Customer Reviews

Faces Of Janus: Marxism And Fascism In The Twentieth Century

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This book is an absolute must-have for any serious student of totalitarianism in the 20th century. Gregor has put together a very well-researched and cogent account of the singular nature of Bolshevism and Fascism, and explores convincingly the link each has to popular revolution in the face of national humiliation and economic weakness. Of special interest is the idea that because the Bolshevik Revolution took place in a largely agrarian and "industrially retrograde" society its similarities to Mussolini's Fascism were inevitable. Furthermore, Gregor's thesis helps to underline how the USSR, Communist China, and their satellite states operated or operate under a perversion of true Marxist doctrine. Almost implies that Fascism is really just Bolshevism unchained by phony Enlightenment values. This book is HIGHLY recommended.

This book brilliantly exposes the true, almost universal nature of 20th century revolutionary regimes. The similarities between Stalinism and Italian Fascism were indeed more profound than their differences... and one conclusion that can be taken away from this book is that supporters of the so-called "leftist" version of this phenomenon should indeed be held to the same level of accountability as the supporters of the "right-wing" variant.

One should also consider the ability of Stalinists to portray their fascist revolutions in progressive light during the 20th century... and what forms of radical ideology could/are being made to seem palatable to the West in 21st century...

Radical Islamo-fascism primarily comes to mind.

This book was very good. It explained one man's theory of how fascism and Marxism are alike. This subject interests me greatly so I decided to buy the book. His theory is one that I have never truly thought of but now I wish he would write a sequel to this book. It is well researched, wrote, and just about everything else. It is definitely worth the price. However I must note that you must know the meaning of the word proletariant and many other words to fully understand this book. At times this book had questionable parts and I would re-read them and then understand them. If you know a lot about communism, marxism, fascism, and revolutions then this book might seem like a walk in the park for you. Overall it is a very good book.

A. James Gregor is one of the strongest proponents academically of the 'left' origin of fascism, as opposed those from Paxton to Griffin to Maier, that see fascism as a 'right' (or right radical) political tradition. In contrast to someone like Zeev Sternhell, however, who believes that fascism in France and Italy was certainly a revision, a very far deviation, of Marxist ideas, but nonetheless distinct from Communism (even in its Stalinist form), Gregor reduces fascism and communism, in the tradition of Ernst Nolte, into two sides of the same coin, and uses a political litmus test as useless as the old right and left divide: democratic and non-democratic (as an example, Russia now, undoubtedly authoritarian, actually has a less invasive police and security apparatus than democratic Great Britain, whose police harass and kill innocents with as much impunity, it seems, as Russian state police). Like Nolte, he is a respected and prolific scholar whose political trajectory and beliefs make the relative value of his argument as problematic as a Maoist writing a history of European imperialism. To wit, Gregor argued in the 60's for a war to the utmost against North Vietnam, in a kind of armchair war-mongering that would no doubt make Christopher Hitchens proud, and was an advisor to the unpleasant Marcos dictatorship in the 80's. His politics and the tone of this book, especially compared to some of his other works, including the far superior "Marxism, Fascism, and Totalitarianism: Chapters in the Intellectual History of Radicalism," leave me cold: he has no interest in an anatomy of fascism, in the Paxton style, that isn't ultimately used to excoriate Marxism and left-wingers more 'moderate' than New Labour or Bill Clinton. I is heartening to see an academic text so popular, even if amongst people whose political beliefs I disagree with, but I worry that they may not realise, having found all the answers they need, the extent to which Gregor is himself a minority on a spectrum of academics studying fascism. In conclusion, I would recommend Zeev Sternhell's excellent 'Neither Right Nor Left,' Jeffrey Hert's book 'Reactionary modernism' on Weimar Germany or Roger Griffin's 'The Nature of Fascism' for studies of fascism and its ideology with more complex and therefore more interesting research, much less tainted by a political career that clearly directs the conclusion of this book before the thesis was even penned.

This book is one of a handful of bibles of the 'new' right. The libertarian fringes want to paint all evil in the universe as being part of the political 'left'. They are as doctrinaire as any Soviet-era Marxist, and far less subject to academic scrutiny.

While there are certainly many similarities between fascism and totalitarian communism, this piece of propaganda completely ignores the historical underpinnings of each movement.