Ernst Nolte Quotes

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?

The negative vitality of a historical phenomenon represents a great danger for the discipline of history. A permanent negative or positive image necessarily has the character of a myth, which is an actualized form of a legend. This is true because a myth like this can be made to found or support an ideology of state ..."

National Socialism could not be deduced exclusively from a reaction to the Bolshevik movement, that on the contrary there existed, even before the war, a brutal German nationalism, and that explicit intentions of extermination of the Jews were even expressed in the program of one party.

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’.

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 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.

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.

I am still sometimes surprised by the contemporary Left’s show of aggressivity, and I can’t even think about it without finding something ridiculous in it. It is really so difficult to note that an internal necessity pushes us toward the historico-genetic conception of the theory of totalitarianism if we subscribe to the basic points of the Marxist interpretation of the twentieth century without accepting the claim of Marxism, and thus of communism, of having the market on absolute truth?

Mussolini participated with equal vigor in the dispute over the method of class warfare. What made this dispute necessary was the fact that nowhere in Europe in 1914 did conditions display that ‘maturity’ which according to Marxist doctrine was essential to the proletarian revolution: namely the polarization of society into a small number of exploiters and the ‘enormous majority’ of the industrial exploited.

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.

It is not Sorel but Marx whom [Mussolini] calls ‘the magnificent philosopher of working-class violence.’ It cannot be denied that Mussolini soon acquired the reputation of a barricadero and a Blanquist. His reputation was due less to certain theoretical convictions than to his temperament, when he conducted an anticlerical campaign of unparalleled fury in the Trentino , or when he pursued social warfare between farm laborers, sharecroppers, and property owners to the point of bloody excesses in the Romagna, or when he was the only prominent Marxist to defend the wild popular uprising of the Settimana Rossa (Red Week) in 1914. Wherever it was a matter of taking a theoretical stand he remained well on the Marxist track.

It is a notable shortcoming of the literature about National Socialism that it does not know or does not want to admit to what degree all the deeds—with the sole exception of the technical process of gassing—that the National Socialists later committed had already been described in a voluminous literature of the early 1920s: mass deportations and shootings, torture, death camps, extermination of entire groups using strictly objective selection criteria, and public demands for the annihilation of millions of guiltless people who were thought to be ‘enemies’.

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 difficulty, the ‘borderline’ element, in Mussolini’s internationalism does not lie where all the panegyrists and apologists try to find it. It is to be found in the abstract radicalism and naïve youthfulness of his internationalism. At nineteen he proclaimed: ‘Socialism knows no nationality’, the young teach of French language and literature in Oneglia writes: ‘The oppressed have no fatherland: they regard themselves as citizens of the universe’, the editor of La Lotta di Classe following in the footsteps of Hervé calls the national flag a ‘rag to be planted on a dunghill.’