fascist ideas have come to Russia at a historical moment, three generations after the Second World War, when it’s impossible for Russians to think of themselves as fascist. The entire meaning of the war in Soviet education was as an anti-fascist struggle, where the Russians are on the side of the good and the fascists are the enemy.
So there’s this odd business, which I call in the book “schizo-fascism,” where people who are themselves unambiguously fascists refer to others as fascists. Which has an interesting consequence, that fascism becomes harder to talk about even as it becomes more important. Amidst all this bad faith, it is easy to say: well, the word is outdated, or it’s just a joke, because look how it’s tossed around. So the very fact that fascists call other people fascists is itself a kind of propaganda, which Jason Stanley calls “undermining propaganda,” which makes it hard for us to talk about fascism as an actual phenomenon.