Stanley G. Payne

"Fascism was created by the nationalization of certain sectors of the revolutionary left, and the central role in its conceptual orientation was played by revolutionary syndicalists who embraced extreme nationalism."

"The communist peasant-nationalist regimes of Asia, relying on the Führerprinzip, extreme nationalism, and racism (and the ultimately grotesque in antimodernism in the case of the Cambodia of the Khmer Rouge) seem to some to represent the fascistization of communism. There is no doubt that, as discussed earlier, fascism and communism share many fundamental characteristics, and Russian spokesmen delight in applying the same words to China as to Nazi Germany: ‘petit bourgeois’ policy, ‘bourgeois nationalism,’ ‘military-bureaucratic degeneration,’ ‘subservient obedience’ of the masses, ‘anti-intellectualism,’ ‘voluntarism,’ ‘subjectivism,’ ‘autarchic’ policies that try to place ‘surplus population’ on ‘foreign territories,’ concluding that ‘the Maoist approach in no way differs from fascism.’"

"The new mass Fascism had not been created by Mussolini so much as it had sprung up round him in the rural areas of the north."

"There was the populist extreme left, whose main spokesman was the journalist Curzio Malaparte, who wanted to see Fascism make a ‘revolution of the people’ that would reflect what the populist left considered true Italian popular culture, both intellectually and socially. There were small sectors of a dissident extreme left or ‘free Fascism’ that promoted a progressivist and leftist revolution of ‘liberty’ under the Fascist banner."

"The initial press commentary in Moscow on the formation of the first Mussolini government was not overwhelmingly anti-Fascist, despite the Duce’s talk of a ‘revolutionary rivalry’ with Lenin. Fascism was sometimes perceived not inaccurately as more of a heresy from, rather than a moral challenge to, revolutionary Marxism."

"At the Twelfth Party Congress in Moscow in 1923, Nikolia Bukharin stressed that the Nazi Party had ‘inherited Bolshevik political culture exactly as Italian Fascism had done.’ On June 20, 1923, Karl Radek gave a speech before the Comintern Executive Committee proposing a common front with the Nazis in Germany. That summer several Nazis addressed Communist meetings and vice versa, as the German Communist Party took a strong stand for ‘national liberation’ against the Treaty of Versailles and inveighed against ‘Jewish capitalists.’ It is said that a few of the more radical Nazis even told German Communists that if the latter go rid of their Jewish leaders, the Nazis would support them."

"Some of the similarities and parallels include: Frequent recognition by Hitler and various Nazi leaders (and also Mussolini) that their only revolutionary and ideological counterparts were to be found in the Soviet Union . . . [and the] espousal of the have-not, proletarian-nation theory, which Lenin adopted only after it had been introduced in Italy . . . Hitlerian National Socialism more nearly paralleled than has any other non-Communist system."

"Not only was [Fascist] Italy the first Western country to recognize the Soviet Union in 1924, but the new Soviet art first appeared in the West that year at the Venice Biennale, Italy's premiere art show."

"Zeev Sternhell has conclusively demonstrated that nearly all the ideas found in fascism first appeared in France. The fusion of racial nationalism with revolutionary and semicollectivist socioeconomic aspirations first occurred there, and in parallel fashion France was the first major country in which the revolutionary left rejected parliamentarianism while supporting a kind of nationalism."