WHEN SUSAN SONTAG announced in 1982 that “communism is fascism,” her statement seemed to many glibly self-exculpatory, a belated effort to wipe away her guilt over having been, a decade and a half earlier, a champion of North Vietnam. But as the twentieth century recedes ever further from us and perspectives become clearer, the affinities between communism and fascism become clearer as well. (They had been noticed by certain astute commentators many decades before Sontag’s melodramatic declaration.) Both systems insisted that the state has no choice except to murder and imprison, to infiltrate daily life completely, to impose a reimagined history on the masses.
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