“In all the countries where fascism became victorious, we had, before the growth of fascism and its victory, a wave of radicalism of the masses -- of the workers and the poorer peasants and farmers, and of the petty bourgeois class. In Italy, after the war and before 1922, we had a revolutionary wave of tremendous dimensions; the state was paralyzed, the police did not exist, the trade unions could do anything they wanted -- but there was not party capable of taking the power. As a reaction came fascism.”

— Leon Trotsky

Fascism: What It Is and How to Fight It (1944)

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Leon Trotsky 106

Marxist revolutionary from Russia 1879–1940

Walter Rodney book How Europe Underdeveloped Africa

Source: How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (1972), p. 310.

“Before Alamein we never had a victory. After Alamein, we never had a defeat.”

Winston S. Churchill book The Second World War

The Second World War, Volume IV : The Hinge of Fate (1951) Chapter 33 (The Battle of Alamein)
BBC News story on the 60th anniversary of Alamein http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/2347801.stm.
The Second World War (1939–1945)

“Italian fascism was the immediate outgrowth of the betrayal by the reformists of the uprising of the Italian proletariat. From the time the [first world] war ended, there was an upward trend in the revolutionary movement in Italy, and in September 1920 it resulted in the seizure of factories and industries by the workers. The dictatorship of the proletariat was an actual fact; all that was lacking was to organize it and draw from it all the necessary conclusions. The social democracy took fright and sprang back. After its bold and heroic exertions, the proletariat was left facing the void. The disruption of the revolutionary movement became the most important factor in the growth of fascism. In September, the revolutionary advance came to a standstill; and November already witnessed the first major demonstration of the fascists”

Leon Trotsky (1879–1940) Marxist revolutionary from Russia

the seizure of Bologna
Source: Fascism: What It Is and How to Fight It (1944), Ch. 2

“We are constantly thinking of the great war … which which we think to-day as a war which saved the Union, and it did indeed save the Union, but it was a war that did a great deal more than that. It created in this country what had never existed before — a national consciousness. It was not the salvation of the Union, it was the rebirth of the Union.”

Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924) American politician, 28th president of the United States (in office from 1913 to 1921)

Memorial Day Address (31 May 1915)
1910s

“That is why so many Sorelians, like many people on the Left both before and after the war, slid into fascism. When these leftists of all shapes and colors came to the conclusion that the working class had definitely beaten a retreat, they did not follow it into this attitude. Their socialism remained revolutionary when that of the proletariat had ceased to be so. Having to choose between the proletariat and revolution, they chose revolution; having to choose between a proletarian but moderate socialism and a nonproletarian but revolutionary and national socialism, they opted for the nonproletarian revolution, the national revolution.”

Zeev Sternhell (1935) Israeli historian

Source: The Birth of Fascist Ideology: From Cultural Rebellion to Political Revolution, 1994, p. 27

“No, fascism is not a power standing above class, nor government of the petty bourgeoisie or the lumpen-proletariat over finance capital. Fascism is the power of finance capital itself.”

Georgi Dimitrov (1882–1949) Bulgarian politician

Ch. 1, The Class Character of Fascism https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/dimitrov/works/1935/08_02.htm#s2.
The Fascist Offensive and the Tasks of the Communist International in the Struggle of the Working Class against Fascism

“The anarchists put the thing upside down. They declare that the proletarian revolution must begin by doing away with the political organisation of the state. But after its victory the sole organisation which the proletariat finds already in existence is precisely the state. This state may require very considerable alterations before it can fulfil its new functions. But to destroy it at such a moment would be to destroy the only organism by means of which the victorious proletariat can assert its newly-conquered power, hold down its capitalist adversaries and carry out that economic revolution of society without which the whole victory must end in a new defeat and in a mass slaughter of the workers similar to those after the Paris Commune.”

Friedrich Engels (1820–1895) German social scientist, author, political theorist, and philosopher

Letter to Philipp Van Patten http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1883/letters/83_04_18.htm (18 April 1883)

“The task of a truly revolutionary party is not to declare that it is impossible to renounce all compromises, but to be able, through all compromises, when they are unavoidable, to remain true to its principles, to its class, to its revolutionary purpose, to its task of paving the way for revolution and educating the mass of the people for victory in the revolution.”

Vladimir Lenin (1870–1924) Russian politician, led the October Revolution

“Fascism, with its violence, gets rid of everything: it attacks universities, it closes them and crushes them; it attacks intellectuals, represses them and persecutes them; it attacks political parties; it attacks trade union organizations; it attacks all mass and cultural organizations. Therefore, nothing is more violent, more retrograde and more illegal than fascism.”

Fidel Castro (1926–2016) former First Secretary of the Communist Party and President of Cuba

Speech (2 December 1971) http://www.cuba.cu/gobierno/discursos/1971/esp/f021271e.html

“Our place is there where pointed out by politics, that means by the side of Germany and Italy. We determined our place in the time already when Germany had not been yet one of the most powerful world superpowers and when Italy had just eneterd the path of invicible fascism.”

János Esterházy (1901–1957) Czechoslovak member of Czechoslovak national parliament, russian nation politician and hungary nation polit…

About orientation of his foreign policy for Hungarian prime minister.
International relationships
Source: [Deák, Ladislav, Ladislav Deák, Political profile of János Esterházy, Bratislava, Kubko Goral, 1995, 20, 80-967427-0-1]

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