It is worth to recall here Ernst Nolte's book on Heidegger, which brought fresh wind into the eternal debate on "Heidegger and the political" - it did this on the very account of its "unacceptable" option: far from excusing Heidegger's infamous political choice in 1933, it justifies it - or, at least, it de-demonizes it, rendering it as a viable and meaningful choice. Against the standard defenders of Heidegger whose mantra is that Heidegger's Nazi engagement was a personal mistake of no fundamental consequences for his thought, Nolte accepts the basic claim of Heidegger's critics that his Nazi choice is inscribed into his thought - but with a twist: instead of problematizing his thought, Nolte justifies his political choice as a viable option in the situation of late 1920s and early 1930s with the economic chaos and Communist threat:

Insofar as Heidegger resisted the attempt at the Communist solution, he, like countless others, was historically right ... In committing himself to the National Socialist solution perhaps he became a 'fascist.' But in no way did that make him historically wrong from the outset.

Nolte also formulated the basic terms and topics of the "revisionist" debate whose basic tenet is to "objectively compare" Fascism and Communism: Fascism and even Nazism was ultimately a reaction to the Communist threat and a repetition of its worst practices (concentration camps, mass liquidations of political enemies):

Could it be the case that the National Socialists and Hitler carried out an 'Asiatic' deed the Holocaust only because they considered themselves and their kind to be potential or actual victims of a Bolshevik 'Asiatic' deed. Didn't the 'Gulag Archipelago' precede Auschwitz?

The merit of Nolte is to approach seriously the task of grasping Fascism - and even Nazism - as a feasible political project, which is a sine qua non if its effective criticism. - It is here that one has to make the choice: the "pure" liberal stance of equidistance towards Leftist and Rightist "totalitarianism" (they are both bead, based on the intolerance of political and other differences, the rejection of democratic and humanist values, etc.) is a priori false, one HAS to take side and proclaim one fundamentally "worse" than the other - for this reason, the ongoing "relativization" of Fascism, the notions that one should rationally compare the two totalitarianisms, etc., ALWAYS involves the - explicit or implicit - thesis that Fascism was "better" than Communism, an understandable reaction to the Communist threat.

¶ 9:33 AM