In the United States and Europe, new forms of disinformation about the history of fascism are taking place, and they don’t just come from Russia. To clarify, the main and most ominous distortion of fascism reached its most critical moment with the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and it came from Russia.
The idea presented by Vladimir Putin to justify his unjustifiable war from the anti-fascist legacy could not be further from the truth about the past and its relationship with our present. There is nothing Nazi or genocidal about the current government of Ukraine, whose president is of Jewish origin.
There is also nothing anti-Nazi about Putin’s government. Putin is a dictator and the historical discussion must begin with the kind of dictatorship he imposes in Russia and which he also wants to impose in Ukraine.
If Nazism is not enough to describe Ukraine, can you accuse Putin of being a Nazi?
People line up to talk about Putin as the new Hitler, his dictatorial regime as a new totalitarianism and his terrible invasion of Ukraine as a continuation of the Holocaust. Emblematic cases abound, but it is worth mentioning the most recent and paradigmatic one by Michael McFaul, former US ambassador to Moscow.
McFaul is one of the most influential opinion leaders in the United States and in a recent interview he argued that “one difference between Putin and Hitler is that Hitler did not kill ethnic Germans, German-speaking people.”
This kind of offensive comment in which the former diplomat problematically accepts the Nazi distinction between Aryans and non-Aryans ignores the historical fact that German-speaking German Jews were in fact Germans. In his eagerness to criticize Putin, McFaul argued that in the category of genocide Putin is worse than Hitler.
As expected of the irate giant, McFaul was widely criticized and apologized saying, “I will never make comparisons with Hitler again…Without historical analogies, I will keep my analysis and my comments centered on the current evil: Putin.”
All or nothing, if one cannot speak of Hitler as synonymous with Putin, should we forget the past to better think about the present? This is a clear example, and the similarities abound with other commentators that historical disinformation gets us nowhere.
In Latin America, and also in Europe, the anti-colonial or anti-imperialist history is often confused with a clear nationalist campaign of Russian aggression.
In the case of Nicaragua, Cuba or Venezuela, these are dictatorships that may have an ideological sympathy for Putin’s autocracy, and in these cases interest in history is totally displaced by an ideological voluntarism that simplifies reality to satisfy their leaders.
The same can be said of Cristina Kirchner’s vision in Argentina or Evo Morales in Bolivia. The result of these stances is also misinformation about the past, although no one serious seems to take them seriously outside of their followers.
Characters like Brazil’s President Jair Bolsonaro also accept Putin’s propaganda and soon link it to their own authoritarian fantasies about the future of the world. Like Donald Trump, the raison d’être of his historical mythologies is to serve his cause, and therefore his disinterest in the real past is absolute.
Autocratic fanaticism is not part of the debates, especially in the global north, among many of those who reasonably oppose Russia’s war.
And yet, without much historical reason, many of these Putin critics argue that Ukraine is persecuted as European Jews were and emphasize the Hitler-Putin equation. Little is said about their relationship to the Russian past in general and to Stalin in particular.
Here and there, these debates are not necessarily Putin-style forms of propaganda, but they do distort or misunderstand history, and their result is also to promote disinformation about the past.
Simplifications are increasing at a rapid pace. As historians, one of our tasks is to insist that the past has continuities but also breaks with the present.
In principle, history cannot satisfy the current demand for simple explanations. In this context, historical explanations are replaced by simple and banal arguments. Simplicity offers what is expected of it: ephemeral explanations that no one will take seriously in the near future.
Can we talk about the present without exaggerations and historical simplifications? Can we stop minimizing the Holocaust in the face of Putin’s war against Ukraine? The Holocaust was not a war between two countries, but a racist attack by a fascist state on individual citizens of a particular ethnic group.
Sometimes, in the histories of the far right, fascism and neo-fascism, the Holocaust represented an inspiration for the murderers. This was the case, for example, with the Argentine dictatorship, whose assassins often promised to continue the Nazi massacres.
For historians, the Holocaust can be analyzed against other murders, but the problem is when people who are not historians fuse different histories without explaining the continuities and ruptures in history. In these cases, the analogy obscures the past and the present.
The contextless analogy ends up insulting the victims’ memory and deceiving the public. Russia can afford to lose this war; Putin cannot lose it, and therein lies the dissonance between Russia’s interests, which are harmed by this war, and Putin’s interests, expressed only through fanatical propaganda.
The Russian dictator is a typical example of an autocrat who thinks more about himself than his country, as the consequences of his actions are clearly harmful to his people. But this does not imply that he can be considered a Nazi. To put it in Argentine terms, Putin is more like a Galtieri (the dictator who started the war against the UK in 1982) than a Hitler.
The current war against Ukraine is more conventional (in terms of European history and others) and as a historian of fascism in the past I am not convinced that it has reached the point of being genocidal or totalitarian.
I also don’t think Putin is a fascist. So far, I do not see in it central elements of fascism, such as the mobilization of masses organized also in paramilitary terms, the glorification of violence or policies of xenophobia and racism. But others, like a certain militarization of politics and society, totalitarian propaganda and dictatorship. But all this doesn’t imply that his war isn’t still horrible and unwarranted.
The problem is not that they make analogies. The problem is that these analogies are historically uninformed.
