Fascist (insult)

The word fascist has been used as a pejorative or insult against a wide range of people, political movements, governments, and institutions since the emergence of fascism in Europe in the 1920s. Political commentators on both the left and the right accused their opponents of being fascists, starting in the years before World War II.

In 1928, the Communist International labeled their social democratic opponents as social fascists, while the social democrats themselves as well as some parties on the political right accused the Communists of having become fascist under Joseph Stalin's leadership. In light of the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, The New York Times declared on 18 September 1939 that, "Hitlerism is brown communism, Stalinism is red fascism." Later, in 1944, the socialist and anti-fascist writer George Orwell commented that fascism had been rendered almost meaningless by its common use as an insult against various people, and argued that in England the word fascist had become a synonym for bully.

During the Cold War, the Soviet Union was categorized by its former World War II allies as totalitarian alongside fascist Nazi Germany to convert pre-World War II anti-fascism into post-war anti-communism, and debates around the comparison of Nazism and Stalinism intensified. Both sides in the Cold War also used the insults fascist and fascism against the other. In the Soviet Union, they were used to describe anti-Soviet activism, and East Germany officially referred to the Berlin Wall as the "Anti-Fascist Protection Wall". Across the Eastern Bloc, the term anti-fascist became synonymous with the Communist state–party line and denoted the struggle against dissenters and the broader Western world. In the United States, early supporters of an aggressive foreign policy and domestic anti-communist measures in the 1940s and 1950s labeled the Soviet Union as fascist, and stated that it posed the same threat as the Axis powers had posed during World War II. Accusations that the enemy was fascist were used to justify opposition to negotiations and compromise, with the argument that the enemy would always act in a manner similar to Adolf Hitler or Nazi Germany in the 1930s. In the 21st century, Vladimir Putin’s government justified the Russo-Ukrainian War by claiming that Ukraine is Nazi.

The Communist International and the Soviet bloc

The Bolshevik movement and later the Soviet Union made frequent use of the fascist insult coming from its conflict with the early German and Italian fascist movements.