The informative Mussolini sketch
continues.
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. (Unfortunately, this fact is virtually ignored by
commentators of history. Mussolini saw the old regimes of the Hapsburgs and the
Hohenzollerns as retrograde and reactionary, in need of being abolished. In his
opinion, the Italian monarchy, of fairly recent origin, had retained the
revolutionary elements of the struggle against Austrian occupation, and he saw
it as no hindrance to fascist rule in Italy. It goes without saying that the
role of the King was to be purely ceremonial and completely subservient to the
fiat of Il Duce. Ironically, in 1943 the king would also rubberstamp Mussolini’s removal from power… No wonder the prestige
of the Italian Monarchy by then left everything to be desired, and the utterly
disgraced monarchy was promptly abolished soon thereafter, with not a tear shed
over it.)
Called
up for military service, Mussolini was wounded in grenade practice in 1917, and
returned to edit his paper. Fascismo became an organized political
movement, following a meeting in Milan on March 23, 1919. (He founded the Fasci
di Combattimento a little earlier,
however, on February 23 of that same year.) After failing in the
1919 elections, he at last entered the Parliament in 1921, as a right-winger.
The Fascisti formed armed squads of war veterans, to terrorize
socialists and communists. (A rather misleading,
but not an entirely inaccurate statement. The Fascisti were nationalists, and
nationalism is quite compatible with socialism, as the name of Hitler’s Nazi Party
convincingly demonstrates. Mussolini himself was by no means alien to
socialism. Ironically, nationalism does not go too well with capitalism, for
the reason of the latter’s internationalist leanings. As for communism, in one
of its political extremist definitions, it is also an internationalist
movement, in which sense it is a variation of Globalism. I must add that the
USSR under Stalin used the name “communism” for its international appeal, but,
other than that, it was a bogus name. The real nature of the Soviet power was
socialist, and it was Russian nationalism, rather than some kind of
internationalist ideology, that won World War II. Returning to Mussolini, he
was not fighting against either socialism or communism. He was engaged in a
power struggle with his political rivals who called themselves “socialists” and
“communists.”)
The
government seldom interfered. In return for the support of a group of
industrialists and agrarians, Mussolini gave his approval (often active) to
strikebreaking and abandoned revolutionary agitation. (Clearly his revolutionism had by then outlived its
usefulness as a political tool of taking power. It was now time for
institutionalization of power. Revolution is an activity to destroy the ruling
power. Having attained that status, no power should be suicidal enough to
continue a revolution. Trotsky’s “permanent revolution” was goods for export,
it was never meant for internal consumption.)
When the
liberal governments of Giovanni Giolitti, Ivanoe Bonomi, and Luigi Facta failed
to stop the spread of anarchy, and after the Fascists had organized the
demonstrative and threatening Marcia su Roma on October 28 1922,
Mussolini was invited by King Vittorio Emanuele III to form the new government.
He became the youngest Premier in the history of Italy on October 31. (Rather than symbolically, this was not a seminal date in
Italian history. Mussolini’s struggle for power had already been won. And this
was merely a statement of fact.)
To be continued…
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