In the early 1920s Mussolini was amongst the first fascists to refer approvingly to the newly
             emerging Italian Fascist state as 'totalitarian'. During the late 1950s and the early 1960s –
             particularly in a Cold War fixated America - a theory centred on totalitarianism became the
             dominant academic narrative on both fascism and communism.
             This was in good part due to its use in legitimising certain anti-communist conservative political
             aims of the Cold War (by associating communism with the universally hated Nazism) and an
             associated solid support in the western popular media which fastened on to this easy to
             understand model and repeated it ad nausium. The correct interpretation of its nazi past
             became a potent ideological weapon in the propaganda war, with historians on both sides
             embroiled in a heavily charged political debate as to whether Nazism was either an expression
             of big business (and therefore chiefly a capitalist and liberal phenomenon), or a variety of
             'totalitarian' regime still expressed in East German 'communism'.
             This historical revisionism was to return in another guise in 1986 with the so called
             historikerstreit ( 'historians battle') Sparked off by the text of a lecture to be given by Ernst Nolte
             in Munich, and a rejoinder to the text, and to the work of Cologne based historian Andreas
             Hillgrubber by Jurgen Habermas. Nolte sought to impose a totalitarian identity with communism
             and modern liberation movements. Habermas saw this as neo-conservative revisionism and
             relativism. In one of his most critical passages Habermas asserted that:
             Nolte is the officious-conservative narrator...he reconstructs a background history for
             mass terror. As it reaches back in time it includes the "Gulag," Stalin's expulsion of the
             kulaks, and the Bolshevik revolution: he sees antecedents of mass terror in Babeuf, the
             early socialist...