“Red Fascism”

Red Fascism is Leon G. Halden’s Cold War–era argument that Soviet communism and European fascism are not opposites but parallel systems built on centralized power, mass mobilization, and the subordination of individual liberty to the state. Writing as a scholar of government and diplomacy, Halden frames Stalinist expansion, wartime alliances, and postwar geopolitics as evidence that ideological labels conceal a shared authoritarian structure. The book advances its case through close attention to treaties, military strategy, and diplomatic maneuvering rather than slogans, insisting that communism’s revolutionary rhetoric masks a system as coercive and imperial as the regimes it claims to oppose. This is not a neutral survey of international relations but a sustained warning that modern totalitarianism can wear different colors while operating by the same logic, and that misunderstanding this equivalence leaves democratic societies strategically and morally exposed.