With regard to Nazism I think that we should emphasize not so much the relationship with Fascism – of which it is said to be an extreme form, which is a rather vague analysis – as much as the relationship that ties it to Communism as its 𝘦𝘹𝘢𝘤𝘵 𝘰𝘱𝘱𝘰𝘴𝘪𝘵𝘦. I mean that we should focus on the fact that Nazism reproduces, in reverse but with perfect symmetry, the characteristics of Communism at the stage when it reaches its unintended outcome.

Fascism, in its subordination-opposition to Communism, corresponds to the Leninist stage of the revolution. Nazism, instead, is the phenomenon correlative to Stalinism in this subordination-opposition. With Stalin Marxism seemed to have become the instrument for an inversion of the movement of history, for the westward counter-expansion of the East against the West, and the first nation threatened by it was Germany.

A transposition of totalitarianism from “physical” to “moral” … would be achieved through the prevalence of coercion over consent, obtained through discrimination against questions, prohibiting those that the interpreters of ideology … define as “reactionary”. Or rather, through the creation, which is arranged through the domination of culture and education, of a new “common sense”, in which traditional metaphysical questions no longer resurface.

The primary theme that characterizes rationalism must be identified in the rejection of the biblical notion of sin. …

Let us now review, quickly, the essential texts of rationalism about sin, and observe that they are fundamentally identical. There is Bruno’s famous passage in 𝘚𝘱𝘢𝘤𝘤𝘪𝘰 𝘥𝘦𝘭𝘭𝘢 𝘣𝘦𝘴𝘵𝘪𝘢 𝘵𝘳𝘪𝘰𝘯𝘧𝘢𝘯𝘵𝘦, which says that the Fall was necessary, and has been salutary, because man’s morality is not innocence but knowledge of good and evil. …

Consider the internal evolution of Communism and its character: the universal revolution conceived by Lenin and Trotsky halts in front of the reality of the nations. Stalin’s figure rises, as the realistic acceptance of this halt, and we must say that is not true at all that he was a demonic and grotesque character as he is often clumsily ridiculed today, as if he understood Communism in a Nazi way.

The ideal of Christian politics must, in my opinion, be seen as an eternal (in the sense of never exhausted; the Christian is always fighting) restoration of principles (not to be confused with the “restoration of facts” proper to reaction) in their eternal character; … … as a dissociation of the eternal principles from their historical realization, which are always relative to a given historical problem and in this way inadequate; that is, as an affirmation of the transcendence of principles, of their eternity, …

Democracy as a value can be justified only starting from the affirmation of the transcendent dignity of man who, as a single person, ontologically surpasses the entire species, because he is ‘capax Dei’ (“capable of God”) … … and transcends that order of finite creatures in which the human species is inserted. It is from this conviction that historically the claim of a right not to be coerced into one’s conscience arises, which is at the basis of the genesis of the modern rule of law.

Recall Max Horkheimer’s thesis on the distinction between the two phases of the development of the bourgeois world. During the first, the family is preserved within the bourgeois world itself, that is, a non-bourgeois institution, founded on the preservation of values ​​of different origins from those specific to the bourgeoisie.

[Total] revolution is an ideal category which is reached through a philosophical process. It means the liberation of man, via politics, from the alienation imposed on him by the social orders that have been realized so far, and rooted only in the structure of these orders. Therefore, it implies the replacement of religion by politics for the sake of man’s liberation, since evil is a consequence of society, which has become the subject of culpability, and not [a consequence] of an original sin.

Today we can distinguish the various stances that Catholics take on politics. I will begin by defining four views that are, in my judgement, inadequate. Some say: the new orientation of society is irreparably in conflict with Christian values. And since these latter have absolute value, their absoluteness requires that political authority enforce respect for them, at least exteriorly. This is the traditionalist position.

Marxism represents the outcome of rationalism and is therefore an insuperable position within the circle of rationalism, but it also represents its self-criticism. … At this point, it becomes clear that even if we abandon the Christian-Marxist delusion, … … the value of Balbo’s thesis remains intact: “Marxism opens up the possibility of a non-mystified investigation of the question of being, the way to non-mystified religious work, it forces Christian thought to re-express itself with formulas that are no longer mystified.”

The critique of Christian-Marxism … [is] quite easy. … Marxist scientific reason does not stand by itself, so to speak, but expresses the recourse to experimental verification which is required by the reduction of philosophical concepts to working hypotheses; … … this reduction, in turn, is based on the critique of every transcendence of the human being with respect to his historical determination; … every aspect of the Marxist political praxis is not intelligible except in relation to this critique; ...

In a [conception of] politics that obeys the postulate of [original] sin, the struggle against evil and the realization of a relative degree of perfection is the task of the individual, and thus is a struggle that can, indeed, minimize evil, … … which is beatable in that precise moment and at that precise point, but cannot extinguish it at its root; and the politician’s ministerial, and not dominative, task is that of establishing the best conditions to facilitate this struggle. What evil? The definition can change.

Fascism and anti-fascism [are] successive and opposite moments of a further revolution than Marx-Leninism. There are singular symmetries between Mussolini’s fascism and Gramsci’s anti-fascist unity. The term ‘fasces’ evokes the idea of ​​divergent political forces, perhaps with opposing ultimate goals, which are associated against a common adversary. … What is essential in fascism as well as in Gramsci’s [anti-fascist] block is the “against”; …

The Gramscian influence … has been enormous, but the types of intellectual that prevail today are that of the “desecrator” or “demystifier” and that of the “expert” or “technician”; what relationship do they have with the Gramscian figure of the “organic” intellectual? I reply that they are the result of its decomposition. The intellectual was assigned by Gramsci a function somewhat similar to that which Marx assigned to the proletariat: that of one who, by freeing himself, frees the world.

What cultural idea led people [incorrectly] to generalize the idea of Fascism to the point of including [in it] any movement that was either authoritarian or generically inclined to defend the past … [and also] to interpret Nazism as the necessary conclusion of this idea? You must think of the standard education of a secular intellectual. It was based – and it is still based, although recently there has been more critical awareness – on an act of faith (which is analogous to the faith in religious revelation of medieval philosophers) …

A transposition of totalitarianism from the “physical” to the “moral” … [is achieved] through the creation, which is arranged by the domination of culture and education, of a new “common sense”, in which traditional metaphysical questions no longer resurface. It is with regard to Gramsci that we can understand in all its depth the apparently very simple formula with which Eric Voegelin defined totalitarianism: “the prohibition of asking questions”.

The secular philosophers of the twentieth century, be they idealists, or Marxists, or neo-positivists, can be defined collectively as “philosophers after the death of God”, this death having been accepted as a result of history. But this idea, as an interpretation of the historical process particular to modern thought, has also been accepted in an inverted form, as regards its evaluation, by the critics of the modern world:

Let us move on to the contemplative aspect of Vico’s ‘New Science’: “the reader will experience in his mortal body a divine pleasure as he contemplates in the divine ideas this world of nations in all the extent of its places, times and varieties” (sec. 345). What the ‘New Science’ leads to is a feeling of admiration for the architecture of the universe, considered from the standpoint of its historical laws. But Malebranche had said exactly the same, in reference to the general laws of the physical world: …

We can say that there are, in Western thought, two great cycles of political thought, bearing in mind that it is not at all true that what comes later is worth more than what comes earlier: one, from Plato to Dante; the other from Marsilius of Padua to us. The first incorporates politics into morality (and we must not forget the political origins of Plato’s thought, against sophistic immorality), seen as respect for an absolute order of values; and understands this incorporation as a continual fight for justice against ‘cupiditas’.

In regard to totalitarianism, we must observe that it is first of all a moral and philosophical reality based on the ethics of the direction of history …; that one must not associate totalitarianism, as people usually do, with the idea of extermination camps and so on, … … even though one is easily led to make this association by remembering Hitler and Stalin; that in principle it can realize itself while formally preserving democratic institutions; that the true point on which it cannot not be intransigent is the ethics I mentioned. …