Fascism and Communism Flashcards
What is Totalitarianism?
Totalitarianism is a political system in which the state recognizes no limits to its authority and strives to regulate every aspect of public and private life wherever feasible, without any respect for human rights.[1] Totalitarian regimes stay in political power through such techniques as propaganda, state control of the mass media and educational system, control over the economy, political repression, capital punishment, restriction of speech, mass surveillance, and the establishment of internment or forced labour camps. A distinctive feature of totalitarian governments is an “elaborate ideology, a set of ideas that gives meaning and direction to the whole society”,[2] often involving a one-party state, a dictator and a personality cult.
What is fascism?
Fascism /ˈfæʃɪzəm/ is a form of radical authoritarian nationalism[1][2] that came to prominence in early 20th-century Europe. The first fascist movements emerged in Italy during World War I, before spreading to other European countries. Opposed to liberalism, Marxism and anarchism, fascism is usually placed on the far-right within the traditional left–right spectrum.[3][4]
What is communism?
In political and social sciences, communism (from Latin communis, “common, universal”)[1][2] is the social, political, and economic ideology and movement whose ultimate goal is the establishment of the communist society, which is a socioeconomic order structured upon the common ownership of the means of production and the absence of social classes, money,[3][4] and the state.[5][6]
What was Italian Fascism?
Italian Fascism (Italian: Fascismo Italiano), also known simply as Fascism (Italian: Fascismo), is the original fascist ideology, as developed in Italy. The ideology is associated with the National Fascist Party, which under Benito Mussolini ruled the Kingdom of Italy from 1922 until 1943, the Republican Fascist Party that ruled the Italian Social Republic from 1943 to 1945, the post-war Italian Social Movement and subsequent Italian neo-fascist movements.
Italian Fascism was rooted in Italian nationalism and the desire to restore and expand Italian territories, which Italian Fascists deemed necessary for a nation to assert its superiority and strength and to avoid succumbing to decay.[1] Italian Fascists claimed that modern Italy is the heir to ancient Rome and its legacy, and historically supported the creation of an Italian Empire to provide spazio vitale (“living space”) for colonization by Italian settlers and to establish control over the Mediterranean Sea.[2]
Italian Fascism promoted a corporatist economic system whereby employer and employee syndicates are linked together in associations to collectively represent the nation’s economic producers and work alongside the state to set national economic policy.[3] This economic system intended to resolve class conflict through collaboration between the classes.[4]
Italian Fascism opposed liberalism, but rather than seeking a reactionary restoration of the pre-French Revolutionary world, which it considered to have been flawed, it had a forward-looking direction.[5] It was opposed to Marxist socialism because of its typical opposition to nationalism,[6] but was also opposed to the reactionary conservatism developed by Joseph de Maistre.[7] It believed the success of Italian nationalism required respect for tradition and a clear sense of a shared past among the Italian people, alongside a commitment to a modernized Italy.[8]
What was German Fascism?
National Socialism (German: Nationalsozialismus), more commonly known as Nazism (/ˈnɑːtsɪzəm, ˈnæ-/[1]), is the ideology and practice associated with the 20th-century German Nazi Party and Nazi state, as well as other far-right groups. Usually characterised as a form of fascism that incorporates scientific racism and antisemitism, Nazism developed out of the influences of Pan-Germanism, the Völkisch German nationalist movement and the anti-communist Freikorps paramilitary groups that emerged during the Weimar Republic after German defeat in World War I.
Nazism subscribed to theories of racial hierarchy and Social Darwinism, identifying Germans as part of what Nazis regarded as an Aryan or Nordic master race.[2] It aimed to overcome social divisions and create a homogeneous society, unified on the basis of “racial purity” (Volksgemeinschaft). The Nazis aimed to unite all Germans living in historically German territory, as well as gain additional lands for German expansion under the doctrine of Lebensraum, while excluding those deemed either to be community aliens or belonging to an “inferior” race. The term “National Socialism” arose out of attempts to create a nationalist redefinition of “socialism”, as an alternative to both international socialism and free market capitalism. Nazism rejected the Marxist concept of class struggle, opposed cosmopolitan internationalism, and sought to convince all parts of a new German society to subordinate their personal interests to the “common good” and to accept the priority of political interests in economic organisation.[3]
The Nazi Party’s precursor, the Pan-German nationalist and anti-Semitic German Workers’ Party, was founded on 5 January 1919. By the early 1920s, Adolf Hitler assumed control of the organisation and renamed it the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, NSDAP) to broaden its appeal. The National Socialist Program, adopted in 1920, called for a united Greater Germany that would deny citizenship to Jews or those of Jewish descent, while also supporting land reform and the nationalisation of some industries. In Mein Kampf, written in 1924, Hitler outlined the antisemitism and anti-communism at the heart of his political philosophy, as well as his disdain for parliamentary democracy and his belief in Germany’s right to territorial expansion.
In 1933, with the support of traditional conservative nationalists, Hitler was appointed Chancellor of Germany and the Nazis gradually established a one-party state, under which Jews, political opponents and other “undesirable” elements were marginalised, with several millions eventually imprisoned and killed. Hitler purged the party’s more socially and economically radical factions in the mid-1934 Night of the Long Knives and, after the death of President Hindenburg, political power was concentrated in his hands, as Führer or “leader”. Following the Holocaust and German defeat in World War II, only a few fringe racist groups, usually referred to as neo-Nazis, still describe themselves as following National Socialism.
Where is Nazism on the political spectrum?
The majority of scholars identify Nazism in practice as a form of far-right politics.[11] Far-right themes in Nazism include the argument that superior people have a right to dominate over other people and purge society of supposed inferior elements.[12] Adolf Hitler and other proponents officially portrayed Nazism as being neither left- nor right-wing, but syncretic.[13][14] Hitler in Mein Kampf directly attacked both left-wing and right-wing politics in Germany, saying:
Origins of Nazism?
One of the most significant ideological influences on the Nazis was the German nationalist Johann Gottlieb Fichte, whose works had served as inspiration to Hitler and other Nazi members, including Dietrich Eckart and Arnold Fanck.[34] In Speeches to the German Nation (1808), written amid Napoleonic France’s occupation of Berlin, Fichte called for a German national revolution against the French occupiers, making passionate public speeches, arming his students for battle against the French, and stressing the need for action by the German nation to free itself.[35] Fichte’s nationalism was populist and opposed to traditional elites, spoke of the need of a “People’s War” (Volkskrieg), and put forth concepts similar to those the Nazis adopted.[35] Fichte promoted German exceptionalism and stressed the need for the German nation to be purified (including purging the German language of French words, a policy that the Nazis undertook upon rising to power).[35]
Another important figure in pre-Nazi völkisch thinking was Wilhelm Heinrich Riehl, whose work—Land und Leute (Land and People, written between 1857 and 1863)—collectively tied the organic German Volk to its native landscape and nature, a pairing which stood in stark opposition to the mechanical and materialistic civilisation developing as a result of industrialisation.[36] Geographers Friedrich Ratzel and Karl Haushofer borrowed from Riehl’s work as did Nazi ideologues Alfred Rosenberg and Paul Schultze-Naumburg; both of whom employed some of Riehl’s philosophy in arguing that “each nation-state was an organism that required a particular living space to survive”.[37] Riehl’s influence is overtly discernible in the Blut und Boden (Blood and Soil) philosophy introduced by Oswald Spengler, which the Nazi agriculturalist Walther Darré and other prominent Nazis adopted.[38][39]
Völkisch nationalism denounced soulless materialism, individualism, and secularised urban industrial society, while advocating a “superior” society based on ethnic German “folk” culture and German “blood”.[40] It denounced foreigners and foreign ideas, and declared that Jews, Freemasons, and others were “traitors to the nation” and unworthy of inclusion.[41] Völkisch nationalism saw the world in terms of natural law and romanticism; it viewed societies as organic, extolling the virtues of rural life, condemning the neglect of tradition and decay of morals, denounced the destruction of the natural environment, and condemned “cosmopolitan” cultures such as Jews and Romani.[42]
During the era of Imperial Germany, Völkisch nationalism was overshadowed by both Prussian patriotism and the federalist tradition of various states therein.[43] The events of World War I, including the end of the Prussian monarchy in Germany, resulted in a surge of revolutionary Völkisch nationalism.[44] The Nazis supported such revolutionary Völkisch nationalist policies[43] and claimed that their ideology was influenced by the leadership and policies of German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck, the founder of the German Empire.[45] The Nazis declared that they were dedicated to continuing the process of creating a unified German nation state that Bismarck had begun and desired to achieve.[46] While Hitler was supportive of Bismarck’s creation of the German Empire, he was critical of Bismarck’s moderate domestic policies.[47] On the issue of Bismarck’s support of a Kleindeutschland (“Lesser Germany”, excluding Austria) versus the Pan-German Großdeutschland (“Greater Germany”) of the Nazis, Hitler stated that Bismarck’s attainment of Kleindeutschland was the “highest achievement” Bismarck could have achieved “within the limits possible of that time”.[48] In Mein Kampf (My Struggle), Hitler presented himself as a “second Bismarck”.[48]
During his youth in Austria, Hitler was politically influenced by Austrian Pan-Germanist proponent Georg Ritter von Schönerer, who advocated radical German nationalism, antisemitism, anti-Catholicism, anti-Slavism, and anti-Habsburg views.[49] From von Schönerer and his followers, Hitler adopted for the Nazi movement the Heil greeting, the Führer title, and the model of absolute party leadership.[49] Hitler was also impressed with the populist antisemitism and anti-liberal bourgeois agitation of Karl Lueger, who as the mayor of Vienna during Hitler’s time in the city used a rabble-rousing oratory style that appealed to the wider masses.[50] Unlike von Schönerer, however, Lueger was not a German nationalist, but a pro-Catholic Habsburg supporter.[50]
Racial theories and anti-Semitism
The concept of the Aryan race, which the Nazis promoted, stems from racial theories asserting that Europeans are the descendants of Indo-Iranian settlers, people of ancient India and ancient Persia.[51] Proponents of this theory based their assertion on the similarity of European words and their meaning to those of Indo-Iranian languages.[51] Johann Gottfried Herder argued that the Germanic peoples held close racial connections with the ancient Indians and ancient Persians, who he claimed were advanced peoples possessing a great capacity for wisdom, nobility, restraint, and science.[51] Contemporaries of Herder used the concept of the Aryan race to draw a distinction between what they deemed “high and noble” Aryan culture versus that of “parasitic” Semitic culture.[51]
Notions of white supremacy and Aryan racial superiority combined in the 19th century, with white supremacists maintaining that certain groups of white people were members of an Aryan “master race” that is superior to other races, and particularly superior to the Semitic race, which they associated with “cultural sterility”.[51] Arthur de Gobineau, a French racial theorist and aristocrat, blamed the fall of the ancien régime in France on racial degeneracy caused by racial intermixing, which he argued destroyed the purity of the Aryan race, a term which he reserved only for Germanic people.[52][53] Gobineau’s theories, which attracted a strong following in Germany,[52] emphasised the existence of an irreconcilable polarity between Aryan (Germanic) and Jewish cultures.[51]
Aryan mysticism claimed that Christianity originated in Aryan religious tradition and that Jews had usurped the legend from Aryans.[51] Houston Stewart Chamberlain, an English proponent of racial theory, supported notions of Germanic supremacy and antisemitism in Germany.[52] Chamberlain’s work, The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century (1899), praised Germanic peoples for their creativity and idealism while asserting that the Germanic spirit was threatened by a “Jewish” spirit of selfishness and materialism.[52] Chamberlain used his thesis to promote monarchical conservatism while denouncing democracy, liberalism, and socialism.[52] The book became popular, especially in Germany.[52] Chamberlain stressed the need of a nation to maintain racial purity in order to prevent degeneration, and argued that racial intermingling with Jews should never be permitted.[52] In 1923, Chamberlain met Hitler, whom he admired as a leader of the rebirth of the free spirit.[54] Madison Grant’s work The Passing of the Great Race (1916) advocated Nordicism and proposed using a eugenic program to preserve the Nordic race. After reading the book, Hitler called it “my Bible”.[55]
In Germany, the idea of Jews economically exploiting Germans became prominent upon the foundation of Germany due to the ascendance of many wealthy Jews into prominent positions upon the unification of Germany in 1871.[56] Empirical evidence demonstrates that from 1871 to the early 20th century, German Jews were overrepresented in Germany’s upper and middle classes while they were underrepresented in Germany’s lower class, particularly in the fields of work of agricultural and industrial labour.[57] German Jewish financiers and bankers played a key role in fostering Germany’s economic growth from the 1871 to 1913, and such Jewish financiers and bankers benefited enormously from this boom. In 1908, amongst the twenty-nine wealthiest German families with aggregate fortunes of up to 55 million marks at the time, five were Jewish, and the Rothschilds were the second wealthiest German family.[58] The predominance of Jews in Germany’s banking, commerce, and industry sectors in this time period was very high with consideration to Jews being estimated to have accounted for 1 percent of the population of Germany.[56] This overrepresentation of Jews in these areas created resentment by non-Jewish Germans during periods of economic crisis.[57] The 1873 stock market crash and ensuing depression resulted in a spate of attacks on alleged Jewish economic dominance in Germany and increased antisemitism.[57]
At this time period in the 1870s, German Völkisch nationalism began to adopt anti-Semitic and racist themes and was adopted by a number of radical right political movements.[59]
The Protocols of the Elders of Zion (1912) was an anti-Semitic forgery created by the secret service of the Russian Empire, the Okhrana. Many anti-Semites believed it was real and the Protocol became widely popular after World War I.[60] The Protocols claimed that there was a secret international Jewish conspiracy to take over the world.[61] Hitler had been introduced to The Protocols by Alfred Rosenberg, and from 1920 onward, Hitler focused his attacks on claiming that Judaism and Marxism were directly connected, that Jews and Bolsheviks were one and the same, and that Marxism was a Jewish ideology.[62] Hitler believed that The Protocols were authentic.[63]
Radical Antisemitism was promoted by prominent advocates of Völkisch nationalism, including Eugen Diederichs, Paul de Lagarde, and Julius Langbehn.[42] De Lagarde called the Jews a “bacillus, the carrier of decay … who pollute every national culture … and destroy all faith with their materialistic liberalism”, and he called for the extermination of the Jews.[64] Langbehn called for a war of annihilation of the Jews; his genocidal policies were published by the Nazis and given to soldiers on the front during World War II.[64] One anti-Semitic ideologue of the period, Friedrich Lange, even used the term “national socialism” to describe his own anti-capitalist take on the Völkisch nationalist template.[65]
Johann Gottlieb Fichte accused Jews in Germany of having been, and inevitably continuing to be, a “state within a state” that threatened German national unity.[35] Fichte promoted two options to address this: the first was the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine to impel the Jews to leave Europe.[66] The other option was violence against Jews, saying that the goal would be “… to cut off all their heads in one night, and set new ones on their shoulders, which should not contain a single Jewish idea”.[66]
Prior to the Nazi ascension to power, Hitler often blamed moral degradation on Rassenschande (racial defilement), a way to assure his followers of his continuing antisemitism, which had been toned down for popular consumption.[67] Prior to the induction of the Nuremberg Race Laws in 1935 by the Nazis, many German nationalists such as Roland Freisler strongly supported laws to ban Rassenschande between Aryans and Jews as racial treason.[67] Even before the laws were officially passed, the Nazis banned sexual relations and marriages between party members and Jews.[68] Party members found guilty of Rassenschande were heavily punished; some members were even sentenced to death.[69]
The Nazis claimed that Bismarck was unable to complete German national unification because of Jewish infiltration of the German parliament, and that their abolition of parliament ended the obstacle to unification.[45] Using the stab-in-the-back myth, the Nazis accused Jews—and other populaces it considered non-German—of possessing extra-national loyalties, thereby exacerbating German antisemitism about the Judenfrage (the Jewish Question), the far-right political canard popular when the ethnic Völkisch movement and their politics of Romantic nationalism for establishing a Großdeutschland were strong.[70][71]
Nazism’s racial policy positions may have developed from the views of important biologists of the 19th century, including French biologist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, through Ernst Haeckel’s idealist version of Lamarckism and the father of genetics, German botanist Gregor Mendel.[72] However, Haeckel’s works were later condemned and banned from bookshops and libraries by the Nazis as inappropriate for “National-Socialist formation and education in the Third Reich”. This may have been because of his “monist” atheistic, materialist philosophy, which the Nazis disliked.[73] Unlike Darwinian theory, Lamarckian theory officially ranked races in a hierarchy of evolution from apes while Darwinian theory did not grade races in a hierarchy of higher or lower evolution from apes, simply categorising humans as a whole of all as having progressed in evolution from apes.[72] Many Lamarckians viewed “lower” races as having been exposed to debilitating conditions for too long for any significant “improvement” of their condition in the near future.[74] Haeckel utilised Lamarckian theory to describe the existence of interracial struggle and put races on a hierarchy of evolution, ranging from being wholly human to subhuman.[72]
Mendelian inheritance, or Mendelism, was supported by the Nazis, as well as by mainstream eugenics proponents at the time. The Mendelian theory of inheritance declared that genetic traits and attributes were passed from one generation to another.[75] Proponents of eugenics used Mendelian inheritance theory to demonstrate the transfer of biological illness and impairments from parents to children, including mental disability; others also utilised Mendelian theory to demonstrate the inheritance of social traits, with racialists claiming a racial nature of certain general traits such as inventiveness or criminal behaviour.[76]
Nationalism and racialism
German Nazism emphasised German nationalism, including both irredentism and expansionism. Nazism held racial theories based upon the belief of the existence of an Aryan master race that was superior to all other races. The Nazis emphasised the existence of racial conflict between the Aryan race and others—particularly Jews, whom the Nazis viewed as a mixed race that had infiltrated multiple societies, and was responsible for exploitation and repression of the Aryan race. The Nazis also categorised Slavs as Untermensch.[100]
Racial theories (Nazi Germany)
In its racial categorisation, Nazism viewed what it called the Aryan race as the master race of the world—a race that was superior to all other races.[106] It viewed Aryans as being in racial conflict with a mixed race people, the Jews, whom Nazis identified as a dangerous enemy of the Aryans. It also viewed a number of other peoples as dangerous to the well-being of the Aryan race. In order to preserve the perceived racial purity of the Aryan race, a set of race laws were introduced in 1935 which came to be known as the Nuremberg Laws. At first these laws only prevented sexual relations and marriages between Germans and Jews, but were later extended to the “Gypsies, Negroes, and their bastard offspring”, who were described by the Nazis as people of “alien blood”.[107][108] Such relations between Aryans (cf. Aryan certificate) and non-Aryans were now punishable under the race laws as Rassenschande or “race defilement”.[107] After the war began, the race defilement law was extended to include all foreigners (non-Germans).[109] At the bottom of the racial scale of non-Aryans were Jews, Romani, Slavs[110] and blacks.[111] To maintain the “purity and strength” of the Aryan race, the Nazis eventually sought to exterminate Jews, Romani, Slavs, and the physically and mentally disabled.[110][112] Other groups deemed “degenerate” and “asocial” who were not targeted for extermination, but received exclusionary treatment by the Nazi state, included homosexuals, blacks, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and political opponents.[112] One of Hitler’s ambitions at the start of the war was to exterminate, expel, or enslave most or all Slavs from central and eastern Europe in order to make living space for German settlers.[113]
Social classes in Nazi Germany
Nazism rejected the Marxist concept of internationalist class struggle, but supported “class struggle between nations”, and sought to resolve internal class struggle in the nation while it identified Germany as a proletarian nation fighting against plutocratic nations.[137]
In 1922, Adolf Hitler discredited other nationalist and racialist political parties as disconnected from the mass populace, especially lower and working-class young people:
The racialists were not capable of drawing the practical conclusions from correct theoretical judgements, especially in the Jewish Question. In this way, the German racialist movement developed a similar pattern to that of the 1880s and 1890s. As in those days, its leadership gradually fell into the hands of highly honourable, but fantastically naïve men of learning, professors, district counsellors, schoolmasters, and lawyers—in short a bourgeois, idealistic, and refined class. It lacked the warm breath of the nation’s youthful vigour.[138]
The Nazi Party had many working-class supporters and members, and a strong appeal to the middle class. The financial collapse of the white collar middle-class of the 1920s figures much in their strong support of Nazism.[139] In the poor country that was the Weimar Republic of the early 1930s, the Nazi Party realised their socialist policies with food and shelter for the unemployed and the homeless—later recruited to the Brownshirt Sturmabteilung (SA – Storm Detachment).[139]
Sex and gender in Nazi Germany
Nazi ideology advocated excluding women from political involvement and confining them to the spheres of “Kinder, Küche, Kirche” (Children, Kitchen, Church).[140] Many women enthusiastically supported the regime but formed their own internal hierarchies.[141]
Hitler’s own opinion on the matter of women in Nazi Germany was that while other eras of German history experienced the development and liberation of the female mind, the National Socialist goal was essentially singular in that they wished for them to produce a child.[142] Along this theme, Hitler once remarked of women, “with every child that she brings into the world, she fights her battle for the nation. The man stands up for the Volk, exactly as the woman stands up for the family.”[143] Proto-natalist programs in Nazi Germany offered favourable loans and grants to encourage newlyweds with additional incentives for the birth of offspring.[144] Contraception was discouraged for racially valuable women in Nazi Germany and abortion was forbidden through strict legal mandates, including prison sentences for those seeking them and for doctors performing them, whereas abortion for racially “undesirable” persons was encouraged.[145][146]
While unmarried until the very end of the regime, Hitler often made excuses about his busy life hindering any chance for marriage.[147] Among National Socialist ideologues, marriage was valued not from moral considerations but because it provided an optimal breeding environment. Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler reportedly told a confidant that when he established the Lebensborn program, an organisation to dramatically increase the birth rate of “Aryan” children through extramarital relations between women classified as racially pure and their male equals, he had only the purest male “conception assistants” in mind.[148]
Since the Nazis at the beginning of the war extended the Rassenschande (race defilement) law to all foreigners,[109] pamphlets were issued to German women to avoid sexual relations with foreign workers brought to Germany and to view them as a danger to their blood.[149] Although the law was punishable to both genders, German women were targeted more for having sexual relations with foreign forced labourers in Germany.[150] The Nazis issued the Polish decrees on 8 March 1940 which set out regulations concerning the Polish forced labourers (Zivilarbeiter) brought to Germany during World War II. One of the regulations stated that any Pole “who has sexual relations with a German man or woman, or approaches them in any other improper manner, will be punished by death”.[151]
After the decrees were enacted, Himmler stated:
Fellow Germans who engage in sexual relations with male or female civil workers of the Polish nationality, commit other immoral acts or engage in love affairs shall be arrested immediately.[152]
The Nazis later issued similar regulations against the Eastern Workers (Ost-Arbeiters), including the death penalty for sexual relations with a German person.[153] Heydrich issued a decree on 20 February 1942 that declared sexual intercourse between a German woman and a Russian worker or prisoner of war would result in the Russian man being punished by the death penalty.[154] A further decree issued by Himmler on 7 December 1942 stated any “unauthorised sexual intercourse” would result in the death penalty.[155] As the Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honour did not permit capital punishment for race defilement, special courts were convened to allow the death penalty for some cases.[156] German women accused of race defilement were marched through the streets with her head shaven and a placard around her neck detailing her crime,[157] those convicted were sent to a concentration camp.[149] When Himmler reportedly asked Hitler what the punishment should be for German girls and German women who have been found guilty of race defilement with prisoners of war (POWs) he ordered “every POW who has relations with a German girl or a German would be shot” and the German woman should be publicly humiliated by “having her hair shorn and being sent to a concentration camp”.[158]
The League of German Girls was particularly regarded as instructing girls to avoid race defilement, which was treated with particular importance for young females.[159]
Opposition to homosexuality in Nazi Germany
After the Night of the Long Knives, Hitler promoted Himmler and the SS, who then zealously suppressed homosexuality, saying: “We must exterminate these people root and branch … the homosexual must be eliminated.”[160] In 1936, Himmler established the “Reichszentrale zur Bekämpfung der Homosexualität und Abtreibung” (“Reich Central Office for the Combating of Homosexuality and Abortion”).[161] The Nazi régime incarcerated some 100,000 homosexuals during the 1930s.[162] As concentration camp prisoners, homosexual men were forced to wear pink triangle badges.[163][164] Nazi ideology still viewed German gay men as part of the Aryan master race but attempted to force them into sexual and social conformity. Gay men who would not change or feign a change in their sexual orientation were sent to concentration camps under the “Extermination Through Work” campaign.[165]
Religion in Nazi Germany
The Nazi Party Programme of 1920 guaranteed freedom for all religious denominations not hostile to the State and endorsed Positive Christianity to combat “the Jewish-materialist spirit”.[166] It was a modified version of Christianity which emphasised racial purity and nationalism.[167] The Nazis were aided by theologians such as Ernst Bergmann. Bergmann, in his work, Die 25 Thesen der
Deutschreligion (Twenty-five Points of the German Religion), held that the Old Testament and portions of the New Testament of the Bible were inaccurate. He claimed that Jesus was not a Jew but of Aryan origin, and that Adolf Hitler was the new messiah.[167]
Hitler denounced the Old Testament as “Satan’s Bible”, and utilising components of the New Testament attempted to demonstrate that Jesus was Aryan and anti-Semitic, such as in John 8:44 where Hitler noted that Jesus is yelling at “the Jews”, as well as Jesus saying to the Jews that “your father is the devil”, and describing Jesus’ whipping of the “Children of the Devil”.[168] Hitler claimed that the New Testament included distortions by Paul the Apostle, whom Hitler described as a “mass-murderer turned saint”.[168]
The Nazis utilised Protestant Martin Luther in their propaganda. They publicly displayed an original of Luther’s On the Jews and their Lies during the annual Nuremberg rallies.[169][170] The Nazis endorsed the pro-Nazi Protestant German Christians organisation.
The Nazis were initially highly hostile to Catholics because most Catholics supported the German Centre Party. Catholics opposed the Nazis’ promotion of sterilisation of those deemed inferior, and the Catholic Church forbade its members to vote for the Nazis. In 1933, extensive Nazi violence occurred against Catholics due to their association with the Centre Party and their opposition to the Nazi regime’s sterilisation laws.[171] The Nazis demanded that Catholics declare their loyalty to the German state.[172] In propaganda, the Nazis used elements of Germany’s Catholic history, in particular the German Catholic Teutonic Knights and their campaigns in Eastern Europe. The Nazis identified them as “sentinels” in the East against “Slavic chaos”, though beyond that symbolism the influence of the Teutonic Knights on Nazism was limited.[173] Hitler also admitted that the Nazis’ night rallies were inspired by the Catholic rituals he witnessed during his Catholic upbringing.[174] The Nazis did seek official reconciliation with the Catholic Church and endorsed the creation of the pro-Nazi Catholic Kreuz und Adler organisation that supported a national Catholicism.[172] On 20 July 1933, a concordat (Reichskonkordat) was signed between Nazi Germany and the Catholic Church; in exchange for acceptance of the Catholic Church in Germany, it required German Catholics to be loyal to the German state. The Catholic Church then ended its ban on members supporting the Nazi Party.[172]
Historian Michael Burleigh claims that Nazism used Christianity for political purposes, but such use required that “fundamental tenets were stripped out, but the remaining diffuse religious emotionality had its uses”.[174] Burleigh claims that Nazism’s conception of spirituality was “self-consciously pagan and primitive”.[174] However, historian Roger Griffin rejects the claim that Nazism was primarily pagan, noting that although there were some influential neo-paganists in the Nazi Party, such as Heinrich Himmler and Alfred Rosenberg, they represented a minority and their views did not influence Nazi ideology beyond its use for symbolism; it is noted that Hitler denounced Germanic paganism in Mein Kampf and condemned Rosenberg’s and Himmler’s paganism as “nonsense”.[175]
Economics in Nazi Germany
Generally speaking, Nazi theorists and politicians blamed Germany’s previous economic failures on political causes like the influence of Marxism on the workforce, the sinister and exploitative machinations of what they called international Jewry, and the vindictiveness of the western political leaders ‘war reparation’ demands. Instead of traditional economic incentives, the Nazis offered solutions of a political nature, such as the elimination of organised labour groups, rearmament (in contravention of the Versailles Treaty), and biological politics.[176] Various work programs designed to establish full-employment for the German population were instituted once the Nazis seized full national power. Hitler encouraged nationally supported projects like the construction of the Autobahn, the introduction of an affordable people’s car (Volkswagen) and later, the Nazis bolstered the economy through the business and employment generated by military rearmament.[177] Not only did the Nazis benefit early in the regime’s existence from the first post-Depression economic upswing, their public works projects, job-procurement program, and subsidised home repair program reduced unemployment by as much as 40 percent in one year, a development which tempered the unfavourable psychological climate caused by the earlier economic crisis and encouraged Germans to march in step with the regime.
To protect the German people and currency from volatile market forces, the Nazis also promised social policies like a national labour service, state-provided health care, guaranteed pensions, and an agrarian settlement program.[179] Agrarian policies were particularly important to the Nazis since they corresponded not just to the economy but to their geopolitical conception of Lebensraum as well. For Hitler, the acquisition of land and soil was requisite in moulding the German economy.[180] To tie farmers to their land, selling agricultural land was prohibited.[181] Farm ownership was nominally private, but business monopoly rights were granted to marketing boards to control production and prices with a quota system.[182]
The Nazis sought to gain support of workers by declaring May Day, a day celebrated by organised labour, to be a paid holiday and held celebrations on 1 May 1933 to honour German workers.[183] The Nazis stressed that Germany must honour its workers.[184] The regime believed that the only way to avoid a repeat of the disaster of 1918 was to secure workers’ support for the German government.[183] The Nazis wanted all Germans take part in the May Day celebrations in the hope that this would help break down class hostility between workers and burghers.[184] Songs in praise of labour and workers were played by state radio throughout May Day as well as fireworks and an air show in Berlin.[184] Hitler spoke of workers as patriots who had built Germany’s industrial strength, had honourably served in the war and claimed that they had been oppressed under economic liberalism.[185] Berliner Morgenpost that had been strongly associated with the political left in the past praised the regime’s May Day celebrations.[185]
The Nazis continued social welfare policies initiated by the governments of the Weimar Republic and mobilised volunteers to assist those impoverished, “racially-worthy” Germans through the National Socialist People’s Welfare organisation.[186] This organisation oversaw charitable activities, and became the largest civic organisation in Nazi Germany.[186] Successful efforts were made to get middle-class women involved in social work assisting large families.[187] The Winter Relief campaigns acted as a ritual to generate public sympathy.[188] Bonfires were made of school children’s differently coloured caps as symbolic of the abolition of class differences.[187] Large celebrations and symbolism were used extensively to encourage those engaged in physical labour on behalf of Germany, with leading National Socialists often praising the ‘honour of labour’, which fostered a sense of community (Gemeinschaft) for the German people and promoted solidarity towards the Nazi cause.[189]
Hitler believed that private ownership was useful in that it encouraged creative competition and technical innovation, but insisted that it had to conform to national interests and be “productive” rather than “parasitical”.[190] Private property rights were conditional upon the economic mode of use; if it did not advance Nazi economic goals then the state could nationalise it.[191] Although the Nazis privatised public properties and public services, they also increased economic state control.[192] Under Nazi economics, free competition and self-regulating markets diminished; nevertheless, Hitler’s social Darwinist beliefs made him reluctant to entirely disregard business competition and private property as economic engines.[193][194]
Hitler primarily viewed the German economy as an instrument of power. Hitler believed the economy was not just about creating wealth and technical progress so as to improve the quality of life for a nation’s citizenry; economic success was paramount in that, it provided the means and material foundations necessary for military conquest.[195] While economic progress generated by National Socialist programs had its role in appeasing the German people, the Nazis and Hitler in particular, did not believe that economic solutions alone were sufficient to thrust Germany onto the stage as a world power. Therefore, the Nazis sought first to secure a command economy through general economic revival accompanied by massive military spending for rearmament, especially later through the implementation of the Four Year Plan, which consolidated their rule and firmly secured a command relationship between the German arms industry and the National Socialist government.[196] Between 1933 and 1939, military expenditures were upwards of 82 billion Reichsmarks and represented 23 percent of Germany’s gross national product as the Nazis mobilised their people and economy for war.
Anti-communism in Nazi Germany
Historians Ian Kershaw and Joachim Fest argue that in post-World War I Germany, the Nazis were one of many nationalist and fascist political parties contending for the leadership of Germany’s anti-communist movement. The Nazis claimed that communism was dangerous to the well-being of nations because of its intention to dissolve private property, its support of class conflict, its aggression against the middle class, its hostility towards small business, and its atheism.[198] Nazism rejected class conflict-based socialism and economic egalitarianism, favouring instead a stratified economy with social classes based on merit and talent, retaining private property, and the creation of national solidarity that transcends class distinction.[199]
During the 1920s, Hitler urged disparate Nazi factions to unite in opposition to Jewish Bolshevism.[200] Hitler asserted that the “three vices” of “Jewish Marxism” were democracy, pacifism, and internationalism.[201]
In 1930, Hitler said: “Our adopted term ‘Socialist’ has nothing to do with Marxist Socialism. Marxism is anti-property; true Socialism is not.”[202] In 1942, Hitler privately said: “I absolutely insist on protecting private property … we must encourage private initiative”.[203]
During the late 1930s and the 1940s, anti-communist regimes and groups that supported Nazism included the Falange in Spain; the Vichy regime and the 33rd Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS Charlemagne (1st French) in France; and in Britain the Cliveden Set, Lord Halifax, the British Union of Fascists under Sir Oswald Mosley, and associates of Neville Chamberlain.[204]
Anti-capitalism in Nazi Germany
The Nazis argued that capitalism damages nations due to international finance, the economic dominance of big business, and Jewish influences.[198] Nazi propaganda posters in working class districts emphasised anti-capitalism, such as one that said: “The maintenance of a rotten industrial system has nothing to do with nationalism. I can love Germany and hate capitalism.”[205]
Adolf Hitler, both in public and in private, expressed disdain for capitalism, arguing that it holds nations ransom in the interests of a parasitic cosmopolitan rentier class.[206] He opposed free market capitalism’s profit-seeking impulses and desired an economy in which community interests would be upheld.[190]
Hitler distrusted capitalism for being unreliable due to its egotism, and he preferred a state-directed economy that is subordinated to the interests of the Volk.[206]
Hitler told a party leader in 1934, “The economic system of our day is the creation of the Jews.”[206] Hitler said to Benito Mussolini that capitalism had “run its course”.[206] Hitler also said that the business bourgeoisie “know nothing except their profit. ‘Fatherland’ is only a word for them.”[207] Hitler was personally disgusted with the ruling bourgeois elites of Germany during the period of the Weimar Republic, who he referred to as “cowardly shits”.[208]
In Mein Kampf, Hitler effectively supported mercantilism, in the belief that economic resources from their respective territories should be seized by force; he believed that the policy of Lebensraum would provide Germany with such economically valuable territories.[209] He argued that the only means to maintain economic security was to have direct control over resources rather than being forced to rely on world trade.[209] He claimed that war to gain such resources was the only means to surpass the failing capitalist economic system.[209]
A number of other Nazis held strong revolutionary socialist and anti-capitalist beliefs, most prominently Ernst Röhm, the leader of the Sturmabteilung (SA).[210] Röhm claimed that the Nazis’ rise to power constituted a national revolution, but insisted that a socialist “second revolution” was required for Nazi ideology to be fulfilled.[30] Röhm’s SA began attacks against individuals deemed to be associated with conservative reaction.[30] Hitler saw Röhm’s independent actions as violating and possibly threatening his leadership, as well as jeopardising the regime by alienating the conservative President Paul von Hindenburg and the conservative-oriented German Army.[31] This resulted in Hitler purging Röhm and other radical members of the SA.[31]
Another radical Nazi, Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels had stressed the socialist character of Nazism, and claimed in his diary in the 1920s that if he were to pick between Bolshevism and capitalism, he said “in final analysis”, “it would be better for us to go down with Bolshevism than live in eternal slavery under capitalism.”[211]
Totalitarianism
Under Nazism, with its emphasis on the nation, individual needs were subordinate to those of the wider community.[212] Hitler declared that “every activity and every need of every individual will be regulated by the collectivity represented by the party” and that “there are no longer any free realms in which the individual belongs to himself”.[213] Himmler justified the establishment of a repressive police state, in which the security forces could exercise power arbitrarily, as national security and order should take precedence over the needs of the individual.[214]
According to the famous philosopher and political theorist, Hannah Arendt, the allure of Nazism as a totalitarian ideology (with its attendant mobilisation of the German population), resided within the construct of helping that society deal with the cognitive dissonance resultant from the tragic interruption of the First World War, the economic and material suffering consequent the Depression, and brought to order the revolutionary unrest occurring all around them. Instead of the plurality that existed in democratic or parliamentary states, Nazism as a totalitarian system promulgated ‘clear’ solutions to the historical problems faced by Germany, levied support by de-legitimizing the former government of Weimar, and provided a politico-biological pathway to a better future, one free from the uncertainty of the past. It was the atomised and disaffected masses that Hitler and the party elite pointed in a particular direction, and using clever propaganda to make them into ideological adherents, exploited in bringing Nazism to life.[215]
While the ideologues of Nazism, much like those of Stalinism, abhorred democratic or parliamentary governance as practiced in the U.S. or Britain, their differences are substantial. An epistemic crisis occurs when one tries to synthesize and contrast Nazism and Stalinism as two-sides of the same coin with their similarly tyrannical leaders, state-controlled economies, and repressive police structures; namely, since while they share a common thematic political construction, they are entirely inimical to one another in their worldviews and when more carefully analysed against one another on a one-to-one level, an “irreconcilable asymmetry” results.[216]
Post-war Nazism
Following Nazi Germany’s defeat in World War II and the end of the Holocaust, overt expressions of support for Nazi ideas were prohibited in Germany and other European countries. Nonetheless, movements that self-identify as National Socialist or are described as adhering to National Socialism continue to exist on the fringes of politics in many western societies. Usually espousing a white supremacist ideology, many deliberately adopt the symbols of Nazi Germany.[217]
What was Italian Fascism?
Italian Fascism (Italian: Fascismo Italiano), also known simply as Fascism (Italian: Fascismo), is the original fascist ideology, as developed in Italy. The ideology is associated with the National Fascist Party, which under Benito Mussolini ruled the Kingdom of Italy from 1922 until 1943, the Republican Fascist Party that ruled the Italian Social Republic from 1943 to 1945, the post-war Italian Social Movement and subsequent Italian neo-fascist movements.
Italian Fascism was rooted in Italian nationalism and the desire to restore and expand Italian territories, which Italian Fascists deemed necessary for a nation to assert its superiority and strength and to avoid succumbing to decay.[1] Italian Fascists claimed that modern Italy is the heir to ancient Rome and its legacy, and historically supported the creation of an Italian Empire to provide spazio vitale (“living space”) for colonization by Italian settlers and to establish control over the Mediterranean Sea.[2]
Italian Fascism promoted a corporatist economic system whereby employer and employee syndicates are linked together in associations to collectively represent the nation’s economic producers and work alongside the state to set national economic policy.[3] This economic system intended to resolve class conflict through collaboration between the classes.[4]
Italian Fascism opposed liberalism, but rather than seeking a reactionary restoration of the pre-French Revolutionary world, which it considered to have been flawed, it had a forward-looking direction.[5] It was opposed to Marxist socialism because of its typical opposition to nationalism,[6] but was also opposed to the reactionary conservatism developed by Joseph de Maistre.[7] It believed the success of Italian nationalism required respect for tradition and a clear sense of a shared past among the Italian people, alongside a commitment to a modernized Italy.[8]
Nationalism in Fascist Italy
Italian Fascism was rooted in Italian nationalism and the desire to restore and expand Italian territories, which Italian Fascists deemed necessary for a nation to assert its superiority and strength and to avoid succumbing to decay.[1] Italian Fascists claimed that modern Italy is the heir to ancient Rome and its legacy, and historically supported the creation of an Italian Empire to provide spazio vitale (“living space”) for colonization by Italian settlers and to establish control over the Mediterranean Sea.[2]
Italian Fascism promoted a corporatist economic system whereby employer and employee syndicates are linked together in associations to collectively represent the nation’s economic producers and work alongside the state to set national economic policy.[3] This economic system intended to resolve class conflict through collaboration between the classes.[4]
Italian Fascism opposed liberalism, but rather than seeking a reactionary restoration of the pre-French Revolutionary world, which it considered to have been flawed, it had a forward-looking direction.[5] It was opposed to Marxist socialism because of its typical opposition to nationalism,[6] but was also opposed to the reactionary conservatism developed by Joseph de Maistre.[7] It believed the success of Italian nationalism required respect for tradition and a clear sense of a shared past among the Italian people, alongside a commitment to a modernized Italy.[8]
The Fascist state is a will to power and empire. The Roman tradition is here a powerful force. According to the Doctrine of Fascism, empire is not only territorial or military or mercantile concept, but a spiritual and moral one. One can think of an empire, that is, a nation, which directly or indirectly guides other nations, without the need to conquer a single square kilometre of territory.
— Benito Mussolini, Giovanni Gentile, Doctrine of Fascism (1932).
Irredentism and expansionism
Fascism emphasized the need for the restoration of the Mazzinian Risorgimento tradition that pursued the unification of Italy, that the Fascists claimed had been left incomplete and abandoned in the Giolittian-era Italy.[11] Fascism sought the incorporation of claimed “unredeemed” territories to Italy.
To the east of Italy, the Fascists claimed that Dalmatia was a land of Italian culture whose Italians, including those of Italianized South Slavic descent, had been driven out of Dalmatia and into exile in Italy, and supported the return of Italians of Dalmatian heritage.[12] Mussolini identified Dalmatia as having strong Italian cultural roots for centuries via the Roman Empire and the Republic of Venice.[13] The Fascists especially focused their claims based on the Venetian cultural heritage of Dalmatia, claiming that Venetian rule had been beneficial for all Dalmatians and had been accepted by the Dalmatian population.[13] The Fascists were outraged after World War I, when the agreement between Italy and the Entente Allies in the Treaty of London of 1915 to have Dalmatia join Italy, was revoked in 1919.[13] The Fascist regime supported annexation of Yugoslavia’s region of Slovenia into Italy that already held a portion of the Slovene population, whereby Slovenia would become an Italian province,[14] resulting in a quarter of Slovene ethnic territory and approximately 327,000 out of total population of 1.3[15] million Slovenes being subjected to forced Italianization.[16][17] The Fascist regime imposed mandatory Italianization upon the German and South Slav populations living within Italy’s borders.[18] The Fascist regime abolished the teaching of minority German and Slavic languages in schools, German and Slavic language newspapers were shut down, and geographical and family names in areas of German or Slavic languages were to be Italianized.[18] This resulted in significant violence against South Slavs deemed to be resisting Italianization.[18] The Fascist regime supported annexation of Albania, claimed that Albanians were ethnically linked to Italians through links with the prehistoric Italiotes, Illyrian and Roman populations, and that the major influence exerted by the Roman and Venetian empires over Albania justified Italy’s right to possess it.[19] The Fascist regime also justified the annexation of Albania on the basis that, because several hundred thousand people of Albanian descent had been absorbed into society in southern Italy already, the incorporation of Albania was a reasonable measure that would unite people of Albanian descent into one state.[20] The Fascist regime endorsed Albanian irredentism, directed against the predominantly Albanian-populated Kosovo and Epirus - particularly in Chameria inhabited by a substantial number of Albanians.[21] After Italy annexed Albania in 1939, the Fascist regime endorsed assimilating Albanians into Italians and colonizing Albania with Italian settlers from the Italian Peninsula to gradually transform it into an Italian land.[22] The Fascist regime claimed the Ionian Islands as Italian territory, on the basis that the islands had belonged to the Venetian Republic from the mid-14th until the 18th century.[23]
To the west of Italy, the Fascists claimed that the territories of Corsica, Nice, and Savoy held by France, were Italian lands.[24][25] During the period of Italian unification in 1860 to 1861, Prime Minister of Piedmont-Sardinia, Camillo Benso, Count of Cavour who was leading the unification effort, faced opposition from French Emperor Napoleon III who indicated that France would oppose Italian unification unless France was given Nice and Savoy that were held by Piedmont Sardinia, as France did not want a powerful state having control of all the passages of the Alps.[26] As a result, Piedmont-Sardinia was pressured to concede Nice and Savoy to France in exchange for France accepting the unification of Italy.[27] The Fascist regime produced literature on Corsica that presented evidence of the Italianità of the island.[28] The Fascist regime produced literature on Nice that justified that Nice was an Italian land based on historic, ethnic, and linguistic grounds.[28] The Fascists quoted Medieval Italian scholar Petrarch who said “The border of Italy is the Var; consequently Nice is a part of Italy”.[28] The Fascists quoted Italian national hero Giuseppe Garibaldi who said: “Corsica and Nice must not belong to France; there will come the day when an Italy mindful of its true worth will reclaim its provinces now so shamefully languishing under foreign domination”.[28] Mussolini initially pursued promoting annexation of Corsica through political and diplomatic means, believing that Corsica could be annexed to Italy through first encouraging the existing autonomist tendencies in Corsica and then independence of Corsica from France, that would be followed by annexation of Corsica into Italy.[29]
To the north of Italy, the Fascist regime in the 1930s had designs on the largely Italian-populated region of Ticino and the Romansch-populated region of Graubünden in Switzerland (the Romansch are a people with a Latin-based language).[30] In November 1938, Mussolini declared to the Grand Fascist Council: “We shall bring our border to the Gotthard Pass”.[31] The Fascist regime accused the Swiss government of oppressing the Romansch people in Graubünden.[30] Mussolini argued that Romansch was an Italian dialect and thus Graubünden should be incorporated into Italy.[32] Ticino was also claimed because the region had belonged to the Duchy of Milan from the mid-fourteenth century until 1515.[33] Claim was also raised on the basis that areas now part of Graubünden in the Mesolcina valley and Hinterrhein were held by the Milanese Trivulzio family, who ruled from the Mesocco Castle in the late 15th century.[34] Also, during the summer of 1940, Galeazzo Ciano met with Hitler and Ribbentrop, and proposed to them the dissection of Switzerland along the central chain of the Western Alps, which would have left Italy also with the canton of Valais in addition to the claims raised earlier.[35]
To the south, the regime claimed the archipelago of Malta, which had been held by the British since 1800.[36] Mussolini claimed that the Maltese language was a dialect of Italian, and theories about Malta being the cradle of the Latin civilization were promoted.[36][37] Italian had been widely used in Malta in the literary, scientific and legal fields, and it was one of Malta’s official languages until 1937, when its status was abolished by the British as a response to Italy’s invasion of Ethiopia.[38] Italian irredentists had claimed that territories on the coast of North Africa were Italy’s Fourth Shore and used the historical Roman rule in North Africa as a precedent to justify the incorporation of such territories to Italian jurisdiction as being a “return” of Italy to North Africa.[39] In January 1939, Italy annexed territories in Libya that it considered within Italy’s Fourth Shore, with Libya’s four coastal provinces of Tripoli, Misurata, Benghazi, and Derna becoming an integral part of metropolitan Italy.[40] At the same time indigenous Libyans were given the ability to apply for “Special Italian Citizenship” which required such people to be literate in the Italian language and confined this type of citizenship to be valid in Libya only.[40] Tunisia that had been taken by France as a protectorate in 1881, had the highest concentration of Italians in North Africa, and its seizure by France had been viewed as an injury to national honour in Italy at what they perceived as a “loss” of Tunisia from Italian plans to incorporate it.[41] Upon entering World War II, Italy declared its intention to seize Tunisia as well as the province of Constantine of Algeria from France.[42]
To the south, the Fascist regime held interest in expanding Italy’s African colonial possessions. In the 1920s, Italy regarded Portugal as a weak country that was unbecoming of a colonial power due to its weak hold on its colonies and mismanagement of them, and, as such, Italy desired to annex Portugal’s colonies.[43] Italy’s relations with Portugal were influenced by the rise to power of the authoritarian conservative nationalist regime of Salazar, which borrowed fascist methods; though Salazar upheld Portugal’s traditional alliance with Britain.[43]
Race in fascist Italy
In a 1921 speech in Bologna, Mussolini stated that “Fascism was born… out of a profound, perennial need of this our Aryan and Mediterranean race”.[44][45] In this speech Mussolini was referring to Italians as being the Mediterranean branch of the Aryan Race, Aryan in the meaning of people of an Indo-European language and culture.[46] Italian Fascism emphasized that race was bound by spiritual and cultural foundations, and identified a racial hierarchy based on spiritual and cultural factors.[46] While Italian Fascism based its conception of race on spiritual and cultural factors, Mussolini explicitly rejected notions that biologically “pure” races were still considered a relevant factor in racial classification.[47] He claimed that Italianità had assimilatory capacity.[47] It used spiritual and cultural conceptions of race to make land claims on Dalmatia and to justify an Italian sphere of influence in the Balkans based on then-present and historical Italian cultural influence in the Balkans.[48] The Fascist regime justified colonialism in Africa by claiming that the spiritual and cultural superiority of Italians as part of the white race, justified the right for Italy and other powers of the white race to rule over the black race, while asserting the racial segregation of whites and blacks in its colonies.[49] It claimed that Fascism’s colonial goals were to civilize the inferior races and defend the purity of Western civilization from racial miscegenation that it claimed would harm the intellectual qualities of the white race.[49] It claimed that the white race needed to increase its natality in order to avoid being overtaken by the black and yellow races that were multiplying at a faster rate than whites.[50]
Within Italy, the Italian Empire, and territory identified as spazio vitale for Italy, a cultural-racial hierarchy that ranked the peoples in terms of value who lived there, was clearly defined by 1940 during which plans for Italy’s spazio vitale were being formalized by the regime.[51] The Fascist regime considered Italians to be superior to other peoples of the Mediterranean region - including Latin, Slavic and Hellenic peoples - because only Italians had achieved racial unity and full political consciousness via the Fascist regime.[51] Latin, Slavic, and Hellenic peoples were regarded as superior to Turkic, Semitic, and Hamitic peoples.[51] Amongst indigenous peoples of Africa, the racial hierarchy regarded indigenous North Africans as superior to indigenous people in Italian East Africa.[51]
Though believing in the racial superiority of Europeans over non-Europeans, the Fascist regime displayed diplomatic courtesy to non-Europeans. The regime held an alliance with Japan within the Tripartite Pact between Germany, Italy, and Japan. Indian independence movement leader Mahatma Gandhi visited Italy in 1931 and was invited by Mussolini for a personal visit, providing Gandhi full diplomatic courtesy.[52] Fascist official Italo Balbo during his transatlantic flight from Italy to the United States in 1933 visited with leaders of the Sioux tribe and accepted the Sioux’s honorary bestowing of his incorporation into the Sioux with the Sioux position and name Chief Flying Eagle.[53]
Italian Fascism strongly rejected the common Nordicist conception of the Aryan Race that idealized “pure” Aryans as having certain physical traits that were defined as Nordic such as blond hair and blue eyes.[54] Nordicism was divisive because Italians - and especially southern Italians had faced discrimination from Nordicist proponents in countries like the United States out of the view that non-Nordic southern Europeans were inferior to Nordics.[55] In Italy, the influence of Nordicism had a divisive effect in which the influence resulted in Northern Italians who regarded themselves to have Nordic racial heritage considered themselves a civilized people while negatively regarding southern Italians as biologically inferior.[56] At least some of the stereotypes about Southern Italians were created by Cesare Lombroso, an Italian Jewish criminologist and anthropologist of Sephardic descent.[57][58][59][60][61] For his controversial theories, Lombroso was expelled from the Italian Society of Anthropology and Ethnology in 1882. The Lombrosian doctrine is currently considered pseudoscientific.[62]
Mussolini and other Fascists held antipathy to Nordicism because of what they viewed as an inferiority complex of people of Mediterranean racial heritage that they claimed had been instilled into Mediterraneans by the propagation of such theories by German and Anglo-Saxon Nordicists who viewed Mediterranean peoples as racially degenerate and thus in their view inferior.[54] However traditional Nordicist claims of Mediterraneans being degenerate due to having a darker colour of skin than Nordics had long been rebuked in anthropology through the depigmentation theory that claimed that lighter skinned peoples had been depigmented from a darker skin, this theory has since become a widely accepted view in anthropology.[63] Anthropologist Carleton S. Coon in his work The races of Europe (1939) subscribed to depigmentation theory that claimed that Nordic race’s light-coloured skin was the result of depigmentation from their ancestors of the Mediterranean race.[64] Mussolini refused to allow Italy to return again to this inferiority complex, initially rejecting Nordicism.[54]
In the early 1930s, with the rise to power of the Nazi Party in Germany with Führer Adolf Hitler’s staunch emphasis on a Nordicist conception of the Aryan Race, strong tensions arose between the Fascists and the Nazis over racial issues. Hitler regarded northern Italians to be strongly Aryan[65] but not southern Italians.[66] The Nazis regarded the ancient Romans to have been largely a people of the Mediterranean race however they claimed that the Roman ruling classes were Nordic, descended from Aryan conquerors from the North; and that this Nordic Aryan minority was responsible for the rise of Roman civilization.[67] The Nazis viewed the downfall of the Roman Empire as being the result of the deterioration of the purity of the Nordic Aryan ruling class through its intermixing with the inferior Mediterranean types that led to the empire’s decay.[67] In addition racial intermixing in the population in general was also blamed for Rome’s downfall, claiming that Italians as a whole were a hybrid of races, including black African races. Due to the darker complexion of Mediterranean peoples, Hitler regarded them as having traces of Negroid blood and therefore were not pure Aryans and inferior to those without such heritage.[68] Hitler praised post-Roman era achievements of northern Italians such as Sandro Botticelli, Michelangelo, Dante Alighieri, and Benito Mussolini.[69] The Nazis ascribed the great achievements of post-Roman era northern Italians to the presence of Nordic racial heritage in such people who via their Nordic heritage had Germanic ancestors, such as Nazi ideologist Alfred Rosenberg recognizing Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci as exemplary Nordic men of history.[70] However the Nazis did claim that aside from biologically Nordic people that a Nordic soul could inhabit a non-Nordic body.[71] Hitler emphasized the role of Germanic influence in Northern Italy, such as stating that the art of Northern Italy was “nothing but pure German”,[72]
In 1934, in the aftermath of Austrian Nazis killing Austrian Chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss, an ally of Italy, Mussolini became enraged and responded by angrily denouncing Nazism. Mussolini rebuked Nazism’s Nordicism, claiming that the Nazis’ emphasizing of a common Nordic “Germanic race” was absurd, saying “a Germanic race does not exist. … We repeat. Does not exist. Scientists say so. Hitler says so.”[73] The fact that Germans were not purely Nordic was indeed acknowledged by prominent Nazi racial theorist Hans F. K. Günther in his book Rassenkunde des deutschen Volkes (1922) (“Racial Science of the German People”), where Günther recognized Germans as being composed of five racial types: Nordic, Mediterranean, Dinaric, Alpine, and East Baltic while asserting that the Nordics were the highest in a racial hierarchy of the five types.[74]
By 1936, the tensions between Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany reduced and relations became more amicable. In 1936, Mussolini decided to launch a racial programme in Italy, and was interested in the racial studies being conducted by Giulio Cogni.[75] Cogni was a Nordicist but did not equate Nordic identity with Germanic identity as was commonly done by German Nordicists.[76] Cogni had travelled to Germany where he had become impressed by Nazi racial theory and sought to create his own version of racial theory.[77] On 11 September 1936, Cogni sent Mussolini a copy of his newly published book Il Razzismo (1936).[75] Cogni declared the racial affinity of the Mediterranean and Nordic racial subtypes of the Aryan race and claimed that the intermixing of Nordic Aryans and Mediterranean Aryans in Italy produced a superior synthesis of Aryan Italians.[76] Cogni addressed the issue of racial differences between northern and southern Italians, declaring southern Italians were mixed between Aryan and non-Aryan races, that he claimed was most likely due to infiltration by Asiatic peoples in Roman times and later Arab invasions.[75] As such, Cogni viewed Southern Italian Mediterraneans as being polluted with orientalizing tendencies.[75] He would later change his idea and claim that Nordics and Southern Italians were closely related groups both racially and spiritually. They were generally responsible for what is the best in European civilization.[75] Initially Mussolini was not impressed with Cogni’s work, however Cogni’s ideas entered into the official Fascist racial policy several years later.[75]
In 1938 Mussolini was concerned that if Italian Fascism did not recognize Nordic heritage within Italians, that the Mediterranean inferiority complex would return to Italian society.[54] Therefore, in summer 1938, the Fascist government officially recognized Italians as having Nordic heritage and being of Nordic-Mediterranean descent and in a meeting with PNF members, and in June 1938 in a meeting with PNF members, Mussolini identified himself as Nordic and declared that previous policy of focus on Mediterraneanism was to be replaced by a focus on Aryanism.[54]
The Fascist regime began publication of the racialist magazine La Difesa della Raza in 1938.[78] The Nordicist racial theorist Guido Landra took a major role in the early work of La Difesa, and published the Manifesto of Racial Scientists in the magazine in 1938.[79]
The Manifesto directly addressed its conception of racism, and emphasized its autonomy from German racial theories, stating:
The question of racism in Italy must be treated from a purely biological point of view, without any philosophical or religious implications. The conception of racism in Italy must be essentially Italian and along Aryan-Nordic lines. This does not mean however that German racial theories are being accepted word for word in Italy and that Italians and Scandinavians are the same. It merely wishes to indicate to the Italian people a physical model and even more importantly a psychological model of human race that on account of its purely European characteristics is completely distinct from all extra-European races. This means to elevate the Italian to an ideal of superior consciousness of himself and to a greater sense of responsibility.
— Manifesto of Racial Scientists, Article 7[80]
The emphasis in the Manifesto on a psychological model of a superior human being was in reference to the Italian antisemitic racial theorists Giovanni Papini and Paolo Orano that stated that those Jews who had associated themselves as being Italian were examples of inferior psychological types that were characterized by moral abjection, falseness, and cowardice, that could not be associated with the Italian community.[81] After Article 7 of the Manifesto, the remainder claimed that peoples of the Oriental race, African races, and Jews, as not belonging to the Italian race; and in Article 10 declared that the physical and psychological characteristics of the Italian people must not be altered by crossbreeding with non-European races.[81]
The Manifesto received substantial criticism, including its assertion of Italians being a “pure race”, as critics viewed the notion as absurd.[79] La Difesa published other theories that described long-term Nordic Aryan amongst Italians, such as the theory that in the Eneolithic age Nordic Aryans arrived to Italy.[82] Many of the writers of La Difesa della Raza took up the traditional Nordicist claim that the decline and fall of the Roman Empire was due to the arrival of Semitic immigrants.[82] La Difesa’s writers were divided on their claims that described how Italians extricated themselves from Semitic influence.[79]
The Nordicist direction of Fascist racial policy was challenged in 1938 by a resurgence of the Mediterraneanist faction in the PNF.[83] By 1939, the Mediterraneanists advocated a nativist racial theory which rejected ascribing the achievements of the Italian people to Nordic peoples.[83] This nativist racial policy was prominently promoted by Ugo Rellini.[83] Rellini rejected the notion of large scale invasions of Italy by Nordic Aryans in the Eneolithic age, and claimed that Italians were an indigenous people descended from the Cro-Magnons.[84] Rellini claimed that Mediterranean and later Nordic peoples arrived and peacefully intermixed in small numbers with the indigenous Italian population.[84]
In 1941 the PNF’s Mediterraneanists through the influence of Giacomo Acerbo put forward a comprehensive definition of the Italian race.[85] However these efforts were challenged by Mussolini’s endorsement of Nordicist figures with the appointment of staunch spiritual Nordicist Alberto Luchini as head of Italy’s Racial Office in May 1941, as well as with Mussolini becoming interested with Julius Evola’s spiritual Nordicism in late 1941.[85] Acerbo and the Mediterraneanists in his High Council on Demography and Race sought to bring the regime back to supporting Mediterraneanism by thoroughly denouncing the pro-Nordicist Manifesto of the Racial Scientists.[85] The Council recognized Aryans as being a linguistic-based group, and condemned the Manifesto for denying the influence of pre-Aryan civilization on modern Italy, saying that the Manifesto “constitutes an unjustifiable and undemonstrable negation of the anthropological, ethnological, and archaeological discoveries that have occurred and are occurring in our country”.[85] Furthermore, the Council denounced the Manifesto for “implicitly” crediting Germanic invaders of Italy in the guise of the Lombards for having “a formative influence on the Italian race in a disproportional degree to the number of invaders and to their biological predominance”.[85] The Council claimed that the obvious superiority of the ancient Greeks and Romans in comparison with the ancient Germanic tribes made it inconceivable that Italian culture owed a debt to ancient Aryan Germans.[85] The Council denounced the Manifesto’s Nordicist supremacist attitude towards Mediterraneans that it claimed was “considering them as slaves” and was “a repudiation of the entire Italian civilization”.[85]
Attitude and policies regarding Jews Edit
Main articles: Manifesto of Race and Italian Racial Laws
In his early years as Fascist leader, while Mussolini harboured negative stereotypes of Jews he did not hold a firm stance on Jews, and his official stances oscillated and shifted to meet the political demands of the various factions of the Fascist movement, rather than having any concrete stance.[86] Mussolini had held antisemitic beliefs prior to becoming a Fascist, such as in a 1908 essay on the topic of Nietzsche’s Übermensch, in which Mussolini condemned “pallid Judeans” for “wrecking” the Roman Empire; and in 1913 as editor of the Italian Socialist Party’s (PSI) Avanti! newspaper again wrote about the Jews having caused havoc in ancient Rome.[87] Although Mussolini held these negative attitudes, he was aware that Italian Jews were a deeply integrated and small community in Italy who were by and large perceived favourably in Italy for fighting valiantly for Italy in World War I.[88] Of the 117 original members of the Fasci Italiani di Combattimento, founded on 23 March 1919, five were Jewish.[89] Since the movement’s early years, there were a small number of prominent openly antisemitic Fascists such as Roberto Farinacci.[90] There were also prominent Fascists who completely rejected antisemitism, such as Italo Balbo who lived in Ferrara that had a substantial Jewish community that was accepted and antisemitic incidents were rare in the city.[91]
In response to his observation of large numbers of Jews amongst the Bolsheviks, and claims (that were later confirmed to be true) that the Bolsheviks and Germany (that Italy was fighting in World War I) were politically connected, Mussolini said antisemitic statements involving the Bolshevik-German connection as being an “unholy alliance between Hindenburg and the synagogue”.[92] Mussolini came to believe rumours that Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin was of Jewish descent.[92] In an article in Il Popolo d’Italia in June 1919, Mussolini wrote a highly antisemitic analysis on the situation in Europe involving Bolshevism following the October Revolution, the Russian Civil War, and war in Hungary involving the Hungarian Soviet Republic.[93]
If Petrograd (Pietrograd) does not yet fall, if [General] Denikin is not moving forward, then this is what the great Jewish bankers of London and New York have decreed. These bankers are bound by ties of blood to those Jews who in Moscow as in Budapest are taking their revenge on the Aryan race that has condemned them to dispersion for so many centuries. In Russia, 80 percent of the managers of the Soviets are Jews, in Budapest 17 out of 22 people’s commissars are Jews. Might it not be that bolshevism is the vendetta of Judaism against Christianity?? It is certainly worth pondering. It is entirely possible that bolshevism will drown in the blood of a pogrom of catastrophic proportions. World finance is in the hands of the Jews. Whoever owns the strongboxes of the peoples is in control of their political systems. Behind the puppets (making peace) in Paris, there are the Rothschilds, the Warburgs, the Schiffs, the Guggenheims who are of the same blood who are conquering Petrograd and Budapest. Race does not betray race….Bolshevism is a defense of the international plutocracy. This is the basic truth of the matter. The international plutocracy dominated and controlled by Jews has a supreme interest in all of Russian life accelerating its process of disintegration to the point of paroxysm. A Russia that is paralyzed, disorganized, starved, will be a place where tomorrow the bourgeoisie, yes the bourgeoisie, o proletarians will celebrate its spectacular feast of plenty.
— Benito Mussolini, Il Popolo d’Italia, June 1919.[93]
This statement by Mussolini on a Jewish-Bolshevik-plutocratic connection and conspiracy was met with opposition in the Fascist movement, resulting in Mussolini responding to this opposition amongst his supporters by abandoning this stance shortly afterwards in 1919.[92] Upon abandoning this stance due to opposition to it, Mussolini no longer said his previous assertion that Bolshevism was Jewish, but warned that due to the large numbers of Jews in the Bolshevik movement, the rise of Bolshevism in Russia would result in a ferocious wave of antisemitism in Russia.[92] He then claimed that “antisemitism is foreign to the Italian people” but warned Zionists that they should be careful not to stir up antisemitism in “the only country where it has not existed”.[92]
Margherita Sarfatti was an influential Jewish member of the PNF whom Mussolini had known since he and her had been members of the Italian Socialist Party (PSI) and she had been his mistress, she helped write Dux (1926), a biography of Mussolini.[94] One of the Jewish financial supporters of the Fascist movement, was Toeplitz, whom Mussolini had earlier accused of being a traitor during World War I.[95] Another prominent Jewish Italian Fascist was Ettore Ovazza who was a staunch Italian nationalist and an opponent of Zionism in Italy.[96] 230 Italian Jews took part in the Fascists’ March on Rome in 1922.[89] Mussolini in the early 1920s was cautious on topics of Italian Jewish financiers, that arose from time to time from antisemitic elements in the Fascist movement; while he regarded them as untrustworthy he believed that he could draw them to his side.[88] In 1932, Mussolini made his private attitude about Jews known to the Austrian ambassador when discussing the issue, saying: “I have no love for the Jews, but they have great influence everywhere. It is better to leave them alone. Hitler’s antisemitism has already brought him more enemies than is necessary”.[92]
On the eve of the March on Rome, the leadership of the PNF declared “a Jewish question does not exist in our country and let us hope that there never shall be one, at least not until Zionism poses Italian Jews with the dilemma of choosing between their Italian homeland and another homeland”.[97] The relations between the regime and Jews as in those practicing the religion of Judaism was affected by the Fascists’ accommodation of the Catholic Church beginning in the early 1920s in which it sought to remove previous provisions of equality of faiths and impose state support of the supremacy of Catholicism.
In 1928 frustration arose in the regime over Zionism, in which Mussolini responded to the Italian Zionist Congress by publicly declaring a question to Italy’s Jews on their self-identity, “Are you a religion or are you a nation?”, Zionist and anti-Zionist Jews responded, the anti-Zionist Jews professed they were religious Jews as part of the Italian nation while Zionist Jews declared that there was no dispute between Zionism and said that all Italian Jews held patriotic respect for Italy.[98] Upon these responses arriving, Mussolini declared that these revealed that a Jewish problem existed in terms of Jewish identity in Italy as a result of conflicting national loyalties amongst Zionist Jews, saying:
My intention was to seek a clarification among Italian Jews and to open the eyes of Christian Italians. […] This goal has been achieved. The problem exists, and it is no longer confined to that “shadowy sphere” where it had been constituted astutely by the former, ingeniously by the latter.
— Benito Mussolini, 1928.
The Fascists at this time were not wholly opposed to Zionism, but took an instrumental approach to it, they were hostile to it when it caused conflict in Italy with the country’s Catholic community and when such Zionists were seen as associated with British interests; they were favourable to Zionists who opposed the British and sought Italy’s support as their protector.[99] In the early 1930s, Mussolini held discussions with Zionist leadership figures over proposals to encourage the emigration of Italian Jews to the mandate of Palestine, as Mussolini hoped that the presence of pro-Italian Jews in the region would weaken pro-British sentiment and potentially overturn the British mandate.[100]
At the 1934 Montreux Fascist conference chaired by the Italian-led Comitati d’Azione per l’Universalita di Roma (CAUR), that sought to found a Fascist International, the issue of antisemitism was debated amongst various fascist parties, with some more favourable to it, and others less favourable. Two final compromises were adopted, creating the official stance of the Fascist International:
[T]he Jewish question cannot be converted into a universal campaign of hatred against the Jews […] Considering that in many places certain groups of Jews are installed in conquered countries, exercising in an open and occult manner an influence injurious to the material and moral interests of the country which harbors them, constituting a sort of state within a state, profiting by all benefits and refusing all duties, considering that they have furnished and are inclined to furnish, elements conducive to international revolution which would be destructive to the idea of patriotism and Christian civilization, the Conference denounces the nefarious action of these elements and is ready to combat them.”
— CAUR, 1934.[101]
In a discussion with President of the World Zionist Organization Chaim Weizmann over requests for Italy to provide refuge for Jews fleeing Nazi Germany, Mussolini agreed that he would accept Jewish refugees but warned Weizmann about consequences if such Jews harmed Italy, saying:[102]
… I don’t hide from you that the collusion of the Jewish world with the plutocracy and international left is ever more evident, and our politico-military situation doesn’t permit us to keep in our bosom eventual saboteurs of the effort that the Italian people are making.
— Benito Mussolini, mid-1930s in conversation with Chaim Weizmann[102]
Italian Fascism’s attitudes towards Zionism and Jews in general underwent a shift in response to the Second Italo-Ethiopian War. At the outset of the war, Mussolini sought to gain favourable support for Italy’s intervention in Ethiopia, and appealed to Zionists by offering them a solution to the Jewish question, in which Italy would set aside a certain amount of territory from conquered Ethiopia to be a homeland for Jews.[103] Mussolini claimed that territory from conquered Ethiopia would make an ideal homeland for the Jews, noting that there were large numbers of Falasha already living there who identified as Jews.[103] However Zionist leaders rejected this proposal, saying that they would only live in the Holy Land in the Levant.[103] Mussolini viewed this as an offensive snub, and responded in frustration saying “If Ethiopia is good enough for my Italians why isn’t it good enough for you Jews?”.[103] Afterwards Mussolini’s relations with the Zionist movement cooled.[103] Mussolini became aggravated with his observation that many Jews opposed the Italo-Ethiopian War, to which he responded:[104]
World Jewry is doing a bad business in aligning itself with the anti-Fascist sanctions campaign against the one European country which, at least until now, has neither practiced nor preached anti-Semitism.
— Benito Mussolini, 1936[104]
In 1936, the Fascist regime began to promote racial antisemitism, Mussolini claimed that international Jewry had sided with Britain against Italy during Italy’s war with Ethiopia.[105] Historian Renzo De Felice believed that the Fascist regime’s pursuit of alliance with Nazi Germany that began in 1936, explains the adoption of antisemitism as a pragmatic component of pursuit of that alliance.[105] De Felice’s interpretation has been challenged by H. Stuart Hughes who has claimed that direct Nazi pressure to adopt antisemitic policy had little or no impact on Mussolini’s decision.[105] Hughes notes that the Fascist version of antisemitism was based on spiritualist considerations while eschewing anthropological or biological arguments unlike the Nazi version of antisemitism.[105] Italian Fascism adopted antisemitism in the late 1930s, and Mussolini personally returned to invoke antisemitic statements as he had done earlier.[106] The Fascist regime used antisemitic propaganda for the Spanish Civil War from 1937 to 1938 that emphasized that Italy was supporting Spain’s Nationalist forces against a “Jewish International”.[106]
In 1938, Fascist Italy passed the Italian Racial Laws which forbid Jews from their citizenship and forbid marriages between Italians and Jews.[107] The adoption of such racial laws was met with opposition from Fascist members including Balbo, who regarded antisemitism as having nothing to do with Fascism and staunchly opposed the antisemitic laws.[91]
Totalitarianism in fascist Italy
In 1925, the PNF declared that Italy’s Fascist state was to be totalitarian.[9] The term “totalitarian” had initially been used as a pejorative accusation by Italy’s liberal opposition, that denounced the Fascist movement for seeking to create a total dictatorship.[9] However the Fascists responded by accepting that they were totalitarian, but presented totalitarianism from a positive viewpoint.[9] Mussolini described totalitarianism as seeking to forge an authoritarian national state that would be capable of completing Risorgimento of the Italia Irredenta, forge a powerful modern Italy, and create a new kind of citizen – politically active Fascist Italians.[9]
The Doctrine of Fascism (1932) described the nature of Italian Fascism’s totalitarianism, stating the following:
Fascism is for the only liberty which can be a serious thing, the liberty of the state and of the individual in the state. Therefore for the fascist, everything is in the state, and no human or spiritual thing exists, or has any sort of value, outside the state. In this sense fascism is totalitarian, and the fascist state which is the synthesis and unity of every value, interprets, develops and strengthens the entire life of the people.
— Benito Mussolini, Giovanni Gentile, Doctrine of Fascism (1932)
American journalist H. R. Knickerbocker wrote in 1941 “Mussolini’s Fascist state is the least terroristic of the three totalitarian states. The terror is so mild in comparison with the Soviet or Nazi varieties, that it almost fails to qualify as terroristic at all.” As example he described an Italian journalist friend who refused to become a Fascist. He was fired from his newspaper and put under 24-hour surveillance, but otherwise not harassed; his employment contract was settled for a lump sum and he was allowed to work for the foreign press. Knickerbocker contrasted his treatment with the inevitable torture and execution under Stalin or Hitler, and stated “you have a fair idea of the comparative mildness of the Italian kind of totalitarianism.”[108]
However, since World War II, historians have noted that in Italy’s colonies, Italian Fascism displayed extreme levels of violence. The deaths of one-tenth of the population of the Italian colony of Libya occurred during the Fascist era, including from the use of gassings, concentration camps, starvation, and disease; and in Ethiopia during the Second Italo-Ethiopian War and afterwards, by 1938 a quarter of a million Ethiopians had died.[109]
Corporate economics in fascist Italy
Italian Fascism promotes a corporatist economic system.[3] The economy involves employer and employee syndicates being linked together in corporative associations to collectively represent the nation’s economic producers and work alongside the state to set national economic policy.[3] Mussolini declared such economics as a “Third Alternative” to capitalism and Marxism that Italian Fascism regarded as “obsolete doctrines”.[110] It supports criminalization of strikes by employees and lockouts by employers as illegal acts it deems these acts as prejudicial to the national community as a whole.[111]
Age and gender in fascist Italy
The Italian Fascists’ political anthem was called Giovinezza (“Youth”).[112] Fascism identifies the physical age period of youth as a critical time for the moral development of people that will affect society.[113]
Italian Fascism pursued what it called “moral hygiene” of youth, particularly regarding sexuality.[114] Fascist Italy promoted what it considered normal sexual behaviour in youth while denouncing what it considered deviant sexual behaviour.[114] It condemned pornography, most forms of birth control and contraceptive devices (with the exception of the condom), homosexuality, and prostitution as deviant sexual behaviour.[114] Fascist Italy regarded the promotion of male sexual excitation before puberty as the cause of criminality amongst male youth.[114] Fascist Italy reflected the belief of most Italians that homosexuality was wrong. Instead of the traditional Catholic teaching that it was a sin, however, a new approach was taken based on then-modern psychoanalysis that it was a social disease.[114] Fascist Italy pursued an aggressive campaign to reduce prostitution of young women.[114]
Mussolini perceived women’s primary role to be childbearers, while men were warriors, once saying, “war is to man what maternity is to the woman”.[115] In an effort to increase birthrates, the Italian Fascist government gave financial incentives to women who raised large families, and initiated policies designed to reduce the number of women employed.[116] Italian Fascism called for women to be honoured as “reproducers of the nation”, and the Italian Fascist government held ritual ceremonies to honour women’s role within the Italian nation.[117] In 1934, Mussolini declared that employment of women was a “major aspect of the thorny problem of unemployment” and that for women, working was “incompatible with childbearing”. Mussolini went on to say that the solution to unemployment for men was the “exodus of women from the work force”.[118]
Tradition in Fascist Italy
Italian Fascism believed that the success of Italian nationalism required a clear sense of a shared past amongst the Italian people, along with a commitment to a modernized Italy.[8] Mussolini in a famous speech in 1926, called for Fascist art that was “traditionalist and at the same time modern, that looks to the past and at the same time to the future”.[8]
Traditional symbols of Roman civilization were utilized by the Fascists, particularly the fasces that symbolized unity, authority, and the exercise of power.[119] Other traditional symbols of ancient Rome used by the Fascists included the she-wolf of Rome.[119] The fasces and the she-wolf symbolized the shared Roman heritage of all the regions that constituted the Italian nation.[119] In 1926, the fasces was adopted by the Fascist government of Italy as a symbol of the state.[120] In that year the Fascist government attempted to have the Italian national flag redesigned to incorporate the fasces on it.[120] However this attempt to incorporate the fasces on the flag, was stopped by strong opposition to the proposal by Italian monarchists.[120] Afterwards the Fascist government in public ceremonies rose the national tricolour flag along with a Fascist black flag.[121] However years later, after Mussolini was forced from power by the King in 1943 and later rescued by German forces, the Italian Social Republic founded by Mussolini and the Fascists, did incorporate the fasces on the state’s war flag, which was a variant of the Italian tricolour national flag.
The issue of the rule of monarchy or republic in Italy was an issue that changed several times through the development of Italian Fascism. Initially Italian Fascism was republican and denounced the Savoy monarchy.[122] However Mussolini tactically abandoned republicanism in 1922 and recognized that the acceptance of the monarchy was a necessary compromise to gain the support of the establishment to challenge the liberal constitutional order that also supported the monarchy.[122] King Victor Emmanuel III had become a popular ruler in the aftermath of Italy’s gains after World War I and the army held close loyalty to the King, thus any idea of overthrowing the monarchy was discarded as foolhardy by the Fascists at this point.[122] Importantly, Fascism’s recognition of monarchy provided Fascism with a sense of historical continuity and legitimacy.[122] The Fascists publicly identified King Victor Emmanuel II - the first King of a reunited Italy who had initiated the Risorgimento - along with other historic Italian figures such as Gaius Marius, Julius Caesar, Giuseppe Mazzini, Camillo Benso, Count of Cavour, Giuseppe Garibaldi, and others, for being within a tradition of dictatorship in Italy, that the Fascists declared that they emulated.[123] However this compromise with the monarchy did not yield a cordial relationship between the King and Mussolini.[122] Although Mussolini had formally accepted the monarchy, he pursued and largely achieved reducing the power of the King to that of a figurehead.[124] Initially the King held complete nominal legal authority over the military through the Statuto Albertino, but this was ended during the Fascist regime when Mussolini created the position of First Marshal of the Empire in 1938, a two-person position of control over the military held by both the King and the head of government, that had the effect of eliminating the King’s previously exclusive legal authority over the military by giving Mussolini equal legal authority to the King over the military.[125] In the 1930s, Mussolini became aggravated by the monarchy’s continued existence, due to envy of the fact that his counterpart in Germany, Adolf Hitler was both head of state and head of government of a republic; and Mussolini in private denounced the monarchy and indicated that he had plans to dismantle the monarchy and create a republic with himself as head of state of Italy upon an Italian success in the then-anticipated major war about to erupt in Europe.[122]
After being removed from office and placed under arrest by the King in 1943, and the Kingdom of Italy’s new non-fascist government switching sides from the Axis to the Allies, Italian Fascism returned to republicanism and condemnation of the monarchy.[126] On 18 September 1943, Mussolini made his first public address to the Italian people since his rescue from arrest by allied German forces, in which he commended the loyalty of Hitler as an ally while condemning King Victor Emmanuel III of the Kingdom of Italy for betraying Italian Fascism.[126] Mussolini on the topic of the monarchy removing him from power and dismantling the Fascist regime, stated “It is not the regime that has betrayed the monarchy, it is the monarchy that has betrayed the regime” and that “When a monarchy fails in its duties, it loses every reason for being…The state we want to establish will be national and social in the highest sense of the word; that is, it will be Fascist, thus returning to our origins.”[126] The Fascists at this point did not denounce the House of Savoy in the entirety of its history, and credited Victor Emmanuel II for his rejection of “scornfully dishonourable pacts” and denounced Victor Emmanuel III for betraying Victor Emmanuel II by entering a dishonourable pact with the Allies.[127]
The relationship between Italian Fascism and the Catholic Church was mixed. Originally it was highly anti-clerical and hostile to Catholicism, however from the mid to late 1920s, anti-clericalism lost ground in the movement, as Mussolini in power sought to seek accord with the Church as the Church held major influence in Italian society with most Italians being Catholic.[128] In 1929, the Italian government signed the Lateran Treaty with the Holy See, a concordat between Italy and the Catholic Church that allowed for the creation of a small enclave known as Vatican City as a sovereign state representing the papacy. This ended years of perceived alienation between the Church and the Italian government after Italy annexed the Papal States in 1870. Italian Fascism justified its adoption of antisemitic laws in 1938 by claiming that Italy was fulfilling the Christian religious mandate of the Catholic Church that had been initiated by Pope Innocent III in the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215, whereby the Pope issued strict regulation of the life of Jews in Christian lands. Jews were prohibited from holding any public office that would give them power over Christians, and Jews were required to wear distinctive clothing to distinguish them from Christians.[129]
Italian fascist doctrine
The Doctrine of Fascism (La dottrina del fascismo, 1932), by the Actualist philosopher Giovanni Gentile, is the official formulation of Italian Fascism, published under Benito Mussolini’s name in 1933.[130] Gentile was intellectually influenced by Hegel, Plato, Benedetto Croce, and Giambattista Vico, as such, his Actual Idealism philosophy was the basis for Fascism.[130] Hence, the Doctrine’s Weltanschauung proposes the world as action in the realm of Humanity — beyond the quotidian constrictions of contemporary political trend, by rejecting “perpetual peace” as fantastical, and accepting Man as a species continually at war; those who meet the challenge, achieve nobility.[130] To wit, Actual Idealism generally accepted that conquerors were the men of historical consequence, e.g., the Roman Julius Caesar, the Greek Alexander the Great, the Frank Charlemagne, and the French Napoleon; the philosopher–intellectual Gentile was especially inspired by the Roman Empire (27 BC – AD 476, 1453), from whence derives Fascism, thus
The Fascist accepts and loves life; he rejects and despises suicide as cowardly. Life as he understands it means duty, elevation, conquest; life must be lofty and full, it must be lived for oneself but above all for others, both near bye and far off, present and future. ”
— Benito Mussolini, The Doctrine of Fascism, 1933.[131]
Therefore, in 1925, Benito Mussolini assumed the title Duce (Leader), derived from the Latin dux (leader), a Roman Republic military-command title. Moreover, although Fascist Italy (1922–43) is historically considered an authoritarian–totalitarian dictatorship, it retained the original “liberal democratic” government façade: the Grand Council of Fascism remained active as administrators; and King Victor Emmanuel III of Italy could—at the risk of his crown—dismiss Mussolini as Italian Prime Minister, as, in the event, he did.[132]
Gentile defined Fascism as an anti-intellectual doctrine, epistemologically based on faith rather than reason. Fascist mysticism emphasized the importance of political myths, which were true not as empirical facts but as “metareality”.[133] Fascist art, architecture and symbols constituted a process which converted Fascism into a sort of a civil religion or political religion.[133] La dottrina del fascismo states that Fascism is a “religious conception of life” and forms a “spiritual community”, in contrast to bourgeois materialism.[133] The slogan Credere Obbedire Combattere (“Believe, Obey, Fight”) reflects the importance of political faith in Fascism.[133]
La dottrina del fascismo proposed an Italy of greater living standards under a one-party Fascist system, than under the multi-party liberal democratic government of 1920.[134] As the Leader of the National Fascist Party (PNF, Partito Nazionale Fascista), Benito Mussolini said that democracy is “beautiful in theory; in practice, it is a fallacy” and spoke of celebrating the burial of the “putrid corpse of liberty”.[134][135] In 1923, to give Deputy Mussolini control of the pluralist parliamentary government of the Kingdom of Italy (1861–1946), an economist, the Baron Giacomo Acerbo proposed – and the Italian Parliament approved – the Acerbo Law, changing the electoral system from proportional representation to majority representation. The party who received the most votes (provided they possessed at least 25 per cent of cast votes), won two-thirds of the parliament; the remaining third was proportionately shared among the other parties – thus the Fascist manipulation of liberal democratic law that rendered Italy a One-party state.
In 1924, the PNF won the election with 65 per cent of the votes;[136] yet the United Socialist Party refused to accept such a defeat – especially Deputy Giacomo Matteotti who, on 30 May 1924, in Parliament formally accused the PNF of electoral fraud, and reiterated his denunciations of PNF Blackshirt political violence, and was publishing The Fascisti Exposed: A Year of Fascist Domination, a book substantiating his accusations.[136][137] Consequently, on 24 June 1924, the Ceka (ostensibly a party secret police, modelled on the Soviet Cheka) assassinated the Parliament Deputy; of the five men arrested, Amerigo Dumini, aka Il Sicario del Duce (The Leader’s Assassin), was sentenced to five years’ imprisonment, yet served only eleven months, and was freed under amnesty from King Victor Emmanuel III. Moreover, when the King supported Prime Minister Mussolini, the socialists quit Parliament in protest, leaving the Fascists to govern unopposed.[138] In that time, assassination was not yet the modus operandi norm; the Italian Fascist Duce usually disposed of opponents in the Imperial Roman way: political arrest punished with island banishment.[139]
