Suchergebnisse

This article focuses on the ways in which anti-colonialism, anti-racism, and anti-fascism were intertwined within the Third Period, and the extent to which these ideals were already being drawn together in the preceding era of the United Front. Drawing heavily on the articles and imagery
of Willi Münzenberg's Arbeiter-Illustrierte-Zeitung, the piece demonstrates the ways in which communist anti-fascist campaigning around the world facilitated the development of sophisticated anti-racist arguments which aimed at undermining the ideological basis of fascist movements
and colonial rulers alike. It evidences the extent to which communists felt that countering the pseudoscience of race could play an important role in numerous facets of their campaigning. Furthermore, it highlights the attempts by activists and writers to develop a conception of anti-fascism
and anti-colonialism as mutually-reinforcing strategies which could be deployed in tandem, and the ways that this ideological interweaving was drawn into campaigns both against the Nazis' use of racial science to justify anti-Semitic policy, and fascist Italy's invasion of Ethiopia based on
Social Darwinist precepts.

Conventionally, the starting point of socialist and communist resistance to fascism in Europe and the creation of a European 'culture of anti-fascism' is dated to the 1930s in the context of the establishment of the Third Reich in 1933 and the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in 1936. The hypothesis of the article is that the initiatives and debates of 1923 played a pivotal role in the creation of the transnational anti-fascist movement that transferred cultures of anti-fascism across borders in Europe and the world. The aim of the article is to analyse the first, but hitherto forgotten, efforts to make anti-fascism a transnational phenomenon in the early 1920s. Further, the article will discuss whether there are clear continuities or discontinuities in the anti-fascist articulations of 1923 and the ones created after 1933.