"The negative vitality of a historical phenomenon represents a great danger for the discipline of history. A permanent negative or positive image necessarily has the character of a myth, which is an actualized form of a legend. This is true because a myth like this can be made to found or support an ideology of state ..."

“Although Italy entered the war in accordance with Mussolini’s will, and although the war finally ended as he wished, his inner course during this period is nevertheless marked by a series of defeats. Hostility toward Germany steps to the fore as his dominating motive. Unrequited love and a surprisingly strong sense of national weakness combined to produce an emotion of genuine sincerity. To the runaway pupil, Marxism is German and Prussian, actually nothing more than Pan-German domination; no one, he feels, has demonstrated as clearly as the German Social Democrats that ‘everything which is treason, disgrace, deceit is genuinely German.’”

“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.”

“In a more drastic sense we can speak of political revolution only when it causes a change in the political system, that is, when no possible configuration within the system can coincide with it. In this sense fascism brought about a revolution, but it did not do so all at once—we cannot really speak of a ‘fascist state’ before 1925.”

“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.”

“Bakunin went so far as to see in ‘Marx’ ‘authoritarian communism’ only the mirror miage of the reactionary Bismarck empire.”

“If communism is described as the splitting off of the intransigent wing from the reformist section of the Socialist party which is willing to co-operate, Mussolini may with good reason be called the first and, from one standpoint, only European Communist; for in all the other European countries this rift occurred under the influence of Russian bolshevism, which formed in 1902 as well as in 1914 in entirely different circumstances.”