The biggest difference between the early 20th century and today when it comes to the fight against fascism is the nonexistence of the Soviet Union.
I’m just going to say this here because I’ll have to say it somewhere in this post: at no point am I endorsing hte Soviet Union, and most certainly no the politics or policies of Josef Stalin. The USSR was a massively oppressive country, whose actions resulted in the deaths of millions, the displacement of even greater numbers, and withheld democratic electoral participation from their people for decades.
Another thing I have to acknowledge before getting started: yes, the Soviets and the Nazis began WWII with a cooperative pact called the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, an agreement on the invasion and partition of Poland to their mutual benefit. No country that collaborated with the Nazis deserves your accolades. You do not, under any circumstances, gotta hand it to ‘em.
But still, the Soviets were vital to defeating the Nazis. The USSR was the primary force that defeated the Germans during WWII. At any given time, over 2/3 of the German Army. Yes, you read that right - the vast majjority of all German forces during the war were stationed on the Eastern Front. Why have you not been taught this?
The first reason is pure propaganda - both the US government and the media landscape have overemphasized the role of the US, the UK, and the D-Day invasion to make them the protagonists in ending the war. The second is that that propaganda has been so successful that many people in the US and Europe simply no longer know or understand what the Soviets did to end the war. The third reason, of course, is that after the war the US and Allies pivoted against the Soviets to the extent that many of their miltary leaders called for simply continuing the war against them through the late 40s.
And so, the Soviets went from being the obvious “heros” of the war (to the extent that any war could be said to have heros, which of course it cannot) to being the villains of the 20th century.
The other complication in noting the Soviet’s role in fighting fascism is the popular equation of Communism and Fascism. Folks, we have got to stop doing this.
Both of these movements are mass political movements from the 19th and 20th centuries. Both are revolutionary, and both come from Europe but were adopted and adapted by people all over the world. Both are critical of liberal democray and capitalism.
But the differences are equally important. Fascism is a movement of the right-wing, whose goal is to entrench the socially powerful. It is misogynist, racist, and believes in and inherent and positive transformative power of violence. It is obsessed with the military, with speed, and with masculinity. It has also produced the most murderous regimes in the history of the world.
Communism, on the other hand, is at least on paper a liberatory politics. Again, this is not a claim that the Soviet Union was a liberating force. But it is central to the reasons that Communism is a politics of the left, and fascism is a politics of the right-wing.
The nonexistence of the Soviet Union today means that there is no superpower existentially opposed to fascism, and no superpower which fascism existentially opposes. This means that fighting fascism, if it came to a grand scale conflict, would be such a different ballgame that it can hardly be thought of.
This is because the last time that fascism was defeated it was by something called the Popular Front. A coalition of different groups - monarchists, olde time 19th century liberals, and the radical left - this is what beat fascism the last time. Both domestically inside of countries that came to be dominated by fascists, and internationally, in the geopolitical struggle prior to and during WWII, communists were fascism’s main opponents.
Their effective nonexistence today completely upends most analogies to how fascism was defeated in the early 20th century.