“Given these evolving notions, it would seem that communism, like fascism—however counterintuitive the idea might be—was a right-wing revolutionary movement. As a consequence, we are now counselled that ‘perhaps we have tended to misjudge the communist elites of yesterday and failed to notice their latent nationalism all along.’ And perhaps we never really appreciated the hierarchical character of communist systems, or the role played in the various regimes by the Vozhd or the Chairman, the Dear Leader or the Lider Massimo.”

The Faces of Janus: Marxism and Fascism in the Twentieth Century, (2000)

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A. James Gregor64

American political scientist 1929–2019

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“We are left with a budget of paradoxes. Given the seeming logic of the proposed classification of right-wing polities—with nationalism, hierarchical political structures, and charismatic leadership as defining properties— both fascism and Marxism-Leninism would seem to be political products of right-wing extremism. Should that be the case, the revolutions undertaken by Benito Mussolini, Adolf Hitler, Josef Stalin, and Mao Zedong were all right-wing endeavors.”

A. James Gregor (1929–2019) American political scientist

Source: The Faces of Janus: Marxism and Fascism in the Twentieth Century, (2000), p. 5

“I am not a communist and neither is the revolutionary movement, but we do not have to say that we are anticommunists just to fawn on foreign powers.”

Fidel Castro (1926–2016) former First Secretary of the Communist Party and President of Cuba

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“The third factor inhibiting inquiries into the influence of Bolshevism on Fascism and National Socialism was the insistence of Moscow on banishing from the vocabulary of ‘progressive’ thought the adjective ‘totalitarian’ in favor of ‘Fascist’ to describe all anti-Communist movements and regimes.”

Richard Pipes (1923–2018) American historian

Source: Russia Under The Bolshevik Regime (1994), p. 242

“To us it seems incredible that the Greek philosophers should have scanned so deep into right and wrong and yet never noticed the immorality of slavery. Perhaps three thousand years from now it will seem equally incredible that we do not notice the immorality of our oppression of animals.”

Brigid Brophy (1929–1995) novelist, essayist

Source: The Rights of Animals (1965), p. 17

“Given the opportunity, Mussolini would have been glad as late as 1920-21 to take under his wing the Italian Communists, for whom he felt great affinities: greater, certainly, than for democratic socialists, liberals and conservatives. Genetically, Fascism issued from the 'Bolshevik' wing of Italian socialism, not from any conservative ideology or movement.”

Richard Pipes (1923–2018) American historian

Source: Russia Under The Bolshevik Regime (1994), p. 253

“Resting beneath the mighty Communist regime is a civil society that remains weak. It doesn't have much courage and is not very sophisticated. As a civil society it is still in a nascent stage, and this is why we mus not expect it, in the near term, to produce a political organization that might replace the Communist regime.”

Liu Xiaobo (1955–2017) Chinese literary critic, writer, professor, and human rights activist

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“We had Italy in our hands. We would never have wanted to attack, but we were like a sentinel, carefully ensuring that the Communist party should never emerge.”

Licio Gelli (1919–2015) Italian financier, liaison with Nazi Germany, P2 grandmaster, involved in many scandals

[Politi, James, Licio Gelli, fascist and masonic chief, https://www.ft.com/content/7d3fdd08-a418-11e5-8218-6b8ff73aae15, 16 August 2018, Financial Times, December 17, 2015]

“Fascism was created by the nationalization of certain sectors of the revolutionary left, and the central role in its conceptual orientation was played by revolutionary syndicalists who embraced extreme nationalism.”

Stanley G. Payne (1934) American historian

Source: Fascism: Comparison and Definition (1980), p. 42

“In order to abolish the idea of private property, the idea of communism is completely sufficient. It takes actual communist action to abolish actual private property. History will com to it; and this movement, which in theory we already know to be a self-transcending movement, will constitute in actual fact a very severe and protracted process. But we must regard it as a real advance to have gained beforehand a consciousness of the limited character a well as of the goal of this historical movement - and a consciousness which reaches out beyond it.”

Karl Marx book Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844

Source: Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, p. 99, The Marx-Engels Reader

“It all comes down to what neither the softliners nor the hardliners want to acknowledge: this is a successful right-wing state, not a failed communist one.”

Brian Reynolds Myers (1963) American professor of international studies

2010s, Interview with Joshua Stanton (August 2017)

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