A popular quote, the authorship of which is attributed to the British Prime Minister, is dedicated to possible manipulation and purposeful emasculation of the concept of “fascism.” We checked whether its author is indeed Sir Winston Churchill.

The statement in question is often cited in recent years when talking about military operations on the territory of Ukraine. The fact that it came from the pen of Winston Churchill is reported by such resources as Izvestia (philosopher and writer Andrey Ashkerov), Radio Liberty (political prisoner German Obukhov, deputy of the Verkhovna Rada Artyom Vitko), "Freedom of speech in Ukraine", "Our Kyiv", "Censor.net", "Ukraine.ru" and even a fact-checker portal StopFake.org.

There is another case, very well known in the West, of attribution of this quote to Winston Churchill. On August 7, 2018, Texas Governor Greg Abbott tweeted a demotivator based on a popular saying:

Abbott is a high-profile and popular figure, so his tweet caused quite a stir. To the point that already on August 13, the International Churchill Society, the most authoritative resource on the issue of the legacy of the famous Briton, responded to it. This is what was said in the post on the society's website: publications: “Unfortunately, as it soon became clear, the governor became a victim of the “Churchillian drift”, attributing an aphorism of unknown origin to Winston Churchill. The tweet quotes Churchill as saying: “Fascists of the future will call themselves anti-fascists.” Reporters from Texas to Washington rushed to contact the International Churchill Society to find out if the quote was indeed Churchill's.

"This quote has never been documented as being spoken or written by Churchill," he told the newspaper. Austin American-Statesman Churchill Bulletin editor David Freeman. "The misattribution of Abbott is not particularly egregious," Freeman continued, "since Churchill criticized both ends of the political spectrum."

Another resource The Churchill Project, confirmed that the quote could not be found in the extensive archive of scanned documents dedicated to Churchill, amounting to 160 million words. It would seem that all questions have been resolved. However, I would like to understand where this quote even came from? The first such maxims appeared in the English-language press in 1936, not in Great Britain, but in the USA. So, in February-March in the newspaper The Cincinnati Inquirer Presbyterian pastor Norman Thomas was quoted several times: “Fascism is likely to come to the United States, but not under that name.” One of the articles contained a clarification: “With this statement, he repeated the words of the late Huey Long, but Huey added: “Of course, we will have it. We will have it under the guise of anti-fascism.”

After this, the statement became popular and, according to the resource, The Quote Investigator, appeared in at least a dozen articles over the next ten years. The quote continued to be attributed to Huey Long, the famous American senator who was assassinated in 1935 and became the prototype for the main character in Robert Penn Warren's novel All the King's Men. However, there is no reliable evidence that Long made such a statement. As for Sir Winston Churchill, they started saying an aphorism to him attribute only around 2010. His authorship in this case is completely excluded.