Mussolini laid the foundations not only for Italian postwar communism (he boasted of this paternity as late as his first chamber speech as a Fascist … - Ernst Nolte

Mussolini himself undoubtedly wished to be regarded as a Marxist. Whenever possible he extols the memory of the ‘father and teacher’ who alone represents the ‘compass’ of the proletarian and Marxist movement. Even the master’s most disputed doctrines, the theory of progressive pauperization, for example, finds in him a stout defender, and there is scarcely one concrete political decision which he does not justify by invoking Marx. Even in his demand for Italy’s entry into the war he uses Marx as a key witness.

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.

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?