“The new regime was headed by Ernst Niekisch, a left-wing Social Democrat and teacher from Augsburg in Swabia. His ascendancy to power in Bavaria signaled a clear move away from a process of democratization compatible with Western-style parliamentary democracy. He was a supporter of National Bolshevism, a political movement that rejected the internationalism of Bolshevism but, other than that, believed in Bolshevism.”

— Thomas Weber (historian)

Source: Becoming Hitler: The Making of a Nazi (2017), p. 38

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

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Thomas Weber (historian) 23

German historian 1974

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Noam Chomsky (1928) american linguist, philosopher and activist

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Quotes 1960s–1980s, 1980s

“The fact that the causes and effective potentialities of Bolshevism were already existent in a latent form in democracy explains why Bolshevism flourishes only on democratic soil, and is indeed generally the inevitable consequence of a radical and excessively democratic conception of the State. Bolshevism allegedly makes a classless society its aim. The equality of whatever bears a human form, which democracy applied only to political and social life, is set up as a ruling principle for economic life also. In this respect there are supposed to be no differences left. But this equality of all individuals in respect of economic goods can, in the Marxist-Bolshevist view, result only from a brutal and pitiless class struggle. … It is only logical that in connexion with this, Bolshevism should proclaim the equality of nations and races. … The opposition between the democratic and the Bolshevist mentality and conception of the State are in the last resort merely theoretical, and here we have the answer to the mysterious riddle which overshadows Europe and the explanation both of the opposition in the lives of nations to-day and of the things which they have in common. It enables us to see at once why democracy and Bolshevism, which in the eyes of the world are irrevocably opposed to one another, meet again and again on common ground in their joint hatred of and attacks on authoritarian nationalist concepts of State and State systems. For the authoritarian nationalist conception of the State represents something essentially new. In it the French Revolution is superseded.”

Joseph Goebbels (1897–1945) Nazi politician and Propaganda Minister

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Source: Disputed, Hitler Speaks (1940), pp. 131-132.

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Hermann Rauschning (1887–1982) German politician

Source: The Voice of Destruction (1940), pp. 131-132

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Richard Pipes (1923–2018) American historian

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

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

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Thomas Mann book The Coming Victory of Democracy

The Coming Victory of Democracy (1938), p. 14, translated by Agnes E. Meyer, Knopf (1938)

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Thomas Weber (historian) 23

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