Rise of Fascism and Mussolini's March on Rome I Between 2 Wars I 1922 Part 1 of 2 - YouTube (1)

The World War had left Europe in complete and utter chaos, and postwar all of the nations

– both old and new – try to find their own paths through the crisis.

A few manage to cling on to fragile democracies, many erupt into full-blown revolutions.

But in 1922, the Italian Kingdom tries a third way – Fascism.

Welcome to “Between Two Wars”; a summary of the interwar years, from the uncertainty

and hedonism of the 1920's to humanity's descent into the darkness of the Second World

War.

I'm Indy Neidell.

In 1915, Italy had joined the World War on the side of the Allies and eventually emerged

victorious in 1918, but this had come at a cost.

Italy had been economically unstable and extremely corrupt already before the war, and after

it the country descends into a much worse financial crisis than any of its allies.

Contrary to many other nations where the war was initially popular with the people, in

Italy the majority of the Italian population had been against joining the war, and when

the ruling class ignored public sentiment it caused an uproar throughout the country.

This conflict has not abated, and dissatisfaction with the government grows and grows.

At this point, Italy is a constitutional Monarchy, with suffrage for a very narrow electorate

of mainly upper-class men, but to calm the unrest, prime minister Vittorio Emanuele Orlando

proclaims universal male suffrage as a “gift” to the returning soldiers, hoping that the

‘responsibility' of having the vote will make them fall in line, but exactly the opposite

occurs.

Now, before the war the Italian government had been mainly divided into liberals and

conservatives, but when universal male suffrage is introduced a whole slew of new political

views and ideologies enter the political scene: anarchism, reactionism, socialism, futurism,

you name it!

The extreme left-wing Socialist and Communists parties instantly go from tiny insignificant

parties to the major forces on the political scene.

The liberal and conservative parties suddenly find themselves without a majority in the

parliament for the first time ever.

Governing becomes impossible as the political system becomes paralyzed by the opposition

between so many different parties, each presenting its own way to solve Italy's problems.

Orlando is forced to resign and a period with no political stability whatsoever begins that

will last until 1922.

In these 4 years Italy sees no fewer than six governments and four different prime ministers.

Okay, the Socialist Party is quick to proclaim its support for Lenin and his newly founded

international communist organization, the Comintern.

The Italian Socialists seek to join the proposed world Communist takeover and proclaim a “dictatorship

of the proletariat”, and with the chaos in which Italy finds herself, this could very

well succeed.

Labor protests, demonstrations, and massive strikes break out in the major industrial

cities like Turin and Milan, organized by newly formed Marxist and Communist councils

modelled on the Russian Soviets.

The strikes spread at an enormous pace; in 1919 more than 1500 strikes are called in

Italy - that's more than four new strikes every single day of the year.

The movement intensifies in 1920 and peaks in August when over 1 million industrial workers

join a general strike.

The police are overwhelmed by the increasingly violent masses of workers, and the government

turns to other means to put down the uprisings.

As in Germany, they turn to nationalist, mostly anti-Socialist, paramilitary groups known

as “the Fascis”, from the latin word “fascis”, which roughly translates to bundle and has

been used to describe fringe political groups in Italian since the 19th century.

It's also the name of the symbol of power of the magistrates in ancient Rome; an axe

wrapped in a bundle of rods, which the Fascis now adopt as their sign.

The Fasci groups disagree on a lot of stuff and have no central leadership, they even

fight each other in the streets at times, but there are common denominators; they're

ultranationalist and ultra-violent.

They despise their current government, whom they blame for the rather small territorial

gains Italy acquires at the Paris Peace Conference.

They literally worship the war, and last but not least, they dream of a militarist Italian

rebirth that will bring about decisive and stable government.

When consecutive prime ministers turn to these groups to stop the Socialist unrest using

violence, they don't disappoint… they suppress strikers by intimidating, beating,

or even murdering any leftists that won't stand down.

In the end several thousand are actually murdered by the Fasci, and in just half a year the

socialist uprisings are all but gone.

The Fasci groups now join together in their opposition to Socialism to create a united

militia - the squadristi.

They adopt black uniforms to show their coherence and become known as the “Blackshirts.”

Now, the Blackshirts want to squash the Socialists once and for all, so despite the uprisings

being over, they continue to target Socialist strongholds and murder left-wing leaders and

activists.

The government has unleashed a monstrous force it can't stop, and they stand by helplessly

as the Blackshirts take control of the country.

Well okay, at this point, Italy is really under nobody's control, not even God or

his representative in the Vatican, but that is about to change in the hands of a man with

a solid Socialist background, Benito Amilcare Andrea Mussolini.

Mussolini is a politically engaged journalist, a veteran of the world war, and an energetic

nationalist and militarist.

He's one of the founding fathers of the Fasci movement and is now crushing Socialist

unrest with enthusiastic violence.

But Mussolini is a complex character that is still in the middle of a political journey

from one extreme to the other.

He was born in Northern Italy to a Socialist blacksmith and a devout Catholic school teacher.

He grows up in a solidly Socialist environment, but his mother also insists on a traditional

Catholic education, so young Benito ends up with two very different, even opposed influences.

At the age of 19, he emigrates to Switzerland after an affair with the wife of a soldier,

becomes a labor agitator, and when he is called up for military service does not return to

Italy, and is sentenced for desertion in absentia.

He will eventually win an amnesty.

He joins other exiled Socialists and comes to work for the labour activist newspaper

L'Avvenire del Lavoratore - “The Worker's Future.”

Young Benito considers himself an intellectual, he's an avid reader and has a gift for languages,

the written word, and rhetoric.

In Switzerland he teaches himself French and German and studies political philosophy.

He's greatly impressed with Nietzsche and the concept of Übermensch, or the superior

being as an ideal, but- much like Hitler- he misunderstands this concept as automatically

creating a juxtaposed concept of Untermensch - inferior people, which Nietzsche neither

posits nor intends.

Benito's greatest inspiration though is George Sorel, a French Syndicalist philosopher

who believes in the power of myth, especially national myth and violence, to achieve the

ideals of Marxism and the overthrow of Capitalism.

Ironically, at the same time as Mussolini is studying his work, Sorel is about to make

a dramatic about face.

In 1909, he abandons Socialism and becomes a supporter of Muarrasian Integral Nationalism,

a philosophy that is in many ways the absolute opposite of Socialism, an entrenched reactionary

right-wing movement and outspoken enemy of all things on the left.

Sorrel has soured on the idea of a class struggle to abolish Capitalism and now believes that

reactionary Integral Nationalism will do the trick and create a world beyond classes, without

private property - in 1914 he will proclaim that “Socialism is dead” after “the

decomposition of Marxism.”

Benito Mussolini will eventually follow Sorel's lead.

But for now Mussolini stays on the far left, and has even become one of the most prominent

Socialists in Italy.

In 1911 he is imprisoned for five months for instigating riots against the Italian war

in Libya.

His journalism career is also taking off with syndication of his work well beyond Italy,

even in the US through the Hearst News Service, which will syndicate his work in translation

until 1935 by which time he has long been dictator of Italy.

In fact, Mussolini will continue to cover events around him as a roving reporter throughout

his rise to power, and his entire time in government.

It becomes an important part of his self promotion and the promotion of Fascism, and his understanding

of the power of mass media will be formative for Hitler and Goebbels in their work to promote

the Nazi movement.

It also serves as a document of his personal political journey, where we can see that by

1914 and outbreak of the world war there are cracks in Mussolini's Socialist convictions.

He has abandoned his belief in the struggle of the classes and started drifting toward

more liberal democratic values.

As the debate rages over Italian intervention in the war, Mussolini is at first on the Socialist

side of opposing the war, but his recent interest in Integral Nationalism has brought him to

focus on Italians as an own ethnicity, and he soon comes to believe that the war offers

an opportunity to crush the Austro-Hungarian Empire and ‘liberate' Italian speakers

in Austria.

When he comes out publicly for the war he is promptly expelled from the Socialist Party.

With money from agents of the French government and the Italian arms industry, he starts an

interventionist newspaper Il Popolo d'Italia - The Italian People - and founds a political

group Fasci Rivoluzionari d'Azione Internazionalista - The Faction for Revolutionary International

Action.

Now Mussolini more or less abandons all of his socialist ideas overnight, later saying

"Socialism as a doctrine was already dead; it continued to exist only as a grudge”.

Instead he embraces a program based on democratic republicanism including demands for universal

suffrage, freedom of speech, an 8-hour work day, abolition of the monarchy, and creation

of a new Italian republic.

And then he goes off to fight the war.

Let's be clear, by that time he was one of the most famous people in Italy, and both

enlisted men and officers asked to meet him.

He was discharged in early 1917 after a grenade supposedly went off during training.

There were no eyewitnesses to this and he had an unusually long convalescence- a few

months in hospital and then a year's leave- and historian Paul O'Brien says the leave

was so long because of syphilis and its complications, but whatever actually happened, strings were

being pulled to get him back to work.

He had made himself known even outside of Italy as a hard propagandist for the war.

Mussolini glorifies the war as an honourable chapter in Italy's as well as his own life,

saying: “Let us have a dagger between our teeth, a bomb in our hand and an infinite

scorn in our hearts”.

The British secret service recruit him to publish pro-war propaganda and use his political

group to intimidate anti-war protesters to stay at home.

They put him on a weekly retainer of 100 pounds, slightly more than 12,000 dollars in 2018,

enough money for Mussolini to start his own independent political career, which won't

really go in the direction the British had hoped for.

He now becomes a leader of one of the many Fasci groups and reforms his political group

into a paramilitary unit with 200 members, naming it Fasci Italiani di Combattimento,

roughly The Italian Combat Squad.

He also founds the Fascist Revolutionary Party to run for election in 1919.

In the party program, though, he still incorporates many Socialist ideas - ostensibly out of populism

- so much so that it has been said that his failure to win a seat in parliament in 1919

was because he tried to ‘out-Socialist the Socialists”.

Electoral defeat has him rethink his political strategy.

He needs something that can be attractive to more than just the working class, and what

he comes up with is significantly more radical and coloured by a deep belief in Integral