Around the crisis of anti-fascism: Betweem History, Memory and Realism Politic

Abstract

After the Second World War, antifascism rose as the basis for the legitimization of most of the political systems of Western and Eastern Europe. In the last decades, we are witnessing an increasing revision of antifascism which is related to the social elements that the antifascist culture included and to its connection with communist political proposals. The disappearance of the socialist system and the transformation of memory paradigms, as well as the progressive overestimation of «victims» as opposed to «resistants», form the background against which the crisis of the antifascist narrative is to be understood. This paper offers a comparative analysis of different manifestations of that crisis; in particular, the transformations experienced by the antifascist narrative in different European countries, including the transformation of the memory of the antifranquist struggle in Spain.