Today the Italian and French fascists and, even in their own pathetic way, the British National Party all protest that they don’t really know who Hitler was, and that all they seek is to put their point of view to the electorate as other parties can. Their hypocrisy is sometimes embarrassingly obvious. Fini, the Italian fascist leader, followed up his insistence that there is ‘all the difference in the world’ between what he stands for now and what Mussolini stood for in the 1920s and 1930s with an interview describing the butcher Mussolini as the ‘greatest statesman of the century’. His supporters too know what he stands for. They greeted his election success with cries of ‘Duce, Duce’, the same cry which brought Mussolini to power in 1922 and sustained him there for nearly 20 years.
Here in Britain a reckless television programme shows a ‘respectable’ fascist urging his supporters not to be violent, hardly commenting on the absurdity of the fact that the same ‘non-violent’ propagandist had just come out of prison after a long stretch for beating up a socialist on the tube.
The strategy of the fascists then and now is to use the freedoms won by fighters for democracy to gain respectability and electoral support so as more relentlessly to pursue their single purpose: to smash democracy and freedom to pieces ...
The single common aim of fascism in the 1930s was to break the strength and spirit of organised labour: to pave the way for uninterrupted profiteering by the people who own the means of production. Though its shock troops were the lumpen proletariat and the lower middle class, fascism’s real master was capital. When at least sections of the capitalists lost all hope of proceeding through the democratic system and the trade unions it had conceded under pressure in the past, it looked round for a battering ram to dispose of both. Big financiers and capitalists don’t like the thought of a civil war, such as the one which brought fascism to power in Spain, or the slaughter of 6 million Jewish people in circumstances of unimaginable barbarism in the Holocaust. Yet, deep in the pit of economic crisis, they will tolerate, arm and finance anything, however horrible, to defeat their competitors and keep their coffers full of their ill-gotten gains. ibid.
The fascist movement is a spontaneous return to the traditions of ancient Rome. Adolf Hitler
If fascism ever came to the United States, it would be wrapped in an American flag. Huey Long
I appeared before the Congressional Committee, the highest representation of the American people, under subpoena to tell what I knew of activities which I believe might lead to an attempt to set up a fascist dictatorship ... I was supposed to lead an organisation of 500,000 men which would be able to take over the functions of government. Major General Smedley Butler, 1934 evidence
Many of the leading anti-New-World Order researchers are actually deceivers and liars working with the New World Order to further the plan to make a one-world new-age religion, humanist utopia – removing Christianity from the face of the earth. However, this utopia that is promised will result in a one-world fascist dictatorship. Keith Thompson, The Coming New-Age One-World Religion
Islam is inherently wicked ... The whole drive of modern Islam is more and more radical, and it’s a menace to everything that goes near it. Keith Allen Meets Nick Griffin, Channel 4 2012
Muslim women come to the British National Party counsellor when they suffer violence at home. ibid.
The BNP’s vote at general elections has risen steeply in the last decade. ibid.
Oswald Mosley’s fascists used to get a very good press. ibid.
Then came the National Front in the 1970s who brought fascism back to the streets. ibid.
Love Thy Neighbour relied on inflammatory language. ibid.
The BNP hate the mainstream media. ibid.
This still sounded to me as racism by another name. ibid.
The modern BNP has apparently replaced racial intolerance with religious intolerance. ibid.
The power to rob the rest of us of a little bit of humanity. ibid.
Fascism is capitalism plus murder. Upton Sinclair
Fascism should rightly be called corporatism, as it is the merger of state and corporate power. Benito Mussolini
Fascism is a religion. The twentieth century will be known in history as the century of fascism. Benito Mussolini
The keystone of the Fascist doctrine is its conception of the State, of its essence, its functions, and its aims. For Fascism the State is absolute, individuals and groups relative. Benito Mussolini
Fascism, the more it considers and observes the future and the development of humanity, quite apart from political considerations of the moment, believes neither in the possibility nor the utility of perpetual peace. Benito Mussolini
Every newspaper must have a ‘responsible’ [that is, a fascistic] editor and only journalists congenial to the government may be employed. A Minister of Propaganda undertakes to colour important dispatches and to dole out instructions on the treatment of news items ... Mussolini has said: ‘Journalism is free just because it serves only one cause and one regime.’ Carl T Schmidt’s The Corporate State in Action 1939
The dirty little secret is that both Houses of Congress are irrelevant. America’s domestic policy is now being run by Alan Greenspan and the Federal Reserve. America’s foreign policy is now being run by the International Monetary Fund. When the President decides to go to war, he no longer needs a declaration of war from Congress. Robert Reich, 7th January 1999 USA Today, member of Clinton’s Cabinet
Victor Haro was Chile’s greatest balladeer. His songs had celebrated the popular democracy of the government of Salvador Allende. He was taken to the stadium, where he was a source of strength for his fellow prisoners, singing for them until soldiers beat him to the ground and smashed his hands. In his last poem smuggled out of the stadium, he wrote:
What horror the face of fascism creates!
They carry out their plans with knife-like precision,
For them, blood equals medals,
How hard it is to sing when I must sing of horror
In which silence and screams are the end of my song.
After two days, they killed him. John Pilger, The War on Democracy
The capacity to assert social and political control over the individual will vastly increase. It will soon be possible to assert almost continuous control over every citizen and to maintain up-to-date files, containing even the most personal details about health and personal behavior of every citizen in addition to the more customary data.
These files will be subject to instantaneous retrieval by the authorities. Power will gravitate into the hands of those who control information. Our existing institutions will be supplanted by pre-crisis management institutions, the task of which will be to identify in advance likely social crises and to develop programs to cope with them.
This will encourage tendencies through the next several decades toward a technetronic era, a dictatorship, leaving even less room for political procedures as we know them. Finally, looking ahead to the end of the century, the possibility of biochemical mind control and genetic tinkering with man, including beings which will function like men and reason with them as well, could give rise to some difficult questions. Zbigniew Brzezinski, Between Two Ages: America’s Role in the Technetronic Era
Society dominated by an elite whose claim to political power would rest on allegedly superior scientific know-how. Unhindered by the restraints of traditional liberal values, this elite would not hesitate to achieve its political ends by using the latest modern techniques for influencing public behavior and keeping society under close surveillance and control. ibid.
Nation state as a fundamental unit of man’s organized life has ceased to be the principal creative force: International banks and multinational corporations are acting and planning in terms that are far in advance of the political concepts of the nation-state. ibid.
The technetronic era involves the gradual appearance of a more controlled society. Such a society would be dominated by an elite, unrestrained by traditional values ... Soon it will be possible to assert almost continuous surveillance over every citizen and maintain up to date complete files contained even the most personal information about the citizen. ibid.
The far right are re-emerging and are back on the streets of Britain. I’ve spent a year building their trust. Getting to know them. To explore their prejudices. What drives them. And what fuels their intense anger. Angry, White and Proud, Channel 4 2015
Scores of confrontational new splinter groups now exist on the far right. ibid.
The true mark of fascism, belief in a peculiar variety of one-party corporate state – not, it should be said, a belief shared by this newspaper – is not Nazism or racism. Let the word fascist be reserved for those who profess that belief, and today’s neo-fascists be judged for their own ideas, not Hitler’s. Fascist Beasts, Economist editorial
Every woman adores a Fascist,
The boot in the face, the brute
Brute heart of a brute like you. Sylvia Plath, Daddy, 1963
Mussolini and his fascist movement will bring about Italy’s darkest hour. Mussolini will eventually betray his country. Mussolini: The Rise of Italian Fascism, Channel 5 2007
At school he was a violent bully. He was even expelled for stabbing a fellow pupil. He became a schoolteacher, but despite his tough reputation he was sacked for failing to control his class. He volunteered when Italy joined the war in 1915. He fought at the front but was seriously wounded in a training exercise. ibid.