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Originally Posted by loquitur
Actually, fascism might be in the eye of the beholder. This is an interesting blog post from Shannon Love, who is one of the bloggers at the classical liberal/libertarianish site Chicago Boyz. The title is " The Left’s Deal with the Devil." His thesis probably needs to be fleshed out to be more and might be the kernel of a good doctoral dissertation were it not for the fact that it uses the "f" word. Using the "f" word makes it a bit incendiary, but that word is in the air a bit these days, so I guess he might just be responding to that. The lesson I take away from this is that it's possible to find fascistic implications in lots of things, and that the people howling loudest about fascism often have some kinds fascistic baggage in their own backyards that they don't even see because they are so intent on bludgeoning the other side.
Anyway, here is an excerpt to give you an idea: |
Sorry. loquitur, this meme, in the first sentence of the piece that your linked to:
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Mussolini grew up from birth a devoted Marxist steeped in the ideology of class identity and conflict.
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.... is nothing more than a contemporary conservative, disinformation "Op". If you believe it to be true, why not revise Mussolini's wiki bio, including it, citing it, and then defending it. It is a extremist description....who would have an incentive to create and distribute such a strong declaration, backed by the tenuous support of the fact that Mussolini was a socialist before, WWI, and expelled from that party. He grew up poor, one of 14 children.
Did you check for supporting sources for this?
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.....devoted Marxist steeped in the ideology....
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Here is some "balance":
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http://books.google.com/books?id=yJx...ummary_s&cad=0
Mussolini in the First World War: The Journalist, The Soldier, The Fascist
By Paul O'Brien
Published 2005
How did Mussolini come to fascism? Standard accounts of the dictator have failed to explain satisfactorily the transition from his pre-World War I "socialism" to his post-war fascism. This controversial new book is the first to examine Mussolini's political trajectory during the Great War through his journalistic writings, speeches and war diary. The author argues that the 1914-18 conflict provided the catalyst for Mussolini to clarify his deep-rooted nationalist tendencies. He demonstrates that Mussolini's interventionism was already anti-socialist and anti-democratic in the early autumn of 1914 and shows how in and through the experience of the conflict the future Duce fine-tuned his authoritarian vision of Italy in a state of permanent mobilization for war.
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http://www.spiritus-temporis.com/ben...f-fascism.html
Birth of Fascism
The word "Fascio" had existed in Italian politics for some time. A section of midget revolutionary syndicalists broke with the Socialists over the issue of Italy's entry into the First World War. Mussolini agreed with them. These syndicalists formed a group called Fasci d'azione rivoluzionaria internazionalista in October 1914. Massimo Rocca and Tulio Masotti asked Mussolini to settle the contradiction of his support for interventionism and still being the editor of Avanti and an official party functionary in the Socialist Party. (1) Two weeks later, he joined the Milan fascio. In November, 1914, supported by his then mistress Margherita Sarfatti, he founded a new newspaper, Il Popolo d'Italia, (The Italian People) and the prowar group Fasci d'Azione Rivoluzionaria. Mussolini was attracted to fasces, the ancient Roman symbol of the life-and-death power of the state, bundles of the lictors' rods of chastisement which, when bound together, were stronger than when they were apart — reflecting the intellectual debt that fascism owed to socialism and presaging the symbolism of the renewed Roman imperium Mussolini promised to bring about. Mussolini claimed that it would help strengthen a relatively new nation (which had been united only in the 1860s in the Risorgimento), although some would say that he wished for a collapse of society that would bring him to power. Italy was a member of the Triple Alliance, thereby allied with Imperial Germany and the Austro-Hungarian Empire. It did not join the war in 1914 but did in 1915 — as Mussolini wished — on the side of Britain and France.
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