ABSTRACT
The Second World War put the anticommunist fight into apparent abeyance. The emergence of expansionist fascism was a complicating factor that temporarily unsettled the opposing anticommunist camps, as it cut across many of the established dividing lines and could be understood in several different anticommunist contexts. In fact, the varieties of arguments used against fascism were essentially the same that had been employed in the anticommunist fight long before the rise of fascism. The encounter with fascism and Nazism – with national socialism – helped solidify the disparate anticommunist approaches, not only because it once more corroborated one of the chief means of demonisation typical of the century, by allowing all autocratic phenomena to be projected to one locus in Germany. The Herberg analysis pointed towards an absolute moral requirement to combat and destroy a force that had such far-reaching evil implications.
