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Notes -
This is consistent with Enlightenment-derived movements and thinking, however. While this begs (as always) what the nature of the enlightenment was, it's generally accepted that both the slave-holding American and the Europe-conquering French revolutions were expressions of it, and the idea of a national / social contract model which ties the ruler to the people, and vice versa, was absolutely a part of both. So was the relative partition of 'us' versus 'them' that led to looser rules of conducts to the out groups including, well, slavery and conquest. You even had the shared rationalizations of tearing down an unjust surrounding political order to all the people (tribes, if you will) express themselves. Naturally we remember this as good because they won and we liked them winning, but the French revolution wasn't exactly shy about exporting the revolution.
For all that the nazis were warmongers who wanted to conquer and colonize others, that too was consistent with the enlightenment civilizations. The status quo powers had just already conquered and colonized enough of the world between them that they didn't want to continue- but they were enlightenment-derived nations when they did so. That is the primary 'pre-modern' thinking- modernity was the status quo, not that post-enlightenment states didn't conquer or do terrible things.
There is always a tension in the enlightenment between it's generally positive connotation and the bad-to-terrible things that Enlightenment-states did. But the French Revolution has about as much a claim as anyone else attempts to separate the french revolution and Napoleon from it runs into typical problems of trying to define away the morally bad stuff, which returns it to the moral connotation argument. The Nazis aren't non-enlightenment just because they did bad things, unless bad things are incompatible with Enlightenment influence.
Which seems pretty unlikely, unless you start moving back the enlightenment a few hundred years to after the Nazis and European de-imperialization.
Using the word "modern" in any such discussion without exactly specifying what it is supposed to mean is usually a massive source of confusion. The comment you are replying to seems to use it with the meaning of post-1945-liberalism, and with such a comparison of course historical fascism is not "modern". post-1945-liberalism was pretty explicitly theorized to be a complete refutal of historical fascism.
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