Ernst Nolte Quotes

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 ..."

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.

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.

Marx succumbed to error in believing that the number of the industrial proletariat would constantly rise and reach a huge majority; in fact the process of industrialization, from a certain point in time, allowed the new group of ‘stiff collar proletarians’ to increase more, and the process led them, in spite of all their anti-capitalist resentments, to an alliance with the old middle strata and the grand bourgeoisie. Thus it came to the paradox ‘that national fascism is on the one hand a political consequence of this development predicted by Marx, and on the other hand a movement which has as its most effective slogan ‘Down with Marxism’.

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.

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

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.

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?

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’.

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.

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.’

In a more drastic sense we can speak of political revolution only when it causes a change in the political system, that is, when no possible configuration within the system can coincide with it. In this sense fascism brought about a revolution, but it did not do so all at once—we cannot really speak of a ‘fascist state’ before 1925.

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.’

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.

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’.