Socialism's Heresy, Fascism...

"What distinguished Nazism from traditional forms of socialism was its febrile nationalism, although not its virulence against despisedpeoples. Marx, as we have seen, looked forward to the "annihilation"of "reactionary races." The examples he gave were "Croats, Pandurs, Czechs and similar scum." He did not in this passage mention Jews, but his desire for their disappearance was amply expressed elsewhere. His aspiration for "the emancipation of society from Judaism" because"the practical Jewish spirit" of "huckstering" had taken over the Christian nations is not that far from the Nazi program's twenty-fourth point: "combating the Jewish-materialist spirit within us and without us" in order "that our nation can.. . achieve permanent health." What also distinguished National Socialism from the mainstream Left was Hitler's insistence that he aimed to "destroy Marxism," and he railed in Mein Kampf against "scatterbrains" who "have not understood the difference between socialism and Marxism. " Yet on other occasions he confessed himself an heir to the Marxian legacy. "National Socialism derives from each of the two camps the pure idea that characterizes it, national resolution from the bourgeois tradition, [and] vital, creative socialism from the teachings of Marxism," he told an interviewer in1934. And his one-time disciple Hermann Rauschning wrote that Hitler once said to him:

I have learned a great deal from Marxism as I do not hesitate to admit....The difference between them and myself is that I have really put intopractice what these peddlers and pen-pushers have timidly begun.The whole of National Socialism is based on it.... National Socialism is what Marxism might have been if it could have broken its absurd and artificial ties with a democratic order."

(Heaven on Earth: The Rise and Fall of Socialism.(2002: Encounter Books)
by Joshua Muravchik :164)