After the humiliation of the First World War Italy was in political turmoil. On March 23rd 1919 Benito Mussolini and two hundred supporters – many disillusioned former soldiers ... formed a new nationalist movement – Fasci Italiani di Combattimento. ibid.
The black shirt became the iconic symbol of fascism. It summed up everything the movement wanted to represent: uniformity, youth, action, glamour, violence and death. ibid.
One in three Italian Jews later joined the Fascist Party. And Mussolini’s mistress was Jewish. ibid.
The black shirts saw themselves as the front line against the Socialist threat. ibid.
Thirty-eight Fascists including Mussolini were elected to parliament. Fascist support was surprisingly widespread. The socialists were beaten, the government was weak, and the army sympathetic. ibid.
The Pope proclaimed that Mussolini was sent from divine providence. ibid.
Once the Allies held Italy the West once again saw communism as a far greater threat than Italian fascism. Senior judges, civil servants, military leaders and police chiefs who had served under fascism were allowed to slip quietly back into office. And fascism as a political force did not die with Mussolini. Mussolini’s belief in fascism, violence and a desire for empire left Italy with a terrible legacy of death and destruction. And together with Hitler, Mussolini plunged Europe into the most destructive war in history, and changed the world for ever. ibid.
Mussolini is an Elizabethan. Allowing for the altered conditions, he stands to modern Italy as Raleigh and Drake did in Queen Elizabeth’s day. He incarnates the new spirit which has possessed his nation, and between the Italy of the early 20th century and the England of the early 17th there is much spiritual resemblance – the same internal national pride, the same unbounded optimism, the same fierce sense of opening opportunity, the same quick sensitive temper, the same tendency to recklessness, the same full-blooded heat of a nation that feels its youth and strength. Ward Price, Daily Mail correspondent
Fascism is the aestheticisation of politics. Walter Benjamin
Ken Clarke’s Controversies: Student Days: Fascist Invitation: Invited Sir Oswald Mosley To Speak At Cambridge University’s Conservative Association. Sky News banner 21st June 2011 11.33 a.m.
Fascism is nothing but capitalist reaction. Leon Trotsky
I’m afraid based on my own experience that fascism will come to America in the name of national security. Jim Garrison
The liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it comes stronger than their democratic state itself. That in its essence is fascism – ownership of government by an individual, by a group. Franklin D Roosevelt
The fascism in us all, in our heads and in our everyday behaviour, the fascism that causes us to love power, to desire the very thing that dominates and exploits us. Michel Foucault
Fascism is capitalism under decay. Vladimir Lenin
Hurrah for the Blackshirts. Daily Mail
They shall not pass. Protest of anti-fascists in East London
We believe Britain will be the next country to give fascism a chance. Oswald Mosley, British fascist party
On October the 4th Oswald’s fascists organised a march through the predominantly Jewish areas of the East End. A deliberate act of intimidation. But Britain’s anti-fascists were ready and waiting ... It became known as the Battle of Cable Street. Andrew Marr, The Making of Modern Britain, BBC 2009
The eagle symbolising the sun. And you’ll see the eagle perched on a fascii ... A bundle of sticks on which you’ll see the eagle perched on a hatchet head – it’s called a fascii. Jordan Maxwell, The Dawn of a New Day
Fascism: that’s what we’ve had in the United States. We’ve had a union of the government and corporate power ever since the beginning of this country. There’s an element of fascism in that. Howard Zinn
There’s a strong move towards fascism. And we should recognise it as such. Howard Zinn, Liberty Bound, 2004
Fascism carries capitalism to its ultimate – it carries the union of corporate power and government power to its extreme – and it destroys civil liberties. And when you get to that point you are reaching the end of the road. ibid.
90% of church-goers aren’t believers. Il Conformista [The Conformist] 1970 starring Jean-Louis Trintignant & Stefania Sandrelli & Gastone Moschin & Enzo Tarasscio & Fosco Giachetti & Jose Quaglio & Dominique Sanda & Pierre Clementi & Yvonne Sanson et al, director Bernardo Bertolucci, Giulia
Priest: Tell me, what sins have you committed?
Clerici: All. Even the most heinous. I’ve killed too. ibid.
It seems that sodomy is worse for the church than the killing of a man. ibid. Clerici to priest
I’m part of the organisation that hunts down subversives. ibid.
Fascism – A system of government that exercises a dictatorship of the extreme right, typically through the merging of state and business leadership, together with belligerent nationalism. The American Heritage Dictionary 1983
Fascism is on the march today in America. Millionaires are marching to the tune. It will come in this country unless a strong defense is set up by all liberal and progressive forces ... A clique of US industrialists is hell-bent to bring a fascist state to supplant our democratic government, and is working closely with the fascist regime in Germany and Italy. Aboard ship a prominent executive of one of America's largest financial corporations told me point blank that if the progressive trend of the Roosevelt administration continued, he would be ready to take definite action to bring fascism to America. William Dodd, former US ambassador to Germany, 1938
English Defence League: this is their story of why they joined, and how they are vilified. EDL Girls, BBC 2014
The English Defence League started in 2009 to combat the spread of Islamic extremism. ibid.
Under Tommy Robinson each region has a boss. ibid.
The marching season is reaching its conclusion. ibid.
Nick Griffin’s British National Party is under investigation by the Metropolitan Police. Party accounts described as fiction. Trouble in Europe over taxpayers’ money. Panorama: BNP: The Fraud Exposed, BBC 2011
Britain’s most successful far right party ever. ibid.
Normally, investigations into the British National Party focus on racism; this one is about corruption, dirty tricks and lies. ibid.
In three years the BNP’s income had tripled to nearly £2 million. Success for the BNP and Jim Dowson. ibid.
Seven donors gave more than £5,000 in 2009. They should have been made public. ibid.
Civil war has broken out in the BNP. ibid.
I remember saying goodbye to my father the night he left to join the Navy. He didn’t have to. He was older than other servicemen and had a family to support but he wanted to be a part of the fight against fascism, not just make movies about it. I admired this about him. Jane Fonda
Fascism is very much a mob movement. P J O’Rourke
The common elements of fascism – extreme nationalism, social Darwinism, the leadership principle, elitism, anti-liberalism, anti-egalitarianism, anti-democracy, intolerance, glorification of war, the supremacy of the state and anti-intellectualism – together form a rather loose doctrine. Fascism emphasises action rather than theory, and fascist theoretical writings are always weak. Hitler’s Nazism had rather more theory, though its intellectual quality is appalling. This greater theoretical content is mostly concerned with race, and it was Hitler’s racial theories that distinguished Nazism from Italian fascism. Ian Adams, in Political Ideology Today 1993
We are the first victims of American fascism! Ethel Rosenberg, spy facing execution, 1953
Trotsky’s words on the matter of pavements: if you cannot convince a fascist, acquaint his head with the pavement. Alan Bleasdale, GBH: It Couldn’t Happen Here starring Robert Lindsay & Lindsay Duncan & Michael Palin & Julie Walters & Tom Georgeson & Andrew Schofield & Jane Danson & David Ross et al, director Robert Young, sidekick to Michael
We are here faced by fascists. Not just their calculated brutality but their belief that they are superior to every single one of us in this Chamber tonight and all of the people that we represent. They hold us in contempt. They hold our values in contempt. They hold our belief in tolerance and decency in contempt. They hold our democracy, the means by which we will make our decision tonight, in contempt. And what we know about fascists is that they need to be defeated. We must now confront this evil. It is now time for us to do our bit in Syria.