Allen Gindler does a good job debunking another leftist myth:
The Left has put out an enormous effort to convince humanity that Italy’sfascism and Germany’s National Socialism have been a phenomenon of the right. In the course of building this myth, the leftists have created yet another one. The Left equalized those two regimes and, as a result, created German fascists and Italian Nazis. Even more often, unsuspecting people called both regimes fascist erroneously.
Indeed, there are many similarities and a political kinship between Italian fascism and German National Socialism. The common denominator of these two regimes is their anti-Marxist and anti-democratic ideologies. Both systems relied on the omnipotent and omnipresent totalitarian state as a method of resolving class hatred and the amalgamation of the nation into one. Both ideologies utilized the collectivization of consciousness as a primary path to socialism. However, the similarities do not mean equality; the differences between ideologies and regimes are as crucial as the supposed similarities.
These two regimes are distinguished primarily by the fact that they are based on completely different philosophical concepts and socio-economic constructions. The most interesting is the fascist regime of Italy, since Italian fascism inherited a rich theoretical and philosophical basis, which cannot be said of the Nazis. The theoretical baggage of revolutionary syndicalists, national-syndicalists, and fascists is tremendous and could be intellectually compared with their rivals of the Marxist current. The intellectual origin of fascist thoughts can be traced to the reactionary tendencies among some thinkers of the “Franco-Italian cultural complex” toward a political philosophy of the eighteenth-century period of the Enlightenment [1].
Fascism was erected on a solid philosophical foundation that could be traced to the works of the French philosopher Henry Bergson (1859–1941), the leading philosopher of his time, whose international fame had reached cult-like heights. Fascism adopted revolutionary syndicalists’ philosophical platform, which they in turn borrowed from these great thinkers. Anti-Cartesian, anti-Kantian, anti-materialist, voluntarist, vitalist, and heroic elements of his philosophy can be distinctly traced in the theory of Fascism. Non-Marxian socialists enthusiastically embraced Bergson’s theories of the irrational, the power of intuition, and the concept of élan vital (vital impetus).
Read more: American Thinker
