"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."

“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.”

“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.”

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

“The communist peasant-nationalist regimes of Asia, relying on the Führerprinzip, extreme nationalism, and racism 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.’”

“Not only was 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.”