Ernst Nolte Quotes

On the contrary, for the doctrine of totalitarianism the ‘liberal constitutional state’ is the self-evident norm, from which Marxism and Fascism (or national socialism) are distinguishable as essentially identical, namely, totalitarian phenomena.

Otto Strasser’s socialism was much more durable and much more carefully thought out. No doubt Marx would have called him a petit-bourgeois socialist. In his best-known publication on his program he spoke of a Reich corporative chamber and the guilds, of hereditary fiefs and the reagrarianization of Germany. Strasser called for autarky and domestic currency, the war of revolution against Versailles, and a military aristocracy. But there was more than mere demagogy in his demands for splitting up of large estates, for profit participation, for a people’s state of Germanic democracy. On the whole it was a genuinely socialist program, at least to the extent to which it was imbued with the emotional appeal of the expansion and attainment of freedom.

Those who desire to envision history not as a mythologem but rather in its essential context are forced to a central conclusion: If history, in all its darkness and its horrors, but also in its confusing novelty, is to have meaning for coming generations, this meaning must be the liberation from collectivist thinking.

The theory of totalitarianism certainly provided a way out in offering a distinction between ‘democratic’ anticommunism and ‘totalitarian’ anticommunism, but it did not prevail for long, and following this, from Right to Left, from press to university, all spokespersons agreed to concentrate on the examination of National Socialism and to focus on ‘Stalinism’ only in passing, without speaking of a ‘world communist movement’ at all.

The duel with Lenin did not turn out as Mussolini desired and expected. The falsest accusation of all, however, was that, for Lenin, violence was not the exception but the prevailing system. Was it not Mussolini himself who had always equated revolution with war? Did he not conduct a tireless campaign in his paper for the totalization and intensification of the war? He ceaselessly takes the field against Germans remaining in Italy and German property, he demands concentration camps and confiscation; he wants to put workers in uniform and have foreigners distinguished by a badge; inquadrare becomes his favorite word; he ruthlessly demands all-out attacks on German cities and even justifies assassination: ‘I for my part approve of assassination—inasmuch as it helps me to conquer.

As the classic form of fascism, national socialism also reaches Inside through its deepest roots, though in a disguised and dissimulating fashion, into the realm of the subversive-utopian element of ‘man’.

Although Italy entered the war in accordance with Mussolini’s will, and although the war finally ended as he wished, his inner course during this period is nevertheless marked by a series of defeats. Hostility toward Germany steps to the fore as his dominating motive. Unrequited love and a surprisingly strong sense of national weakness combined to produce an emotion of genuine sincerity. To the runaway pupil, Marxism is German and Prussian, actually nothing more than Pan-German domination; no one, he feels, has demonstrated as clearly as the German Social Democrats that ‘everything which is treason, disgrace, deceit is genuinely German.’

If communism is described as the splitting off of the intransigent wing from the reformist section of the Socialist party which is willing to co-operate, Mussolini may with good reason be called the first and, from one standpoint, only European Communist; for in all the other European countries this rift occurred under the influence of Russian bolshevism, which formed in 1902 as well as in 1914 in entirely different circumstances.

Did the National Socialists or Hitler perhaps commit an ‘Asiatic’ deed merely because they and their ilk considered themselves to be potential victims of an Asiatic’ deed? Was the Gulag Archipelago not primary to Auschwitz? Was the Bolshevik murder of an entire class not the logical and factual prius of the ‘racial murder’ of National Socialism? Cannot Hitler's most secret deeds be explained by the fact that he had not forgotten the rat cage? Did Auschwitz in its root causes not originate in a past that would not pass?

Bakunin went so far as to see in ‘Marx’ ‘authoritarian communism’ only the mirror miage of the reactionary Bismarck empire.

The most personal and intense instance of Mussolini’s coming to grips with Marxism is his confrontation with Lenin and the Bolshevik revolution. During his stay in Switzerland, Mussolini had had contact, if not with Lenin himself, with men around him; he had read some of Lenin’s writings; Angelica Balabanov, Mussolini’s former tutor, was now with Lenin in Russia… But it is typical of Mussolini’s prevailing interests of the moment that, like his dialogue with Marxism, even the duel with Lenin appears at first as merely one further aspect of the struggle against Germany.

Mussolini laid the foundations not only for Italian postwar communism (he boasted of this paternity as late as his first chamber speech as a Fascist deputy in 1921), but also for the impotence of the embryonic Social Democracy led by Turati, and this impotence was perhaps the most immediate cause of the fascist victory.

Actually, there are obviously profound reason why what appears banal from a certain point of view meets with so much resistance in the case we are concerned with. The long held conviction that Marxist socialism and even Leninist Bolshevism were absolutely different from fascism and totally opposed to it must be mentioned first. Of course, today ‘Stalinism’ has been abandoned everywhere, but the old conviction remains in diverse versions and in diverse watered down forms, from reformed communists to well into the liberal camp.

Fascism is anti-Marxism which seeks to destroy the enemy by the evolvement of a radically opposed and yet related ideology and by the use of almost identical and yet typically modified methods, always, however within the unyielding framework of national self-assertion and autonomy. This definition implies that without Marxism there is no fascism, that fascism is at the same time closer to and further from communism than is liberal anti-communism, that it necessarily shows at least an inclination toward a radical ideology, that fascism should never be said to exist in the absence of at least the rudiments of an organization and propaganda comparable to those of Marxism.

The fact that Mussolini emphasizes the ‘ideal’ with a vigor unknown to Marx and Lenin does not, however, place him outside the framework of Marxist orthodoxy. The unclear form which Marx gave his being-consciousness statement avenges itself everywhere in Marxism; and if Marx and Lenin dramatically show ‘idealism’ the door, it finds its way in again through the back door under such disguises as ‘revolutionary ardor’ or ‘determination of the working class.’