Anti-Fascism Yesterday and Today
by Frank Panzarella, New Haven activist
On Nov. 28, 2022, about 90 people, mostly on Zoom, participated in a program at SCSU that addressed the part of World War II history largely ignored. The event was sponsored by Promoting Enduring Peace, The Women’s and Gender Studies Program at SCSU and Jewish Voice for Peace. Speaking from London, authors Merilyn Moos and Steve Cushion spoke of anti-Nazi Germans and other partisan resistance rarely given credit in mainstream accounts of the war. These experiences are documented in their book Anti-Nazi Germans, about the hidden history of working-class resistance to Nazism. Many were young people who courageously fought the rise of fascism and were communists, socialists, anarchists (survivors of the destruction of the Spanish Republic), social democrats and Jewish activists.
The two-hour program explored the complex relations of political parties and conditions that led to the rise of Nazism. This included divisions that pitted social democrats against communists at a time when unity against Nazism was critical.
The book contains many individual stories of people brutally murdered who dared spread literature, post flyers, organize factory resistance (even within concentration camps), sabotage war industries, and engage in street battles against Nazi thugs. Another part of the book details resist-ance to collaboration governments, including thousands of prisoners of war forced to work in German factories in France, Germans who left Germany and joined the Under-ground and veterans of the Spanish Civil War who fled into southern France, as well as Jewish partisans who fled Germany continuing to fight in France.
The discussion included how to recognize the dangerous signs of extreme nationalism today. Many countries grappling with economic chaos, climate change, mass migrations and multiple wars are collapsing back to extreme ideologies that blame immigrants and rival nations. Participants mentioned Orbán in Hungary, Le Pen in France, the AFD (Alternative for Germany), Meloni in Italy and Donald Trump. Democrats and Republicans continue supporting authoritarian regimes and their floundering global capitalist empire. Discussion included Russia’s new imperial dreams under the fascist Putin regime, his invasion of Ukraine and China’s global capitalist ambitions.
Copies of this book are available for $15. Please call 203-562-2798.
