The history of communism and fascism The two movements have been known to share a lot in terms of their history and even ideologies. Both are clearly seen to have been established after the First World War in order to create a new world political order that would not plunge blocks or continents into such a gruesome war as was WWI. Both ideologies loathed the domination of the bourgeoisie and wanted to recruit people to the new utopia that made all members of the society equal. Both the systems put totalitarianism into action. It was Lenin’s step of kick starting totalitarianism in October 1917 that brought into existence totalitarianism as we know it today. Both movements initiated the insurrection of the masses in politics and diminished the significance of individuals in politics. As stated by Hobsbwan E., (nd: Pp 29) “revolution swept across central and south-eastern Europe in the autumn of 1918, as it had swept across Russia in 1917…No old government was left standing between the borders of France and the sea of Japan. Even the belligerents on the victorious side were shaken… ” These two gave way for all forms of totalitarian ideologies and thinking that shaped the 20th Century. Further, Robert Paxton (nd: Pp28) points out at WWI as the most central...

He indicates that “The experience of WWI was the most decisive immediate pre-condition for fascism. The successful campaign to bring Italy into the war in May 1915 (the ‘radiant Nay’ of Fascist mythology) first brought together the founding elements of Italian Fascism.” Further he notes that “…the great war by itself suffices to explain both Fascism and Bolshevism” (Robert Paxton (nd: Pp29).
Both fascism and communism are a form of religious conviction where man considers more his relationship with the superior law with an aim that transcends the particular individual and lifts him up to the level of conscious belonging to a spiritual society. Robert Paxton indicates that fascism was seen as “A form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy and purity, in which a massed-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion.” (O’Malley J.P.,…