Who Discredited Fascism?

Hint: It Was the Fascists

Target practice after the liberation of Sicily, 1943. Source: Imperial War Museum

Nowadays, the term “fascist” is invariably used as an insult.¹ But it wasn’t always so. Benito Mussolini coined the term when he founded the Fasci Italiani di Combattimento militia in 1919, which evolved into the National Fascist Party in 1921. (“Fascism” derives from the Latin fasces, a bundle of rods symbolizing authority in ancient Rome.) Italy’s Fascists seized power through the 1922 March on Rome, which was subsequently legitimized via a 1924 general election marred by violence and suppression. But regardless of unsavory methods, the Fascists garnered significant domestic support, as well as foreign admirers and imitators. Mussolini was praised for restoring national stability, draining the swamps, fighting the mafia, and, perhaps most famously (and debatably), “making the trains run on time.” Winston Churchill said of Mussolini that “If I were Italian, I am sure I would have been with you entirely from the beginning of your victorious struggle against the bestial appetites and passion of Leninism.” For Sigmund Freud, he was “the Hero of Culture.” For Thomas Edison, “The greatest genius of the modern age.” Even Mohandas Gandhi, the renowned pacifist, called him “one of the great statesmen of our time.” In the interwar period, almost every European country (and many beyond) had a fascist party; including, of course, Germany’s National Socialists.²

Adolf Hitler’s 1933 rise to power augured Mussolini’s decline into the role of fascism’s second fiddle. Although an authoritarian dictatorship, Fascist Italy lacked the overriding antisemitic and racial animus of Nazi Germany.³ In 1927, Mussolini told a Romanian newspaper that “Fascism seeks unity; anti-Semitism seeks destruction and separation.” In 1932, he declared that “Race? It is a feeling, not a reality: ninety-five percent, at least, is a feeling.” Jews were prominently represented among the Italian Fascists, including Guido Jung, Minister of Finance; Maurizio Rava, governor of Italian Somaliland; and Margherita Sarfatti, Mussolini’s mistress and official biographer. Mussolini helped develop an early Zionist navy and was even blessed by the chief rabbi of Rome.⁴ And while Mussolini valorized combat (famously proclaiming that “War is to man what maternity is to a woman”), he had been in power for over a decade before his first major act of international aggression, against Ethiopia in 1935.⁵ Mussolini once derided Nazism as a “parody of Fascism,”⁶ while Nazi propagandist Alfred Rosenberg accused Italy of being “Judeo-Fascist.” An article in an official Fascist journal, likely written by Mussolini, declared Nazi ideology a threat “yesterday to Christian civilization, today to Latin civilization, and tomorrow to the civilization of the whole world.” The 1934 Montreux conference, an Italian attempt to sponsor a “Fascist International,” formally “rejected any materialistic concept which exalts the exclusive domination of one race above others,”⁷ a clear broadside at the Nazis.

Ultimately, however, the fascist split proved ephemeral. Hitler and Mussolini joined together to support Francisco Franco’s nationalists in the Spanish Civil War (1936–39), which resulted in the formation of the Rome–Berlin Axis in 1936. More fundamentally, as historian Stanley Payne notes, while Mussolini’s attitudes toward Hitler “reflected an unstable combination of envy and fear,” the Duce “had reached the conclusion that Germany was about to become the dominant power in Europe and hence it was better for Italy to be aligned with it than opposed it.”⁸ To curry German favor, Italy’s Fascists adopted antisemitic racial laws for the first time, which resulted in the expulsion of Jews from the civil service, armed forces, and Fascist Party.⁹ In 1939, when Hitler proposed a diplomatic alliance, Mussolini himself suggested a military pact instead. Privately, the Italian ambassador in Berlin compared him to a man who, when asked to jump out a window, insists on throwing himself off the roof instead. Per Payne, “Mussolini was motivated above all by the concern to make Italy the complete equal of Germany.”¹⁰ But the outbreak of World War II soon revealed Italy’s military limitations. The Nazis were forced to come to Italy’s rescue following Mussolini’s disastrous 1940 invasion of Greece, which accelerated the country’s descent into the status of German satellite. By war’s end, Mussolini ruled just the rump, Nazi-controlled Italian Social Republic before his execution by partisans in 1945.

Don’t Sign Pacts with Hitler

After the fascists launched their world war, the term cemented its status as a slur. In 1944, Orwell observed that he’d heard fascism “applied to farmers, shopkeepers, Social Credit, corporal punishment, fox-hunting, bull-fighting, the 1922 Committee, the 1941 Committee, Kipling, Gandhi, Chiang Kai-Shek, homosexuality, Priestley's broadcasts, Youth Hostels, astrology, women, dogs and I do not know what else.” Orwell pointed to “a kind of buried meaning” behind this rhetorical chaos; namely, that “almost any English person would accept ‘bully’ as a synonym for ‘Fascist.’” Before the war, fascism could be associated with national regeneration. During the war, it signaled savage, nihilistic aggression. And after the war, it became a byword for national ruin. As Albert Camus put it in 1951: “Hitler presents the example, perhaps unique in history, of a tyrant who left absolutely nothing to his credit.” Because he measured human worth by racial struggle, “the very destruction of Hitler’s final justification — that is, the German nation — henceforth makes this man, whose presence in history for years on end haunted the minds of millions of men, into an inconsistent and contemptible phantom.¹¹ For Payne, fascism had “appealed to war as the ultimate test, the nation’s most validating mission.” Thus, “to have failed in the final test of what was largely—even though not exclusively—a fascist war put the seal on the unviability and self-destructiveness of the fascist enterprise.”¹² To call yourself a fascist after fascism started and lost the bloodiest war in history is like supporting Jim Jones after Jonestown, only 60 million times worse.

What can we learn from the fascist discrediting of fascism? First, and most obviously, don’t try to ride Hitler’s coattails. He’ll drag you into the abyss. At first, Mussolini tried to distance himself from the Nazis. After all, Italy’s Fascists believed in palingenetic ultra-nationalism, not an Aryan death cult. While they glorified violence, they were not, like the Nazis, ideologically committed to an apocalyptic race war. It’s possible to imagine Mussolini staying neutral during World War II, and even emerging like Franco as an American Cold War ally. But by aligning with Hitler and slavishly aping Nazi policy, the Duce doomed himself and his movement. For podcaster Darryl Cooper, the Nazis need to be rehabilitated so we can be “genuinely right wing” again. But if you think “genuinely right-wing” ideas have been tainted by association with Nazism, the solution isn’t to rewrite history in Hitler’s favor. It’s to condemn the Nazis from a right-wing perspective, as enemies of civilization, religion, and life itself. Hitler killed himself in a bunker after ordering his own country destroyed. Mussolini’s corpse was dragged through the streets, mutilated, and strung up for display. Today’s most famous Hitler fan is a schizoid rapper who’s destroyed his own career. These aren’t aberrations. They’re the dead ends to which Nazism naturally leads.

More broadly, if you don’t want your ideology to become a slur, then: 1) Don’t commit evil in its name, and 2) Oppose those who do. We associate fascism with war and genocide because the fascists themselves launched a world war and committed genocide.¹³ And it’s impossible to separate Italian Fascism from Nazism because its leader signed a “Pact of Steel” with Hitler.¹⁴ Related to these points: if your ideology consistently produces bad results, then perhaps there’s something wrong with the ideology itself. In fascism’s case, an authoritarian personality cult, the glorification of violence, and a vitalist contempt for reason (in Italian, menefreghismo, or “not giving a fuck”) predictably lead to tyranny, warmongering, and mass hysteria. Communism, another totalitarian ideology, results in the same negative outcomes despite theoretically opposing principles (eg, equality instead of hierarchy, collectivization instead of corporatism, class struggle instead of nationalism). Today, for good reason, few Westerners self-identify as fascists or communists.¹⁵ But there are lessons here for ideologues of any stripe. If social justice becomes an excuse to commit injustice, then condemn that injustice. If the “dissident right” embraces groupthink, then dissent with the dissenters. And if any ideology descends into barbarism, then don’t go down in flames with it.

1. Academic convention is to lowercase “fascism” when used in the general sense, and to apply uppercase when referring to Italian Fascism specifically.

2. As an example of the term’s broad early usage, Adolf Hitler said in 1923 that “We look on Heinrich [Henry] Ford as the leader of the growing Fascisti movement in America. We admire particularly his anti-Jewish policy, which is the Bavarian Fascisti platform.”

3. Fascist Italy justified its colonial empire by appealing to white superiority. However, this stance was unremarkable in the context of early 20th-century Europe, and of a different magnitude than Hitler’s monomaniacal racial obsession.

4. Stanley G. Payne, A History of Fascism, 1914–1945 (1995), p. 240.

5. Mussolini had earlier waged a brutal campaign against the Senussi rebels in Italian-controlled Libya, but Libya itself was conquered prior to his reign. Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi funded a 1981 film glorifying the rebellion, Lion of the Desert, which was banned in Italy. Fascist Italy also briefly occupied the Greek island of Corfu in 1923.

6. Payne, p. 231.

7. Payne, p. 232.

8. Payne, p. 239.

9. Despite this official persecution, the Italians were not very good antisemites. Hannah Arendt cites some telling examples in Eichmann in Jerusalem (1964, pp. 177–78). In Yugoslavia, “General Roatta declared that it was ‘incompatible with the honor of the Italian army’ to deliver the Jews from Italian-occupied territory to the appropriate German authorities.” In their portion of occupied France, the Italians expelled Jews from the Mediterranean coast under German pressure, but put them up in nice digs. Thus “a thousand Jews of the poorest class were living in the best hotels of Isère and Savoie.” In Italy itself, “Roberto Farinacci, head of the Italian anti-Semitic movement, had a Jewish secretary in his employ.”

10. Payne, p. 244.

11. Albert Camus, The Rebel (1951), p. 185.

12. Payne, p. 436.

13. Hence the obvious motivation of revisionists who claim that Churchill instigated World War II and the Holocaust never happened: to make Nazism respectable again.

14. Mussolini initially proposed the name “Pact of Blood.”

15. Notably, there are still some professed communist regimes outside the Western world, such as China, North Korea, and Cuba. There are fewer self-declared fascists, though the Nazis directly influenced authoritarian regimes in the Middle East and South America.