“Marxists could be converted to national socialism, as indeed quite a number of them were, similarly, national socialism could sign treaties with Communist, exchange ambassadors, and coexist with the, if only temporarily. Nothing like this, however, applied to the Jews.”

—  Zeev Sternhell

Source: The Birth of Fascist Ideology: From Cultural Rebellion to Political Revolution, 1994, p. 5

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "Marxists could be converted to national socialism, as indeed quite a number of them were, similarly, national socialism…" by Zeev Sternhell?
Zeev Sternhell photo
Zeev Sternhell 12
Israeli historian 1935

Related quotes

“National Socialism could not be deduced exclusively from a reaction to the Bolshevik movement, that on the contrary there existed, even before the war, a brutal German nationalism, and that explicit intentions of extermination of the Jews were even expressed in the program of one party.”

Ernst Nolte (1923–2016) German historian and philosopher

Source: Fascism & Communism (2004), p. 27

Adolf Hitler photo

“Not long ago, an American magazine wrote that what was worst about National Socialism was its women. They said that National Socialism did more for women than any other nation. It improved their social position. It began to bring them together in tremendous organizations. It sent the women of the educated classes into the factories so that female workers could go on vacation, and so on. The paper concluded that the democracies could not imitate this.”

Adolf Hitler (1889–1945) Führer and Reich Chancellor of Germany, Leader of the Nazi Party

As quoted in The Third Reich: A New History by Michael Burleigh, p. 2842
Other remarks

Hermann Rauschning photo

“We see then that National Socialism, like the Marxist Socialist parties, has a sort of religious element that demands the sacrifice of the intellect and of individual opinions.”

Hermann Rauschning (1887–1982) German politician

Source: Men in Chaos (1942), p. 56

Ernesto Che Guevara photo

“As Marxists we have maintained that peaceful coexistence among nations does not encompass coexistence between the exploiters and the exploited, between the oppressors and the oppressed.”

Ernesto Che Guevara (1928–1967) Argentine Marxist revolutionary

Address to the United Nations (1964)

Gottfried Feder photo

“The interest slavery of the nation means the rule of the bank and stock-exchange. The breaking of interest slavery is by far the greatest task of National Socialism.”

Gottfried Feder (1883–1941) German economist and politician

Source: The German State on a National and Socialist Foundation (1923), p. 113

Jesse Owens photo

“Joe Louis and I were the first modern national sports figures who were black… But neither of us could do national advertising because the South wouldn't buy it. That was the social stigma we lived under.”

Jesse Owens (1913–1980) American track and field athlete

The Tampa Tribune (1 April 1980)

Leonid Brezhnev photo

“Communists have always viewed the national question through the prism of the class struggle, believing that its solution has to be subordinated to the interests of the Revolution, to the interests of socialism. That is why Communists and all fighters for socialism believe that the main aspect of the national question is unification of the working people, regardless of their national origin, in the common struggle against every type of oppression, and for a new social system which rules out exploitation of the working people.”

Leonid Brezhnev (1906–1982) General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union

Cited in Nations and Internationalism http://leninist.biz/en/1979/NI302/0-Introduction.005

Margaret Thatcher photo

“Nazism (national Socialism) and communism (international socialism) were but two sides of the same coin.”

Margaret Thatcher (1925–2013) British stateswoman and politician

The Path To Power (1995)

Jonah Goldberg photo

“We can debate how much socialism there was in Hitler’s National Socialism. It is remarkable, however, that many of the people insisting that Norway or Sweden is obviously socialist even though they both are more free-market than Hitlerite Germany are aghast at the suggestion that the National Socialists were…socialists.”

Jonah Goldberg (1969) American political writer and pundit

2010s, 2018, Socialism is So Hot Right Now (2018)

“Even the word “socialism” itself was originally applied to the free communist communities which were so common in America in the nineteenth century.”

Kenneth Rexroth (1905–1982) American poet, writer, anarchist, academic and conscientious objector

Introduction : The Libertarian Tradition http://www.bopsecrets.org/rexroth/communalism1.htm
Communalism (1974)
Context: Prior to 1918 the word “communism” did not mean Left Social Democracy of the sort represented by the Russian Bolsheviks, a radical, revolutionary form of State socialism. Quite the contrary, it was used of those who wished in one way or another to abolish the State, who believed that socialism was not a matter of seizing power, but of doing away with power and returning society to an organic community of non-coercive human relations. They believed that this was what society was naturally, and that the State was only a morbid growth on the normal body of oeconomia, the housekeeping of the human family, grouped in voluntary association. Even the word “socialism” itself was originally applied to the free communist communities which were so common in America in the nineteenth century.

Related topics