They have also drawn a compelling analogy between the sympathetic attitudes of American intellectuals toward Soviet Russia and the sympathy of a later generation of intellectuals towards Cuba, China and North Vietnam (Skotheim 1971: 96-106; Hollander 1981; Caute 1988). However, little effort has been made to examine whether the forgiving attitudes toward fascist Italy might also have had a historical analogue in the form of forgiving attitudes toward other, non-communist, dictatorships. The reason for this omission might be that fascism, unlike communism, had lost any respectability as a philosophy or self-descriptive identification. While numerous postwar regimes raised the red flag, not a single regime openly identified itself as fascist after the defeat of the Axis powers. Still, during the 1930s and early 1940s there emerged several dictators whose ideological sympathies lay with the fascist powers, yet who shrewdly avoided joining the Axis: Francisco Franco in Spain, Antonio Salazar in Portugal, Juan Peron in Argentina, and Getulio Vargas in Brazil. These dictators were strongly influenced by Italian fascism, but as the tide of the war turned against the Axis they abandoned their pro-fascist rhetoric and distanced their regimes from fascism. Might there be a resemblance between the portrayal of these Iberian and Latin American dictatorships by American intellectuals in the postwar years and the uncritical portrayal of Mussolini's Italy before World War II? I explore this question here with regard to the discipline of political science 87