Fascism by Madeleine Albright

JOSEPH STALIN CONDEMNED WITH RELISH THE REACTIONARY policies of Italian and German Fascists, but to a Communist, "Fascist" was the most versatile of insults. Rather than reserve the epithet for the real thing, Soviets used the F-word to discredit capitalists, nationalists, democrats, the religious, and any faction-whether Trotskyite, Socialist, or liberal-that did battle with the USSR for the hearts and minds of the left. In Stalin's universe, you were either with him or no better than Hitler; there wasn't any middle ground. One might think, therefore, that the two-Fascism and Communism-were opposites, but the contrast is more complicated.

In 1932, Mussolini described Fascism as a closed universe in which "the State is all-embracing," and outside which "no human or spiritual values can exist. " In so doing, he acknowledged its overlap with Communism in its disdain for democracy and all its trappings. Publicly, Il Duce denounced Bolsheviks but in private he confessed his admiration for the effectiveness of Lenin's brutal tactics. Both Fascism and Communism had utopian aspirations and both took hold amid the intellectual and social ferment of the late nineteenth century. Each purported to deliver a level of emotional sustenance that liberal political systems lacked.