The Communist in the Fascist Imaginary: From Defeated Enemy to Global Threat

This paper focuses on the Fascist conception of its primary enemy --  the communist. The defeated communist figured centrally in the cultural world of the Fascist period, appearing in films, artwork, postcards, pamphlets and speeches. Anti-communism played a critical tactical and philosophical role in Fascist politics after the March on Rome. During Fascism's first decade in power, communism and communists symbolized in Fascist politics the near violent dissolution of the nation and the state that the Fascists had prevented. Through the middle 1930s, Fascist anti-communism stressed the alien, anti-national character of the enemy, its defeat, and its distance from the unified national community forged through Fascism. This paper addresses the shifts in the representation of communists from internal threats to the integrity of the nation and to Italianess to the specter of an external inhuman enemy bent on total and absolute destruction. With growing ferocity from 1936 forward, Fascist propaganda depicted communists as the racially inferior and the degenerate counterpoint to Fascists and Catholics. Pro-Nazi factions within the Fascist hierarchy developed a racial/biological interpretation of the nexus between Jews and communists. During the Second World War, anti-communism was revitalized as Fascism’s raison d’etre and as the foundation of the coming Nazi-Fascist "New  Order." Taking up Alexander De Grand's conception of the composite character of Italian Fascism and its dependence on hybrid "fascisms," I look at the varied factions which embraced and articulated Fascist anti-communism, including apostates from the left who turned to anti-communism, Catholic anti-communists, and anti-semitic/ pro-Nazi anti-communists.