The Crisis of Modernity (McGill-Queen's Studies in the History of Ideas Book 64)

by Augusto Del Noce

In Nazism everything develops as if the criterion of truth were to replace each Communist category with its exact opposite, but still within the same materialistic perspective of Marxism. Thus, class is replaced by race, the bourgeois by the Jew. Hence, history is interpreted as a death struggle between the Aryan and the Jew, which has now reached the decisive stage when evil will be defeated or will triumph. It is not by chance that the anti-Semitic passages of Mein Kampf take a universalistic missionary tone – the same idea as the universal mission of the proletarian revolution – and that Hitler could feel that he was the world’s saviour. In opposition to Marxism’s emphasis on the future, Nazism emphasizes the past. In opposition to the secularized Marxist eschatology that places the perfect society at the end of times, Nazi mythology places it before history. The Nazi revolution, albeit in the form of revolution against the revolution, aimed at realizing a new man that would fulfill the Aryan type, which had never been realized before in pure form. This is why Nazism wished to call itself a revolution. Hatred for Bolshevism, which may seem reactionary, was accompanied by revolutionary hatred for the old world, as shown by the fact that no previous period of history was taken as a model.