Humanity is plagued with monsters. No matter where you run, they will always follow you. My demons are also relentless. A whole team of exorcists cou… - L.K. Samuels

If society is confined by the chains of groupthink and top-to-bottom command structures, frustration and anger have few outlets—leading mostly to hopeless confrontation with the status quo. When confronted by a wall of complex, emotional, and politically charged rifts, a powder keg of resentment can burst into a vicious civil war of backstabbing, mistrust, and disloyalty, especially when taking political control is the only means by which to terminate domination by a particular ruling elite.

Marxism had a lot to offer Hitler. Largely saddled with an unmovable, single-mindedness, hardcore Marxism allowed proponents to see themselves as noble crusaders saving humankind. Here too, Hitler could identify with such closed-mindedness, political messianism, and authoritarian tactics that licensed him to see himself as the savior of the world. A lover of the power of politics, Hitler’s hidebound views pushed him into the unshaded world of white and black antipodes, a battleground where you were either with him or undoubtedly against him, leaving no luxury of neutrality. Such exacting standards of political absolutism likely blinded him to other alternatives, or at least to the possibility of subjective objectivity that would allow the people to freely display their own diversity of opinions.

By June 1919, Mussolini was criticizing Lenin’s handling of the communist revolution in Russia, concerned that he was straying from the tenets of Marxism. Distressed that Lenin was not Marxist enough, Mussolini wrote that his old comrade was ‘the very negation of socialism’ because he had not created a dictatorship of the proletariat or of the socialist party, but only of a few intellectuals who had found the secret of winning power.