Fascism Plain and Simple

In 1919, Benito Mussolini founded the Fasci Italiani di Combattimento in Milan with about 200 members, most of them war veterans who felt cheated by the peace settlement and threatened by socialist organizing in the factories. Three years later he was Prime Minister of Italy; twelve years after that, he was a war criminal presiding over the industrial massacre of Ethiopian civilians, a campaign in which his air force dropped mustard gas on villages that had neither anti-aircraft weapons nor gas masks. The word fascism comes from fascio, the bundle of rods bound around an axe that was a symbol of Roman state authority. Mussolini chose it deliberately to present his movement presented as both ancient and new, drawing on the prestige of classical Rome while claiming to represent a modern, technological future. Hitler and Franco both borrowed freely from Mussolini’s aesthetics and methods. In each case, these movements came to power by promising order, strength, and national restoration…