There have been plenty of depictions of dystopian future from popular entertainment media over the years, most of them derivatives of books like Brave New World by Aldous Huxley or 1984 by George Orwell with a contemporary spin. Interestingly, Orwell was inspired to write 1984 by a lesser known dystopian tale called ‘We’, written by Russian author Yevgeny Zamyatin during the darkest years of communism. Orwell argued that Huxley was also inspired by We, but Huxley denied it.
Whenever scientific dictatorship is envisioned by fiction writers the end result is usually very similar to already existing socialist regimes. Soviet doctrine and the ideals of the Third Reich were inspired by Karl Marx; meaning, both regimes were built on far-left philosophies. Progressives today often maliciously associate Nazis with conservative thought, but both Adolph Hitler and Benito Mussolini were avid followers of Marx. As Hitler noted on January 27, 1934, in an interview with Hanns Johst in Frankforter Volksblatt:
“National Socialism derives from each of the two camps the pure idea that characterizes it, national resolution from bourgeois tradition; vital, creative socialism from the teachings of Marxism. Volksgemeinschaft: that means a community of all productive labor, that means the oneness of all vital interests, that means overcoming bourgeois privatism and the unionized, mechanically organized masses, that means unconditionally equating the individual fate and the nation, the individual and the Volk…”
Hitler presented himself as a Christian patriot to win over the German public as they faced economic and moral degradation during the unchecked liberalism of the 1920s, but in private he was not a fan of the religion. Hitler is noted by Albert Speer as saying:
“You see, it’s been our misfortune to have the wrong religion. Why didn’t we have the religion of the Japanese, who regard sacrifice for the Fatherland as the highest good? The Mohammedan religion [Islam] too would have been more compatible to us than Christianity. Why did it have to be Christianity with its meekness and flabbiness?”
Hellbound and Down 