WHAT IS FASCISM

 

INTRODUCTION

 

The term “Fascism” was forever defined by Benito Mussolini who founded the Fascist movement in 1914 and led the “National Fascist Party” in Italy from 1922 to 1943.  The term itself is derived from the Latin “fasci” meaning a bundle of sticks meant to refer to a socialistic collectivism.

 

Fascists unabashedly espoused a big government welfare state, promoted a centrally planned economy, rejected religion, capitalism and private property rights, and enacted purely left-wing programs modeled on those of the Communists in the Soviet Union.

Mussolini was a lifelong devotee of Karl Marx’s Communist manifesto adapting his left wing socialist ideology to Italian politics and culture [q.v. the following Appendix: Mussolini’s Invention of an Italian Marxist Ideology].   He was a gifted public speaker known for dramatic spectacles as in this classic photo from the balcony of the Palazzo Venezia, Rome, Italy, at a Fascist Party rally in 1933.

 

A few well attested features of Fascism, which are identical then and now, to the well known liberal policies of the American democrat party include

1.      Elimination of religion from the public sphere.  Suppression of religious freedom and substitution of “scientific socialism”.  In Italy, this meant confiscation of Church property and bank accounts.

2.      Massive public works programs similar to the “Works Project Administration” (WPA) of US President Roosevelt in the US to hire unskilled workers for superfluous make-work government jobs.

3.      Supplemental food assistance similar to US Food Stamps.

4.      A guaranteed minimum wage, wage supplements, a maximum work day of eight hours, mandatory paid vacations, and unemployment benefits.

5.      General family assistance.

6.      Public housing similar to the sub-prime mortgage program of the US democrat party.

7.      Nationalized health care to include maternity leave and state run day care facilities which is the same as Obama-Care but without the free enterprise components.

8.      Introduction of government provided old age and disability insurance similar to US Social Security and Medicare.

9.      Nationalization of industry so that in 1934, Mussolini boasted that three-quarters of Italian businesses "is in the hands of the state". [1][2]  By 1939, Fascist Italy had the highest rate of state ownership of any economy in the world other than the Soviet Union, [3].  The Italian state “controlled over four-fifths of Italy’s shipping and shipbuilding, three-quarters of its pig iron production and almost half that of steel” [4].  Invariably the resulting inefficiencies of big government control destroyed the economy requiring ever more “social care and fixing.”

10.  Massive tax hikes along with deficit spending.  Basically, Mussolini spent Italy into a structural deficit that grew exponentially and unsustainably [5].  In Mussolini’s first year as Prime Minister in 1922, the national debt was 93 billion lire, [6] increasing to 149 billion lire in 1934 and to 406 billion in 1943. [7]

 

FASCIST PROGRAMS

 

In common with left wing socialistic movements everywhere, their program was a familiar one.   Basically, the Fascists came to power promising free stuff to the poor.  And initially they succeeded by massively increasing taxes and public debt as well as outright confiscation of wealth which was then lavishly redistributed to adoring masses.

 

But to accomplish this, Fascists needed to drastically increase the power of the state by expanding government regulation and control administered by a centralized cadre of bureaucrats.  Inevitably, this authority became concentrated in the person of Benito Mussolini who assumed absolute dictatorial power. 

 

Unfortunately the nature of human societies is that socialistic collectivization is so inefficient the economy collapses making it difficult to buy the continued support of the masses.  In a downward spiral everyone is impoverished even to the point of lacking the basic necessities of life.  Only the leader and a small ruling class remain comfortable.   This was certainly true of left-wing Marxist (Fascism) in Italy, the contemporaneous left-wing National Socialism (Nazi) in Germany and left-wing Communism in the Soviet Union

 

To divert attention from economic failures, the Italian Fascists blamed local minorities and foreigners, and especially competing left wing ideologies at home and abroad in the Soviet Union.  To generate local support, they instituted unprovoked war on neighboring countries whose land and treasure and food they could loot.  At the same time and in a similar fashion, their fellow socialists in Nazi Germany were resettling German farmers in the conquered territory of Poland and in the Ukraine (q.v. “lebensraum” and Mussolini’s “spazio vitale” on which the former concept was based).

 

To the extent the injustice of these nationalistic passions, which provided resources and domestic support for a massive welfare state, aroused moral indignation, Mussolini, and his admirer of Adolph Hitler who modeled his National Socialism (Nazism) in Germany on the example of Fascist Italy, shut down dissent not with reasoned argument protected by right wing principles of inalienable rights granted by a Creator and not the state, but by the brute force terrorism of the left.

 

The difficulty for modern liberal apologists trying to distance themselves from the past left-wing disasters of the Socialists, National Socialists (Nazi), Marxists (Fascism) or Communist ideologies is that the natural progression of all such left-wing movements have the same features, to wit

 

1.      The promise of massive welfare benefits in return for empowering an elite bureaucracy always devolving into dictatorial control.

2.      The initial funding of left wing largess by taking private property from those who earned it to give to those, who may or may not be in need but certainly did not earn it, creating a permanent dependency and a reliable inter-generational base of support.

3.      The initial and preferential elimination of fellow left wing political movements who were promising the same free stuff followed by the eventual elimination of right wing opposition as well.  But this should not be surprising.  Since difficult economic times foster the rise of “social saviors”, right wing opponents are not in vogue and can be ignored with impunity.  But in stark contrast, competing left wing opponents promising identical grandiose quick fix solutions for impossible problems, are by far the greater and immediate threat [q.v. Lenin’s “useful idiots”].

4.      The elimination of the private sector and consequent economic ruin by the unavoidable inefficiency top-down management.   

5.      The creation of a police state to silence all dissent, and the attempt to divert attention from the manifest failures by inventing scapegoats of local minorities or the rich or foreign countries.

 

The disingenuous liberal argument is to bask in the moral superiority of redistributing wealth and then in the same breath to blame the consequent economic ruin, police state terror, and the looting of foreign countries, on the principles of their right-wing opposition, who died in large numbers for opposing the original left wing policies.  This rationalization is so disconnected from reality as to be nearly unbelievable were it not so widely asserted.

 

In any event, the undeniable historical result of left-wing Fascism was to rain ruin and destruction on industrial scales; all the while claiming to be everything to everyone in an avalanche of fuzzy thinking and fast talk.

 

HISTORICAL REVISIONISM

 

Before World War II, democrats in the US were more honest.  As everyone knew, but one liberal democrat New York Police Commissioner wrote

 

 “You want to know what ‘Fascism’ is like? It is like your [democrat] New Deal!^” [8],

 

referring to the campaign slogan of democrat President Franklin D. Roosevelt who was promoting left-wing socialism in the United States.

 

In America, neither Canada nor Mexico had much tempting wealth, so democrats looked to loot local sources of capital from banks and corporate accounts in order to buy votes from the poor at the height of the Great Depression.   Today it should be no surprise that more than half of their members are down-trodden uneducated minorities and immigrants.

 

But after World War II with all the manifest horrors of Marxism-Fascism exposed, democrats were desperate to distance themselves from prior associations and labels that still characterized their most cherished policies.  For that they needed to twist their minds into pretzels.    They invented the claim that Fascism was instead the philosophy of right-wing free-market Republicans, who paradoxically had always voted en masse against every left-wing democrat-Socialist-National Socialist-Fascist-Communist policy proposed.

 

The rationalization was that big-government Marxism (Fascism), and National Socialism (Nazi) which implemented the same policies, somehow circles around to resemble a right-wing anarchy that would eliminate government entirely.   And this is despite these ideologies being polar opposites in form, practice, and remedy.  Indeed, they are so different the one and only feature common to both left-wing Socialism-Marxism-Fascism and right-wing anarchy is an elevated state of misery.

 

But what is truly incredible is that anyone could believe this revisionist nonsense. 

 

And yet today most democrats unquestioningly accept the assertion that Fascism with its big government left-wing socialistic programs, which are all part and parcel of today’s democrat party platform, is somehow a right-wing stratagem.  The irony was never clearer than when democrats created an affiliate calling itself “ANTI-FA” (i.e. opposing Fascism).   

 

Unfortunately, the indefensible illogic is so manifest that, like Socialists, Fascist Black-Shirt, Nazi Brown-Shirts, Communist Red Guards, and kindred left-wing movements everywhere, the color coded democrats in ANTI-FA require masked violence to silence free speech ridicule.

 

You just cannot make this stuff up.

 

CONCLUSIONS

 

In short, the democrat claim is that Fascism had a different origin and policies than what history unambiguously records.  And the manifest horrors of Fascism which promoted left-wing big- government Marxist-Socialism are boldly blamed on their right wing Republican opponents, who in strident opposition had always instead championed the conservative principles of right-wing small- government free-market capitalism. 

 

This twisted logic is insane, but then pretzels are no substitute for brains.

 

APPENDIX

 

President Reagan’s warning about liberals twisting the truth about the socialistic-Marxist basis of left-wing Fascism.

 

 

Below is a picture of left wing ANTI-FA thugs organized by the democrat party preparing for masked violence against a peaceful Republican rally which in bitter irony was opposed to the destructive socialistic programs of both Marxist-Fascism and the identical policies of modern liberals in the democrat party (Univ. of Cal. at Berkeley, 2017).   You can’t make this stuff up.

 

 

American Anti-Fa Terrorists assembling to support Marxism-Fascism (2017)

 

For reference, the paramilitary forces of the Italian Fascists (1922-1943) were called the “Black Shirts”.  These gangs of thugs supplied the violence to suppress opposition to the manifest failures of left-wing Fascism.  Demonstrating that nothing really changes (i.e. neither left-wing violence nor even costume choice), images from the historical archives of Fascism include

 

 

 

 

And a dramatic re-enactment of despicable, bordering on the obscene, left-wing Marxist-Fascist terror against minorities and indeed any dissent is

 

 

Note that this is identical to the Hillary Clinton campaign (funded out of the Democrat National Campaign reporting directly to Hillary) who hired thugs to physically assault families at Republican rallies for President Trump notably in San Jose, CA in 2015 [9]; and the democrat party affiliate Anti-Fa (see above) which assaulted Republicans in Berkeley, CA In 2017.

 

The problem is that democrats feel empowered to use the absolute power of the state to make people do the “right thing” which includes using violence to silence any opposition and especially free speech criticism.

 

REFERENCES

 

1.      Carl Schmidt, "The Corporate State in Action London", Victor Gollancz Ltd., 1939, pp. 153–76.

2.      Gianni Toniolo, editor, The Oxford Handbook of the Italian Economy Since Unification, Oxford: UK, Oxford University Press, 2013, p. 59; Mussolini’s speech to the Chamber of Deputies was on May 26, 1934.

3.      James Strachey Barnes, Universal Aspects of Fascism, Williams and Norgate, London: UK, (1928) pp. 113-114.

4.      Patricia Knight, Mussolini and Fascism: Questions and Analysis in History, New York: Routledge, 2003, p. 65.

5.      Martin Blinkhorn, Mussolini and Fascist Italy, 2nd edition, New York: NY, Routledge, 1991, p. 26.

6.      John T. Flynn, As We Go Marching, New York: NY, Doubleday and Company, Inc., 1944, p. 51. Also see “Twelve Years of Fascist Finance,” by Dr. Gaetano Salvemini Foreign Affairs, April 1935, Vol. 13, No. 3, p. 463

7.      John T. Flynn, As We Go Marching, New York: NY, Doubleday and Company, Inc., 1944, p. 50. See New York Times, Aug. 8, 1943.

8.      Mussolini in Mr. New York: The Autobiography of Grover A. Whalen by Grover Aloysius Whalen, G.P. Putnam’s Sons, (1955), p. 188.

9.      Robert Creamer and Scott Foval who founded “Democratic Partners” who worked directly for Hillary Clinton and met with President Obama more than 50 times in the Oval Office.

 

APPENDIX: MUSSOLINI’S INVENTION OF AN ITALIAN MARXIST IDEOLOGY

 

Although Benito Mussolini (1883-1945) is best known as the founder of “Fascism”, his profession was as a gifted writer and especially as a newspaper editor endlessly espousing an admiration for the philosophy of Karl Marx as he uniquely adapted communist philosophy to the Italian culture.

 

He was born in the small Italian town of Dovia di Predappio.  His father was an ardent atheist and outspoken socialist who named him after the left-wing Mexican revolutionary Benito Juárez.  Mussolini's early political views were strongly influenced by his father and showed no signs of wavering from an extreme left-wing ideology over his lifetime.

In 1902, Mussolini immigrated to Switzerland [1], becoming active in the revolutionary socialist underground working as the secretary for the local labor union in Lausanne [2].  In 1903, he was arrested in Bern for organizing a violent general strike in support of new welfare policies for the workers.  He spent two weeks in jail [3].

 

Around this time, he came to the attention of Vladimir Lenin who was there also in exile [4].   Amazingly Lenin was impressed enough with his passion for left wing socialist revolution and manifest devotion to the philosophy of none other than Karl Marx that he later criticized the Italian socialists for not recruiting Mussolini into the local Communist Party.

 

In any event Mussolini continued to write and agitate as a “community organizer” and in 1909 became the editor of the left-wing Socialist Party newspaper L'Avvenire del Lavoratore (The Future of the Worker) in Trento.   The next year in 1910 he returned to his hometown of Forlì, as the editor of the left-wing Socialist Party newpaper Lotta di classe (The Class Struggle) [5].

 

By 1914 Mussolini had moved on to found his own newspaper Il Popolo d'Italia ("The People of Italy"), which remained in publication until 1943.  In the early years the word “Socialist” was prominently displayed on its masthead to properly identify it to the masses.   Later this became the official news outlet of the Liberal-Socialist-Fascist Party [6].

 

From 1912 to 1914, Mussolini headed up the Bolshevik wing of the Italian Socialist Party and led the purge of moderate or reformist socialists [7].  Those supporting Marxists philosophies followed Mussolini to create “Fascism”, q.v. Appendix: History of Fascism in Italy.

 

Nor did the long held political convictions of Mussolini ever waiver from an extreme left wing ideology as in 1935, he wrote an editorial describing Karl Marx as "the greatest of all theorists of socialism” [8].    In fact, up until the very end of his life in 1945, he remained committed to a massive expansion of the Italian public welfare system even as he became ever more desperate to pay for it by extending state control over nearly every aspect of the Italian economy.

 

The historical evidence is unmistakable.  At the start of WWII in 1939, Mussolini following Marxist principles had managed to nationalize nearly 80% of all Italian industry second only to the Soviet Union which had nationalized 100% and closely followed in third place by Nazi Germany which had nationalized more than 50%. 

And at no period of Mussolini’s life, did he apologize for his left-wing proclivities or suggest that he regretted the oppression and murder of his right wing conservative opponents in the tens to hundreds of thousands, who had expressed the slightest preference for religion, individual rights, capitalism, free enterprise, or limited government as opposed to welfare state excess.

 

APPENDIX: HISTORY OF FASCISM IN ITALY

 

In the last decade of the 19th century, left wing Italian politics was a violent force for change forming and then splintering into a nearly endless succession of factions.  These political movements all held far left wing Marxist principles in great esteem but were more personality cults than distinguished by ideology.   At no time did any temporary alliance for political expediency dull their ultimate aim of installing extreme left wing governments and policies.

 

In 1892 in Genoa, the “Italian Labor Party” and the “Italian Revolutionary Socialist Party” came together to form the “Italian Socialist Party“ or the “Partito Socialista Italiano” (PSI).   Benito Mussolini headed the Bolshevik wing favoring extreme Marxist principles modeled after the Communist Party of Vladimir Lenin then in exile in Switzerland.  In 1912, the PSI split over the political tactic of a temporary alliance with the majority coalition to form a ruling  Italian government.  This lead to a new political party called the “Italian Reformist Socialist Party” or the “Partito Socialista Riformista Italiano” (PSRI).

 

Into this mix of left wing violence, Mussolini walked away from the PSI in 1915 to form the Marxist party he called the “Fascist Revolutionary Party” or the “Partito Fascista Rivoluzionario” (PFR).  After poor election results, in 1921 this was renamed the “National Fascist Party” or the “Partito Nazionale Fascista” (PNF).  The idea was to install something akin to a Russian collectivism with welfare state benefits for Italian citizens with “living space” (“spazio vitale”) gained by aggressive war; all to be paid for by the looting of local resources and foreign nations.

 

Fascism promoted state control of all industry and differed from Russian Communism only in that expansion beyond national borders was to be pursued by overt rather than mostly covert means.  Despite desperate attempts by left wing revisionists to claim otherwise, at no time did Fascism tolerate or fail to violently repress any right wing sentiments for Christian moral principles, individual rights, private property rights, free market capitalism, or limited government as opposed to a democrat-like socialistic welfare state.

 

And again please note that violence needed to enforce failing policies attendant on total government control is a universal characteristic of left-wing socialism and not a characteristic of the right.   The historical record is unambiguous.

 

After the upheaval of the Russian Revolution in 1917, the PSI allied itself with the Russian Communist government and called for a similar revolution in Italy based on the principles of Karl Marx.  In 1921, even more fervent supporters of Lenin broke away to form the “Communist Party of Italy.”   Later in 1922, one left wing faction called “reformists” was expelled from the PSI to form the “Unitary Socialist Party” or the “Partito Socialista Unitario” (PSU). 

 

Finally in 1922 at age 39, Mussolini, whose black shirt thugs had by then murdered tens of thousands of right-wing political opponents, came to power in Italy resolutely espousing their Marxist ideologies.   What is nearly unbelievable, is that some liberal revisionists actually claim, in writing, that initial Fascistic attempts to consolidate power by making temporary alliances with right wing opponents signaled a complete reversal of principles to those of their former victims.

 

If so, the conversion was short lived as reluctant right wing collaborators were ruthlessly and systematically murdered over the next several years as Italy transmogrified into a Marxist (Fascist), massive-welfare, left-wing, police state.   And needless to say, competing liberal movements fared even worse.   These were immediately eliminated by the Marxists (Fascists) after coming to power in exactly the same manner as the Communists did in Russia after 1917.

REFERENCES

1.     Charles F. Delzel, editor (1970). “Mediterranean Fascism 1919–1945”. Harper Rowe. p. 3.

2.     Mauro Cerutti.  Benito Mussolini in German, French, and Italian in the “Historical Dictionary of Switzerland.”

3.     Haugen, Brenda (2007). “Benito Mussolini.” Compass Point Books. ISBN 978-0-7565-1892-9.

4.     Gunther, John (1940).  “Inside Europe.” New York, Harper and Brothers. pp. 236–237, 239–241, 243, 245–249.

5.     Georg Scheuer.  “Mussolinis langer Schatten. Marsch auf Rom im Nadelstreif.” Köln 1996, S. 21.

6.     "Il popolo d'Italia", founded by Benito Mussolini, The Library of Congress. Retrieved 2017-11-07

7.     “Mussolini”, by Dennis M. Smith, Vintage Books, p. 96 (1983).

8.     Denis Mack Smith (1983), “Mussolini: A Biography”, p. 7.