/lit/ - Literature

>>8675559
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>>8675626
(You)
Mosley came from a clearly socialist view of the economy, Mussolini was an out-and-out socialist, Sorel wrote Reflections on Violence in an attempt to return Marxism back to what it once was, and Jose Antonio's Falange were seen as being too left-wing by the Carlists, Conservatives, or the military.

Fascism in Italy developed because the Italians had a permanent inferiority complex going back to 1870 when they unified the country, except for the Trentino and Southern Tyrol, and were being overshadowed by everybody around them. In the 1880s and 1890s there were intellectuals in places like Milan, Turin, Florence, and so on, that argued that parliamentary democracy wasn't going to work, and that in order to make Italy great again, the country would need a strong man in order to unify the country, unite the classes, remove labor differences, and make Italy a great power. Along came Sorel's book on political violence, and suddenly you could be both socially progressive and violent at the same time, all in the name of changing the government.

Going out of the 1890s, the Italians got cucked out of Africa, and kept developing the theory that only a strong man would be able to make the country into a great power. In the 1900s, the Futurists burst onto the scene led by F. T. Marinetti who decided that being counter-cultural and ultra-progressive was great. (Read the Futurist Party manifesto, they called for nationalization of industries, the abolition of the church, free love, and a universal militia.) Marinetti was probably not influenced by Sorel's views on economics, but they both shared a love of violence as a way of getting things done, and a distrust in parliamentary politics.

Marinetti was just one of several Italian intellectuals that would go into the border towns between Italy and the Austro-Hungarian Empire and start fights on purpose. He'd give anti-A-H E plays, burn the A-H E flag, and starts riots. (Marinetti also had a habit of going to audiences and getting in fights with them because it was part of the performance.)

So by 1914 Italy had a bunch of intellectuals who didn't like the current government, ultra-nationalists who believed violence was a good way to get past the system. The only thing that was missing was someone with enough mainstream appeal to combine these two factors.

By 1918 Italy had gone from being the least of the greats to being better than Austria-Hungary, and for all their time fighting in the Alps and the Isonzo Valley, they got nothing. Since this flew right in the face of the treaty the Entente had used to get Italy into the war, the Italians (especially soldiers) were upset. To make this situation even better, the Italian communists were gaining ground in the countryside, especially with the peasants, and in the post-war period there was the chance that a civil war was going to happen. Enter Mussolini and the Fascists.

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