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  • Transatlantic Antifascisms: From the Spanish Civil War to the End of World War II by Michael Seidman
  • Michael Ortiz
Seidman, Michael – Transatlantic Antifascisms: From the Spanish Civil War to the End of World War II. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018. Pp. 348.

Michael Seidman begins his engaging Transatlantic Antifascisms by pointing out that a recent Worldcat search returned 59,000 titles devoted to fascism and only 2,000 to antifascism—a discrepancy that belies antifascism’s success during the Second World War. Addressing this historiographical imbalance, Seidman comparatively analyzes the various strains of antifascism that emerged in Spain, France, Britain, and the United States. He proposes an alternative analytical lens for understanding antifascism that challenges conventional interpretations, contending that antifascism’s most consistent and effective practitioners were not Marxists, leftists, or even democrats, but, rather, conservatives and counterrevolutionaries. It is a provocative and necessary argument, even as it occasionally falters.

Seidman introduces two analytical frameworks that animate his examination of transatlantic antifascisms. First, he proposes a tripartite antifascist minimum: (1) antifascists must prioritize the fight against fascism against all else; (2) antifascists must reject the conspiratorial and anti-Semitic scapegoating that [End Page 416] characterized many fascist regimes; and (3) antifascists must renounce pacifism and marshal the resources of the state in order to defeat the fascist menace. While this definition certainly internationalizes existing frameworks, it does not significantly revise antifascist minimums put forth by scholars such as Dave Renton or Nigel Copsey. Seidman’s main contribution to the field comes in the form of his second analytical framework: the two types of antifascism. The first, revolutionary antifascism, was practiced primarily by the political left and demanded the transformation of political, social, and economic institutions. In short, it was the antifascism eulogized by poets, writers, and artists of the inter and postwar periods. The second type of antifascism was conservative, anti-communist, and, according to Seidman, counterrevolutionary. In this particular context, Seidman uses counterrevolutionary to signify the restoration of Enlightenment-era liberalism—democracy, private property, and individual freedom. However, he purposely rejects the term “liberal-democratic antifascism,” because many of the loudest counterrevolutionary antifascists were monarchists, imperialists, and “antidemocratic racists in the American South and elsewhere” (p. 4).

With his analytical framework established, Seidman traces the intertwined, and often strained, relationship between revolutionary and counterrevolutionary antifascisms. His narrative begins in Spain, where revolutionary antifascists— Marxists, anarchists, and syndicalists, among others—predominated within the Republic during the Spanish Civil War. Seidman contends that revolutionary attacks against private property and the Catholic Church disillusioned counterrevolutionary antifascists across Europe, who subsequently refused to intervene in the conflict. Meanwhile, in Britain and France, “Versailles Guilt” pervaded international politics, leading many across the political spectrum to attribute fascist radicalism to a vindictive postwar settlement. As a result, counterrevolutionary antifascists appeased fascist aggression, convinced that it amounted to limited irredentism, not violent expansionism. With the German invasion of Czechoslovakia and Poland in 1939, counterrevolutionary antifascists reversed course and went to war against fascism. After the German invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, revolutionary antifascism rejoined the conflict, creating a grand antifascist alliance. Victory over the Axis powers allowed counterrevolutionary antifascists—the United States, among them—to restore liberal democracies in Western Europe and revolutionary antifascists to establish communist regimes in Eastern Europe. With fascism defeated, the grand antifascist alliance faltered, as revolutionaries and counterrevolutionaries identified each other as potential, perhaps inevitable, adversaries.

Seidman succeeds in challenging many of the conventional tropes of Western antifascisms. His examination of counterrevolutionary antifascism, in particular, provides important insights into an underdeveloped topic. Addressing this gap in the historiography, Seidman contends that in the past counterrevolutionary strains of antifascism were obscured by scholars’ tendency to characterize fascism as a reactionary phenomenon which attracted conservatives. “The fascist counterrevolution,” he maintains, “has hidden the antifascist one” (p. 252). Seidman introduces an analytical framework for uncovering the antifascist [End Page 417] counterrevolution. His approach offers a convincing, if occasionally teleological, explanation for why European conservatives abandoned Spain and Ethiopia, attempted to form an alliance with Italy, appeased Hitler, and finally formed a grant antifascist alliance. Additionally, despite comparing revolutionary and counterrevolutionary antifascisms across multiple nation-states, Seidman delivers an accessible...

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