. https://www.youtube.com/@lucianofietto4773/videos. Since the creation of this channel its visualization counter doesn't work, the same has been happening with the counter of this blog since its creation in 2010. This post is a summary of the article with the title above published at https://www.wilsoncenter.org/publication/241-understanding-radical-evil-communism-fascism-and-the-lessons-the-20th-century
The comparison between Fascism and Communism is justified on both moral and scholarly grounds. French historian Francois Furet, inhis correspondence with German historian Ernst Nolte, insisted that there is something absolutely evil, both at: the level of original intention and the implementation of the utopian goals in Nazi practice. But can one compare the two ideologies by examining their essentially different visions of human nature, progress and politics without losing axiological distinctions? Or was the centrality of the concentration camps the lone common denominator between Commnism and Fascism? Fascism (in its radicalized Nazi form) was a simple reincarnation of counter-revolutionary thinking and action. Nazism was something brand new, an attempt to renovate the world by getting rid of the bourgeoisie, parliaments, parties and all the other "decadent, Judeo-plutocratic" elements. Clarifying these issues is vital for understanding the political, moral and cultural stakes of the post-cold war. The war between liberalsm and its revolutionary opponents is not over, and new varieties of extreme politics remain. In the novel "La Condition Humaine", published in the early 1930s, Andre Malraux captured the dream of communism. In China during the failed communist insurrection of 1926, a communist militant is asked what he finds so appealing in the cause he fights for. The answer is:"Because communism defends human dignity." "And what is dignity?" Asks the tormentor. "The opposite of humiliation," replies. The party as the incarnation of historical defender of human digity, the revolutionary avant-garde endowed to lead the otherwise lethargic masses into the communist paradise, was the hallmark of the communist intervention in the political praxis of the 20th century. The myth of the party more than the myth of the leader explains the longevity and endurance of the Leninist project. By contrast, the Fascists, while invoking the commands of historical providence, invested the center of power not so much in the institutions as in the "genius" of the leader. "The Black Book of Communism," which documents communist atrocities, was very well received upon publication in France in 1997. This book succeeds in demonstrating is that communism was from the outset of inimical to the values of individual rights and human freedom. In spite of communism's overblown rhetoric on emancipation from oppression, the leap into freedom turned out to be an experiment in social engineering. The idea of an independent judiciary was rejected as "rotten liberalism," the party defined what was legal and what was not. Just as in Hitler's Germany where the heinous 1936 Nuremberg Laws were a legal fiction dictated by racial obsessions, from the outset, communism subordinated justice to party interests. For Lenin, dictatorship was rule by force and unrestricted by any law. The presumption of innocence was replaced by a universalized presumption of guilt. Utopian ideals were used to legitimaze abuses against political adversaries. Paranoia regarding infiltration, subversion and treason were enduring features of all communist political cultures, from Russia to China. Communist parties in France and Italy, officially playing the democratic parliamentary game, were no less tolerant of deviation from the orthodox line than similar extreme right institutions. When comparing the number of victims of the communist regimes (between 85 and 100 million) with the number of people who perished under or because of Nazism (25 million), however, communism has existed since its inception in 1917 until the present time in some countries (North Korea, China, Cuba). Nazism lasted between 1933 and 1945, what the price in terms of victims would had been, if Hitler had won the war, is not known. The chasm between theory and practice, or at least between the moral-humanist Marxian creed, and Stalinist, or Maoist or Khmer Rouge experiment was more than an intellectual fantasy. Commuism and Nazism were equally scornful of morality and legality in their drive to eliminate political "enemies." The problem with Stalinism was the sanctification of the ultimate ends. This fixation with the future and the readiness to use the most atrocious means to attain it is a feature of all ideological utopias, but in the communism and nazism experience it reached grotesquely tragic limits. No less important, the appeals of communism were linked to the power of its ideology. The most important point is that both regimes were genocidal. Analytical distinctions between them are important, but the commonality in terms of complete contempt for the state of law, human rights and the universality of humankind regardless of spurious race and class distinction is beyond doubt. Communism and Nazism contained all the political and ideological ingredients of the totalitarian order: party monopoly on power, ideological uniformity and regimentation, censorship, demonization of the "people's enemy," besieged fortress mentality, secret police terror, concentration camps and the obsession with the shaping of the "new man." Often, comparing the two disgrace of the 20th centurym leads to misunderstandings and injured feelings among victims of one or another of these monstrosities. Thw key point, however, is the legitimacy of the comparison. The challenge is to avoid "comparative trivialization" or any form of competitive martyrology and to admit that, beyond similarities, the extreme systems had unique features, including razionalization of power, definition of the enemy and designated goals. They represented efforts to establish total control over society through systematic aggression against any form of autonomous association and initiatives, as well as the persecution and eventual extermination of ideologically defined adversaries. The ideology behind the tragedy of Communism and Fascism is summarized in this vision of a superior political elite whose utopian goals sanctify the most barbaric methods, the denial of the right to life to those defined as adversaries and the deliberate dehumanization of the victims.
