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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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. 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.
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.
