>>18145774
>Heavily militarized societies where army service was mandatory and refusants were punished
Well yeah. Buty what I think tends to get left out of these debates about communism, fascism, etc. is just how militarized politics were in Europe back then across the board. So, yes, communism was highly militarized (and viewing a giant war as helping further the revolution isn't unusual among Marxist-Leninists either) and that seems very different from mainstream politics in Europe today.

I think you can say one of Lenin's (and Trotsky's) innovations was the use of party militia and the deployment of violence and terror as a normal part of doing politics, but I think that's really where the "horseshoe" resemblence with fascism is, the fascists quickly "learned" from that and deployed similar methods against socialists and communists. The main group in Italy that flipped sides from the socialists to the fascists were rural farm workers but the core of the fascist movement was middle class which also tended to be more nationalistic back then.

BTW, fascism initially appeared as a kind of schismatic, nationalistic far-left movement (that sounds weird but initially it tried to code as a radical left / syndicalist / republican force that advocated many progressive policies) which engaged in violent sectarian attacks on the socialists and then mutated dramatically in, like, 1920 into a more overtly right-wing party, and the composition of the rank-and-file membership also changed pretty radically. A lot of the core leaders remained but they basically chudded themselves up and came to lead angry chuds and war veterans hostile to socialism and with support from right-wing businessmen and land owners.