ABSTRACT
The abrupt end of the essentially prosperous post-World War I decade followed by its antithesis, the Great Depression, had a profound effect throughout the Western world. Not only would this catastrophe reinvigorate the interest in Marxism-Leninism, which had ebbed during the 1920s good times, but it would fuel a rise in the fascist regimes that would dominate most of western Europe even before the Axis powers resorted to war in late 1939 to seek domination. Fascism came to power in Italy behind Benito Mussolini in the mid-1920s, with Adolf Hitler and his Nazis gaining control of Germany in 1933. Holding sway over much of Spain after its civil war broke out in the mid-1930s, Generalissimo Francisco Franco’s Falange organization, a crossbreed of Spain’s traditional authoritarian Catholic corporatism with modern fascism’s rejection of individualism and many aspects of modernization, was in full control of that country by the 1940s (and would prevail until the mid-1970s). A similar regime was already entrenched in Portugal under Antônio de Oliveira Salazar.
