Quotes About Mussolini

What, actually, is the difference between communism and fascism? Both are forms of statism, authoritarianism. The only difference between Stalin's communism and Mussolini's fascism is an insignificant detail in organizational structure.

Sánchez Mazas) "Sea como fuere, lo cierto es que saludó en una seria de crónicas tituladas Italia a paso gentil, y que vio en Benito Mussolini la reencarnación de los condotieros renacentistas y en su ascensión al poder el anuncio de que el tiempo de los héroes y los poetas había vuelto a Italia

most of its existence, Mussolini's regime had not been anti-Semitic, and early on, the Duce had explicitly criticized Hitler's racism—probably in part because Nazism did not include modern Italians in its pantheon of Aryan supermen.

Hitler responded by calling Mussolini's movement "Kosher fascism.")

Mussolini's mistress, a leading Fascist intellectual and theorist of the movement, was openly Jewish. Perhaps less well known is that the Israeli Navy was born out of a 1930s Fascist training program, and the Duce even endowed a Fascist chair at Hebrew University in Jerusalem.

eclipsed and forgotten by Mussolini's brief but disastrous alliance with Hitler.

If I had been an Italian I am sure that I should have been whole-heartedly with you from the start to finish in your triumphant struggle against the bestial appetites and passions of Leninism. (Speech in Rome on 20 January, 1927, praising Mussolini)

Now at this very moment I knew that the United States was in the war, up to the neck and in to the death. So we had won after all! ... How long the war would last or in what fashion it would end no man could tell, nor did I at this moment care ... We should not be wiped out. Our history would not come to an end ... Hitler's fate was sealed. Mussolini's fate was sealed. As for the Japanese, they would be ground to a powder. All the rest was merely the proper application of overwhelming force.

History remembers Mussolini as the buffoonish Fascist, the ineffective silly man of Italy who led a lame military campaign in the Second World War, but in Libya he oversaw a campaign of genocide. The

Like an existentialist, I will infer my state from the actions I perform. Thought follows deed, as Mussolini taught. In Anfang war die Tat, as Goethe says in Faust. In the beginning was the deed, not the word.

Primo Levi was three years old when, between 26–28 October 1922 an obscure political agitator, Benito Mussolini, staged a dramatic assault on Italy's ailing Liberal government.

What a waste that we lost Mussolini. He is a first-rate man who would have led our party to power in Italy. [Addressing to a delegation of Italian socialists in Moscow after Mussolini's March on Rome in 1922]

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.

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.

Hitler greatly admired Mussolini and aspired to become like him. Mussolini, Hitler said, was "the leading statesman in the world, to whom none may even remotely compare himself."3 Hitler modeled his failed Munich Putsch in November 1923 on Mussolini's successful March on Rome.

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.

FDR did learn from both of them, and moreover, like Mussolini and Hitler, he had the economic catastrophe of the Great Depression to justify moving his country in a direction that the people would never ordinarily want to go.

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.

At the same time, progressives began to redefine fascism and Nazism in such a way that they could project these evils onto the right, so that future generations would be bamboozled into thinking that the Republicans, not the Democrats, the conservatives, not the progressives, were in bed with Mussolini and Hitler in the critical decades leading up to global war and Holocaust.

As we will see, Franklin D. Roosevelt was an avid admirer of Mussolini who sought to import Italian fascist schemes to America. FDR also collaborated with the worst racist elements in America, working with them to block anti-lynching laws and exclude blacks from New Deal programs and name a former Klansman to the Supreme Court.

History was not a matter of missing minutes on the tape. I did not stand helpless before it. I hewed to the texture of collected knowledge, took faith from the solid and availing stuff of our experience. Even if we believe that history is a workwheel powered by human blood -- read the speeches of Mussolini -- at least we've known the thing together. A single narrative sweep, not ten thousand wisps of disinformation.

SENATOR JOSEPH MCCARTHY—ANGRY, JOWLY, AND PERPETUALLY indignant—had the instincts of a Mussolini, but without the intellectual foundation. Like Il Duce, he was a showman who loved politics and craved power. Unlike him, he began his public life largely ignorant of policy.

Fascism did not die with Mussolini," he warned. "Hitler is finished, but the seeds spread by his disordered mind have firm root in too many fanatical brains.