Quotes About Fascism

No school can supply an anti-liberal education, or a fascist education, as these terms are contradictory. Liberalism and education are one.

Fascist education is moral, physical, social, and military: it aims to create a complete and harmoniously developed human, a fascist one according to our views.

The fascist synthesis did not view Italy as a society divided by class but rather as a unified country in which all sectors of society could come together. The fascists replaced the old Marxist divide between unproductive capitalists and productive labor with the single category of the productive nation.

In addition, the fascists adopted an economic policy that is closely parallel to, and in many respects identical with, today's progressivism. Mussolini called this policy "corporatism," but a more descriptive term would be state-run capitalism.

fascism and Nazism both emerged out of a debate within socialism. The problem began when the central prophecies of Marxism failed to occur. This created a massive crisis within the Left, and essentially Marxism split into two camps: the first became Leninism and Bolshevism, and the other became fascism and Nazism.

When Mussolini "sold out" he became an outcast. He had neither money nor power. Nor did any of the first fascists embrace fascism for this reason. Rather, they became fascists because they saw fascism as the only way to rescue socialism and make it viable. In other words, their defection was within socialism—they sought to create a new type of socialism that would actually draw a mass following and produce the workers' revolution that Marx anticipated and hoped for.

Goldberg argues that fascism and communism, far from being opposites, are "closely related historical competitors for the same constituents.

As the German sociologist Wolfgang Schivelbusch argues in a book tellingly titled Three New Deals, progressivism, Communism and National Socialism (also called fascism) were all sister ideologies, variations on a single theme, motivated by the same impulses, seeking to move society in a similar direction—away from free market capitalism and toward a collectivist society with the state as the instrument of the common good.

Giovanni Gentile

The fascist synthesis did not view Italy as a society divided by class but rather as a unified country in which all sectors of society could come together. The fascists replaced the old Marxist divide between unproductive capitalists and productive labor with the single category of the productive nation. Mussolini called this a Fascio nazionale, a national union.

Around the same time, however, and beaten by the fascists by only a hair, a closely related ideology developed in America that also called for a powerful centralized state. That ideology was, of course, progressivism. The fascists, like the progressives, sought a radical transformation of society that is the very antithesis of classical liberalism or modern American conservatism.

The roots of fascism fully expose the connection between fascism and America's political Left, and the antithesis between fascism and America's political Right.

Both the fascists and the progressives viewed the centralized state as the logical outgrowth of everything they stood for.

It was Gentile," Mussolini confessed, "who prepared the road for those like me who wished to take it."30 Gentile served as a member of the Fascist Grand Council, a senator in the Upper House of the Italian Parliament, and also as Mussolini's minister of education. Later, after Mussolini was deposed and established himself at Salo, Gentile became at Il Duce's request the president of the Italian Academy.

Although today's American Left dares not invoke Mussolini's name, the honest among them will have to admit that it was he and his fellow fascists who were their pioneers and paved their way.

A NEW SCAM So progressive Democrats realized they needed a new and bigger scam. For two centuries they had oppressed and stolen from blacks and other minorities; now they had an idea for how to do it to the country as a whole. The new Democratic scam was progressivism, not the old progressivism of forced sterilization and support for fascism, but a new progressivism that turned blacks and other minorities into pawns in a grand larceny scheme.

Mussolini and Hitler became "right-wingers," and the people who supposedly brought them to power became "conservatives." The Left, then, became the glorious resisters of fascism and Nazism. To make this story work, fascism and Nazism had to be largely redefined.

Hundreds of leading socialists, initially in Italy but subsequently in Germany, France, and other countries, also became fascists.

In fact, I will go further to say that all the leading figures in the founding of fascism were men of the Left.

The first fascists," Anthony James Gregor tells us, "were almost all Marxists.

Progressivism simply cannot account for the easy traffic from socialism to fascism. Consequently, progressives typically maintain complete silence about this whole historical relationship which is deeply embarrassing to them.

During the 1920s, progressives developed a fascination with and admiration for Italian and German fascism, and the fascists, for their part, praised American progressives. These were likeminded people who spoke the same language, and progressives and fascists worked together to implement programs to sterilize so-called mental defectives and "unfit" people, resulting subsequently in tens of thousands of forced sterilizations in America and hundreds of thousands in Nazi Germany.

Even so, for people who know how to recognize it, today's Left is still the party of fascism and National Socialism, old ideologies now marching on a different continent under new colors, a fascism for the twenty-first century.

The classic document in this regard is Adorno's famous F-Scale. The F stands for fascism. Adorno outlined the scale in his 1950 book The Authoritarian Personality. The basic argument was that fascism is a form of authoritarianism and that the worst manifestation of authoritarianism is self-imposed repression.