Living Under Fascism

 

Living Under Fascism

September 25, 2025

Until recently, I had never lived under a fascist regime. I have, however, lived under s communist one. People tend to think that fascism (or Nazism) and Marxist communism are polar opposites, but they aren’t. They may be at opposite ends of some spectrum, but the spectrum isn’t a straight line. It’s more like a nearly complete circle. Fascism is at one end, communism is at the other; but because the spectrum is a circle, they end up being very close to each other. When I say fascism in this piece I will mean both fascism and communism unless the context dictates otherwise.

When fully developed, fascism produces totalitarian regimes. It produces, that is, a governmental system that claims complete control over all aspects of the nation’s life and even over the private lives of the nation’s citizens. Fascist regimes both prohibit criticism and any statement or action that is negative toward the government. Or toward the ruling political party, for fascist regimes have only one ruling political party. All other political parties are either prohibited or forced to operate under the control from the regime. In fascist systems, citizens have essentially no civil rights the regime must respect.

Perhaps most significantly, fascist regimes create existential fear in at least most of their citizens. The fear comes from the way the regime encourages or even requires citizens to report any other citizen they think has said or done something critical of the regime. People cannot trust anyone, not even their own family members, because anyone could be a government operative. Anyone could make up a story about them that would bring the wrath of regime down on them, report that story to the authorities, and wait for the authorities to take that person out of the picture either through imprisonment or execution. Communist, and perhaps some fascist, regimes may claim to be the freest system in the world, but both of them create the exact opposite of freedom. They produce frightened, subservient citizens who, publicly at least, mouth support for the regime and sing the praises of the regime’s leaders.

I spent the 1975-1976 academic year in the Soviet Union. My wife, our young son, and I lived in a dormitory wing of Moscow State University. I was there under a cultural exchange treaty between the United States and the Soviet Union to do research for a PhD dissertation on a topic from Russian history. The Communist Party of the Soviet Union (which the Russians always called the KPSS) ruled the country with an iron fist. Not as heavy a fist as it had been under Stalin, but the Party had changed none of the institutions Stalin had created in any meaningful way. The KPSS was the only legal political party.

Most significantly, it had not changed the KGB, the Committee on State Security. That secretive organization had two functions. One was to gather foreign intelligence. Many Soviet spies worked for the KGB. The KGB’s other function was to keep Soviet citizens subservient to the KPSS and the government it had created. It had spies everywhere in the country. It had enough of them to keep the Soviet people under strict control. Though we lived in a wing of the main Moscow State University building, a Russian man we got to know agreed to come to our place for dinner only when I assured him that Boris lived on the seventh floor and we lived on the fifth floor. Everyone knew that Boris was the resident KGB spy. I’m not sure how everyone knew that he was a KGB spy, but everyone knew that he was. My dormitory was hardly unique in having a resident KGB spy. KGB spies were everywhere, and no one could be sure that any person they were interacting with was not one of them.

The communist Soviet Union was, for the most part, a dull, gray, depressing place. Nearly everyone who worked with the public in any capacity was gruff, short-tempered, and even mean. Except perhaps in some restaurants, actual service was hard to come by. There were severe shortages of nearly every consumer product.[1] Most Americans who knew anything about Soviet reality, including not just me but the diplomats at the American embassy, thought that the Soviet Union was this immense, stable, inert structure that would last for a very long time. We turned out to be wrong about that “would last for a very long time” bit, but that was the general opinion of the place at the time.

The people of the Soviet Union were not free, and at least some of them knew they were not free. A couple of stories about that Soviet student we had invited to dinner will illustrate the point. He was a journalism student at Moscow State University. I’m not sure how he did it, but somehow he felt much freer to associate with Americans than most Soviet people did. He felt freer to express negative opinions about his country to foreigners than all but a few people in the country in the country would have. He probably had connections at a level of the KPSS high enough to afford him protection. He said two things to me, and had a reaction to one thing I did for him, that are quite informative about Soviet reality.

Like I said, he was a journalism student. He once said to me that it was so hard because they only let journalists write good things about the country when everything they saw was bad. And indeed, Soviet journalism was nothing like western journalism, or at least not like western journalism is supposed to be. Here are a couple of example from my personal experience.

I was in the Soviet Union for the first time in the summer of 1968 on a Russian language study program of Indiana University, of the America’s primary Russian studies centers. We were in Moscow in August of that year. One day, as we were on a bus going somewhere or other, one of our group shouted for all of us to hear: “Holy shit! They invaded Czechoslovakia!” And indeed they had, but that was not what our fellow traveler had read. That’s not what the Soviet press said. It said that the Soviet Union and other fraternal socialist countries (the Soviets called themselves socialists as well as communists) had responded to a plea from the people of Czechoslovakia, a Soviet satellite country ruled by a communist regime, to intervene to protect them from a counterrevolutionary plot being run against them by the American CIA. That’s what our fellow would have read. There was some truth in what he read, for the Red Army had indeed entered Czechoslovakia. But everything else about that event in the Soviet press was a propagandistic lie. Soviet journalists had to say that a very bad thing was actually a very good thing. That’s how Soviet journalism worked.

During my academic year in the USSR, we experienced one two-week period of extraordinarily cold weather. The Russian winter really is everything it’s reputed to be. It’s not hard to see how it defeated both Napoleon and Hitler. The dorm rooms in which we and many other Americans and other western students lived were heated by radiators heated by central heat. They worked well enough most of the time, but they could not adequately counter the external temperatures of -30 degrees or lower that we had during that two week period. My family and I were lucky. We had a corner unit, which meant that we had two radiators in one of our two little rooms while most units had only one in each little room. The temperature in our room with two radiators probably didn’t get below 50 degrees F or so. In the rooms with only one radiator, water left in a glass overnight would freeze. Heating systems were failing in this way all over Russia.

Which you could learn from the Soviet press, but only if you knew how to read the Soviet press. The Soviet press reported that workers in the United Kingdom were suffering that winter because the capitalists would not supply enough coal for them to keep warm. That, of course, was a lie, but you learned to read between the lines of the Soviet press. That story told many Russians that there was inadequate heat in Moscow and perhaps elsewhere in Russia. The press couldn’t say that directly, so it said it very indirectly. The lies of the Soviet press could point to truth if you knew how to read them, but they were still lies.

Then there’s the other significant thing my journalist student friend said to me. He said: You can come here, live with us, and learn about our country firsthand. I will never be able to do that in your country. And, indeed, he never would be able to do that as long as the KPSS ruled the country.[2] Travel abroad, and especially travel to western countries, was tightly restricted in the USSR. Soviet people did travel to the west on occasion, but only select people were allowed to do so. They were people the regime was confident would come back. They were people the regime was confident would give a good impression of the Soviet Union. They often had to have family members who stayed behind because that would make it more likely that the person would come back. There were Soviet students studying in the US under that same treaty that allowed me to do research in the Soviet Union, but the same restrictions applied to them as applied to anyone permitted to go to the west. I was free to travel almost anywhere in the world I wanted to see. My friend most definitely did not have that freedom.

Then there is the way he reacted to something I did for him. I had become a parishioner and friend of the pastor of the Anglo-American Church in Moscow. It wasn’t open to the Soviet public. It was attached to the American and British embassies. Shortly before I was to leave the USSR for home, this very good man gave me a book. It was in Russian. It was written by Nikolai Berdyaev, the most prominent Russian theologian of the twentieth century. I don’t remember which of Berdyaev’s books it was. My friend had told he was an atheist. He said the one thing he could not understand about Americans is how they could believe in God, as my wife and I had told him we did. Yet when I gave him this book by a Russian Orthodox theologian, he nearly broke down in tears. He said: “You will never know what you have done for me.”

I can’t be sure, but here’s what I think I had done for him. Totalitarian regimes like that of the Soviet Union control the study and teaching of history very tightly. All history writing had to conform to the ideology of the KPSS. In the context of Russian history, that meant that it had to extol the virtues of Vladimir Lenin and the Bolsheviks. It meant it had to portray capitalists and capitalism as enemies of the people. It had to contend that history was moving inevitably toward the establishment of true communism or at least not to contradict that nonsense in any way. It meant that history writing had to condemn the Russian Orthodox Church as reactionary and as an oppressor of the Russian people throughout its existence.

I think my friend must have heard of Berdyaev, Berdyaev having been one of the leading lights of what is called the Silver Age of Russian culture. That’s the ten years or so before the outbreak of World War I. He was a member of what is called “the Vekhi group.” Berdyaev and several other writers had published a collection of essays titled Vekhi, which means “mileposts.” Each of them had once been a Marxist and thus a revolutionary of one sort or another. They had all left Marxism behind and returned to the Russian Orthodox Church in which they almost certainly had been raised. Berdyaev is perhaps the most famous of them. My friend almost had certainly heard Berdyaev condemned as a class traitor who had sold out to the capitalists and become an enemy of the Russian people. Berdyaev was nothing of the sort, but never mind. That is certainly how Russian historians had to depict him if they depicted him at all.

Now, Berdyaev was both an existentialist philosopher and an Orthodox Christian theologian. My friend was an atheist. Why did he react so strongly to my giving him a book by Berdyaev? I think it was because, despite what he may have been taught about Berdyaev, he knew that Berdyaev was foundationally Russian. He was a prominent figure of Russian culture both while he was still in Russia and after he fled communist Russia and lived in Paris. The KPSS distorted Russian history and culture horrifically, but it could never stop Russians from being Russians. It could never destroy the Russians’ interest in and commitment to Russian culture. When I was in Russia in the mid-1970s, there was a slight revival of the Russian Orthodox Church underway. I don’t think that was because more Russians were becoming Christians. I think it was because the Russian Orthodox Church was the most quintessentially Russian institution in the country. It was also the only institution in the country of any great significance whose commitments and aims were different from those of the Communist Party.[3] That, I think, must be why my friend reacted the way he did to my giving him a book by Berdyaev. Berdyaev was a theologian, but he was nothing if not Russian. I had given my friend access to an aspect of Russian culture he never would get from anyone in his own country. The rulers of his country had molded Russian history to fit their ideology, thereby distorting that history beyond recognition. I have many more stories from my time in Russia, but enough is enough.

Now I ask: What about the United States? Does any of this talk about Soviet communism have anything to say to us in the United States? Tragically, it has a great deal to say to us here in the United States. We are not threatened with communism, but we are most definitely threatened with fascism. The President of the United States, Donald J. Trump, is an American fascist. He has turned the Republican Party, or at least most of it, into a fascist party. He has turned at least most of it into a cult of personality loyal only to him, and both fascist and communist parties are often cults of personality at some point in their development.[4] Trump and his supporters have taken significant steps in the direction of turning the United States into an authoritarian or even totalitarian fascist country,

In explaining those steps, I’ll start with history. The KPSS distorted Russian history beyond recognition. Trump and his supporters are trying to do the same thing to American history. Trump has ordered the Smithsonian Institution to remove all references to slavery from its exhibits. His supporters in Oklahoma, Florida, and elsewhere have the state dictating the content of public education and forcing it not to tell the whole truth about the history of those states and of this country, most especially not to tell the truth about slavery. They claim to be Christians, and, at least in Oklahoma, they are forcing every public classroom to display the Ten Commandments, the First Amendment to the US Constitution be damned. Distorting history is a thing fascists always do. Trump and his acolytes want history to speak only of actual or supposed good things in our country’s past. Never mind that that past is rotten with racism and other ideologies of hate and that we need to come to terms with that truth if we are ever to overcome ideologies of hate in our country.

Trump is trying to establish one party rule in this country. To Trump, the Democratic Party is not as much the political opposition to Trump as it is Trump’s enemy and therefore an enemy of the American people. It seems quite clear that Trump would ban all opposition to him if he thought he could. He can’t, at least not yet. In the future? Who knows.

Trump is leading a campaign against the rule of law. Fascist countries have laws. The Soviet Union had a constitution that said it guaranteed the people’s civil rights. It had a judicial system that worked reasonably well most of the time. But the laws were often essentially meaningless. People were not allowed to raise the constitution’s guarantee of civil liberties as a defense to a claim the government had brought against them. Especially in criminal cases, the system ceased to work altogether when the KGB expressed an interest in a case. The KGB always got the result it wanted. The upper echelons of the KPSS followed the law when they wanted to, but they certainly felt themselves free to disregard the law when they wanted to. That was especially true under Stalin, but it was true to some extent up to the end of the USSR.

Donald Trump does not believe that he is bound by the law. He has said as much quite explicitly. He’s perfectly happy with the courts when they rule the way he wants them to rule. He’s mad as hell at them when they rule in a way he doesn’t want them to rule. If he could, he surely would remove from office every judge who ever ruled against him. His agents, especially ICE, violate the law at will, and Trump supports them in doing so. The law means something to Trump only when it serves his purposes. When it hinders those purposes, he says to hell with it: I don’t need no stinking laws.

Trump is trying to abolish the separation of powers that the US Constitution creates as part of the federal government. His attacks on the courts that I just mentioned are part of that effort. In addition, because the American people have given him Republican majorities in both houses of Congress, he has turned Congress into his lapdog. Under the Republicans, Congress has simply abandoned its constitutional oversight function. It has become an institution that implements Trump’s policies every time rather than make its own decisions after due deliberation.

Moreover, Trump thinks he can legislate by executive decree. He has issued executive decrees that he has no constitutional power whatsoever to issue. On the day he was inaugurated for his second term he issued one that purported to abolish birthright citizenship, something the Fourteenth Amendment grants to every person born in this country and under this country’s jurisdiction. Trump thinks his executive orders have the force of law, which, as a legal matter, they do not. I don’t know that Trump would abolish Congress if he could, but he would, at the very least, turn it into something like the Supreme Soviet of the USSR, nominally a legislative body that in fact just rubber stamped whatever the KPSS wanted.

It seems quite clear that Donald Trump would revoke the First Amendment to the US Constitution, especially its guarantees of freedom of speech and of the press, if he could. He has called the public media of the country enemies of the people. He calls any reporter who asks a question he doesn’t like “stupid.” He has threatened to revoke the federal licenses of the major broadcast media because they say things he doesn’t like. He thinks the First Amendment does not protect criticism of the president, which it most obviously does. He was delighted when CBS took Steven Colbert off the air and ABC suspended Jimmy Kimmel because they had said things Trump didn’t like.[5] For Trump, we are all free to praise him. We are not free to criticize him. That, folks, is simply and undeniably fascism.

Trump’s fascism is plainly seen in the way has made a hero of Charlie Kirk. Kirk was a right-wing lunatic who had a substantial following on some public media. Frankly, I had never heard of him until he was murdered. I do not celebrate his murder. Murder is a crime and a sin no matter who it is who is murdered. I will never, however, see Kirk as a martyr and certainly not as a hero. His murderer is himself a right-wing extremist not any kind of leftist. Kirk was a bigot in just about every way it is possible for a person to be a bigot. He said he didn’t hate his enemies; but he was a racist, a misogynist, a homophobe, a xenophobe, and a man who thought the deaths of school children were worth it to preserve the Second Amendment. Yet to Trump he was a hero. Trump ordered all American flags flown at half mast to honor him. He has declared that he will award Kirk the Medal of Freedom posthumously, but as of this writing he hasn’t done it yet. Even in his saying that he will Trump had dishonored and abased the Medal of Freedom in a purely fascistic way.

This is hardly a complete list of all of Trump’s fascistic statements and actions. It is, however, undeniably clear that Trump is an American fascist. He will make our national government as fascistic as he can. He will take as much power for himself as he can. He will disregard the rights of American citizens as much as he can. He will disregard all law as much as he can. He will continue to incite violence against people who oppose him. He doesn’t have his own Brown Shirts the way Hitler did, not yet at least. He would surely love to have them if he could, and there are any number of armed “militia” ready to go to war for him against other Americans.

The examples of Communist Russia and Nazi Germany are red flags waving before us to warn us of the dangers of authoritarianism and totalitarianism, in short, of fascism. Fascists kill people at will. Both the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany killed millions of them the Germans because they thought  them to be subhumans standing in Germany’s way, the Soviets in an attempt to get people to accept policies they deplored and opposed.[6] Fascists give not one good God damn about the law when it gets in their way. Fascists trample the rights of the people at will. They stifle public discussion of most issues by allowing only speech that praises them. Most of all, fascists rule through fear. They terrify people into obeying them. They make people afraid not only of the government and its enforcement agencies but of each other.

Fascists make people’s lives miserable for the fascists own purposes. Sure, fascists sometimes do some good. It became a cliché to say that Mussolini made the trains run on time. Hitler built freeways and brought out the Volkswagen Beetle. The Soviet communists created a universal literacy that Russia had never had before. They were first into space. They produced world class scientists and other academicians (though not historians or literary scholars). We have no need to deny the good things that fascistic regimes have done on occasion.

We have a screaming need to point out the horrific things that most characterize fascistic regimes. We have a screaming need to speak up in defense of the precious things fascists hate. Things like freedom of speech. Freedom of the press. Freedom of assembly. Freedom of association. The freedom of religion. We need to speak out loud and clear against the violence that always characterizes fascistic regimes.

Perhaps most of all, we must do everything we can to prevent the creation of a fascist regime grounded in fear in our country. Our country has numerous flaws. It is still far too racist. It is still far too addicted to guns. It is still far too classist. It has other faults too. And yes, some of our people have lived in fear for centuries. Black Americans lived in fear as enslaved people or as the victims of Jim Crow until recent decades, and, I suppose, some of them still live in fear of white people. Today, mostly because of Trump, millions of people with brown skin whose native language is Spanish live in fear of ICE. But most of us Americans have never lived in fear of our government. Sure, we might fear a tax audit; but that fear is from the kind of fear the people of the Soviet Union lived under.

Donald Trump, the American fascist, is out to create a regime of fear in our country, fear in every part of the country’s population. He wants people to like and respect him (hard as it is to believe that anyone could like or respect him), but he wants people who don’t like or respect him to fear him. He tries to make people of the public media and others afraid to criticize him. He acts as much like the ruler of a banana republic as he can, which makes us fear him because we don’t know what the hell he will do next.

Folks, we cannot let Donald Trump and his Republican toadies turn our beloved country into a fascist nation. We’ve always had our flaws, some of them very serious. But, except perhaps with regard to race in the south, we have never been fascist. Back in the 1930s, 1940s, and early 1950s, many Americans thought we truly were threatened by communists; but we have never been communist, and there were never enough American communists to present a real threat to the country. We cannot let Donald Trump make journalists say we have to write only the good, but everything we see is bad, the way my Soviet friend did. We cannot let Donald Trump so to cow the media that they do nothing but lie to us and avoid truth at every step (which, of course, some of them, like Fox News, already do far too frequently). No fascism is a good thing. Donald Trump’s fascism is far from a good thing. It is, in fact, a very evil thing.

We must stop him. Because I am a Christian, I am committed to our doing it nonviolently; but we must do it. We must speak out. We must shout out. We must proclaim the truth every chance we get, indeed even when we think we have no chance to do it. We must vote, and we must not vote for Trumpist Republicans. If things get much worse, we may have to engage in nonviolent civil disobedience, or at least many of us may feel, correctly, that they have to do it and are willing to do it themselves.[7] Trump has not squelched all freedom of speech. If he had, I wouldn’t be sitting here writing these words. He will squelch all freedom of speech and every other civil right we have unless we stop him from doing it. Trump is a megalomaniac. He is a narcissist. He is emotionally unstable. He is a sexual predator and probably a pedophile. He is a threat to us in more ways than we can count. So let’s do it. Let’s stop him before it’s too late.

 

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[1] Except sugar. There was lots and lots of sugar available. I always figured, without really knowing, that was because the Soviet Union was supporting the Castro regime in Cuba.

[2] I lost touch with this fellow decades ago, but I have often hoped that once the KPSS was no longer in control of the country and before Putin made it an international pariah he got that chance after all.

[3] There were a few other religious institutions in the country of which that was also true; but in Russia at least, they didn’t amount to much. I don’t know enough about that status of Islam in central Asia and certain parts of Russia to comment on its status, but there certainly were Muslim people in the USSR. There were members of many other religions there too. It is also true that the KGB had infiltrated the Russian Orthodox Church and that some Orthodox priests were actually KGB agents. That appalling situation, however, did not change the foundational beliefs and aims of the Russian Orthodox Church, which definitely were not those of the KPSS.

[4] The Fascist Party of Italy (which is where the word “fascist” comes from) was a cult of personality around Mussolini. Nazi Germany was one around Hitler. The Soviet Union wasn’t so much a cult of personality when I was there, but it had most definitely been one under Stalin.

[5] As I write, on September 25, 2025, Colbert’s termination has not been rescinded. Kimmel’s has though some conservative media companies refuse to air his show.

[6] The Holocaust the Nazis perpetrated is relatively well known in our country. What the Ukrainians call the Holodomor isn’t. The Holodomor is a period of a couple of years in the mid-1930s when the KPSS, under Stalin, intentionally starved around four million Ukrainians to death in an effort to force peasants to give up their land to the collective farms Stalin was out to create.

[7] I put that caveat about being willing and able to engage in civil disobedience in here because I’m 79 years old and not always in the best of health. I don’t think I’m much a candidate for doing it myself.