Fascism today
One of the objections that Kitchen makes to the German thinker Ernst Nolte’s theory
of fascism is the view that fascism belongs only to the past. It does not exist today.
This is not only a complacent view of fascism, it confuses a movement with its
historical manifestations (Kitchen, 1976: 40–1). It is true that fascism arose in the
inter-war period, and that one of the problems of identifying post-war fascism is
that the revulsion of most of the world against Nazism in particular has meant that
contemporary fascism generally avoids too close an identity with the models of the
past. Fascists in Europe have had the problem in the post-war period of getting to
grips with the defeat of Mussolini and Hitler in the Second World War. There have
been a variety of responses.The unrepentant apologists
Some have taken the view that Hitler and Mussolini were correct in their policies
although they were defeated by the Allied forces. Jordan, who founded the White
Defence League in 1958 and the National Socialist Movement in 1962 in the UK,
took the view that fascism (even in its extreme Hitlerian form) is as relevant as
ever, and the West European Federation set up in 1963 espoused explicitly Nazi
doctrine. The New European Order established in Switzerland supported similar
views (Griffin, 1995: 326–8).Chapter 13 Fascism 299Stalin was admired by Hitler, and the latter told Speer that if Germany won the Second World War,
Stalin would remain in charge of Russia (Speer, 1970: 306). The famine in the early 1930s that
followed collectivisation in Russia killed between six and seven million people. The purges that
began in the mid-1930s were directed against dissidents within the party and in society at large,
and took millions of lives. About 35,000 military officers were shot or imprisoned. Robert Conquest
has estimated that by 1938 there were seven million victims in the labour camps, where the
survival rate could drop to some 2 or 3 per cent. The purges have been summarised as follows:
Arrests, 1937–8 – about 7 million
Executions – about 1 million
Died in camps – about 2 million
In prison, late 1938 – about 1 million
In camps, late 1938 – about 8 million.
By the time Stalin died in 1953, the camps’ population had increased to some 12 million.
Source: http://www.gendercide.orgStalin’s purges