A. James Gregor Quotes

Trump took issue with all of that. He has sought to reanimate the United States with a soft, or sentimental (if well-armed) nationalism. His populism depicts the nation as an admirable cultural and historic continuity—neither biological nor class-based. It finds its strength not in a particular ideology, but in traditional symbols—in its history, its flag and its national anthem. His is a relatively benign form of nationalism. He is not a statist. His nationalism is neither aggressive nor expansionist. He will use, or invoke, the threat of violence whenever he is convinced (at times perhaps incorrectly) that the security, territory, or citizens of the nation are in jeopardy. Unlike other nationalisms, that of Trump’s United States has no specific racial reference; it has no irredentist claims on the territory of others, nor does it seek to secure external “vital spaces” to supply it resources.

Whether their ideological commitment was to proletarian communism, or the Nordic race, or the restoration of Italy to its proper place in the community of nations, they all chose the hierarchically structured, charismatically led single party state to pursue their ends—a state first fixed in the political doctrine by Fascism.

Not only has capitalism not entered into its final crisis anywhere in the world, but Fascism was first successful in marginally industrialized Italy—in a nation that had only begun its industrial development. Italian industrial capitalism was hardly at the end of its life cycle. It was at little more than its commencement. Moreover, subsequent movements elsewhere in Europe that have been characterized as fascist proved to 'have been most successful in mobilizing lower classes in underdeveloped... countries.'

All totalitarianism of the twentieth century were predicated on a systematic, anti-individualistic collectivism. In the case of Marxist-Leninism, the source was classical Marxism. [Giovanni] Gentile had carefully dissected the neo-Hegelian roots of that collectivism. What he found missing in the collectivism of Marx was ethical concern. He sought to provide that concern to the collectivism of Fascism—a collectivism that shared a common intellectual origin with Marxism and Marxism-Leninism.

The fact is that Soviet Leninism, through a process of gradual involution, has taken on more and more of the attributes of paradigmatic Fascism.

Towards the end of the 1930s, few Fascist intellectuals denied that the social and political system put together in the Soviet Union substantially overlapped that fashioned by Fascism. Whatever distinctions were drawn, and however emphatically those distinctions were insisted upon, no Fascist intellectual failed to note the significant institutional and behavioral similarities of Fascism and Stalinism.

Mussolini insisted that Fascism was the only form of ‘socialism’ appropriate to the ‘proletarian nations’ of the twentieth century.

By the time Spirito delivered his communications at the Convention of 1932, these sentiments had united with neo-idealist totalitarian aspirations. The result was variously identified as ‘Fascist communism,’ Fascist Bolshevism’ or ‘Fascist socialism.’

Bereft of much of its mummery, Marxist theory reveals itself as a variant of generic fascism. The contest of the twentieth century, which has cost so much in human lives, was not between the Right and the Left. It was between representative democracies and their anti-democratic opponents

As have been indicated, many Fascist theoreticians, throughout their active political lives, acknowledged the affinities between Fascism and Marxist-Leninism. There were even Italian Marxist-Leninists--including Nicola Bombacci, one of the founders of his nation's Communist Party--who conceived of Fascism as the only viable form of Marxism for economically retrograde communities.

Where mass-mobilizing ‘revolutionary Marxists’ have come to power, and remained in power sufficiently long to create a viable political system, what they have generally succeeded in creating is a reasonable analogue of the Fascist state.

There was pervasive recognition that Stalinism, as a system, had ‘dialectically thrown overboard the principles in whose name’ the Bolshevisk Revolution had been undertaken, and that ‘Marxist-Leninist principles’ had been transformed into their ‘contraries,’ that is to say, the ideas that provide body and substance to the Fascism of Mussolini. Fascist theoreticians pointed out that organization of Soviet society, with its inculcation of an ethic of military obedience, self-sacrifice and heroism, totalitarian regulation of public life, party-dominant hierarchical stratification, all under the dominance of the inerrant state, corresponded, in form, to the requirements of Fascist doctrine.

What some of the revolutionary syndicalists proceed to do was to identify the ‘communality’ of man not will class, but with the nation. The first intimations of a ‘revolutionary nationalism’ made their appearance among the most radical Marxists.

In order to create the appropriate material conditions, Lenin was prepared to make recourse not only to market arrangements, but to international capitalism as well. Not only was private property, private enterprise, and private profit largely restored in Lenin’s Russia, but Lenin appealed to international capitalism for assistance as well. He was prepared to offer generous concessions to foreign capitalism.

In 1934, Mussolini reiterated that capitalism, as an economic system, was no longer viable. Fascist economy was to be based not on individual profit but on collective interest.