UNDER THREAT, GOVERNMENTS FALL TO THE FASCISTS
October 29, 2022 -Durt Fibo

Today is a disturbing anniversary, and a simple public blueprint anyone can unfurl and understand: Today it is 100 years since the first Fascist government took over Italy.

In the reshuffling of financial might and collapsing empires, the end of the First World War created many new nations, patriotisms and economies, all of which speedily reconstructed almost the exact same ambitions that had exploded into war in the first place. Much of that proud yet deleterious activity eventually hurtled them into the Great Depression.

As with most of the new states, Italy dreamed of expansion, and glory was an idea transferred from active war to threats of it. Continuously roused by such adventurers as Gabriele D’Annunzio, the De Ambris brothers and even Filippo Tomasso Marinetti, the initially incoherent movement began to coalesce –like fasces– into a party of demands; demands for foreign territories, and demands to eradicate the unionized workers and rural peasantry. All these ‘ideals’ were easily sold to businessmen small and great, who stood to gain everything from these aims, as did the church, the still-beating monarchy and aristocracy, and, naturally, the upper military echelons.

In 1919, Mussolini first bundled together an organization claiming to be populist and libertarian, but dedicated to ‘protecting’ traditional values (of the region), in the name Fasci Italiani di Combattimento (Italian Fasces of Combat), whose symbol was the ancient Roman ax blade embedded in a leather-bound tubular collection of wooden sticks called fasces in Latin –fascis in the singular form– simply meaning ‘bundle’. But to concretely define itself it needed enemies, such as those listed above, and to justify its existence it needed to attack those enemies. One of the first assaults was on the offices of the biggest socialist publication “Avanti!” (Forwards!), which Mussolini himself had been editor of from 1912 to 1914, when war fever altered his mind. Having failed to the point of becoming a fasces of laughingstocks in the November 1919 election, Mussolini’s party regrouped into squadristri (Blackshirts), who rolled as a wave over the country violently eliminating unionists, leftists, farm laborers, and esteemed leaders of other political persuasions. The police usually declined to intervene, and in fact felt deep longings to join such an energetic and impervious gang. By 1921, Mussolini’s group managed to win electoral victories by joining a coalition of 4 right-wing parties called Blocco Nazionale (the National Bloc). As part of the ruling government, the party had both the authority and material means to augment its program of violence, threats and assassinations which exceeded anyone’s imagination up til then. Just before the end of his first year in parliament, Mussolini rebirthed himself again as the Partito Nazionale Fascista (National Fascist Party).

Scarcely one year later, during the night of October 28, approximately 30,000 Blackshirts assembled in and threatened to seize Rome unless the Prime Minister resigned and appointed Mussolini in his place. The actual “March on Rome” began in Milan, where Mussolini secured the backing of Italy’s captains of industry, then in Naples on October 24, where Mussolini riled up around 60,000 followers –enraged by workers’ resistance, or simply by hormonal ballistics– took a few steps for photographers then dashed back to Milan. As the mob bayed in Rome, when King Victor Emmanuel III understood that Italy’s biggest financiers and industrialists had indeed placed their final bets on fascism, he appointed Benito Mussolini Prime Minister of the nation on October 29.

Soon all of Italy was united by the dictates of one man building a personality cult. By 1926 all other political parties were formally outlawed. And more prisoner-citizens accrued through colonialist resplendence in the Balkans, Greece, Libya, Sudan, Ethiopia…the new empire was conceivably boundless. When the Great Depression invaded, Fascist Italy regrouped into the corporatist state, where clarity was achieved by, in Mussolini’s own words: “Everything for the State, nothing outside the State, nothing against the State.” Some three-quarters of production, finance and commerce were run by his government.

Much of this will seem familiar to people around the world. As was the case with other fascist countries, it wasn’t until they had been bombed nearly flat that Italy expressed any remorse. Now, precisely 100 years after the disasters brought upon themselves by fascism, Italy is attempting to prove just how right that first fatal choice was.

Such is the moral and such is the paradox: the weaknesses of human minds their and sociopolitical mechanisms leave openings for the infection of totalitarianism, yet because of those veins of fragility totalitarianism always shatters.