Neither Stalinism nor Fascist totalitarianism would have been possible without the transmogrified Marxism, that infilled both. - A. James Gregor

In a nonspecific sense, one might say that almost all the other antiliberal, reactive nationalist and developmental revolutions in our century were deviant forms of paradigmatic Fascism—the more deviant, the more destructive.

Fascism, National Socialism, Stalinism and Maoism were all species of a single genus, ‘totalitarianism.’ The resemblances they shared were cognitively more significant than the features that distinguished them. More significantly, perhaps, the features that originally distinguished one totalitarianism from another gradually abated over time. By the end of the century, Marxist-Leninist systems had begun to take on some of the major species-traits of Mussolini’s Fascism. All of this attests to the futility of attempting to identify Fascism, or fascism, with the political right. Fascism was neither essentially right-wing nor intrinsically ‘anticommunist.' Fascism was neither ‘anti-intellectual’ nor, in principle ‘irrationalist.’

That Mussolini chose Gentile to author the philosophical portion of Fascism’s official doctrine provides evidence of the confidence Fascists entertained with respect to Gentile’s thought.