The purpose of this material is to show that Benito Mussolini and his political movement were elements of the left of the politico-economic spectrum.

Fascism is the name Benito Mussolini chose for his movement and later it was applied to similar movements elsewhere. Mussolini came from a socialist revolutionary family that named him after Benito Jaurez, the Mexican revolutionary. He grew up as a socialist and maintained his belief in the efficacy of socialism until the end of his life. He undoubtedly considered Fascism as just a variant, if not of socialism at least of collectivism, that was nationalistic. The internationalist socialists expelled him when he advocated for nationalistic reasons the entry of Italy into World War I.

Italy did enter WWI and on the side of the Allies (Britain, France and Russia). This was long before Mussolini came to power in Italy.

Here is the timeline of Benito Mussolini's career:

• 1883: He was born July 29. His father was a blacksmith who was a lieutenant in the National Guard of Italy and sometimes served as a journalist for socialist publications. His mother was a school teacher. He was their first child.
• He was an unruly child and was sent sent to religious boarding schools because the local teachers could not contol him. The boarding school teachers could not control him either and his misbehaviour included stabbing some students and teachers with a penknife. But he passed his final exams easily and did graduate with a diploma for teaching. .
• c. 1901: He publically announced that he was an advocate of revolutionary socialism.
• 1902: After teaching for a short while he moved to Switzerland and lived by taking short-term jobs. He also wrote pieces for socialist and union publications. He was a follower Karl Marx. He gave public speaches and came be known as an advocate of revolution and political violence. He was arrested a number of times.
• 1904: He returned to Italy. He became a school teacher again and taught school for a while. But after a period political inactivity he returned to revolutionary journalism and the support of labor union actions. In the course this he was arrested and imprisoned.
• 1909: Out of prison and at age 26 he initiated a romantic relationship with the 16 year old daughter of his father's mistress. She went to live with him and later they married. Soon afterwards he was again imprisoned.`Once out of prison he again began to write articles for Marxist socialist publications. He then started his own newspaper with the very Marxist title of La Lotta di Classe (The Class Struggle). It was a notable success in terms of circulation.
• 1912: Because of the success of the newspaper he started he was appointed editor of the major socialist newspaper Avanti!. He was able to double its circulation.
  
  Benito Mussolini, well known
  before WWI in Italy as a
  Marxist revolutionary socialist
  i.e. a flaming Red

• 1914: As World War I was developing, Avanti! took the standard socialist position that the working class had no interest one way or another in the war. It was simply a battle between the ruling classes of the various countries. Mussolini as editor initially supported that line. Then Mussolini changed his mind. He saw the opportunity for Italy to gain territory at the expense of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. He had Avanti! publish articles strongly advocating Italy entering the war on the side of Britain and France. He also gave public speeches supporting that position. He was forced to resign his editorship of Avanti! and he was expelled from the Socialist Party. There was no indication that he himself had given up his advocacy of socialism. He became the editor of another newspaper Il Popolo d'Italia. He stated his nationalistic position,

  From this day onward we are all Italians and nothing but Italians. Now that steel has met steel, one single cry comes from our hearts--Long Live Italy.

  To make his new position palatable to the general public and because of the organized socialists rejected him he had to give his new position a different political orientation. He chose Corporatism, a collectivist sociopolitical philosophy developed in the 19th century by Catholic intelllectuals as an alternative to Marxist socialism. The various economic interest groups were to be brought together in political organizations to settle their differences by negotiation.

  
  A New Deal cartoon
  advocating Corporatism

  Corporatism was collectivist but did not involve confiscation of all private property as did socialism. This was very astute. It was better to have industry run by people who had a talent for operating industry and had years of experience rather than politically appointed amateurs. This was a lesson the Bolshevik communists of the Soviet Union never learned. Soviet inefficiency was notorious.

  Mussolini called his system National Corporatism. Other European leaders in the 1930's copied Mussolini in adopting a collectivist economic system and appended national to its title. In Franco Spain it was National Syndicalism. Syndicalists believe that labor unions should run the economy, In Germany Hitler changed the name of the German Workers' Party which he joined to the National Socialist German Workers' Party

• 1919: Mussolini in Milan created his Fasci di Combattimento. He chose the name and its icon from the Roman/Etruscan fasces, a bundle of sticks wrapped together around a two-heaed ax. It was a symbol of collectivist government authority and is widely used to symbolize the strength of collectivity. It even appeared on a U.S. ten cent coin.
  
• After the war there was political turmoil in Italy. Nationalists thought Italy did not get properly rewarded for supporting the winning side. Socialists wanted to duplicate the revolutionary success of the socialists in the Russian Empire. The non-socialists of Italy feared that this just might happen.
• 1922: Mussolini's rhetoric and oratory had made him a publically well known figure. His physical appearance contributed to his political renown.

  The socialists called for a general strike. General strikes were well known preliminaries to revolutions. Mussolini called for the government to prevent the general strike and announed that if the government did not do so his Fasci di Combattimento would do so. He then further announced that in four days time four columns of Fascists would march on Rome from four different directions, Mussolini himself waited at a place where the King of Italy could contact him. As the Fasci di Combattimento converged on Rome, the King of Italy dismissed the current prime minister and sent Mussolini a telegram asking him form a new government in the legislature with himself as prime minister. Mussolini allayed fears of a facist dictatorship by requesting the appointment of ministers the majority of whom were not members of his party. Thus in the first few years of Mussolini's prime ministership not much was done that reflected his politico-economic philosophy.

• 1924: An election was held which led to Mussolini's party gaining majority control of the legislature. Mussolini then restored public order and carried out a program of public works. He was hailed in Italy and also across Europe as a political hero.
• 1932: The accomplishments of Mussolini and his Fascist Party were widely admired and was looked upon as having saved Italy from a communist dictatorship of the type that developed in the Russian Empire. An American admirer was Hugh Johnson, the man who managed government policy during World War I. Franklin Roosevelt chose Hugh Johnson to design his program called The New Deal for coping with the problems of the Great Depression. There was not much faith in a purely market economy at the time. Johnson adopted some of the policies of Mussolini for the Roosevelt New Deal. He also adopted programs of other corporatist leaders in Europe such as Miguel Primo de Rivera in Spain. This was the origin of the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA). Thus the modern platform of the Democratic Party had its origin in corporatist programs of Mussolini's Fascist Party in Italy and other such statist leaders..
  
  Hugh Johnson, architect of Roosevelt's New
  Deal and an admirer of Mussolini's system

• 1935: After a decade of domestic success Mussolini decided to conquer Abyssinia (Ethiopia). A previous Italian invasion had been defeated there. Many countries expressed their objection to his African venture but did not impose any sanctions which would have thwarted it.
• 1936: In Rome Mussolini announced to a crowd of 400,000 that victory had been achieved in Abyssinia and that Rome had a new empire.
• Adolph Hitler was one of the few leaders who did not object to Mussolini's conquest of Abyssinia. Hitler and Mussolini admired each other. From their personal relationship the Axis Pact of Germany and Italy developed.
• 1939: Hitler was trying to retrieve sections of Germany that had been given to Poland in its creation at the end of World War I. He decided to dismember Poland and bring the the Soviet Union in on the dismemberment. He knew Britain and France could not possibly go to war with Germany and the Soviet Union simultaneously and apparently he believed they would not go to war with just one party to the dismemberment. He was wrong. Britain and France both declared war with Germany over the dismemberment. France was ill prepared for war and was defeated in a couple of weeks. The British army of several hundred thousand had to desperately seek escape across the Channel at Dunkirk.
• 1940: Mussolini honored the Axis Pact and attacked France from the south. On his own Mussolini decided to conquer Greece by an invasion through Albania. It was a military disaster and Hitler had to rescue the Italian invasion by launching a German conquest of Greece.
• 1943 The Allies invaded Sicily. The Fascist Grand Council, the legislative authority of Italy at the time, voted overwhelmingly to dismiss Mussolini from office. Mussolini thought he could ignore this action but he was arrested at royal command. After an audience with the king he was sent for imprisonment on a mountain on an island off the coast of Sardinia. It was thought to be an impregnable prison but Hitler sent a daring paratroop commando squad that rescued him.
• Mussolini was installled as the leader of a northern section of Italy under German control. Mussolini was given authority to create the Repubblica Sociale Italiana. He spent his time at the city of Saló formulating the laws and policies of his idea of an ideal socialist state. This shows he never gave up his belief in socialism as the ideal form of society. This effort was of no consequence in Italy but it is alleged that Tito (Joseph Broz) adopted lt as the system for Yugoslavia after his break with Stalin.
• The Italian Communists decided to assassinate Mussolini. They caught him and his mistress trying to cross the border into Austria. They shot them after a cursory trial and hung them up by their legs and beat their bodies with clubs and such..

The application of the term fascist to conservative and libertarian thinkers and thought is an example of the Big Lie; i.e., repeating a statement that has no basis in fact over and over until people think there must be some basis for it. Its use demonstrates that Leftists have no intellectual integrity.

To apply the label fascist to organizations which advocate an economic system based upon markets represents the most abysmal ignorance. Fascism was a collectivist political movement of the left. It is to the right of socialism but that does not make it to the right of the whole politico-economic spectrum.

Perhaps the systematic misapplication of the term fascist is to make it a meaningless term and thus disguise the fact that the one American political organization whose ideological roots trace back to Mussolini's Fascist Party through the Rooseveltian New Deal is the Democratic Party.

There is an effort to identify fascism and street thuggery. Street thuggery is just street thuggery. It is not identified with any particular part of the politico-economic spectrum. Communists engaged in it as did fascists. Labor unions engaged in it. Moslems engaged in it. Members of the Ku Klux Klan, who undoubedly were members of the Democratic Party, engaged in it. What street thuggery is associated with is organizations who believe they are absolutely right and any contrary opinions are heresy and should not be voiced.

The recent political organization that most thoroughly represents the street thuggery of the National Socialists of Germany is called Anti-fa, supposedly for anti-fascist. Its campaign of thuggery against free speech is thoroughly fascist in the loose sense of the term. Anti-fa is evidence that Progressive Liberalism is becoming an intolerant religion.

This opposition to free speech is unAmerican in its spirit and even has a foreign origin. Herbert Marcuse was a German intellectual who witnessed how effectively Hitler's National Socialists overwhelmed their opposition and created a near universal acceptance of their philosophy by the German people. He migrated to America and spent the rest of his life trying to create an intellectual justification for the use of repressive methods to destroy political opposition to the political Leftists. His results were just blather: "No freedom of speech for Fascists". But the Fascists he and his followers were referring to were not the followers of historical Fascism but just any opposition to the political Left even when they had absolutely no relationship with historical Fascism and were its political enemy. Also Anti-fa seems to ignore that the American Constitution guarantees freedom of speech even to bad guys with bad ideas. They have been denying freedom of speech to good guys like Charles Murray who are merely reporting the results of scientic studies.

Dinesh d'Souza has written the folowing succinct account of Mussolini:

Mussolini never had the heart to be a true totalitarian, in part, because he was, well, Italian. His totalitaranism was always Italian, which is to say, half-assed. He sort of had his opponents arrested and he sort of controlled the media and he sort of had the parliament under his thumb, but he lacked the punctiliousness that characterized his more grim totalitarian counterparts, Stalin and Hitler. Throughout his twenty year reign, Mussolini killed off very few of his own citizens and allowed people, including Jews, to leave Italy. Stalin and Hitler would never dream of allowing this.

What kind of totalitarian control can you have over people if they are free to pack up and say sayonara?

Dinesh d'Souza, The Big Lie, Regnery Publishing, Washington, D.C., 2017, p. 58.

It is clear that the National Socialism in Germany and Marxist Communism in Russia were far, far more evil than Fascism in Italy.

Colors and Political Movements

The first such identification of color and politics was of communism and red. This occured because of the connotations of the word red in the Russian language. The Bolsheviks chose i t to associate their movement with the pleasant connotations of red.

Mussolini wanted his movement to look organized visually. His followers could not afford military style uniforms so he had them wear black shirts.

Mussolini and his
Blackshirts

In Germany, in imitation of Mussolini, Hitler had his followers wear brown shirts. This established the colored shirt identifications. In Spain it was blue shirts. In Brazil and independently in Ireland it was green shirts, In China there was period in which the Nationalist Party wanted to imitate the Fascist parties of Europe and its supporters wore blue shirts. In Britain the small local fascist party was identified by black shirts. In America there was a very small fascist movement headquartered in North Carolina called the Silver Shirts.

Conclusions

All of his life Benito Mussolini was a collectivist. Until he was 31 years of age he was a Marxist revolutionary socialist. He then became a nationalist at the beginning of World War I. The socialists expelled him but there is no evidence that he ever gave up his adherence to socialism. He adopted the collectivist philosophy of corporatism to differentiate himself from his enemies, the international socialists, and called it Fascism. Fascism did not have to confiscate private industries as long as the owners followed the dictates of government. Near the end of his life Mussolini formulated the laws and policies of his notion of a perfect society as socialistic.

There is no specific relationship between ideological fascism and street thuggery. Street thuggery is engaged in by any political movement that believes that it is absolutely right and is allowed to get away with thuggery. Such political movemenrs can be Marxist socialist, national socialist, national corporatist, progressive liberal, fundamentalist Moslem or White suprematist.

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