Actually, there are obviously profound reason why what appears banal from a certain point of view meets with so much resistance in the case we are co… - Ernst Nolte

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’.

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?

The fact that Mussolini emphasizes the ‘ideal’ with a vigor unknown to Marx and Lenin does not, however, place him outside the framework of Marxist orthodoxy. The unclear form which Marx gave his being-consciousness statement avenges itself everywhere in Marxism; and if Marx and Lenin dramatically show ‘idealism’ the door, it finds its way in again through the back door under such disguises as ‘revolutionary ardor’ or ‘determination of the working class.’