Hello, this is Rusty Reno at the First Things Editor's Desk podcast.

And I have with me Professor Stanley Payne from the University of Wisconsin to talk about his review of Paul Gottfried's book, Antifascism,

The Course of a Crusade. Welcome, Professor Payne to the podcast. Thank you very much.

Now, before we get going, I have to make my year-end plug to listeners to log on to First things.com and make a year-end donation to support

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Okay, now that we've got the fundraising plug out of the way, we can jump into this question of anti-fascism.

I suppose the place to start is, what is fascism?

This is a very complicated place to start because fascism is simply used as an all-purpose majority.

So that when people talk about fascism, it often has very little to do with historical fascism at all.

Anti-fascism began when there was originally an organized fascism,

that is in Italy about 1921, 1922, the emergence of the Italian fascist movement.

And it was first raised into an ideology by the Communist International, starting about 1923,

because it was the propagandists of the international who understood first that they could

really use fascism as a kind of symbol with which to denounce their political adversaries and employ the terms

a special kind of pejorative that would be used to smear a variety of people who were not fascists at all.

And this led during the course of the 1920s to the commenter's development of its rhetorical propaganda policy of hyphenate fascism,

including calling all its enemies fascists with a hyphen to indicate what kind of fascists they were,

whether they were conservatives, conservative fascists, liberals liberal fascists,

anti-communist socialists, in that case social fascists, and so on down the line.

So this was developed as a kind of general propaganda ploy in the 1920s, particularly by the Communist International.

And it was only used that way by people more than particularly by the Communist International.

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