There is only one intellectual position in modern times which disregards history as either a matter of interest in its own right (beyond a paranoia about the conspiracies of the recent past), or as the central determinant of human character and behaviour. That position is fascism. As Mussolini's own definition makes clear, fascism is an obscure response to the event of communism, the major truth claim of the twentieth century which generated a faithful response in Russia (all too soon collapsing into the catastrophe of total enforcement of the idea) and a reactive response in the social-democratic politics of the European welfare-state model and the New Deal in the United States. Communism, and its view of human history as the history of class struggle, is the founding truth on which all three responses take their stand. Fascisms rejection of the communist view of history is a denial of history as such, since its corollary is a rejection of the idea that human nature itself is a sedimented history.