October 2, 2022
FASCISM IS NOT RACISM:
Mussolini's willing followers? The Italians devoted to Fascism and the duce: The postwar orthodoxy held that most Italians never truly bought into Fascism. Yet, wrote the late Christopher Duggan in 2012, the devotion to Mussolini expressed in analysed diaries and letters of the time tells a very different story (Christopher Duggan, September 26, 2022, History Extra)
[T]he idea that Italian people had simply been the 'victims' of a warmongering leader wasn't confined to the dark days of 1940. In fact, the idea would go on to provide powerful ammunition for what, after 1945, became the dominant public interpretation of Fascist Italy: that it was ruled by a dictatorship built on limited or minimal popular support.Various sources helped to make the idea that Fascism had never really been accepted by the mass of Italians into something of an orthodoxy. The Allies were content to accept it, not least because it spared them the need to press for purges of the public administration which would leave the conservative fabric of the state weakened at a time when the Italian Communist and Socialist parties appeared a major threat.In the 1930s especially, when the liberal capitalist model seemed everywhere in crisis, Mussolini's Italy inspired a broad array of political movements in countries ranging from Argentina and Brazil in South America, to Portugal, Spain, Hungary, Romania and Poland in Europe, to China in the far east. These movements all had different features and emphases, not least because at the heart of fascism was the idea of asserting the threatened identity of the nation, especially against communism.Hence in the case of Italy, the idea of Rome and its universal mission played an important role. In Franco's Spain, the Catholic Reconquista of the Middle Ages provided an emotionally powerful point of historical reference.Given how influential Italian Fascism has been - far more so than Hitler's Third Reich, whose extreme racism and brutal expansionism place it on the radical edge of the spectrum - the fact that fascism has, since 1945, so often been viewed through the filter of Nazism has probably made for historical distortion.Mussolini - the populist charismatic leader - is much more the prototype of the 20th-century dictator than Hitler. And though anti-Semitism was common to numerous fascist movements, it was not as central to many as it was for Nazism.Arguably, it was the defence of religious values, seen as vital elements of national identity against the materialistic doctrines of liberalism and communism, that was a more important common factor.
The Right today is not specifically Hitlerian--Adolph is pretty silent about Mexicans--but it is more properly viewed as similar to Nazism than as fascist. Nevermind just the racism, there is also the fact that Communism is long dead and the last thing they want to preserve is Christianity, specifically, or the End of History, generally.
Posted by Orrin Judd at October 2, 2022 5:54 PM