Trotsky vs Stalin on Fascism

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More documentation on the contrasting views of Stalin and Trotsky regarding the rise of German fascism in the early 1930s:

Stalin: “Social democracy is objectively the moderate wing of fascism. They are not antipodes, they are twins.”

Trotsky: “Fascism has opened up the depths of society for politics. Today, not only in peasant homes but also in the city skyscrapers, there lives alongside of the 20th century the 10th or 13th. A hundred million people use electricity and still believe in the magic power of signs and exorcisms. What inexhaustible reserves they possess of darkness, ignorance, and savagery! Despair has raised them to their feet, fascism has given them a banner. Everything that should have been eliminated from the national organism in the course of the unhindered development of society comes out today gushing from the throat: capitalist society is puking up the undigested barbarism.

Such is the physiology of National Socialism...Fascism has become a real danger as an acute expression of the helpless position of the bourgeois regime, the conservative role of the Social Democracy in this regime, and the accumulated powerlessness of the Communist Party to abolish it.…

Worker-communists, you are hundreds of thousands, millions; you cannot leave for anywhere; there are not enough passports for you. Should fascism come to power, it will ride over your skulls and spines like a terrific tank. Your salvation lies in merciless struggle. And only a fighting unity with the Social Democratic workers can bring victory.”

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—China Daily, June 27, 2004