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The past few years have seen the rise of political extremism at home and abroad. Violence is the hallmark of extremism, violence by mobs or by armies. We have become very familiar with violence. At home the trend erupted on Jan. 6, 2021, with the climactic assault on the U.S. Capitol and the anti-climactic violent riots after the George Floyd murder. But were lucky. Our democracy has mostly weathered the storm and the threat of civil war, which was considered a serious possibility by many, has receded.

We can only hope that the 2022 elections, unlike those of 2020, do not set off another firestorm of subversion and denial, no matter who comes out on top. And that the 2024 presidential election is held in a peaceful and fair way. Democratic Europe hopes for the same. But on the margins of Europe, the pressure has slowly mounted and gained strength. Finally, the forces of chaos became too powerful for civilization to resist and the Russian invasion of Ukraine exploded.

Those twin scourges of the 20th century, communism and fascism, which we had assumed were safely dead and buried, have been resuscitated. Once again, they have the power to motivate people and they have returned to haunt the twenty-first-century.

We can best see the union of communism and fascism in Russia. Communism found its secure home in Russia with the Bolshevik revolution. The birth of the communist Soviet Union in 1917-1920, which included many nationalities such as the Ukrainians, was bloody and violent.

Thousands died so that Vladimir Lenin, Josef Stalin, Leon Trotsky and other communist satraps could have their communist regime.

In 1941, the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union, whose rulers were almost all Russians. This was the battle of the century, the life and death struggle of communism and fascism. Communism, with ample help from capitalism, won the war. But not until the fascist Germans had killed 27 million Russians, Belarussians, Ukrainians, Jews, and others, by reliable count. Almost all the killing occurred in what historian Timothy Snyder calls the Bloodlands, in his book about the war between Adolph Hitler and Stalin. Ukraine is in the Bloodlands. The present war is the latest chapter in the bloody saga of that unhappy territory.

Strange, given this history, that we now find a convergence of communism and fascism in Russia. Vladimir Putin, the former KGB officer and incarnation in one personality of tsars such as Ivan the Terrible and Peter the Great and communist tyrants such as Lenin and Stalin, has led Russia out of her communist past, not into liberal democracy as many had hoped, but into a new version of fascism. However, his communist KGB mentality remains. Russia is again the repressive and highly efficient police state it was under communism. The Lubyanka prison in Moscow is again filled with enemies of the people. On top of that, Russia is also now a fascist dictatorship.

Fascism is reactionary, built on notions of religion, national identity and racial superiority. In spite of his KGB training, Putin attends church, and the Orthodox patriarch of Moscow has endorsed his war. The war is premised on the doctrine that a nation has to recover its lost brethren, as Hitler wanted to do with the Sudeten Germans in Czechoslovakia, and as Putin claims he wants to do with the Ukrainians.

Putin says the Ukrainians are really Russians, if only they would just admit it.

If they wont admit it, then he will beat them until they do. Gone from Putins rhetoric are communist bromides like the class struggle. Putin has thrown out the communist idea that nationalism is a distraction to divert the exploited masses from the class struggle. Putin has embraced fascist nationalism, aided and abetted by the oligarchs, the new nobility, much like Hitler was enabled by the Krupps and other wealthy industrialists in Germany.

All of this is a done deal, and like the snake that swallowed its own tail, the extremes of left and right, communism and fascism have joined, and are now one and the same beast.

Joe Barrera, Ph.D, is the former director of the Ethnic Studies Program at UCCS. He teaches U.S. Military History and Mexico/U.S. Border Studies. He is a combat veteran of the Vietnam War.

Joe Barrera, Ph.D, is the former director of the Ethnic Studies Program at UCCS. He teaches U.S. Military History and Mexico/U.S. Border Studies. He is a combat veteran of the Vietnam War.

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COLUMN: The Convergence of Communism and Fascism - Colorado Springs Gazette