Antifascism

The history and the present of an international movement. 

With Vjekoslav Perica.

Listen: “Antifascism” (Episode #120)

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Extended, ad-free version of “Antifascism” (Episode #120).

Transcript: “Antifascism” (Episode #120)

PETER KORCHNAK: This episode of Remembering Yugoslavia is brought to you by Yugoblok, a member-supported global community and resource hub for all who remember Yugoslavia. Through membership contributions, Yugoblok members make this podcast (and a whole lot more) accessible and freely available to all. Members can also listen to the extended episode, as well as all past extended and bonus episodes.

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PETER KORCHNAK: This is Remembering Yugoslavia, a Yugoblok show exploring the memory of a country that no longer exists. I’m your commissar, Peter Korchnak.

The word fascism gets thrown around a lot these days. This F-word has become an easy term of insult almost to the point of losing its meaning altogether. In the Unites States you’ll hear it most often from the left with regard to the Trump policies leading the country down the path to quote unquote fascism or when leftists charge their right-wing opponents, from Trump on down, with being quote unquote fascist. The Putin regime too has been described as a version of fascism. Fascism has been said to be rearing its head in Germany or France as well as in some countries where the far-leaning right is in power, including Italy and Hungary. In the former Yugoslav space, the local version of fascist discourse is becoming increasingly normalized in Croatia, which the historian Hrvoje Klasić recently described as, not a fascist country but an anti-antifascist country. 

Antifascism played a big historic and ideological role in all the socialist countries before 1991, and perhaps the biggest in Yugoslavia. Antifascism was one of the pillars of the communist-party-led regime, as the communists had won World War II against domestic and foreign fascists practically on their own. Antifascism remains a central value of the post-Yugoslav left; indeed particularly in Croatia, antifascism seems the strongest.

Last year, Plejada Zagreb published a book whose Croatian title translates to, Antifascism: History, Myth, and Present of a World Movement, 1924-2024. Its author, Vjekoslav Perica, is a Croatian historian, who focuses on the role of religion in nationalism; indeed he’s best known for the book Balkan Idols: Religion and Nationalism in Yugoslav States, published in 2004. He was then a longtime history professor at the University of Rijeka. I recently sat down with Perica—he in New Jersey, I in Ljubljana—to talk about antifascism.

We started with the definition of fascism. 

VJEKOSLAV PERICA: Well, I am trying to avoid it. I think that the more important is the question When rather than What. 

PETER KORCHNAK: The definition of antifascism is pretty simple as it’s quite singularly, and perhaps obviously, thanks to the Greek prefix, an opposition: antifascism opposes fascism. 

Defining fascism is a different story. There are as many definitions of fascism as there are scholars of it, it seems. It is, however, possible to distill a few commonalities: fascism is a far-right, ultranationalist, and racist ideology organized in an autocratic political system headed by a single dictatorial leader; fascism puts a pure national collective above the individual, and aims to subdue its citizens into obedience and mobilize them to its ends; fascism pursues its goals through violence, military, and often war; and fascism organizes the economy from the top-down, with strong state intervention and around large corporations, and around the principles of protectionism and self-sufficiency. 

The word itself comes from the Latin fascis, or bundle, signifying a collection of rods tied around an axe that was a symbol of imperial power; the Italian fascists took the fascio as their symbol, or logo if you will, to indicate a grouping of organizations united by common goals.

VJEKOSLAV PERICA: Fascism and anti fascism, we can define them, and we can say what they were in the 20th century. And then what they are now in the 21st century, all we can say is that they are new 21st century phenomena. They have some features from the old 20th century phenomena under similar name. But we are basically dealing with new things. The most important thing is that we defer not exactly what we are talking about, but when. What kind of fascism, antifascism we mean, so the 20th century historic or classical fascism.

PETER KORCHNAK: Perica classifies historical fascism into two phases. The first phase was preceded by the Bolshevik or October Revolution in Russia in 1917 that triggered revolutionary movements in Europe. These left-wing revolutions, or attempts at revolutions, engendered a reaction that became fascism, which in turn sparked early antifascism between 1919 and 1921.

VJEKOSLAV PERICA: The key process was the interaction between revolution and counterrevolution. So basically Bolshevism and the Communist Revolution was advancing, and the right-wing forces, the fascists and the Nazis and others, they were trying to halt it. 

So the first clashes between groups, they call themselves fascist, later Nazis, and groups that call themselves antifascists. 

And then there are first organizations, which somehow they all dated in 1921. That’s the year in which Mussolini founded the Italian Fascist Party, Hitler founded the National Socialist Arbeits [sic] Party, and Antonio Gramsci broke with the socialists and founded the Communist Party of Italy, and insisted that the Communist Party of Italy, in order to resist fascism, needs to be more strict, tougher, Leninist, and later, by extension, Stalinist, and it means the party which is like some kind of a religious sect which demands loyalty, sacrifice, and all that. Debate is free but when the authority, supreme authority, decides something, then all the members need to carry on and execute whatever is the party line. 

PETER KORCHNAK: The means by which the Italian right, that is Mussolini’s party, combatted the red menace was its own paramilitary wing, known as the Blackshirts. (Paramilitary organizations attached to political parties were another hallmark of fascism.) 

In response, a leftists coalition of anarchists, socialists, communists, and other working class people formed militias called Arditi del Popolo, or arditi of the people, with arditi, meaning the daring ones, having been the Italian army’s shock troops in WWI. The banner of Arditi del Popolo featured a big axe chopping a fascio in half. 

The two groupings clashed often, in factories or at farms, which the revolutionary leftists were trying to take over, in cooperatives, cultural or union centers, party seats, on the streets, and so on.

VJEKOSLAV PERICA: The first clashes, incidentally, they were connected with mostly Northern Italy and some parts of what is today, Yugoslavia, basically. So one of the first, for example, was then in Italy, in Istria, for example, in Albona, today Labin, Istria, there was a large coal miner strike and the blackshirted fascists took part in the suppressing this coal miners strike. 

PETER KORCHNAK: In the mining area around Albona, Labin in today’s Croatia, miners kept the mines under the authority of workers’ councils and practiced self-management 30 years before Tito introduced it in socialist Yugoslavia, writes Perica. Some 600 miners went on a monthlong strike after Blackshirts had assaulted their union representative in Trieste. They occupied the mines and other facilities and the strike grew into a revolutionary movement and self-government, the Soviet-like Labin Republic, under a red flag featuring the proletarian symbol of the hammer and sickle and with organized armed units called the Red Guards. Blackshirts joined the regular army in violently suppressing the movement. The Labin Republic antifascist movement saw the first victims of fascism, when two miners were killed in the clashes. 

The Labin Republic was the first antifascist but not the first workers’ rebellion in what later became Yugoslavia. In the Husino Rebellion in central Bosnia, in 1920, miners carrying red flags rebelled against their working conditions. Memory of the Husino Rebellion later played a role in socialist Yugoslavia thanks to the Partisan movement from that region, which referenced the Husino miners and which sang the legendary song Konjuh planinom (On Horseback Across the Mountain) dedicated to a Husino miner who died in battle. 

[SOUNDBITE – “Konjuh planinom” by Zbor Praksa]

PETER KORCHNAK: “Konjuh planinom” performed by the Pula-based choir, Zbor Praksa.

VJEKOSLAV PERICA: A couple of years later, there was the first clash between organized fascists and antifascists in the former Yugoslavia, which was in Slovenia, in the city of Trbovlje, again, [a] coal mining area in which the Communist Party of Yugoslavia organized so called proletarian action troops, something like that, this Yugoslavian version of the Arditi del Popolo. There was a battle with the proto-fascist organization, ORJUNA organization, of the Yugoslav nationalists, founded in Split also in 1921; they imitated Italian Fascists, they were unitary Yugoslavia nationalists. 

PETER KORCHNAK: But then, long story short, in this first phase, the antifascists were losing. In 1922, Mussolini’s Italian fascists consolidated their power and established the world’s first fascist state. And in 1933, Hitler ascended to power in Germany and launched severe suppression of his opponents, chief among them the well-organized Communists.

VJEKOSLAV PERICA: The clash between Hitler, the Nazis, and the largest Communist Party in Europe was it was the first blitzkrieg, because Hitler almost destroyed the Communist Party of Germany in [a] very short period. The concentration camp Dachau was built for the communists, and they were the first victims in this concentration camp. 

PETER KORCHNAK: Within a year of coming to power, the Nazis liquidated about 30,000 German communists and sent 150,000 to concentration camps. 

VJEKOSLAV PERICA: So it is also the phase in which something called Antifa, which is the organization in America which today claims some kind of connection with the antifascists of the 20th century, which I do not see, I don’t see any kind of continuity between this 20th century antifascism and the Antifa in present day America, but in any case, we need to say that Antifa the term was invented in 1932 in Germany by the Communist Party of Germany.

So the Antifa and the Red Front, they were two organizations of the Communist Party of Germany for fighting the Nazi storm troopers and others. 

PETER KORCHNAK: According to Perica’s historization, the first, early phase of antifascism ended in the mid-1930s. The second phase of antifascism spanned the decade between 1935 and 1945. 

VJEKOSLAV PERICA: That’s the apex of antifascism, historic 20th century antifascism. That’s the antifascist moment. And that is unique, unique, really, history, which I don’t see that is repeating or has much continuity with what is happening in the world today.

PETER KORCHNAK: Perica terms the second phase of antifascism as the popular front antifascism. It started at the 7th congress of the Communist International, or Comintern, conference in Moscow in August 1935.

VJEKOSLAV PERICA: The Congress inaugurated a new political strategy they called the People’s Front, or popular front against fascism and war.

According to historian Eric Hobsbawm, precisely in the mid-1930s the world realized that the fascism means war. The fascists, Mussolini and Hitler and Imperial Japan, already started war in Manchuria, Mussolini started the war in Africa, war of conquest, war of aggression, and it was only a matter of time when Hitler will [sic] start with his own wars, and shortly he would go to Czechoslovakia, and then Poland and so forth and so forth.

Initially this new antifascist line of the Comintern was first, let’s mobilize some kind of very broad world anti-war movement. So the anti fascism of this stage, of this kind was basically [the] first anti-war movement. 

And [the] second thing was some kind of Popular Front, a broad coalition of literally everyone who is willing to fight fascism, religious, non-religious, bourgeois, right-wing, centrist, everyone who wants to fight Fascism is welcome to the Popular Front. 

The Communists [who] were to do everything for the cause of the world revolution, all of a sudden, they are saying, No, we are putting revolution on hold. Now new communists in some cases, will cooperate with the nationalists and themselves will lead national liberation movements against fascism. 

So no more revolution. Now the fight is about preventing fascism.

PETER KORCHNAK: After being appointed general secretary of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia in 1937, in the article “Communists and Catholics” published in the magazine Proleter, Tito—

VJEKOSLAV PERICA: —then, the rising star of the Comintern—

PETER KORCHNAK: —issued an open letter to Catholics in Slovenia and Croatia who, for religious and patriotic reasons, wanted to fight against fascism. 

VJEKOSLAV PERICA: He said, Well, simply, it’s a struggle between tyranny and democracy. And we need to be prepared to cooperate even with the clericalist parties. That was important, for example, in Slovenia, the Catholic parties were very strong. And in Croatia too, and Tito was saying, well, there are many Christians that are against fascism, and now we see what fascism is doing… 

But not everyone was happy about the new Stalinist line.

VJEKOSLAV PERICA: Stalin’s principal opponent, Trotsky, Leon Trotsky was, of course, against it, and it was just another, in his view, Stalin’s betrayal of the revolution.

The anarchists and the Trotskyite groups and the many other groups that on the left that were still antifascists, and they were active antifascists, and they were fighting fascism and losing lives and so forth, they could not accept Stalin’s new political line, because the Comintern line, because it demanded something that for the anarchists, for the radical left, extreme left, was totally unacceptable, and which is the revolution is now frozen. 

PETER KORCHNAK: The new Comintern strategy yielded both positive and negative outcomes.

VJEKOSLAV PERICA: Antifascism of this kind, it really decisively contributed to the victory against fascism. 

The Popular Front coalition government, in which socialists and some other centrist parties of the left were leading forces and the communists usually participated, these Popular Front governments came to power through elections in Spain, in France and in Chile. 

PETER KORCHNAK: The downsides of the Popular Front strategy first showed in the Spanish Civil War, from 1936 to 1939.

VJEKOSLAV PERICA: The real action, the real story begins in 1936 after the military coup in Spain and the attempt on the part of the nationalist Spanish nationalists to overthrow the democratically elected government and to destroy the Spanish Republic. The Spanish Civil War begins, and antifascism is becoming [an] international world movement. 

And then the Comintern is mobilizing the communists around the world, and the communists are— largely communists are coming to Spain to defend the Republic,  the International Brigades and all of them, of course, were not communist, but predominantly communists. 

VJEKOSLAV PERICA: What happened in the movement in Spain was the definite split between the anarchist, revolutionary antifascism and the communist, populist and in some cases nationalist, antifascism. 

I’m saying nationalist because Stalinism, especially after 1934 when he proclaimed socialism in one country is possible, contrary to Trotsky, who says—and Marx, of course—that socialism must triumph in whole world, he said, Yeah, socialism in one country, that’s basically nationalism. And later on, as Hobsbawm would note the antifascist movements in particular countries, they would become basically nationalist movements. So Hobsbawn is talking about antifascist nationalism. So we have cases of antifascist nationalism in some of the most massive and successful antifascist movements, such as Greece, Poland, Yugoslavia, and so forth. 

And basically now we have really two different variants, two different kind[s] of antifascism: the revolutionary anarchist antifascism that is pursuing simultaneously the struggle against fascism and Bolshevik style socialist revolution and communist populist antifascism, which is basically saying, what is crucial, what is the priority, is the liberation struggle. 

PETER KORCHNAK: The so-called Republicans, ultimately lost in Spain, militarily and politically, as both Hitler and Mussolini supported the nationalist side, assuring its victory. Franco was then in power until 1975. 

On the flipside, the struggle resulted in the creation of persistent antifascist myths, narratives, and art, in other words an antifascist culture whose traces persist to this day.

VJEKOSLAV PERICA: All this cultural production and the antifascist culture would inspire and energize and fuel antifascism liberation movements in various countries. 

Spain was a defeat for the antifascist side, but was was not really a defeat, it was a long-term victory. 

For people familiar with the Kosovo myth in Serbian culture, so basically, that’s some kind of a great sacrifice, which is also [an] investment for the future through the keeping of memory and the desire for revenge. I like to think of the Spanish Civil War  as the Kosovo of the left. 

PETER KORCHNAK: One of the things I like about Perica’s book is that he dedicates a fair deal of space to the cultural production of antifascism. 

[BACKGROUND MUSIC]

In the case of the Spanish Civil War, the anthem on the Republican side was the song, “Los Soldados del Pantano,” or “Peat Bog Soldiers.” 

It was the Spanish version of the song created three years prior in the Borgenmoor concentration camp. “Die Moorsoldaten” spread throughout the antifascist movements, all the way to Spain, and across the world, in different languages and versions. 

In the 1960s, Pete Seeger covered it as well. 

[SOUNDBITE]

VJEKOSLAV PERICA: Volunteers in Spain, the fighters who survived the concentration camps and Franco’s retaliation and so forth, they were returning to their countries to lead the antifascist movements. 

In Yugoslavia, out of nearly 2,000 volunteers in the Spanish Civil War, about 800 of them joined the Partisan liberation antifascist movement structures on the political strategy of Popular Front.

PETER KORCHNAK: Almost half of the 1,775 Yugoslav volunteers died in Spain or later in WWII. Almost every other of these „španjolski borci,” Spanish fighters, was from today’s Croatia, one in four was from Slovenia, and one in five from Serbia.  

VJEKOSLAV PERICA: They would become, later on, Tito’s leading generals and so forth. 

PETER KORCHNAK: Among them were the famous commanders Koča Popović and Peko Dapčević; in 1945, all four army commanders of the new Yugoslav Army had fought in Spain. Sixty quote unquote “Yugoslav Spaniards” were later declared People’s Heroes of Yugoslavia.

In Belgrade, there’s a small monument erected in 1956 to the International Brigades, whose volunteers quote “came to the aid of the heroic Spanish nation in its fight against fascist aggression; [the International Brigades] were the best examples of international solidarity and proletarian internationalism.” End quote.

So how did the conflict between the hardcore, radical-left communists, as Perica calls them, and the Stalinists pursuing Comintern’s popular-front line manifest?

VJEKOSLAV PERICA: Everything that looked like some kind of leftist extremism was met with a tough response. 

PETER KORCHNAK: In 1936, Stalin launched the Great Purge, executing or otherwise persecuting thousands of opponents, within the party and the broader society, the intelligentsia, peasants, and so on; many Soviet volunteers in the Spanish Civil War were shot after they returned home. 

The Communist Party of Yugoslavia, an underground party in the Yugoslav kingdom, too underwent a purge after Tito’s ascendancy, albeit on a much smaller scale. The fight in Yugoslavia between different communist factions continued during the war as well.

VJEKOSLAV PERICA: For example, if somebody was trying to, on a liberated territory, to impose collectivization of agriculture, to take land from the peasants and so forth, that was considered like leftist errors, and a number of Partisan fighters would simply get shot for that. 

According to Milovan Djilas who was chief Tito commissar, basically he was sent to Montenegro to deal with these leftist errors, allegedly, because it didn’t work, neither in Serbia nor in Montenegro, the united front with the Chetniks (Serbian nationalists) didn’t work.  The Communists were trying to find out what, not only the mistakes on the part of the Chetniks, but also what may be their own errors. And of course, they were punishing whoever they considered some kind of extreme left. So there were such bizarre things, for example, the Partisan fighters who would not ask nicely, politely peasants for food, they would be disciplined or executed in most cases.

To me, the most bizarre example, for example, is, Djilas ordered [the] execution of three Partisan fighters, volunteers, basically heroes, two women partisans and one Partisan fighter for having three-way sex. And every time when I find that story, and there were other stories, by the way, the sex in the Partisan movement was punished, except in the case of the top guy, of course, Tito and his secretary, so that was a kind of exception, but sex was not tolerated, sex was considered leftist errors. So these antifascists were of World War Two and interwar they were kind of ascetic…

PETER KORCHNAK: Perica takes a global view on antifascism. In fact, China, a lesser known case here in the West, provides a fascinating version of antifascism. That story is in the extended episode.

Meanwhile back in Yugoslavia…

VJEKOSLAV PERICA: The Partisans and Chetniks, they couldn’t work together. There was some success in the beginning in 1941 but not after that. The Chetniks eventually became enemies of the Partisans, and there was a civil war basically fought within occupied Yugoslavia between Partisans and Chetniks. And also in almost every Yugoslav nation, there was some kind of inter ethnic civil war going on: in Croatia, Croatian communists versus Croatian nationalists and the Ustashe Croatian fascists and so forth. 

So this idea, the Comintern idea of creating some kind of democratic movement didn’t work in reality. But there were some incredible things that happened on the part of the communists trying really to prove that they can take part in a democratic coalition, antifascist coalitions. 

Communists didn’t really abandon completely the idea of revolution and transformation of society through revolution when they come to power, when they win. We will see that it was so in 1945 right after victory, wherever communists were strong, they tried to seize power and then return to the old Bolshevik methods.

PETER KORCHNAK: While the Yugoslav communists did not pursue revolutionary politics in the liberated territories, they did establish parallel governing and administrative structures there, the so-called national antifascist councils. After the war they became the actual government.

VJEKOSLAV PERICA: So they would organize on these liberated territories, the normal life, food production, education, health, healthcare, everything. But that was not a revolution that was following the line of the Comintern.

The Tito movement was trying really to create some sense of people’s government. So for example, it was important for him in Croatia to win over a number of prominent Croatians that were not communists, and put them in positions of in the new structures of power. So, for example, the writer Vladimir Nazor, who was, let’s call him a Christian socialist, when we read his wartime writings, it was a strange mix of basically Christian socialism, he was a conservative in fact, and at the same time, he wrote Ode to Stalin and Tito and so forth. 

PETER KORCHNAK: If the antifascists lost the Spanish Civil War, they won the Second World War. 

VJEKOSLAV PERICA: The classical historical antifascism was over. It was finished by the victory against fascism 1945.

PETER KORCHNAK: In Yugoslavia, now the communists were in power, and it was time to deal with war’s fallout.

VJEKOSLAV PERICA: First of all, there was a question of revenge, because the atrocities were terrible, there was a genocide and ethnic cleansing and everything.

The official policy was kind of, there will be no revenge except against leading collaborators and so forth and so forth. But when you read the documents by the Communist leaders at the end of the war, the revenge was promised by the fighters, by their leaders, by those who recruited them to the Partisan ranks. 

PETER KORCHNAK: As you heard in the story about women Partisans, in their recruiting tactics, that is when persuading peasants to join their ranks, the communists appealed to local myths and heroes. So for example, in Croatia, the 16th century peasant revolt leader and justice fighter Matija Gubec was evoked as a hero to follow in order to defeat those occupying and taking the villagers’ property; among Serbian peasants the Kosovo Myth was used as a way to get them to join the fight against the invaders, and so on.

Enemies of the new state were in some cases subjected to fast trials and subsequent executions, or there were no trials at all, and many, in the thousands, were killed while fleeing or in other ways. These events at the end and after World War II became, beginning already in the 1980s and continuing up to the present day, subject to waves of historical revisionism and rightwing politics.

VJEKOSLAV PERICA: The national liberation struggle, in many cases, involved also civil wars. And the consequences of civil wars needed somehow to be managed. [A] Post war period needs healing. And of course, they are communists, they are not, you know, Abraham Lincoln, with malice toward none and charity for all, and we are now going to start over and so forth? No, there was revenge.

PETER KORCHNAK: At the same time, now that fascism was defeated, Tito and his troops were on the one hand instrumentalizing their victory and on the other implementing a Stalinist-style revolution and policies in the country.

VJEKOSLAV PERICA: What happens next is that the history of antifascism was used by the systems in which the Communists were in power for legitimizing their power. And the antifascist narratives and the antifascist culture was creating the culture of memory antifascism and that was basically how the communist run nations were basically created as antifascist nations. 

All countries after World War Two was [sic] basically dealing with that traumatic past and with the, in some cases, in former Yugoslavia, for example, the cultures of memory, production, all the films and monuments and everything. They tried to remember, but also to facilitate reconciliation through the idea of brotherhood and unity. So the idea was the joint multinational army together defeated not just the enemy militarily, but also the hatred between various nationalities that the enemy basically tried to produce. 

In Yugoslavia it was some combination emphasizing the communist sacrifice and casualties— they were massive, indeed massive, over 300,000 Partisans lost their lives, not counting the wounded and disabled and so forth; iincluding the civilian casualties there were almost 2 million victims of fascism.

PETER KORCHNAK: The losing side did not take to this well.

VJEKOSLAV PERICA: Yet again, in the emigre circles, they did not really take the same perspective, and they were continuing the hatred and the struggle and they were plotting revenge, and Ustasha circles were trying to say that they were patriots and denying genocide. 

When, finally, [the] communist system fell apart, and the old myths were quickly forgotten, then the old hatred was restored, and so forth. 

PETER KORCHNAK: Which brings us to today, the present moment of the period that began with the end of the Cold War.

VJEKOSLAV PERICA: So what happened with the communists?

It seems to me that they became history. They do not exist today. A large number of them simply turn into nationalists and post-fascists and some kind of similar politics. And a number of them try to some kind of join the leftist groups and leftist parties and preserve the memory of the great antifascist heroic epic. 

The communists turned fascist, the best example is Putin’s Russia. But it’s interesting that both Russia and China are commemorating, still commemorating, antifascism, they consider themselves antifascists and the successors of Chinese antifascist or Soviet antifascists. But because there is [sic] no communists anywhere really, we are now going back to the antifascism of the anarchist origin that was preserved in the West, particularly in America, through culture, through popular culture. In the 60s, for example, in the movements of the left. Then there was a revival of antifascist songs from the Civil War. Then there is the antifascist narratives in popular culture, in rock music and punk and so forth and so forth. 

And because the Communists were never so prominent and so crucial in America as they were in Eastern Europe and elsewhere, the dominant line of antifascism was, in fact, of anarchist sources. And that’s what we have today, now, some kind of post-antifascism, a new antifascism that is drawing mostly from the historic antifascism of the anarchist kind. 

PETER KORCHNAK: And the people and groups claiming the antifascist mantle today?

VJEKOSLAV PERICA: I believe that these present day antifascists, for example, that are fighting Donald Trump, they are fighting the American right, they are calling the Charlie Kirk fascist and Trump Hitler and so forth, it is difficult for me to connect them— to see continuity between them and anarchists of the Spanish Civil War and the antifascist anarchists. Simply because most of the anarchists in the period of classical antifascism, in interwar period, in Spanish Civil War, they were, they were industrial workers, mostly organizing in labor unions, the anarcho-syndicalists, and they were people of the left, people of the class struggle. And then all of a sudden we have some people who call themselves antifascists, they do not talk about class struggle. They talk about some kind of cultural wars. So I think it’s, it’s something new, something different. 

The types of fascism today, such as in Putin’s Russia, in China, it’s post-fascists but this post-fascism is still different from the old fascism, and we do not have a repetition. Trump is not Hitler. Trump may be some kind of Hitler’s apprentice, but he is not Hitler. So the situation now is different. We are dealing with the 21st century fascism and antifascism that looks like repetition of history, which I think it is not.

So basically connecting present day antifascism with the classical antifascism is almost impossible. They are two totally different things. 

[SOUNDBITE]

PETER KORCHNAK: That’s all for this episode of Remembering Yugoslavia, thank you for listening and fighting post-fascism with us. 

All guests’ opinions expressed are solely their own; unless otherwise noted they do not express, reflect, or represent the views or opinions of any third party, including myself. 

Find additional information, sources, embeds, links, photos, and the transcript of this episode at Yugoblok.com/RememberingYugoslavia. Also at Yugoblok, the extended version of this episode, with additional quotes, anecdotes, and other stories from the history of antifascism. Become a member today. 

Outro music courtesy of Robert Petrić. 

“Die Moorsoldaten” and “Los Soldados del Pantano” by Ernst Busch, Pi de la Serra y Pere Camps, and Una Lengua Infinita, played under Fair Use. “Konjuh planinom” courtesy of Zbor Praksa – thank you!

I am Peter Korchňak. 

Smrt fašizmu!