Konstantin Kisin prefaces his monologue by insisting that he has no intention of defending fascism. For serious antifascists such as ourselves, this is a hollow promise; we know just from looking at history that the liberal élites were willing to put aside their quibbles with fascism when capitalism’s livelihood was at stake, and, furthermore, that many ‘antifascist’ anticommunists honor Axis collaborators anyway. The tradition persists to this day, with many antisocialists overlooking if not outright honoring neofascists such as Georgia Melon, Viktor Orbán, and Azov.

But perhaps a reason more obvious than either is their poor understanding of fascism. Maybe we could forgive these anticommunists for being clueless of the obscurer events such as the Riot at Christie Pits and maybe the annexation of the Saar Basin, but what about basic facts, such as the reinvasion of Ethiopia? What about so much as a slim familiarity with Eritrea’s status under Fascism? What about the Wannsee Conference? What about the Pact of Steel? What about the Anticomintern Pact, its signators, its dates, &c.?

Anyway, Kisin then mentions a Bulgarian book titled Fascism, by Zheliu Zhelev, which the authorities prohibited allegedly because any analysis of fascism would make the similarities between it and socialism in one country impossible to ignore. In reality, Zheliu Zhelev was already somebody under suspicion after his expulsion from the party, and furthermore:

The book never makes an explicit comparison with socialist régimes, but it doesn’t have to—the analogy was consciously invited and easily available to those readers who wanted to find it. Before 1989, the author did not admit that the project invited the analogy or contained any political subtext, but in the introduction to the second edition of the book in 1990, he spelled out the political gesture he had made:

Before perestroika, readers were attracted to the book because of the full coincidence between the two totalitarian régimes—the fascist one and ours, the communist one. Even though explicit analogies are nowhere to be found, on the basis of the documentary material and the organization [of the text], the reader could discover for himself the horrible truth that the differences between the fascist and communist political systems are not only insignificant but, insofar as they exist, are not in favor of communism.⁴⁹

(Source.)

Zhelev’s book, in spite of its research, essentially regurgitates the same tired liberal oversimplification of fascism that reduces it to a cartoon: the fantasy where the state micromanages (almost) everything and any deviation from the thousands of rules is (nearly) impossible. We’ve all heard it before, and it’s a caricature that’s just as mindless as the gullible schmucks who take it seriously.

Comparisons to socialism in one country do not naturally arise from studying fascism. On the contrary, many of my students can’t help but be reminded of (neo)liberal régimes when they read some of my anecdotes, and Michael Parenti explicitly noted some similarities between fascism and (U.S.) neoliberalism in his lecture on the former. Oftentimes the similarities are so obvious that it is rarely necessary to explicitly note them, and other times it is unnecessary because they aren’t coincidental.

The author mentions the supposed economic similarities between communism and fascism and inevitably mentions the invasion of Poland, blaming it for WWII (which I’ve disputed before). Tellingly, he makes no mention of the Republic of Slovakia’s participation in the invasion (presumably he’d claim that it was ‘unimportant’), but falsely claims that the Soviet Union ‘invaded’ Poland at ‘exactly the same time’. The funny thing is that this would have more accurately applied to the Reich–Slovakian joint invasion than the Soviet intervention in Western Ukraine two and a half weeks later.

He quotes the perpetually overrated George Orwell and his inaccurate claim that Western civilisation was ‘founded’ on freedom of thought and freedom of speech. He briefly lies that communism killed more people than any other ideology, that Guevara was a mass murdering heterosexist white supremacist—the same shit that we’ve all heard over and over again, before claiming that Bulgaria still hasn’t ‘recovered’ from communism and that ‘while fascism is nationalistic, totalitarian, and collectivistic, it does not aspire to dominate the lives of ordinary citizens to anything like the same extent.’ Just why or how Moscow expected to police dozens of millions of people with scarcely 0.2% of the Soviet population is never explained.

Kisin then claims that fascism did not seek to reach its aims by stealing and redistributing private property, ‘stealing your business or installing a new tyrannical hierarchy under the pretense of eradicating it’. I am almost astonished that he would make this mistake; every Shoah scholar will tell you what ‘Aryanization’ was and how it frequently involved redistributing ‘Jewish’ businesses and other properties to gentile businessmen. But I suppose since Kisin’s audience is supposed to consist of white, cishet, capitalist gentiles, what he said here technically still applies.

He refers to the grossly overrated Chernobyl miniseries almost as if it were a documentary, and claims that ‘the drive to better your own life, to see your children prosper and thrive, to create and build things worthy of notice and admiration, all of these were beaten, starved and tortured out of the people who had the misfortune to live under communist régimes.’

Yes, you read that correctly: the space race never happened, the Bezostaia crop never existed, the Ye‐6/3 never existed, nobody ever went to the People’s Republic of Mozambique to help the revolutionaries, the Rep. of Cuba’s organic farming never existed—in short, nobody produced a single innovation under socialism in one country (or if they did, it was completely unimportant). Truly, the capitalist man’s burden is to lift us socialist cannibals out of our primitive state and teach us civilization!

So ends his video. I know that I did not minutely comment on every single factoid in his monologue, but I think that you get the picture: it’s the same shit that anticommunists have already been spewing at us over and over again for decades (including the presumably ‘new’ argument that communism ‘broke the will of its people’). What is more interesting about the monologue is exactly what it doesn’t say: the opinions of prominent Jewish antifascists? Omitted. The catastrophic implications of Lebensraum? Nowhere to be found. Thoughts on the statues dedicated to Fascists and Axis collaborators? Bupkes. Do you think that these anticommunists would seriously entertain the suggestion that Fascism was (far) worse than communism…? I don’t believe that I need to answer that question. Along with their general cluelessness about the subject, this shows their ‘antifascism’ for what it truly is.