What is Marxism? And why you should fear it.

Thank you for being here……

Once again, I cannot begin to discuss the today’s topic without first thanking the loyal readership of this, my humble blog.
To you, my beloved, I am truly grateful.
The people who follow and support my work do so because they are in search of a truly independent voice. I use my international platform to affect positive change, education, well-being, wisdom, and good health. Both physically and mentally. As well as emotionally.
Now before we begin, check your emotions a the door, prepare to employ critical thinking, and read on with an open mind. Lastly, please do not believe me out of out hand? Do your own research. There are over a hundred hyperlinks and sources cited for you to confirm these things for yourselves.

In this grand thesis, we shall examine what amounts to an attempted Marxist Power Grab occurring in the United States (and thus rest of the Westernized World), likely masterminded by the Russian and Chinese Communists in concert with the Elitist International Banking Cartels who fund and control them all.
Since the early nineteenth century, despotic regimes have attempted to apply the eloquent, yet impractical theories of one man to gain power over large populations and control them mercilessly. This man is Karl Heinrich Marx.

To overstand Marx, one must first familiarize themselves with Hegel. A philosopher who had a profound influence upon a young Karl Marx. As well as every philosopher who has come after him. Hegel is notorious for being “obscure” and difficult to read. Often regarded as the most obscure and difficult to read.
Herein I will do my best to inform the reader without “weighing them down” with all the “abstract minutiae” Hegel is famous for.

Part One

Hegel….

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (/ˈheɪɡəl/; German: [ˈɡeːɔʁk ˈvɪlhɛlm ˈfʁiːdʁɪç ˈheːɡl̩]; August 27, 1770 – November 14, 1831) was a German philosopher and an important figure of German idealism. He achieved recognition in his day and—while primarily influential in the continental tradition of philosophy—has become increasingly influential in the analytic tradition as well.

Hegel’s principal achievement was his development of a distinctive articulation of idealism, sometimes termed absolute idealism, in which the dualisms of, for instance, mind and nature and subject and object are overcome. His account of the master–slave dialectic has been influential, especially in 20th-century France. Of special importance is his concept of spirit (Geist, sometimes also translated as “mind”) as the historical manifestation of the logical concept – and the “sublation” (Aufhebung, integration without elimination or reduction) – of seemingly contradictory or opposing factors. Hegel has been seen in the twentieth century as the originator of the thesis, antithesis, synthesis triad, but as an explicit phrase it originated with Johann Gottlieb Fichte.

Hegel has influenced many thinkers and writers whose own positions vary widely. Maurice Merleau-Ponty wrote that “all the great philosophical ideas of the past century—the philosophies of Marx and Nietzsche, phenomenology, German existentialism, and psychoanalysis—had their beginnings in Hegel.”

Hegelian dialectic….

Usually presented in a threefold manner, was stated by Heinrich Moritz Chalybäus as comprising three dialectical stages of development: a thesis, giving rise to its reaction; an antithesis, which contradicts or negates the thesis; and the tension between the two being resolved by means of a synthesis. In more simplistic terms, one can consider it thus: problem → reaction → solution. Although this model is often named after Hegel, he himself never used that specific formulation. Hegel ascribed that terminology to Kant. Carrying on Kant’s work, Fichte greatly elaborated on the synthesis model and popularized it.

On the other hand, Hegel did use a three-valued logical model that is very similar to the antithesis model, but Hegel’s most usual terms were: Abstract-Negative-Concrete. Hegel used this writing model as a backbone to accompany his points in many of his works.

The formula, thesis-antithesis-synthesis, does not explain why the thesis requires an antithesis. However, the formula, abstract-negative-concrete, suggests a flaw, or perhaps an incompleteness, in any initial thesis—it is too abstract and lacks the negative of trial, error, and experience. For Hegel, the concrete, the synthesis, the absolute, must always pass through the phase of the negative, in the journey to completion, that is, mediation. This is the essence of what is popularly called Hegelian dialectics.
According to the German philosopher Walter Kaufmann

Karl Marx….

Karl Heinrich Marx (5 May 1818 – 14 March 1883) was a German philosopher, economist, historian, sociologist, political theorist, journalist and socialist revolutionary.
Marx studied law and philosophy at university. Born in Trier, Germany, on 5 May 1818 to Heinrich Marx (1777–1838) and Henriette Pressburg (1788–1863). Marx was ethnically but not religiously Jewish. His maternal grandfather was a Dutch rabbi, while his paternal line had supplied Trier’s rabbis since 1723, a role taken by his grandfather Meier Halevi Marx. His father, as a child known as Herschel, was the first in the line to receive a secular education. He became a lawyer with a comfortably Upper middle class income; in addition to his income as an attorney, the family owned a number of Moselle vineyards. Prior to his son’s birth, Herschel converted from Judaism to join the state Evangelical Church of Prussia, taking on the German forename Heinrich over the Yiddish Herschel.

Due to his political publications, Marx became stateless and lived in exile with his wife and children in London for decades, where he continued to develop his thought in collaboration with German thinker Friedrich Engels and publish his writings, researching in the reading room of the British Museum. His best-known titles are the 1848 pamphlet, The Communist Manifesto, and the three-volume Das Kapital (1867–1883). His political and philosophical thought had enormous influence on subsequent intellectual, economic and political history, and his name has been used as an adjective, a noun and a school of social theory.

Marx’s critical theories about society, economics and politics – collectively understood as Marxism – hold that human societies develop through class conflict. In capitalism, this manifests itself in the conflict between the ruling classes (known as the bourgeoisie) that control the means of production and the working classes (known as the proletariat) that enable these means by selling their labour power in return for wages. Employing a critical approach known as historical materialism, Marx predicted that, like previous socioeconomic systems, capitalism produced internal tensions that would lead to its self-destruction and replacement by a new system known as socialism.

Marx has been described as one of the most influential figures in human history, and his work has been both lauded and criticised. His work in economics laid the basis for much of the current understanding of labor and its relation to capital, and subsequent economic thought. Many intellectuals, labor unions, artists and political parties worldwide have been influenced by Marx’s work, with many modifying or adapting his ideas. Marx is typically cited as one of the principal architects of modern social science.

The Communist Manifesto…

The Communist Manifesto reflects an attempt to explain the goals of Communism, as well as the theory underlying this movement. It argues that class struggles, or the exploitation of one class by another, are the motivating force behind all historical developments. Class relationships are defined by an era’s means of production. However, eventually these relationships cease to be compatible with the developing forces of production. At this point, a revolution occurs and a new class emerges as the ruling one. This process represents the “march of history” as driven by larger economic forces.

“Modern Industrial society in specific is characterized by class conflict between the bourgeoisie and proletariat…. Thus, the proletariat will lead a revolution. However, this revolution will be of a different character than all previous ones: previous revolutions simply reallocated property in favor of the new ruling class. However, by the nature of their class, the members of the proletariat have no way of appropriating property. Therefore, when they obtain control they will have to destroy all ownership of private property, and classes themselves will disappear.

The Manifesto argues that this development is inevitable, and that capitalism is inherently unstable. The Communists intend to promote this revolution, and will promote the parties and associations that are moving history towards its natural conclusion. They argue that the elimination of social classes cannot come about through reforms or changes in government. Rather, a revolution will be required.

The Communist Manifesto has four sections. In the first section, it discusses the Communists’ theory of history and the relationship between proletarians and bourgeoisie. The second section explains the relationship between the Communists and the proletarians. The third section addresses the flaws in other, previous socialist literature. The final section discusses the relationship between the Communists and other parties.”
Summary excerpt taken from Sparknotes dot com

Das Kapital…

Das Kapital, also called Capital. A Critique of Political Economy (German: Das Kapital. Kritik der politischen Ökonomie, pronounced [das kapiˈtaːl kʁɪˈtiːk deːɐ poˈliːtɪʃən økonoˈmiː]; 1867–1883), is a foundational theoretical text in materialist philosophy, economics and politics by Karl Marx. Marx aimed to reveal the economic patterns underpinning the capitalist mode of production in contrast to classical political economists such as Adam Smith, Jean-Baptiste Say, David Ricardo and John Stuart Mill. While Marx did not live to publish the planned second and third parts, they were both completed from his notes and published after his death by his colleague Friedrich Engels. Das Kapital is the most cited book in the social sciences published before 1950.

Karl Marx and the Communist Manifesto can never be seriously discussed without at least a cursory mention of Friedrich Engels.

Friedrich Engels…

(/ˈɛŋ(ɡ)əlz/ ENG-(g)əlz;German: [ˈfʁiːdʁɪç ˈʔɛŋl̩s]; sometimes anglicised Frederick Engels; 28 November 1820 – 5 August 1895) was a German philosopher, historian, communist, social scientist, sociologist, journalist and businessman. His father was an owner of large textile factories in Salford, England, and Barmen, Prussia (now Wuppertal, Germany).

Engels developed what is now known as Marxist theory together with Karl Marx and in 1845 he published The Condition of the Working Class in England, based on personal observations and research in English cities. In 1848, Engels co-authored The Communist Manifesto with Marx and also authored and co-authored (primarily with Marx) many other works. Later, Engels supported Marx financially, allowing him to do research and write Das Kapital. After Marx’s death, Engels edited the second and third volumes of Das Kapital. Additionally, Engels organized Marx’s notes on the Theories of Surplus Value, which were later published as the “fourth volume” of Das Kapital. In 1884, he published The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State on the basis of Marx’s ethnographic research.

I’ve left several links for the intellectually curious among my readership to do further research about Marx’s “right hand man.” As time constraints simply do not allow me to go as in depth on all these facts and figures as I had to do in researching for this essay.

Vladimir Lenin…..

Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov (22 April 1870 – 21 January 1924), better known by his alias Lenin, was a Russian revolutionary, politician, and political theorist.
Lenin’s father, Ilya Nikolayevich Ulyanov, was from a family of serfs. Despite this lower-class background Ilya had risen to middle-class status, studying physics and mathematics at Kazan Imperial University before teaching at the Penza Institute for the Nobility. Ilya married Maria Alexandrovna Blank in mid-1863. Well educated, she was the daughter of a wealthy German–Swedish Lutheran mother, and a Russian Jewish father who had converted to Christianity and worked as a physician. 

Lenin served as head of government of Soviet Russia from 1917 to 1924 and of the Soviet Union from 1922 to 1924. Under his administration, Russia and then the wider Soviet Union became a one-party communist state governed by the Russian Communist Party. Ideologically a communist, he developed a variant of Marxism known as Leninism. Born to a moderately prosperous middle-class family in Simbirsk, Lenin embraced revolutionary socialist politics following his brother’s 1887 execution.

Lenin’s Bolshevik government initially shared power with the Left Socialist Revolutionaries, elected soviets, and a multi-party Constituent Assembly, although by 1918 it had centralized power in the new Communist Party.
Opponents were suppressed in the Red Terror, a violent campaign administered by the state security services; tens of thousands were killed or interned in concentration camps. His health failing in 1922, Lenin died in Gorki in 1924, with Joseph Stalin succeeding him as the per-eminent figure in the Soviet government.

Widely considered one of the most significant and influential figures of the 20th century. He became an ideological figurehead behind Marxism–Leninism and thus a prominent influence over the international communist movement.
A controversial and highly divisive historical figure, Lenin is viewed by supporters as a champion of socialism and the working class, while critics on both the left and right emphasize his role as founder and leader of an authoritarian regime responsible for political repression and mass killings.

Leninist Communism is a direct descendant of Marxism. He did not believe that Capitalism alone would spark revolution. Lenin felt the need for “professional revolutionaries”

Leninism….

Marxism–Leninism is a political philosophy that seeks to establish a socialist state to develop further into socialism and eventually communism, a classless social system with common ownership of the means of production, with full social and economic equality of all members of society. Marxist–Leninists espouse a wide array of views depending on their understanding of orthodox Marxism and Leninism. As an ideology, it was developed by Joseph Stalin in the late 1920s based on his understanding and synthesis of both orthodox Marxism and Leninism. It was the official state ideology of the Soviet Union and the other ruling parties making up the Eastern Bloc as well as the political parties of the Communist International after Bolshevisation. 
Today, Marxism–Leninism is the ideology of Stalinist and Maoist political parties around the world and remains the official ideology of the ruling parties of China, Cuba, Laos and Vietnam.
It rejected the common notions among Western Marxists at the time of world revolution as a prerequisite for building socialism in favor of the concept of socialism in one country.

The goal of Marxism–Leninism is the revolutionary transformation of a capitalist state into a socialist state by way of two-stage revolution led by a vanguard party of professional revolutionaries drawn from the proletariat.
To realize the two-stage transformation of the state, the vanguard party establishes the dictatorship of the proletariat (as opposed to that of the bourgeoisie) and determines policy through democratic centralism. 
The Marxist–Leninist communist party is the vanguard for the political, economic and social transformation of a capitalist society into a socialist society which is the lower stage of socio-economic development and progress towards the upper-stage communist society which is stateless and classless. It features public ownership of the means of production, accelerated industrialization, pro-active development of society’s productive forces (research and development) and nationalized natural resources.

The Fabian Society…

After the unsuccessful European revolutions of mid-nineteenth Century, socialist reformers realized that a different approach was required. While some hard core revolutionaries still persisted in their violent methods, a more clever approach was devised in England by a group of socialist intellectuals. In 1883 an American citizen born in Scotland, Thomas Davidson, joined with a group of socialists in the London apartment of Edward R. Pease and discussed the establishment of a society for the promotion of Socialism among intellectuals. An English couple, Beatrice and Sidney Webb, and George Bernard Shaw (an outspoken eugenicist), were among the early organizers. The name given to the new society was based on their planned intellectual guerrilla-type tactics. They called their group the British Fabian Socialist Society. The name Fabian was derived from that of the Roman general Quintus Fabius Maximus (Cunctator), whose delaying guerrilla tactics were so effective in Opposing Hannibal across Italy during the second Punic war. The Fabian techniques consisted in attracting highly respectable intellectuals to influence the unsuspecting masses of the population. The scheme has worked to influence the unsuspecting masses of the population….

In 1907 the British Fabian society sponsored a meeting of a group of Russian Marxist revolutionaries in London. At that meeting the Russian Bolshevik Party was formed under the leadership of Vladimir Ulyanov (Lenin). The close ideological ties between the Fabians and the Bolsheviks have remained through the years. The main difference between them lies in their methodology of takeover. The Fabians believe in imposing their brand of Marxism through their intellectual influence over universities, politicians, and the mass communications media. They disdain violence as a means of takeover; although not as eventual means of maintaining power. On the other hand, the Bolsheviks believe in the imposition of Marxism through violent revolution (Marxism-Leninism). Fabian Socialism, long having preceded Marxism-Leninism, achieved some influence in American intellectual circles before the Russian revolution of 1917. By 1929 a prominent Fabian became Prime Minister of Britain…
Since that time both forms of Marxist subversion have been influential in the United States….
Around the turn of this Century the Fabian Socialist Society founded the London School of Economics to insure proper Fabian economic education. By that instrument they have expanded their influence enormously throughout British society and government.
(except from “Extent of Subversion in Campus Disorders, Testimony of Ernesto E. Blanco. Hearings, Ninety-first Congress, First Session. June 19, 1969”

*(interesting to note… Bill Clinton and Tony Blair are Fabian Scholars)

Pavlovian conditioning…

“Given that Communism regards human being in this way, it follows that its major efforts have been towards “bestializing” them—beating them like wild animals, “training” them by instilling fear and inflicting pain and, when necessary, cutting their throats. Very clearly, Lenin accepted this materialist-Darwinist philosophy that regards human beings as animals. After speaking privately with Ivan Petrovich Pavlov, the Russian scientist famous for his experiments on the conditioned reflexes of animals, Lenin tried applying Pavlov’s methods to Russian society. In his book, A People’s Tragedy: A History of the Russian Revolution, Orlando Figes writes about Lenin’s desire to “educate” the Russian people as an animal trainer would, and how the roots of this ambition lie in Darwinism:

In October 1919, according to legend, Lenin paid a secret visit to the laboratory of the great physiologist I. P. Pavlov to find out if his work on the conditional reflexes of the brain might help the Bolsheviks control human behavior. ‘I want the masses of Russia to follow a Communistic pattern of thinking and reacting,’ Lenin explained… Pavlov was astounded. It seemed that Lenin wanted him to do for humans what he had already done for dogs. ‘Do you mean that you would like to standardize the population of Russia? Make them all behave in the same way?’ he asked. ‘Exactly’ replied Lenin. ‘Man can be corrected. Man can be made what we want him to be.’… [T]he ultimate aim of the Communist system was the transformation of human nature. It was an aim shared by the other so-called totalitarian regimes of the inter-war period…As one of the pioneers of the eugenics movement in Nazi Germany put in 1920, ‘it could almost seem as if we have witnessed a change in the concept of humanity…We were forced by the terrible exigencies of war to ascribe a different value to the life of the individual than was the case before.”
(excerpt from the book “Communism In Ambush” by Harun Yahya page 37)

*(Interestingly enough Pavlov was actually opposed to communism and spoke out against it. To his own great peril, and danger of becoming one of the hundreds of millions killed for doing so).
And despite Pavlov refusing Lenin’s requests to enact this vile practice on an unsuspecting populace, less moralistic “scientists” after him indeed did so.
It is these very tactics that are employed to condition the world populace through the corporately owned mainstream media (matrix) of the westernized world. People claim to be “woke” (the opposite of awake ironically), while at the same time constantly sharing the memes, videos, and articles of the very people pulling their “puppet strings.”
While at the same time wondering why there is so much stress and drama in the social media-sphere?
(pro tip – this!)

“Reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else.”
― George Orwell, 1984

Trotsky…

The “Leninist-Communists cannot be mentioned without including Leon Trotsky.
A Menshevik and a very important piece of the Leninist puzzle, and as the War Commissar of the Red Army. I could easily write an entire essay on this incredibly interesting man but alas, I must stay on topic. Therefore I leave you with a summary along with a link or few to aid the research minded among you in your deeper exploration of this particular rabbit hole.
Leon Trotsky, was born Lev Davidovich Bronshtein, to David Leontyevich Bronstein (1847-1922) and Anna Lvovna (née Zhivotovskaya, 1850-1910) on 7 November 1879 [October 26, Old Style], 1879, the fifth child of a Ukrainian-Jewish family of wealthy farmers in Yanovka or Yanivka, in the Kherson governorate of the Russian Empire (now Bereslavka, in Ukraine).

Trotsky’s father, David Bronshtein, was a farmer of Russified Jewish background who had settled as a colonist in the steppe region, and his mother, Anna, was of the educated middle class. He had an older brother and sister; two other siblings died in infancy. At the age of eight, he was sent to school in Odessa, where he spent eight years with the family of his mother’s nephew, a liberal intellectual. When he moved to Nikolayev in 1896 to complete his schooling, he was drawn into an underground socialist circle and introduced to Marxism. After briefly attending the University of Odessa, he returned to Nikolayev to help organize the underground South Russian Workers’ Union.

Arrested in January 1898 for revolutionary activity, Bronshtein spent four and a half years in prison and in exile in Siberia, during which time he married his co-conspirator Aleksandra Sokolovskaya and fathered two daughters. He escaped in 1902 with a forged passport bearing the name Trotsky, which he adopted as his revolutionary pseudonym. His wife remained behind, and the separation became permanent. Trotsky made his way to London, where he joined the group of Russian Social-Democrats working with Vladimir Ulyanov (Lenin) on the revolutionary newspaper Iskra “The Spark.”
At the Second Congress of the Russian Social-Democratic Workers’ Party, held in Brussels and London in July 1903, Trotsky sided with the Menshevik faction—advocating a democratic approach to socialism—against Lenin and the Bolsheviks. Shortly before this, in Paris, Trotsky had met and married Natalya Sedova, by whom he subsequently had two sons, Lev and Sergey.

Joseph Stalin…

Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin  (born Ioseb Besarionis dzе Jugashvili; 18 December [O.S. 6 December] 1878 – 5 March 1953) was a Georgian revolutionary and Soviet politician who led the Soviet Union from the mid-1920s until 1953 as the general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (1922–1952) and premier of the Soviet Union (1941–1953). Despite initially governing the Soviet Union as part of a collective leadership, he eventually consolidated power to become the country’s de facto dictator by the 1930s. A communist ideologically committed to the Leninist interpretation of Marxism, Stalin formalized these ideas as Marxism–Leninism, while his own policies are known as Stalinism.

Born to a poor family in Gori in the Russian Empire (now Georgia), Stalin joined the Marxist Russian Social Democratic Labour Party as a youth. He edited the party’s newspaper, Pravda, and raised funds for Vladimir Lenin‘s Bolshevik faction via robberies, kidnappings, and protection rackets. Repeatedly arrested, he underwent several internal exiles. Stalin formed a Bolshevik Battle Squad which he used to try to keep Baku’s warring ethnic factions apart. Stalin’s Squads disarmed local police and troops, raided government arsenals, and raised funds through protection rackets on large local businesses and mines. They launched attacks on the government’s Cossack troops and pro-Tsarist Black Hundreds, coordinating some of their operations with the Menshevik militia.

In November 1905, Stalin met Lenin for the first time. Although Stalin held Lenin in deep respect, he was vocal in his disagreement with Lenin’s view that the Bolsheviks should field candidates for the forthcoming election to the State Duma; Stalin saw the parliamentary process as a waste of time. Stalin married Kato Svanidze in a church ceremony at Senaki in July 1906. In March 1907 she bore a son, Yakov. By that year—according to the historian Robert Service—Stalin had established himself as “Georgia’s leading Bolshevik”.
In November 1907, his wife died of typhus, and he left his son with her family in Tiflis. 
Deeply affected by the death of his wife, Stalin swore to himself to never allow anyone else into his heart. It was at this point that he became completely numb to the suffering of others.

After the Bolsheviks seized power during the 1917 October Revolution and created a one-party state under Lenin’s newly renamed Communist Party, Stalin joined its governing Politburo. Serving in the Russian Civil War before overseeing the Soviet Union’s establishment in 1922, Stalin assumed leadership over the country following Lenin’s 1924 death. Under Stalin, “Socialism in One Country” became a central tenet of the party’s dogma. Through the Five-Year Plans, the country underwent agricultural collectivisation and rapid industrialisation, creating a centralized command economy. This led to significant disruptions in food production that contributed to the famine of 1932–33. To eradicate accused “enemies of the working class“, Stalin instituted the “Great Purge“, in which over a million were imprisoned and at least 700,000 executed between 1934 and 1939. By 1937, he had complete personal control over the party and state.

Stalin’s government promoted Marxism–Leninism abroad through the Communist International and supported European anti-fascist movements during the 1930s.
The Soviets annexed the Baltic states and helped establish Soviet-aligned governments throughout Central and Eastern Europe, China, and North Korea.
Widely considered one of the 20th century’s most significant figures, Stalin was the subject of a pervasive personality cult within the international Marxist–Leninist movement, which revered him as a champion of the working class and socialism. Conversely, his totalitarian government has been widely condemned for overseeing mass repressions, ethnic cleansing, deportations, hundreds of thousands of executions, and famines that killed millions.

This is but a mere fraction of what there is to be known about “The Man of Steel”.
Stalin, just like all the other men in this thesis could easily engulf the entire essay.
Once again, links for further independent research are provided.

Hitler and the socialist dream…

“He declared that ‘national socialism was based on Marx. Socialists have always disowned him. But a new book insists that he was, at heart, a left-winger”

In April 1945, when Adolf Hitler died by his own hand in the rubble of Berlin, nobody was much interested in what he had once believed. That was to be expected. War is no time for reflection, and what Hitler had done was so shattering, and so widely known through images of naked bodies piled high in mass graves, that little or no attention could readily be paid to National Socialism as an idea. It was hard to think of it as an idea at all. Hitler, who had once looked a crank or a clown, was exposed as the leader of a gang of thugs, and the world was content to know no more than that.
Half a century on, there is much to be said. Even thuggery can have its reasons, and the materials that have newly appeared, though they may not transform judgement, undoubtedly enrich and deepen it. Confidants of Hitler, such as the late Albert Speer, have published their reminiscences; his wartime table-talk is a book; early revelations like Hermann Rauschning’s Hitler Speaks of 1939 have been validated by painstaking research, and the notes of dead Nazis like Otto Wagener have been edited, along with a full text of Goebbels’s diary.

It is now clear beyond all reasonable doubt that Hitler and his associates believed they were socialists, and that others, including democratic socialists, thought so too. The title of National Socialism was not hypocritical. The evidence before 1945 was more private than public, which is perhaps significant in itself. In public Hitler was always anti-Marxist, and in an age in which the Soviet Union was the only socialist state on earth, and with anti-Bolshevism a large part of his popular appeal, he may have been understandably reluctant to speak openly of his sources. His megalomania, in any case, would have prevented him from calling himself anyone’s disciple. That led to an odd and paradoxical alliance between modern historians and the mind of a dead dictator. Many recent analysts have fastidiously refused to study the mind of Hitler; and they accept, as unquestioningly as many Nazis did in the 1930s, the slogan “Crusade against Marxism” as a summary of his views. An age in which fascism has become a term of abuse is unlikely to analyse it profoundly.

His private conversations, however, though they do not overturn his reputation as an anti-Communist, qualify it heavily. Hermann Rauschning, for example, a Danzig Nazi who knew Hitler before and after his accession to power in 1933, tells how in private Hitler acknowledged his profound debt to the Marxian tradition. “I have learned a great deal from Marxism” he once remarked, “as I do not hesitate to admit”. He was proud of a knowledge of Marxist texts acquired in his student days before the First World War and later in a Bavarian prison, in 1924, after the failure of the Munich putsch.
The trouble with Weimar Republic politicians, he told Otto Wagener at much the same time, was that “they had never even read Marx”, implying that no one who had failed to read so important an author could even begin to understand the modern world; in consequence, he went on, they imagined that the October revolution in 1917 had been “a private Russian affair”, whereas in fact it had changed the whole course of human history!

His differences with the communists, he explained, were less ideological than tactical. German communists he had known before he took power, he told Rauschning, thought politics meant talking and writing. They were mere pamphleteers, whereas “I have put into practice what these peddlers and pen pushers have timidly begun”, adding revealingly that “the whole of National Socialism” was based on Marx. – George Watson
excerpt from “Hitler and the socialist dream” (Article published in The Independent – Sunday 22 November 1998 01:02)