Rosebrough and Mahler next go back and forth on whether or not German Fascism was a form of Marxism. Here I score a point for Rosebrough because German Fascism was a form of Marxism. Now, certainly it was a different form of Marxism as expressed among the Communists but they both embrace shards of Marxist thought. Even Hitler admitted this;
“National Socialism derives from each of the two camps the pure idea that characterizes it, national resolution from bourgeois tradition; vital, creative socialism from the teaching of Marxism.”
Adolf Hitler
Interview with Hanns Johst in Frankforter Volksblatt
January 27, 1934
People need to realize that there have been countless variants of Marxism and that the various Marxists disagreed with one another hammer and tong over the decades.
In terms of Marxist variants I offer these just off the top of my head. More could be adduced;
1.) Syndicalists
2.) Mensheviks
3.) Bolsheviks
4.) Nihilists
5.) Max Stirner’s Libertarian Marxists
6.) Anarchists
7.) Cultural Marxists (Originating with Italian Antonio Gramsci)
8.) Trotskyites
9.) National Socialism
10.) Bundism
11.) Maoism
12.) Leninism
13.) Stalinism
Marxist thought has spawned countless movements much like larva spawn flies and if one has studied Marxism at all one realizes that they all hated one another like water hates oil, and yet, once one expression had reached an ascendency often people from the other elements would join that expression which had become hegemonic. This explains, why so many rank and file German communists eventually joined the National Socialist movement. It just wasn’t a stretch for them to enter into this slightly different expression of Marxism. Hitler hinted at this;
It is not Germany that will turn Bolshevist, but Bolshevism that will become a sort of National Socialism. Besides, there is more that binds us to Bolshevism than separate us from it… The petit bourgeois Social-Democrat and the trade-union boss will never make a National Socialist, but the Communist always will.
Look at it this way. There are a myriad of expressions of Christianity and among those different expression exist real and substantive differences. However, there also exist real and substantive agreements. In the same way the Marxist religion had all kinds of variants but in the end they all claimed Marxism.
Roseborough was correct, as against Mahler, that Fascism is an expression of Marxism. Communism and Fascism are merely variants of Marxism. Marxism, had TONS of variants, of which Fascism was one.
Score 1 point for Rosebrough.Current tally …. Rosebrough 1.5 …. Mahler 1.5
My own two cents: I do not believe that Fascism is NECESSARILY, inevitably anti-Christian ideology, but a sober observer can see that it has plenty of amoral “warlord” mentality in it – which was all to familiar to Europeans in the Middle Ages. Back then, the same feudal military leader who might at times fight bravely against Muslims and other barbarian threats could ALSO, in different times, launch immoral and selfish private feuds, and plunge nearby lands into atrocious fratricidal warfare.
And so Mussolini, even though he had saved Italy from Communism in the 1920s, committed an obvious and grievous sin – and also the kind of sin that was simultaneously “both crime and blunder” – when he attacked Greece in late 1940, even though that country had not done anything to deserve it, and was ruled by conservative pro-Christian authorities. Mussolini attacked the Greeks simply to satisfy his own selfish macho ego, which had been hurt and made envious by Hitler’s successes..
Any ideology that locates divine centralization in the State is necessarily anti-Christ.
We’ll never agree on this, but, using Hitler to interpret Hitler I offer the following:
“I can give my hand to a Communist at the moment when I see that he recognizes the madness of his former ideology: I can give my hand to the most narrow-minded reactionaries in the moment when they see that their former standpoint is untenable. There is only one to whom I can never give my hand: he who has never known what it is to have a political conviction, but who could be bought for money.” pp. 58-9. –Kiel, Nov. 6, 1933.
Michael Walsh, ‘Adolf Hitler: My Last Testament – Let God Judge Me’
Note he says “when he recognizes the madness of his former ideology” i.e. MARXISM. Sure, there were communists who were persuaded to become National Socialists, but it wasn’t because they were in any way of a kindred spirit. One could argue that Ernst Rohm was always a communist, but that’s why, with his belief in perpetual revolution, he had to be purged from their ranks.