The fact that Communism and Fascism assigned contradictory roles to history and reason—the emancipation of the proletariat versus the domination of t… - François Furet

Born of war, both Bolshevism and Fascism drew their basic education from war. They transferred to politics the lessons of the trenches: familiarity with violence, the simplicity of extreme passions, the submission of the individual to the collectivity, and finally the bitterness of futile or betrayed sacrifices.

Hitler did a better job than Stalin of accomplishing Lenin's totalitarian promises—better, too, than Mussolini.

The Mussolinian fascism of 1919 can be seen as a 'reaction' to the threat of Italian-style Bolshevism, also arising out of the war and following more or less the Russian example—a reaction in the broadest sense of the word, since Mussolini, who, like Lenin, comes from an ultrarevolutionary socialism, can more easily imitate it in order to fight it.