Getting an Education — Hitler, Stalin and Mao Today, Part I

Seeds of Fire Celebrates Forty Years

法日斯

 

In this chapter of Seeds of Fire: China Heritage Annual 2026 we introduce Hitler and Stalin Today, The Munk School, University of Toronto, a lecture series devised by Timothy D. Snyder, historian and author in 2016 of the book On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century.

On 4 July 2026, we marked the 250th anniversary of the American Declaration of Independence with Professor  Snyder whose work formed an earlier chapter of Contra Trump titled Twenty Lessons for a Nation Sleepwalking into Autocracy.

Hitler and Stalin Today is an open-access lecture series and we are reproducing it in four parts:

  • Class 1 (What is History?);
  • Classes 2 (A World of Empire), 3 (What is Fascism?), & 4 (What is Communism?);
  • Classes 5 (What is Ukraine?), 6 (Why was Communism appealing) & 7 (How as mass killing possible?); and,
  • Classes 8 (Back to Colonialism?), 9 (East European Dissident Thought) & 10 (Oligarchy, Neo fascism and Liberation).

The first lecture in the series is titled ‘What is History?’ Of weighty importance to authoritarians throughout the twentieth century, history — and the battle over truth telling and official lies — remains a subject of obsessive concern for today’s authoritarians, particular those in China, Russia and the United States of America.

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Although the term ‘Leninism’ has enjoys renewed currency among some international China watchers when describing Xi Jinping’s brand of Marxist nationalism, at China Heritage we have long used the term Stalino-Maoism to describe the ideological underpinnings of post-1949 China.

Since 2019, we have also employed Professor Xu Zhangrun‘s shorthand expression for the ideological matrix of the Xi Jinping era (2012-): ‘Legalistic-Fascist-Stalinism’ 法日斯. Xu observed that essentially Xi Jinping Thought it is cobbled together from strains of traditional harsh Chinese Legalist thought (法; or 中式法家思想), an admix of the Leninist-Stalinist-Maoist interpretation of Marxism (斯; as in 斯大林主義) along with the Germano-Aryan form of fascism (日;  as in日耳曼法西斯主義. (See Xu Zhangrun, Viral Alarm: When Fury Overcomes Fear.)

In 2022, the first chapter of Xi Jinping’s Empire of Tedium featured a discussion of the Stalino-Fascist-Maoist legacy in contemporary China. See We Need to Talk About Totalitarianism, Again. Since then, we have frequently returned to the topic, in particular in Contra Trump — America’s Empire of Tedium, a series devoted to the authoritarian turn in American politics and its resonances with Xi-era China.

In many regards, China is a mature fascist army-party-state. Taking into account its reformist decades and mercantilist strategy, we have also described it as a Semi-Feudal, Quasi-Capitalist Party-State.

We would suggest that the lecture series Hitler and Stalin Today could easily be expanded to include the living legacy of Mao Zedong, its global relevance and continued threat. To that end, we will suggest readings drawn from China Heritage, which marks its tenth anniversary this year.

On 9 September 2026, the Chinese state will commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of Mao’s death and, on 26 December, popular celebrations will mark Mao’s birthday.

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The rubric of this chapter in Seeds of Fire is 法日斯. It is also included in the two series Xi Jinping’s Empire of Tedium and Contra Trump.

— Geremie R. Barmé
Editor, China Heritage
16 July 2026

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Related Material:

Hitler, Stalin & Us

Democracy is an attitude toward the futuref that demands a reckoning with the past.

In Hitler and Stalin Today, Timothy Snyder examines the Nazi and Soviet responses to the new globalized world they shared. The coure begins with the colonial background that made totalitarianism possible, and which remains an essential element of our politics now. Their ideologies are described as worldviews and as practical politics, with an emphasis on the reasons for their appeal. Attention to their policies of mass killing, essential events of twentieth-century history, instruct us about how “it” can happen here. The study of dissident thought helps us to see connections between historical predicaments and our own, and instructs us about possible reactions as individuals and as citizens. The course asks what we have learned from the twentieth century, and what we should.

— Hitler and Stalin Today, The Munk School, University of Toronto

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Class 1: What is History?

We speak often about history, but we are careless with the past. When we choose not to know what has happened before, we are also choosing not to influence what will happen after. If we don’t care about history, we find ourselves in an eternal present, denied any sort of imagination about the future, and nurtured on lies about a past in which we were innocent. History does not mean these misleading tales; it means a search for knowledge, using a certain set of tools; it means a process that enriches and humanizes, one that allows us to name things by their proper names.

Readings:

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Source:

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史 shǐ, ‘to record, a person who makes a record, history’, in various hands