Its a great quote, no matter who said it... and actually I was going to use this photo... a friend of mine had seen an interview with a tea party member and they caught this rather candid 'accessory' shot...
It may be a "great quote", but it is also exceedingly inaccurate, if not intentionally misleading.
The reason fascism is so misunderstood is because of Stalin's use of it to demonize his political enemies. Orthodox socialists considered fascism (and national socialism) to be Marxist heresy. But, as much as your signature attempts to paint it as right wing, it is an ideology of the left.
I am a Socialist, and a very different kind of Socialist from your rich friend, Count Reventlow. ... What you understand by Socialism is nothing more than Marxism.
Adolf Hitler, spoken to Otto Strasser, Berlin, May 21, 1930.
We National Socialists [Nazi] are enemies, deadly enemies, of the present capitalist system with its exploitation of the economically weak ... and we are resolved under all circumstances to destroy this system.
-Gregor Strasser
[With Mussolini] Socialists should be delighted to find at last a socialist who speaks and thinks as responsible rulers do.
-George Bernard Shaw
And then we have F.A. Hayek's work on this in
The Road To Serfdom...
It is a common mistake to regard National Socialism [Nazism] as a mere revolt against reason, an irrational movement without intellectual background. If that were so, the movement would be much less dangerous than it is. But nothing could be further from the truth or more misleading. The doctrines of National Socialism are the culmination of a long evolution of thought, a process in which thinkers who have had great influence far beyond the confines of Germany have taken part. Whatever one may think of the premises from which they started, it cannot be denied that the men who produced the new doctrines were powerful writers who left the impress of their ideas on the whole of European thought. Their system was developed with ruthless consistency. Once one accepts the premises from which it starts, there is no escape from its logic. It is simply collectivism freed from all traces of an individualist tradition which might hamper its realization.
....
What, then, caused these views held by a reactionary minority finally to gain the support of the great majority of Germans and practically the whole of Germany's youth? It was not merely the defeat, the suffering, and the wave of nationalism which led to their success. Still less was the cause, as so many people wish to believe, a capitalist reaction against the advance of socialism. On the contrary, the support which brought these ideas to power came precisely from the socialist camp. It was certainly not through the bourgeoisie, but rather through the absence of a strong bourgeoisie, that they were helped to power.
... the socialists of the Left approached more and more to those of the Right. It was the union of the anticapitalist forces of the Right and of the Left, the fusion of radical and conservative socialism, which drove out from Germany everything that was liberal [in the classical sense].
The connection between socialism and nationalism in Germany was close from the beginning. It is significant that the most important ancestors of National Socialism—Fichte, Rodbertus, and Lassalle—are at the same time acknowledged fathers of socialism. .... From 1914 onward there arose from the ranks of Marxist socialism one teacher after another who led, not the conservatives and reactionaries, but the hard-working laborer and idealist youth into the National Socialist fold. It was only thereafter that the tide of nationalist socialism attained major importance and rapidly grew into the Hitlerian doctrine.
