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.Adelheid von Saldern, The Challenge of Modernity: German Social and Cultural Studies, 1890-1960 (2002), University of Michigan Press, p. 78, . 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.""Editorial: The Russian Betrayal". The New York Times. 18 September 1939. 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.Adler, Les K.; Paterson, Thomas G. (April 1970). "Red Fascism: The Merger of Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia in the American Image of Totalitarianism, 1930s–1950s". The American Historical Review. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 75 (4): 1046–1064. . . 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. Meanwhile, accusations that the leaders of the Soviet Union during the Stalin era acted as red fascists were commonly stated by both left-wing and right-wing critics.
The fascist label was widely used in press and political language to describe the ideological opponents of the Bolsheviks, such as the White movement. Later, from 1928 to the mid-1930s, during the Third Period, it was even applied to social democracy, which was called social fascism and even regarded by communist parties as the most dangerous form of fascism for a time. In Germany, the Communist Party of Germany, which had been largely controlled by the Soviet leadership since 1928, used the insult fascism to describe both the Social Democratic Party (SPD) and the Nazi Party (NSDAP). This position was abandoned at the Seventh Congress of the Comintern in 1935, with a turn to a Popular Front policy of allying with "bourgeois" parties against fascism. Georgi Dimitrov, the General Secretary of the Comintern, made a speech criticising the earlier ultra-left position: there has been a tendency among us to contemplate fascism in general, without taking into account the specific features of the fascist movement in the various countries, erroneously classifying all reactionary measures of the bourgeoisie as fascism and going so far as calling the entire non-Communist camp fascist. The struggle against fascism was not strengthened but rather weakened in consequence. Even now we still have survivals of a stereotyped approach to the question of fascism. When some comrades assert that Roosevelt's 'New Deal' represents an even clearer and more pronounced form of the development of the bourgeoisie toward fascism than the 'National Government' in Great Britain, for example, is this not a manifestation of such a stereotyped approach to the question? One must be very partial to hackneyed schemes not to see that the most partial to reactionary circles of American finance capital, which are attacking Roosevelt, are above all the very force which is stimulating and organizing the fascist movement in the United States, Not to see the beginnings of real fascism in the United States behind the hypocritical outpourings of these circles 'in defence of the democratic rights of the American citizen' is tantamount to misleading the working class in the struggle against its worst enemy.
In Soviet usage, the German Nazis were described as fascists until 1939, when the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact was signed, after which Nazi–Soviet relations started to be presented positively in Soviet propaganda. After the German invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, fascist was used in the USSR to describe virtually any anti-Soviet activity or opinion. Later, the international investigation on Katyn massacre was described as "fascist libel"Robert Stiller, "Semantyka zbrodni" and the Warsaw Uprising as "illegal and organised by fascists". In Poland during the Polish People's Republic, communist propaganda referred to the Home Army () as a fascist organization.Maciej Gelberg, "Wierni do końca" [w:] "Kombatant", nr 3 (291), Urząd do spraw Kombatantów i Osób Represjonowanych, Warszawa 2015, s.10 Polish Communist Security Service () described Trotskyism, Titoism, and imperialism as "variants of fascism".
This use continued into the Cold War era and up to the dissolution of the Soviet Union. The official Soviet version of the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 was described as "Fascist, Hitlerite, reactionary and counter-revolutionary hooligans financed by the imperialist West [which] took advantage of the unrest to stage a counter-revolution". Some rank-and-file Soviet soldiers reportedly believed they were being sent to East Berlin to fight German fascists. The Soviet-backed German Democratic Republic's official name for the Berlin Wall was the Anti-Fascist Protection Rampart ().
After the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai denounced the Soviet Union for "fascist politics, great power chauvinism, national egoism and social imperialism", comparing the invasion to the Vietnam War and the German occupation of Czechoslovakia. During the Barricades in January 1991, which followed the May 1990 "On the Restoration of Independence of the Republic of Latvia" independence declaration of the Republic of Latvia from the Soviet Union, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union declared that "fascism was reborn in Latvia".
In 2006, the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) found contrary to the Article 10 (freedom of expression) of the ECHR fining a journalist for calling a right-wing journalist "local neo-fascist", regarding the statement as a value-judgment acceptable in the circumstances.
Postwar Europe
In 1944, the English writer, democratic socialist and anti-fascist George Orwell wrote about the term's overuse as an insult, arguing:
In 1946, in his essay "Politics and the English Language", he wrote that Fascism' has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies something not desirable."
The American historian Stanley G. Payne has argued in the right-wing magazine First Things that after World War II fascism assumed a quasi-religious position within Western culture as a form of absolute moral evil. Payne further argued that it gave the term's use as an insult a particularly strong form of social power that any other equivalent term lacks, which encouraged its overuse as the term offered an extremely easy way to stigmatize and assert power over an opponent.
Former Yugoslavia During the 1990s, in the midst of the Yugoslav wars, Serbian media often disseminated inflammatory statements in order to stigmatize and dehumanize adversaries, with Croatians being denigrated as "Ustasha" (Croatian fascists). In modern Serbia, Dragan J. Vučićević, editor-in-chief of the tabloid and propaganda flagship Informer, holds the belief that the "vast majority of Croatian nation are Ustaše" and thus ''fascists'' and this notion is sometimes drawn in his tabloid's writing. After the EU banned Serbia from importing Russian oil through the Croatian Adriatic Pipeline in October 2022, the Serbian news station B92 wrote that the sanctions came after: "insisting of ustasha regime from Zagreb and its ustasha prime minister Andrej Plenković". Serbian politician Aleksandar Vulin has stated that modern-day Croatia is a "follower of Ante Pavelić's fascist ideology" and he has described the EU as "the club of countries which had their divisions under Stalingrad". In June 2022, Aleksandar Vučić was prevented from entering Croatia to visit the Jasenovac Memorial Site by Croatian authorities due to him not announcing his visit through official diplomatic channels which is a common practice. As a response, Serbian ministers labeled Andrej Plenković's government as "ustasha government" with some tabloids calling the Croatian nation fascist. German historian Alexander Korb compared these labels with Putin's labels of Ukraine being fascist as a pretext for his invasion of Ukraine.
In modern-day Bosnia and Herzegovina, the insult has been used by political opponents of Bosnian Serb leader Milorad Dodik, while Dodik himself has used it as a slur against the High Representative, Christian Schmidt.
It has also been used in the political discourse of Montenegro.
During the 2024–present Serbian anti-corruption protests, Vučić's pro-government media and members of Serbian Progressive Party labeled the protesting students and opposition figures as ustashe.
United States In the United States, fascist is used by both the left-wing and right-wing, and its use in American political discourse is contentious. Several U.S. presidencies have been described as fascistic. In 2004, Samantha Power, a lecturer at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, reflected Orwell's words from 60 years prior when she stated: "Fascism – unlike communism, socialism, capitalism, or conservatism – is a smear word more often used to brand one's foes than it is a descriptor used to shed light on them."Power, Samantha (May 2, 2014). "The Original Axis of Evil". The New York Times. Retrieved August 7, 2021.
Use by the left American leftists have often denounced parts of the American right as fascist. In her 1970 book Beyond Mere Obedience, radical activist and theologian Dorothee Sölle coined the term Christofascist to describe fundamentalist Christians.
In the 1980s, the term was used by leftist critics to describe the presidency of Ronald Reagan. The term was later used in the 2000s to describe the presidency of George W. Bush by its critics, and in the late 2010s and 2020s to describe the candidacy and presidencies of Donald Trump.