title: Islington

text: The hill on which Islington stands has long supplied the City of London with water, the first projects drawing water through wooden pipes from the many springs that lay at its foot, in Finsbury. These included Sadler's Wells, London Spa and Clerkenwell.


title: Islington

text: By the 17th century these traditional sources were inadequate to supply the growing population and plans were laid to construct a waterway, the New River, to bring fresh water from the source of the River Lea, in Hertfordshire to New River Head, below Islington in Finsbury. The river was opened on 29 September 1613 by Sir Hugh Myddelton, the constructor of the project. His statue still stands where Upper Street meets Essex Road. The course of the river ran to the east of Upper Street, and much of its course is now covered and forms a "linear park" through the area.


title: Islington

text: The Regent's Canal passes through Islington, for much of which in an tunnel that runs from Colebrook Row east of the Angel, to emerge at Muriel Street near Caledonian Road. The stretch is marked above with a series of pavement plaques so walkers may find their way from one entrance to the other. The area of the canal east of the tunnel and north of the City Road was once dominated by much warehousing and industry surrounding the large City Road Basin and Wenlock Basin. Those old buildings that survive here are now largely residential or small creative work units. This stretch has an old double-fronted pub "The Narrowboat", one side accessed from the towpath.


title: Islington

text: The canal was constructed in 1820 to carry cargo from Limehouse into the canal system. There is no tow-path in the tunnel so bargees had to "walk" their barges through, braced against the roof. Commercial use of the canal has declined since the 1960s.


title: Islington

text: In the 17th and 18th centuries the availability of water made Islington a good place for growing vegetables to feed London. The manor became a popular excursion destination for Londoners, attracted to the area by its rural feel. Many public houses were therefore built to serve the needs of both the excursionists and travellers on the turnpike. By 1716, there were 56 ale-house keepers in Upper Street, also offering pleasure and tea gardens, and activities such as archery, skittle alleys and bowling. By the 18th century, music and dancing were offered, together with billiards, firework displays and balloon ascents. The "King's Head Tavern", now a Victorian building with a theatre, has remained on the same site, opposite the parish church, since 1543. The founder of the theatre, Dan Crawford, who died in 2005, disagreed with the introduction of decimal coinage. For twenty-plus years after decimalisation (on 15 February 1971), the bar continued to show prices and charge for drinks in pre-decimalisation currency.


title: Islington

text: By the 19th century many music halls and theatres were established around Islington Green. One such was Collins' Music Hall, the remains of which are now partly incorporated into a bookshop. The remainder of the Hall has been redeveloped into a new theatre, with its entrance at the bottom of Essex Road. It stood on the site of the Landsdowne Tavern, where the landlord had built an entertainment room for customers who wanted to sing (and later for professional entertainers). It was founded in 1862 by Samuel Thomas Collins Vagg and by 1897 had become a 1,800-seat theatre with 10 bars. The theatre suffered damage in a fire in 1958 and has not reopened. Between 92 and 162 acts were put on each evening and performers who started there included Marie Lloyd, George Robey, Harry Lauder, Harry Tate, George Formby, Vesta Tilley, Tommy Trinder, Gracie Fields, Tommy Handley and Norman Wisdom.


title: Islington

text: The Islington Literary and Scientific Society was established in 1833 and first met in Mr. Edgeworth's Academy on Upper Street. Its goal was to spread knowledge through lectures, discussions, and experiments, politics and theology being forbidden. A building, the Literary and Scientific Institution, was erected in 1837 in Wellington (later Almeida) Street, designed by Roumieu and Gough in a stuccoed Grecian style. It included a library (containing 3,300 volumes in 1839), reading room, museum, laboratory, and lecture theatre seating 500. The subscription was two guineas a year. After the library was sold off in 1872, the building was sold or leased in 1874 to the "Wellington Club", which occupied it until 1886. In 1885 the hall was used for concerts, balls, and public meetings. The Salvation Army bought the building in 1890, renamed it the Wellington Castle barracks, and remained there until 1955. The building became a factory and showroom for Beck's British Carnival Novelties for a few years from 1956, after which it stood empty. In 1978 a campaign began with the goal to redevelop the building as a theatre. A public appeal was launched in 1981, and a festival of avant-garde theatre and music was held there and at other Islington venues in 1982. What has become the successful Almeida Theatre was founded.


title: Islington

text: Some early development took place to accommodate the popularity of the nearby Sadler's Wells, which became a resort in the 16th century, but the 19th century saw the greatest expansion in housing, soon to cover the whole parish. In 1801, the population was 10,212, but by 1891 this had increased to 319,143. This rapid expansion was partly due to the introduction of horse-drawn omnibuses in 1830. Large well-built houses and fashionable squares drew clerks, artisans and professionals to the district. However, from the middle of the 19th century the poor were being displaced by clearances in inner London to build the new railway stations and goods yards. Many of the displaced settled in Islington, with the houses becoming occupied by many families. This, combined with the railways pushing into outer Middlesex, reduced Islington's attraction for the "better off" as it became "unfashionable". The area fell into a long decline; and by the mid-20th century, it was largely run-down and a byword for urban poverty.


title: Islington

text: The aerial bombing of World War II caused much damage to Islington's housing stock, with 3,200 dwellings destroyed. Before the war a number of 1930s council housing blocks had been added to the stock. After the war, partly as a result of bomb site redevelopment, the council housing boom got into its stride, reaching its peak in the 1960s: several extensive estates were constructed, by both the Metropolitan Borough of Islington and the London County Council. Clearance of the worst terraced housing was undertaken, but Islington continued to be very densely populated, with a high level of overcrowding. The district has many council blocks, and the local authority has begun to replace some of them.


title: Islington

text: From the 1960s, the remaining Georgian terraces were rediscovered by middle-class families. Many of the houses were rehabilitated, and the area became newly fashionable. This displacement of the poor by the aspirational has become known as gentrification. Among the new residents were a number of figures who became central in the New Labour movement, including Tony Blair before his victory in the 1997 general election. According to "The Guardian in 2006," "Islington is widely regarded as the spiritual home of Britain's left-wing intelligentsia." The "Granita Pact" between Gordon Brown and Tony Blair is said to have been made at a now defunct restaurant on Upper Street.


title: Islington

text: The African National Congress's headquarters in-exile was based on Penton Street. It was the target of a bomb attack in 1982.


title: Islington

text: The completion of the Victoria line and redevelopment of Angel tube station created the conditions for developers to renovate many of the early Victorian and Georgian townhouses. They also built new developments. Islington remains a district with diverse inhabitants, with its private houses and apartments not far from social housing in immediately neighbouring wards such as Finsbury and Clerkenwell to the south, Bloomsbury and King's Cross to the west, and Highbury to the north west, and also the Hackney districts of De Beauvoir and Old Street to the north east.


title: Islington

text: Islington is the most densely populated borough in the UK according to the 2011 census, with a population density of 138.7 people per hectare, compared to an average of 52.0 for London.


title: Islington

text: Islington High Street is the former High Street of the original village of Islington. High Street runs approximately from the intersection of Pentonville Road and City Road at the south end to Islington Green at the north end, where it branches into Upper Street and Essex Road (former Lower Street) – though some maps may simply show High Street as the southern portion of Upper Street. The earliest reference to Islington High Street is its appearance on a 1590 map of the area. At this time, nine inns (including the famous Angel, which has subsequently given its name to the area around High Street), as well as housing and a public pond were shown lining the street. Then as now, Islington was and is unusual in that the village church, St Mary's, does not stand on the high street but is some way off on Upper Street.


title: Islington

text: In 1716 Islington High Street came under the control of the newly formed Islington Turnpike Trust. The Trust grew rapidly, and soon had control of most major roads in the area, building a number of major road arteries through the expanding residential areas, including Caledonian Road, Euston Road, City Road and New North Road.


title: Islington

text: The Peacock Inn at 11 Islington High Street dates from 1564, although the current façade dates from 1857. It featured in "Tom Brown's Schooldays" as the inn at which Tom stays prior to travelling to Rugby School. It closed in 1962, although the building still stands.


title: Islington

text: Angel tube station on Islington High Street has the longest escalator on the London Underground system, at 318 steps. In 2006 a Norwegian man made headlines after skiing down the escalator at the station.


title: Islington

text: There are over 60 sports and other types of physical activity on offer to the public in Islington, at more than approximately one hundred clubs, leisure centres, parks, community centres, and other venues. The Islington Boxing Club, on Hazellville Road, was founded in January 1974 and was originally based in the community hall of York Way Court, close to Kings Cross Station.


title: Islington

text: The borough is home to top-flight professional football club Arsenal F.C., whose sixty-thousand capacity stadium is in Holloway.


title: Islington

text: The area is served by numerous bus routes, with a major bus interchange located near the Angel tube station. Red route and residents' parking restrictions apply throughout the area.


title: Islington

text: According to latest figures published by the Department for Education, there are 47 primary and 10 state-funded secondary schools in Islington.


title: Islington

text: English Heritage list three Grade II* listed buildings within Central Islington (and many more in surrounding districts):


title: Islington

text: The area contains numerous Georgian townhouses, shops and pubs. Many whole terraces are listed including much of Liverpool Road (one side of which is in Barnsbury) and Islington High Street/Upper Street. Other multiply listed streets include Arlington Square (one of the UK's top 10 garden squares) Camden Passage, Compton Terrace, Colebrooke Row, Cross Street, Duncan Terrace, Essex Road, Gibson Square and Milner Square.


title: The Score (Fugees album)

text: The Score is the second and final studio album by the hip hop trio Fugees. "The Score" was released worldwide on February 13, 1996, on Columbia Records. The album features a wide range of samples and instrumentation, with many aspects of alternative hip hop that would come to dominate the hip-hop music scene in the mid- to late 1990s. Primarily, "The Score's" production was handled by the Fugees themselves, Jerry Duplessis and Warren Riker, with additional production from Salaam Remi, John Forté, Diamond D, and Shawn King. The album's guest verses are from Outsidaz members Rah Digga, Young Zee, and Pacewon, as well as Omega, John Forté, and Diamond D. Most versions of the album feature four bonus tracks, including three remixes of "Fu-Gee-La", and a short acoustic Wyclef Jean solo track entitled "Mista Mista".


title: The Score (Fugees album)

text: Upon its release, "The Score" was a commercial success, peaking atop the U.S. "Billboard" 200, and became the third best selling album of 1996. It also topped the Top R&B/Hip-hop Albums chart for eight weeks, becoming the longest running number one for a hip hop group, and topped the 1996 year-end chart. The singles "Killing Me Softly", "Fu-Gee-La", and "Ready or Not" also achieved notable chart success, helping the group achieve worldwide recognition.


title: The Score (Fugees album)

text: The album received mostly favorable reviews. It received a nomination for Album of the Year at the 39th Grammy Awards, becoming the second rap album to receive a nomination and the first for a hip hop group; and won the Grammy Award for Best Rap Album, along with Best R&B Performance by a Duo or Group with Vocal for "Killing Me Softly". In retrospect, "The Score" has garnered a considerable amount of acclaim over the years, with many music critics and publications noting it as one of the greatest albums of the 1990s, as well as one of the greatest hip hop albums of all time. "The Score" was included in "The Source"'s 100 best rap albums list (1998), and was ranked number 134 on "Rolling Stone"'s revised list of "The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time" (2020).


title: The Score (Fugees album)

text: As of February 2021, "The Score" has been certified seven times platinum by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA). It is the best-selling album by an American hip hop act in France, where the album has been certified Diamond. With an estimated 22 million copies sold worldwide, the album has become one of the best-selling albums of all time, at the time of its release it briefly became the best-selling hip hop album of all time, and remains the best-selling album by a hip hop group. As of June 2021, the album is the fifth-most streamed 1990s hip-hop album on Spotify.


title: The Score (Fugees album)

text: Although the Fugees' previous album, "Blunted on Reality" proved to be critically and commercially unsuccessful, Chris Schwartz, the head of Ruffhouse Records, decided to give the group another chance. In early 1995, he gave them a $135,000 advance and granted them complete artistic control for a follow-up album. The group used the money for recording equipment and set up a studio in Wyclef Jean's uncle's basement, which they referred to as the Booga Basement.


title: The Score (Fugees album)

text: Recording for the album began in June 1995, and extended into November 1995 at what Jean described as a "relaxed pace... It was done calmly, almost unconsciously. There wasn't any pressure - it was like 'let's make some music,' and it just started forming into something amazing. It sounded like a feel-good hip hop record to us, and it was different than what anyone was doing at the time. It was three kids from an urban background expressing themselves."


title: The Score (Fugees album)

text: In regard to "The Score"s unified themes and production, Lauryn Hill commented: "It's an audio film. It's like how radio was back in the 1940s. It tells a story, and there are cuts and breaks in the music. It's almost like a hip hop version of "Tommy", like what The Who did for rock music."


title: The Score (Fugees album)

text: "The Score" was produced by a variety of producers including each member of the Fugees, as well as Diamond D, Salaam Remi, and Jerry Duplessis. Although most tracks are built on sampled melodies, live instrumentation and DJing are incorporated into multiple tracks. Wyclef Jean plays the guitar on "Family Business", while DJ Scribble scratches on "Manifest/Outro". Nevertheless, samples are the predominant production tool on "The Score". "Fu-Gee-La" incorporates a sample of Teena Marie's "Ooo La La La", and is interpolated in the song's chorus. "Ready or Not" also contains a sample that is interpolated; "Ready or Not (Here I Come)" by The Delfonics. "Manifest/Outro" contains a sample from "Rock Dis Funky Joint" by Poor Righteous Teachers, while the title track, "Red Intro" contains vocal samples from every track on the entire album.


title: The Score (Fugees album)

text: Three official singles were released in promotion of "The Score", the first of which was "Fu-Gee-La", which was released on January 9, 1996, reached the Top 40, peaking at No. 29 on the "Billboard" Hot 100. Additionally, the song reached No. 13 on the Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Songs, and No. 2 on the Hot Rap Songs chart. "Fu-Gee-La" was produced by Salaam Remi and includes elements of "Ooo La La La" as performed by Teena Marie.


title: The Score (Fugees album)

text: The second single, "Killing Me Softly", with lead vocals by Lauryn Hill, was released on May 31, 1996. "Killing Me Softly" proved to be the most successful single from the album. The song went No. 1 in 20 countries, including the United Kingdom, where it peaked atop the UK Singles Chart, and became one of the region's best-selling singles ever. In the US the song wasn’t available for purchase, which made it ineligible to chart on the "Billboard" Hot 100 chart due to their previous rules; however it still managed to peak at No. 1 on the US Mainstream Top 40 and Rhythmic airplay charts. Initially, the song was to be titled "Killing Them Softly", and though alluding to Charles Fox and Norman Gimbel's "Killing Me Softly with His Song", it was originally not intended to be a cover; however, the original writers refused permission for the rewrite of their song, but did allow the Fugees to do a cover version. In 1997, "Killing Me Softly" won the Fugees a Grammy Award for Best R&B Performance by Duo or group.


title: The Score (Fugees album)

text: The third single released from the album was "Ready or Not", which was released on September 2, 1996. In the US the song peaked at No. 34 on the Rhythmic Top 40 chart. The song became their second No. 1 on the UK Singles Chart, staying at the top for two weeks. The track interpolates "Ready or Not, Here I Come (Can't Hide from Love)" as performed by The Delfonics, and also samples Enya's "Boadicea". Initially this sample was uncredited, and Enya was prepared to sue for copyright infringement, but decided not to when she discovered that the Fugees were not gangsta rappers.


title: The Score (Fugees album)

text: The accompanying music video was directed by film director Marcus Nispel, and was reported to have cost approximately 1.3 million dollars at the time, making it one of the most expensive music videos ever. In a later interview, Fugees member Pras described the recording of "Ready or Not", stating, "The three of us was each going through some pain. Lauryn was crying when she did her vocals. It was unbelievable. To see her singing with tears coming out of her eyes, it made me want to cry too."


title: The Score (Fugees album)

text: The fourth and final single from the album, a cover of Bob Marley's "No Woman, No Cry", with lead vocals by Wyclef Jean, was released on November 18, 1996. It was produced by Wyclef Jean and Lauryn Hill, with additionally production from Pras and Jerry 'Wonder' Duplessis. It features uncredited backing vocals from by Marley's children Stephen and Sharon Marley, as well as reggae singer Pam Hall. An official remix of the track, featuring Stephen Marley, was included on the group's third release, "Bootleg Versions". The song peaked at No. 38 on the US Hot 100 Airplay chart. It was more successful worldwide, peaking atop the New Zealand Singles Chart for two weeks, and No. 2 in the UK.


title: The Score (Fugees album)

text: Upon its release, "The Score" received critical acclaim. "Entertainment Weekly" writer James Bernard commented, "What a shock: a smooth, well-produced rap album that doesn't have Dr. Dre's fingerprints on it [...] "The Score" showcases their acrobatic lyrical techniques and restless intelligence, and unlike much East Coast rap, "The Score" feels warm and intimate — partly because the instruments are live but also because the Fugees sound so relaxed and casual." Robert Christgau from "The Village Voice" called "The Score" "so beautiful and funny its courage could make you weep", and said the Fugees possess "black humanism" and "the gender-equality formula in which one girl learning equals two guys calling the shots". Steve Huey from AllMusic wrote that, "Even when they're not relying on easily recognizable tunes, their original material is powered by a raft of indelible hooks [...] "The Score" balances intelligence and accessibility with an easy assurance, and ranks as one of the most distinctive hip hop albums of its era." Cheo Hodari Coker from the "Los Angeles Times" wrote that, ""The Score" succeeds on all counts", while the Fugees are as fluid a rap group since A Tribe Called Quest: "Their specialty is matching a gymnastic rhyme flow and rock-solid beats with expert crooning." Selwyn Seyfu Hinds of "Spin" commented, "A sense of organic interaction is the hallmark of this album [...] the album's most important factor is its beats; chest-shaking, obscure-texture-having, freestyle-friendly beats." "Q" described the album as "An impressively panoramic soundscape."


title: The Score (Fugees album)

text: However, in a mixed review, "Rolling Stone" writer Ann Powers commented, "The Fugees' roots in reggae gives them a solid base in song and a basic philosophy that's richer than the money-or-nothing ethic that dulls much of rap these days. Without being sanctimonious, "The Score" paints the ghetto as a mythical landscape, one that can inspire pride as well as sorrow. Like Wu-Tang Clan, the Fugees view the world as their movie, complete with stunts and special effects." Jon Pareles of "The New York Times" found the group's "vision of ghetto life" both eccentric and realistic, although he felt "Killing Me Softly" sounds "out of place amid the hard-nosed surrealism".


title: Wireshark

text: Wireshark is a free and open-source packet analyzer. It is used for network troubleshooting, analysis, software and communications protocol development, and education. Originally named Ethereal, the project was renamed Wireshark in May 2006 due to trademark issues.


title: Wireshark

text: Wireshark is cross-platform, using the Qt widget toolkit in current releases to implement its user interface, and using pcap to capture packets; it runs on Linux, macOS, BSD, Solaris, some other Unix-like operating systems, and Microsoft Windows. There is also a terminal-based (non-GUI) version called TShark. Wireshark, and the other programs distributed with it such as TShark, are free software, released under the terms of the GNU General Public License version 2 or any later version.


title: Wireshark

text: Wireshark is very similar to tcpdump, but has a graphical front-end and integrated sorting and filtering options.


title: Wireshark

text: Wireshark lets the user put network interface controllers into promiscuous mode (if supported by the network interface controller), so they can see all the traffic visible on that interface including unicast traffic not sent to that network interface controller's MAC address. However, when capturing with a packet analyzer in promiscuous mode on a port on a network switch, not all traffic through the switch is necessarily sent to the port where the capture is done, so capturing in promiscuous mode is not necessarily sufficient to see all network traffic. Port mirroring or various network taps extend capture to any point on the network. Simple passive taps are extremely resistant to tampering.


title: Wireshark

text: On Linux, BSD, and macOS, with libpcap 1.0.0 or later, Wireshark 1.4 and later can also put wireless network interface controllers into monitor mode.


title: Wireshark

text: If a remote machine captures packets and sends the captured packets to a machine running Wireshark using the TZSP protocol or the protocol used by OmniPeek, Wireshark dissects those packets, so it can analyze packets captured on a remote machine at the time that they are captured.


title: Wireshark

text: In the late 1990s, Gerald Combs, a computer science graduate of the University of Missouri–Kansas City, was working for a small Internet service provider. The commercial protocol analysis products at the time were priced around $1500 and did not run on the company's primary platforms (Solaris and Linux), so Gerald began writing Ethereal and released the first version around 1998. The Ethereal trademark is owned by Network Integration Services.


title: Wireshark

text: In May 2006, Combs accepted a job with CACE Technologies. Combs still held copyright on most of Ethereal's source code (and the rest was re-distributable under the GNU GPL), so he used the contents of the Ethereal Subversion repository as the basis for the Wireshark repository. However, he did not own the Ethereal trademark, so he changed the name to Wireshark. In 2010 Riverbed Technology purchased CACE and took over as the primary sponsor of Wireshark. Ethereal development has ceased, and an Ethereal security advisory recommended switching to Wireshark.


title: Wireshark

text: Wireshark has won several industry awards over the years, including "eWeek", "InfoWorld", and "PC Magazine". It is also the top-rated packet sniffer in the Insecure.Org network security tools survey and was the SourceForge Project of the Month in August 2010.


title: Wireshark

text: Combs continues to maintain the overall code of Wireshark and issue releases of new versions of the software. The product website lists almost 2000 additional contributing authors.


title: Wireshark

text: Wireshark is a data capturing program that "understands" the structure (encapsulation) of different networking protocols. It can parse and display the fields, along with their meanings as specified by different networking protocols. Wireshark uses pcap to capture packets, so it can only capture packets on the types of networks that pcap supports.


title: Wireshark

text: Wireshark's native network trace file format is the libpcap format supported by libpcap and WinPcap, so it can exchange captured network traces with other applications that use the same format, including tcpdump and CA NetMaster. It can also read captures from other network analyzers, such as snoop, Network General's Sniffer, and Microsoft Network Monitor.


title: Wireshark

text: Capturing raw network traffic from an interface requires elevated privileges on some platforms. For this reason, older versions of Wireshark and TShark often ran with superuser privileges. Considering the huge number of protocol dissectors that are called when traffic is captured and recognizing the possibility of a bug in a dissector, a serious security risk can be posed. Due to the rather large number of vulnerabilities in the past (of which many have allowed remote code execution) and developers' doubts for better future development, OpenBSD removed Ethereal from its ports tree prior to OpenBSD 3.6.


title: Wireshark

text: Elevated privileges are not needed for all operations. For example, an alternative is to run tcpdump or the "dumpcap" utility that comes with Wireshark with superuser privileges to capture packets into a file, and later analyze the packets by running Wireshark with restricted privileges. To emulate near realtime analysis, each captured file may be merged by "mergecap" into growing file processed by Wireshark. On wireless networks, it is possible to use the Aircrack wireless security tools to capture IEEE 802.11 frames and read the resulting dump files with Wireshark.


title: Wireshark

text: As of Wireshark 0.99.7, Wireshark and TShark run dumpcap to perform traffic capture. Platforms that require special privileges to capture traffic need only dumpcap run with those privileges. Neither Wireshark nor TShark need to or should be run with special privileges.


title: Wireshark

text: Wireshark can color packets based on rules that match particular fields in packets, to help the user identify the types of traffic at a glance. A default set of rules is provided; users can change existing rules for coloring packets, add new rules, or remove rules.


title: Wireshark

text: Wireshark can also be used to capture packets from most network simulation tools such as ns and OPNET Modeler.


title: Fascism and ideology

text: The history of fascist ideology is long and it draws on many sources. Fascists took inspiration from sources as ancient as the Spartans for their focus on racial purity and their emphasis on rule by an elite minority. Fascism has also been connected to the ideals of Plato, though there are key differences between the two. Fascism styled itself as the ideological successor to Rome, particularly the Roman Empire. From the same era, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel's view on the absolute authority of the state also strongly influenced fascist thinking. The French Revolution was a major influence insofar as the Nazis saw themselves as fighting back against many of the ideas which it brought to prominence, especially liberalism, liberal democracy and racial equality, whereas on the other hand, fascism drew heavily on the revolutionary ideal of nationalism. The prejudice of a "high and noble" Aryan culture as opposed to a "parasitic" Semitic culture was core to Nazi racial views, while other early forms of fascism concerned themselves with non-racialized conceptions of the nation.


title: Fascism and ideology

text: Common themes among fascist movements include: authoritarianism, nationalism (including racial nationalism), hierarchy and elitism, and militarism. Other aspects of fascism such as its "myth of decadence", anti-egalitarianism and totalitarianism can be seen to originate from these ideas. Roger Griffin has proposed that fascism is a synthesis of totalitarianism and ultranationalism sacralized through a myth of national rebirth and regeneration, which he terms "Palingenetic ultranationalism".


title: Fascism and ideology

text: Fascism's relationship with other ideologies of its day was complex. It frequently considered those ideologies its adversaries, but at the same time it was also focused on co-opting their more popular aspects. Fascism supported private property rights – except for the groups which it persecuted – and the profit motive of capitalism, but it sought to eliminate the autonomy of large-scale capitalism from the state. Fascists shared many of the goals of the conservatives of their day and they often allied themselves with them by drawing recruits from disaffected conservative ranks, but they presented themselves as holding a more modern ideology, with less focus on things like traditional religion, and sought to radically reshape society through revolutionary action rather than preserve the status quo. Fascism opposed class conflict and the egalitarian and international character of socialism. It strongly opposed liberalism, communism, anarchism, and democratic socialism.


title: Fascism and ideology

text: Early influences that shaped the ideology of fascism have been dated back to Ancient Greece. The political culture of ancient Greece and specifically the ancient Greek city state of Sparta under Lycurgus, with its emphasis on militarism and racial purity, were admired by the Nazis. Nazi "Führer" Adolf Hitler emphasized that Germany should adhere to Hellenic values and culture – particularly that of ancient Sparta. He rebuked potential criticism of Hellenic values being non-German by emphasizing the common Aryan race connection with ancient Greeks, saying in "Mein Kampf": "One must not allow the differences of the individual races to tear up the greater racial community". In fact, drawing racial ties to ancient Greek culture was seen as necessary to the national narrative, as Hitler was unimpressed with the cultural works of Germanic tribes at the time, saying, "if anyone asks us about our ancestors, we should continually allude to the ancient Greeks."


title: Fascism and ideology

text: Hitler went on to say in "Mein Kampf": "The struggle that rages today involves very great aims: a culture fights for its existence, which combines millenniums and embraces Hellenism and Germanity together". The Spartans were emulated by the quasi-fascist regime of Ioannis Metaxas who called for Greeks to wholly commit themselves to the nation with self-control as the Spartans had done. Supporters of the 4th of August Regime in the 1930s to 1940s justified the dictatorship of Metaxas on the basis that the "First Greek Civilization" involved an Athenian dictatorship led by Pericles who had brought ancient Greece to greatness. The Greek philosopher Plato supported many similar political positions to fascism. In "The Republic" (c. 380 BC), Plato emphasizes the need for a philosopher king in an ideal state. Plato believed the ideal state would be ruled by an elite class of rulers known as "Guardians" and rejected the idea of social equality. Plato believed in an authoritarian state. Plato held Athenian democracy in contempt by saying: "The laws of democracy remain a dead letter, its freedom is anarchy, its equality the equality of unequals". Like fascism, Plato emphasized that individuals must adhere to laws and perform duties while declining to grant individuals rights to limit or reject state interference in their lives. Like fascism, Plato also claimed that an ideal state would have state-run education that was designed to promote able rulers and warriors. Like many fascist ideologues, Plato advocated for a state-sponsored eugenics program to be carried out in order to improve the Guardian class in his "Republic" through selective breeding. Italian Fascist "Il Duce" Benito Mussolini had a strong attachment to the works of Plato. However, there are significant differences between Plato's ideals and fascism. Unlike fascism, Plato never promoted expansionism and he was opposed to offensive war.


title: Fascism and ideology

text: Italian Fascists identified their ideology as being connected to the legacy of ancient Rome and particularly the Roman Empire: they idolized Julius Caesar and Augustus. Italian Fascism viewed the modern state of Italy as the heir of the Roman Empire and emphasized the need for renovation of Italian culture to "return to Roman values". Italian Fascists identified the Roman Empire as being an ideal organic and stable society in contrast to contemporary individualist liberal society that they saw as being chaotic in comparison. Julius Caesar was considered a role model by fascists because he led a revolution that overthrew an old order to establish a new order based on a dictatorship in which he wielded absolute power. Mussolini emphasized the need for dictatorship, activist leadership style and a leader cult like that of Julius Caesar that involved "the will to fix a unifying and balanced centre and a common will to action". Italian Fascists also idolized Augustus as the champion who built the Roman Empire. The fasces – a symbol of Roman authority – was the symbol of the Italian Fascists and was additionally adopted by many other national fascist movements formed in emulation of Italian Fascism. While a number of Nazis rejected Roman civilization because they saw it as incompatible with Aryan Germanic culture and they also believed that Aryan Germanic culture was outside Roman culture, Adolf Hitler personally admired ancient Rome. Hitler focused on ancient Rome during its rise to dominance and at the height of its power as a model to follow, and he deeply admired the Roman Empire for its ability to forge a strong and unified civilization. In private conversations, Hitler blamed the fall of the Roman Empire on the Roman adoption of Christianity because he claimed that Christianity authorized the racial intermixing that weakened Rome and led to its destruction.


title: Fascism and ideology

text: There were a number of influences on fascism from the Renaissance era in Europe. Niccolò Machiavelli is known to have influenced Italian Fascism, particularly through his promotion of the absolute authority of the state. Machiavelli rejected all existing traditional and metaphysical assumptions of the time—especially those associated with the Middle Ages—and asserted as an Italian patriot that Italy needed a strong and all-powerful state led by a vigorous and ruthless leader who would conquer and unify Italy. Mussolini saw himself as a modern-day Machiavellian and wrote an introduction to his honorary doctoral thesis for the University of Bologna—"Prelude to Machiavelli". Mussolini professed that Machiavelli's "pessimism about human nature was eternal in its acuity. Individuals simply could not be relied on voluntarily to 'obey the law, pay their taxes and serve in war'. No well-ordered society could want the people to be sovereign". Most dictators of the 20th century mimicked Mussolini's admiration for Machiavelli and "Stalin... saw himself as the embodiment of Machiavellian "virtù"".


title: Fascism and ideology

text: English political theorist Thomas Hobbes in his work "Leviathan" (1651) created the ideology of absolutism that advocated an all-powerful absolute monarchy to maintain order within a state. Absolutism was an influence on fascism. Absolutism based its legitimacy on the precedents of Roman law including the centralized Roman state and the manifestation of Roman law in the Catholic Church. Though fascism supported the absolute power of the state, it opposed the idea of absolute power being in the hands of a monarch and opposed the feudalism that was associated with absolute monarchies.


title: Fascism and ideology

text: During the Enlightenment, a number of ideological influences arose that would shape the development of fascism. The development of the study of universal histories by Johann Gottfried Herder resulted in Herder's analysis of the development of nations. Herder developed the term "Nationalismus" ("nationalism") to describe this cultural phenomenon. At this time nationalism did not refer to the political ideology of nationalism that was later developed during the French Revolution. Herder also developed the theory that Europeans are the descendants of Indo-Aryan people based on language studies. Herder argued that the Germanic peoples held close racial connections with the ancient Indians and ancient Persians, who he claimed were advanced peoples possessing a great capacity for wisdom, nobility, restraint and science. Contemporaries of Herder used the concept of the Aryan race to draw a distinction between what they deemed "high and noble" Aryan culture versus that of "parasitic" Semitic culture and this anti-Semitic variant view of Europeans' Aryan roots formed the basis of Nazi racial views. Another major influence on fascism came from the political theories of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Hegel promoted the absolute authority of the state and said "nothing short of the state is the actualization of freedom" and that the "state is the march of God on earth".


title: Fascism and ideology

text: The French Revolution and its political legacy had a major influence upon the development of fascism. Fascists view the French Revolution as a largely negative event that resulted in the entrenchment of liberal ideas such as liberal democracy, anticlericalism and rationalism. Opponents of the French Revolution initially were conservatives and reactionaries, but the Revolution was also later criticized by Marxists for its bourgeois character, and by racist nationalists who opposed its universalist principles. Racist nationalists in particular condemned the French Revolution for granting social equality to "inferior races" such as Jews. Mussolini condemned the French Revolution for developing liberalism, scientific socialism and liberal democracy, but also acknowledged that fascism extracted and used all the elements that had preserved those ideologies' vitality and that fascism had no desire to restore the conditions that precipitated the French Revolution. Though fascism opposed core parts of the Revolution, fascists supported other aspects of it, Mussolini declared his support for the Revolution's demolishment of remnants of the Middle Ages such as tolls and compulsory labour upon citizens and he noted that the French Revolution did have benefits in that it had been a cause of the whole French nation and not merely a political party. Most importantly, the French Revolution was responsible for the entrenchment of nationalism as a political ideology – both in its development in France as French nationalism and in the creation of nationalist movements particularly in Germany with the development of German nationalism by Johann Gottlieb Fichte as a political response to the development of French nationalism. The Nazis accused the French Revolution of being dominated by Jews and Freemasons and were deeply disturbed by the Revolution's intention to completely break France away from its history in what the Nazis claimed was a repudiation of history that they asserted to be a trait of the Enlightenment. Though the Nazis were highly critical of the Revolution, Hitler in "Mein Kampf" said that the French Revolution is a model for how to achieve change that he claims was caused by the rhetorical strength of demagogues. Furthermore, the Nazis idealized the "levée en masse" (mass mobilization of soldiers) that was developed by French Revolutionary armies and the Nazis sought to use the system for their paramilitary movement.


title: Fascism and ideology

text: The ideological roots of fascism have been traced to the 1880s and in particular the "fin de siècle" theme of that time. The theme was based on revolt against materialism, rationalism, positivism, bourgeois society and liberal democracy. The "fin-de-siècle" generation supported emotionalism, irrationalism, subjectivism and vitalism. The "fin-de-siècle" mindset saw civilization as being in a crisis that required a massive and total solution. The "fin-de-siècle" intellectual school of the 1890s – including Gabriele d'Annunzio and Enrico Corradini in Italy; Maurice Barrès, Edouard Drumont and Georges Sorel in France; and Paul de Lagarde, Julius Langbehn and Arthur Moeller van den Bruck in Germany – saw social and political collectivity as more important than individualism and rationalism. They considered the individual as only one part of the larger collectivity, which should not be viewed as an atomized numerical sum of individuals. They condemned the rationalistic individualism of liberal society and the dissolution of social links in bourgeois society. They saw modern society as one of mediocrity, materialism, instability, and corruption. They denounced big-city urban society as being merely based on instinct and animality and without heroism.


title: Fascism and ideology

text: The "fin-de-siècle" outlook was influenced by various intellectual developments, including Darwinian biology; Wagnerian aesthetics; Arthur de Gobineau's racialism; Gustave Le Bon's psychology; and the philosophies of Friedrich Nietzsche, Fyodor Dostoyevsky and Henri Bergson. Social Darwinism, which gained widespread acceptance, made no distinction between physical and social life and viewed the human condition as being an unceasing struggle to achieve the survival of the fittest. Social Darwinism challenged positivism's claim of deliberate and rational choice as the determining behaviour of humans, with social Darwinism focusing on heredity, race and environment. Social Darwinism's emphasis on biogroup identity and the role of organic relations within societies fostered legitimacy and appeal for nationalism. New theories of social and political psychology also rejected the notion of human behaviour being governed by rational choice, and instead claimed that emotion was more influential in political issues than reason. Nietzsche's argument that "God is dead" coincided with his attack on the "herd mentality" of Christianity, democracy and modern collectivism; his concept of the "übermensch"; and his advocacy of the will to power as a primordial instinct were major influences upon many of the "fin-de-siècle" generation. Bergson's claim of the existence of an ""élan vital"" or vital instinct centred upon free choice and rejected the processes of materialism and determinism, thus challenged Marxism.


title: Fascism and ideology

text: With the advent of the Darwinian theory of evolution came claims of evolution possibly leading to decadence. Proponents of decadence theories claimed that contemporary Western society's decadence was the result of modern life, including urbanization, sedentary lifestyle, the survival of the least fit and modern culture's emphasis on egalitarianism, individualistic anomie, and nonconformity. The main work that gave rise to decadence theories was the work "Degeneration" (1892) by Max Nordau that was popular in Europe, the ideas of decadence helped the cause of nationalists who presented nationalism as a cure for decadence.


title: Fascism and ideology

text: Gaetano Mosca in his work "The Ruling Class" (1896) developed the theory that claims that in all societies, an "organized minority" will dominate and rule over the "disorganized majority". Mosca claims that there are only two classes in society, "the governing" (the organized minority) and "the governed" (the disorganized majority). He claims that the organized nature of the organized minority makes it irresistible to any individual of the disorganized majority. Mosca developed this theory in 1896 in which he argued that the problem of the supremacy of civilian power in society is solved in part by the presence and social structural design of militaries. He claims that the social structure of the military is ideal because it includes diverse social elements that balance each other out and more importantly is its inclusion of an officer class as a "power elite". Mosca presented the social structure and methods of governance by the military as a valid model of development for civil society. Mosca's theories are known to have significantly influenced Mussolini's notion of the political process and fascism.


title: Fascism and ideology

text: Related to Mosca's theory of domination of society by an organized minority over a disorganized majority was Robert Michels' theory of the iron law of oligarchy, created in 1911, which was a major attack on the basis of contemporary democracy. Michels argues that oligarchy is inevitable as an "iron law" within any organization as part of the "tactical and technical necessities" of organization and on the topic of democracy, Michels stated: "It is organization which gives birth to the dominion of the elected over the electors, of the mandataries over the mandators, of the delegates over the delegators. Who says organization, says oligarchy". He claims: "Historical evolution mocks all the prophylactic measures that have been adopted for the prevention of oligarchy". He states that the official goal of contemporary democracy of eliminating elite rule was impossible, that democracy is a façade which legitimizes the rule of a particular elite and that elite rule, which he refers to as oligarchy, is inevitable. Michels had previously been a social democrat, but became drawn to the ideas of Georges Sorel, Édouard Berth, Arturo Labriola and Enrico Leone and came to strongly oppose the parliamentarian, legalistic and bureaucratic socialism of social democracy. As early as 1904, he began to advocate in favor of patriotism and national interests. Later he began to support activist, voluntarist, and anti-parliamentarian concepts, and in 1911 he took a position in favor of the Italian war effort in Libya and started moving towards Italian nationalism. Michels eventually became a supporter of fascism upon Mussolini's rise to power in 1922, viewing fascism's goal to destroy liberal democracy in a sympathetic manner.


title: Fascism and ideology

text: Maurice Barrès, a French politician of the late 19th and early 20th centuries who influenced the later fascist movement, claimed that true democracy was authoritarian democracy while rejecting liberal democracy as a fraud. Barrès claimed that authoritarian democracy involved a spiritual connection between a leader of a nation and the nation's people, and that true freedom did not arise from individual rights nor parliamentary restraints, but through "heroic leadership" and "national power". He emphasized the need for hero worship and charismatic leadership in national society. Barrès was a founding member of the League for the French Fatherland in 1889, and later coined the term "socialist nationalism" to describe his views during an electoral campaign in 1898. He emphasized class collaboration, the role of intuition and emotion in politics alongside racial Antisemitism, and "he tried to combine the search for energy and a vital style of life with national rootedness and a sort of Darwinian racism." Later in life he returned to cultural traditionalism and parliamentary conservatism, but his ideas contributed to the development of an extremist form of nationalism in pre-1914 France. Other French nationalist intellectuals of the early 20th century also wished to "obliterate the class struggle in ideological terms," ending the threat of communism by persuading working people to identify with their nation rather than their class.


title: Fascism and ideology

text: The rise of support for anarchism in this period of time was important in influencing the politics of fascism. The anarchist Mikhail Bakunin's concept of propaganda of the deed, which stressed the importance of direct action as the primary means of politics—including revolutionary violence, became popular amongst fascists who admired the concept and adopted it as a part of fascism.


title: Fascism and ideology

text: One of the key persons who greatly influenced fascism was the French intellectual Georges Sorel, who "must be considered one of the least classifiable political thinkers of the twentieth century" and supported a variety of different ideologies throughout his life, including conservatism, socialism, revolutionary syndicalism and nationalism. Sorel also contributed to the fusion of anarchism and syndicalism together into anarcho-syndicalism. He promoted the legitimacy of political violence in his work "Reflections on Violence" (1908), during a period in his life when he advocated radical syndicalist action to achieve a revolution which would overthrow capitalism and the bourgeoisie through a general strike. In "Reflections on Violence", Sorel emphasized need for a revolutionary political religion. Also in his work "The Illusions of Progress", Sorel denounced democracy as reactionary, saying "nothing is more aristocratic than democracy". By 1909, after the failure of a syndicalist general strike in France, Sorel and his supporters abandoned the radical left and went to the radical right, where they sought to merge militant Catholicism and French patriotism with their views – advocating anti-republican Christian French patriots as ideal revolutionaries. In the early 1900s Sorel had officially been a revisionist of Marxism, but by 1910 he announced his abandonment of socialism, and in 1914 he claimed – following an aphorism of Benedetto Croce – that "socialism is dead" due to the "decomposition of Marxism". Sorel became a supporter of reactionary Maurrassian integral nationalism beginning in 1909, and this greatly influenced his works.


title: Fascism and ideology

text: Sorel's political allegiances were constantly shifting, influencing a variety of people across the political spectrum from Benito Mussolini to Benedetto Croce to Georg Lukács, and both sympathizers and critics of Sorel considered his political thought to be a collection of separate ideas with no coherence and no common thread linking them. In this, Sorelianism is considered to be a precursor to fascism, as fascist thought also drew from disparate sources and did not form a single coherent ideological system. Sorel described himself as "a self-taught man exhibiting to other people the notebooks which have served for my own instruction", and stated that his goal was to be original in all of his writings and that his apparent lack of coherence was due to an unwillingness to write down anything that had already been said elsewhere by someone else. The academic intellectual establishment did not take him seriously, but Mussolini applauded Sorel by declaring: "What I am, I owe to Sorel".


title: Fascism and ideology

text: Charles Maurras was a French right-wing monarchist and nationalist who held interest in merging his nationalist ideals with Sorelian syndicalism as a means to confront liberal democracy. This fusion of nationalism from the political right with Sorelian syndicalism from the left took place around the outbreak of World War I. Sorelian syndicalism, unlike other ideologies on the left, held an elitist view that the morality of the working class needed to be raised. The Sorelian concept of the positive nature of social war and its insistence on a moral revolution led some syndicalists to believe that war was the ultimate manifestation of social change and moral revolution.


title: Fascism and ideology

text: The fusion of Maurrassian nationalism and Sorelian syndicalism influenced radical Italian nationalist Enrico Corradini. Corradini spoke of the need for a nationalist-syndicalist movement, led by elitist aristocrats and anti-democrats who shared a revolutionary syndicalist commitment to direct action and a willingness to fight. Corradini spoke of Italy as being a "proletarian nation" that needed to pursue imperialism to challenge the "plutocratic" French and British. Corradini's views were part of a wider set of perceptions within the right-wing Italian Nationalist Association (ANI), which claimed that Italy's economic backwardness was caused by corruption in its political class, liberalism, and division caused by "ignoble socialism". The ANI held ties and influence among conservatives, Catholics, and the business community. Italian national syndicalists held a common set of principles: the rejection of bourgeois values, democracy, liberalism, Marxism, internationalism and pacifism and the promotion of heroism, vitalism and violence.


title: Fascism and ideology

text: Radical nationalism in Italy—support for expansionism and cultural revolution to create a "New Man" and a "New State"—began to grow in 1912 during the Italian conquest of Libya and was supported by Italian Futurists and members of the ANI. Futurism was both an artistic-cultural movement and initially a political movement in Italy led by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, the author of the "Futurist Manifesto" (1908), that championed the causes of modernism, action and political violence as necessary elements of politics while denouncing liberalism and parliamentary politics. Marinetti rejected conventional democracy for being based on majority rule and egalitarianism, while promoting a new form of democracy, that he described in his work "The Futurist Conception of Democracy" as the following: "We are therefore able to give the directions to create and to dismantle to numbers, to quantity, to the mass, for with us number, quantity and mass will never be—as they are in Germany and Russia—the number, quantity and mass of mediocre men, incapable and indecisive". The ANI claimed that liberal democracy was no longer compatible with the modern world and advocated a strong state and imperialism, claiming that humans are naturally predatory and that nations were in a constant struggle, in which only the strongest nations could survive.


title: Fascism and ideology

text: Until 1914, Italian nationalists and revolutionary syndicalists with nationalist leanings remained apart. Such syndicalists opposed the Italo-Turkish War of 1911 as an affair of financial interests and not the nation, but World War I was seen by both Italian nationalists and syndicalists as a national affair.


title: Fascism and ideology

text: At the outbreak of World War I in August 1914, the Italian political left became severely split over its position on the war. The Italian Socialist Party opposed the war on the grounds of proletarian internationalism, but a number of Italian revolutionary syndicalists supported intervention in the war on the grounds that it could serve to mobilize the masses against the status quo and that the national question had to be resolved before the social one. Corradini presented the need for Italy as a "proletarian nation" to defeat a reactionary Germany from a nationalist perspective. Angelo Oliviero Olivetti formed the Revolutionary Fascio for International Action in October 1914, to support Italy's entry into the war. At the same time, Benito Mussolini joined the interventionist cause. At first, these interventionist groups were composed of disaffected syndicalists who had concluded that their attempts to promote social change through a general strike had been a failure, and became interested in the transformative potential of militarism and war. They would help to form the Fascist movement several years later.


title: Fascism and ideology

text: This early interventionist movement was very small, and did not have an integrated set of policies. Its attempts to hold mass meetings were ineffective and it was regularly harassed by government authorities and socialists. Antagonism between interventionists and socialists resulted in violence. Attacks on interventionists were so violent that even democratic socialists who opposed the war, such as Anna Kuliscioff, said that the Italian Socialist Party had gone too far in its campaign to silence supporters of the war.


title: Fascism and ideology

text: Benito Mussolini became prominent within the early pro-war movement thanks to his newspaper, , which he founded in November 1914 to support the interventionist cause. The newspaper received funding from the governments of Allied powers that wanted Italy to join them in the war, particularly France and Britain. was also funded in part by Italian industrialists who hoped to gain financially from the war, including Fiat, other arms manufacturers, and agrarian interests. Mussolini did not have any clear agenda in the beginning other than support for Italy's entry into the war, and sought to appeal to diverse groups of readers. These ranged from dissident socialists who opposed the Socialist Party's anti-war stance, to democratic idealists who believed the war would overthrow autocratic monarchies across Europe, to Italian patriots who wanted to recover ethnic Italian territories from Austria, to imperialists who dreamed of a new Roman Empire.


title: Fascism and ideology

text: By early 1915, Mussolini had moved towards the nationalist position. He began arguing that Italy should conquer Trieste and Fiume, and expand its northeastern border to the Alps, following the ideals of Mazzini who called for a patriotic war to "secure Italy's natural frontiers of language and race". Mussolini also advocated waging a war of conquest in the Balkans and the Middle East, and his supporters began to call themselves . He also started advocating for a "positive attitude" towards capitalism and capitalists, as part of his transition towards supporting class collaboration and an "Italy first" position.


title: Fascism and ideology

text: Italy finally entered the war on the Allied side in May 1915. Mussolini later took credit for having allegedly forced the government to declare war on Austria, although his influence on events was minimal. He enrolled into the Royal Italian Army in September 1915 and fought in the war until 1917, when he was wounded during a training exercise and discharged.


title: Fascism and ideology

text: Italy's use of daredevil elite shock troops known as the , beginning in 1917, was an important influence on the early Fascist movement. The were soldiers who were specifically trained for a life of violence and wore unique blackshirt uniforms and fezzes. The formed a national organization in November 1918, the , which by mid-1919 had about twenty thousand young men within it. Mussolini appealed to the , and the Fascist movement that developed after the war was based upon the .


title: Fascism and ideology

text: A major event that greatly influenced the development of fascism was the October Revolution of 1917, in which Bolshevik communists led by Vladimir Lenin seized power in Russia. The revolution in Russia gave rise to a fear of communism among the elites and among society at large in several European countries, and fascist movements gained support by presenting themselves as a radical anti-communist political force. Anti-communism was also an expression of fascist anti-universalism, as communism insisted on international working class unity while fascism insisted on national interests. In addition, fascist anti-communism was linked to anti-Semitism and even anti-capitalism, because many fascists believed that communism and capitalism were both Jewish creations meant to undermine nation-states. The Nazis advocated the conspiracy theory that Jewish communists were working together with Jewish finance capital against Germany. After World War I, fascists have commonly campaigned on anti-Marxist agendas.


title: Fascism and ideology

text: Mussolini's immediate reaction to the Russian Revolution was contradictory. He admired Lenin's boldness in seizing power by force and was envious of the success of the Bolsheviks, while at the same time attacking them in his paper for restricting free speech and creating "a tyranny worse than that of the tsars." At this time, between 1917 and 1919, Mussolini and the early Fascist movement presented themselves as opponents of censorship and champions of free thought and speech, calling these "among the highest expressions of human civilization." Mussolini wrote that "we are libertarians above all" and claimed that the Fascists were committed to "loving liberty for everyone, even for our enemies."


title: Fascism and ideology

text: Mussolini consolidated control over the Fascist movement in 1919 with the founding of the in Milan. For a brief time in 1919, this early fascist movement tried to position itself as a radical populist alternative to the socialists, offering its own version of a revolutionary transformation of society. In a speech delivered in Milan's Piazza San Sepolcro in March 1919, Mussolini set forward the proposals of the new movement, combining ideas from nationalism, Sorelian syndicalism, the idealism of the French philosopher Henri Bergson, and the theories of Gaetano Mosca and Vilfredo Pareto. Mussolini declared his opposition to Bolshevism because "Bolshevism has ruined the economic life of Russia" and because he claimed that Bolshevism was incompatible with Western civilization; he said that "we declare war against socialism, not because it is socialism, but because it has opposed nationalism", that "we intend to be an active minority, to attract the proletariat away from the official Socialist party" and that "we go halfway toward meeting the workers"; and he declared that "we favor national syndicalism and reject state intervention whenever it aims at throttling the creation of wealth."


title: Fascism and ideology

text: In these early post-war years, the Italian Fascist movement tried to become a broad political umbrella that could include all people of all classes and political positions, united only by a desire to save Italy from the Marxist threat and to ensure the expansion of Italian territories in the post-war peace settlements. wrote in March 1919 that "We allow ourselves the luxury of being aristocrats and democrats, conservatives and progressives, reactionaries and revolutionaries, legalists and antilegalists."


title: Fascism and ideology

text: Later in 1919, Alceste De Ambris and futurist movement leader Filippo Tommaso Marinetti created "The Manifesto of the Italian Fasci of Combat" (also known as the "Fascist Manifesto"). The Manifesto was presented on 6 June 1919 in the Fascist newspaper . The Manifesto supported the creation of universal suffrage for both men and women (the latter being realized only partly in late 1925, with all opposition parties banned or disbanded); proportional representation on a regional basis; government representation through a corporatist system of "National Councils" of experts, selected from professionals and tradespeople, elected to represent and hold legislative power over their respective areas, including labour, industry, transportation, public health, communications, etc.; and the abolition of the Italian Senate. The Manifesto supported the creation of an eight-hour work day for all workers, a minimum wage, worker representation in industrial management, equal confidence in labour unions as in industrial executives and public servants, reorganization of the transportation sector, revision of the draft law on invalidity insurance, reduction of the retirement age from 65 to 55, a strong progressive tax on capital, confiscation of the property of religious institutions and abolishment of bishoprics and revision of military contracts to allow the government to seize 85% of war profits made by the armaments industry. It also called for the creation of a short-service national militia to serve defensive duties, nationalization of the armaments industry and a foreign policy designed to be peaceful but also competitive. Nevertheless, Mussolini also demanded the expansion of Italian territories, particularly by annexing Dalmatia (which he claimed could be accomplished by peaceful means), and insisted that "the state must confine itself to directing the civil and political life of the nation," which meant taking the government out of business and transferring large segments of the economy from public to private control. The intention was to appeal to a working class electorate while also maintaining the support of business interests, even if this meant making contradictory promises.


title: Fascism and ideology

text: With this manifesto, the campaigned in the Italian elections of November 1919, mostly attempting to take votes away from the socialists. The results were disastrous. The fascists received less than 5000 votes in their political heartland of Milan, compared to 190,000 for the socialists, and not a single fascist candidate was elected to any office. Mussolini's political career seemed to be over. This crippling electoral defeat was largely due to fascism's lack of ideological credibility, as the fascist movement was a mixture of many different ideas and tendencies. It contained monarchists, republicans, syndicalists and conservatives, and some candidates supported the Vatican while others wanted to expel the Pope from Italy. In response to the failure of his electoral strategy, Mussolini shifted his political movement to the right, seeking to form an alliance with the conservatives. Soon, agrarian conflicts in the region of Emilia and in the Po Valley provided an opportunity to launch a series of violent attacks against the socialists, and thus to win credibility with the conservatives and establish fascism as a paramilitary movement rather than an electoral one.


title: Fascism and ideology

text: With the antagonism between anti-interventionist Marxists and pro-interventionist Fascists complete by the end of the war, the two sides became irreconcilable. The Fascists presented themselves as anti-Marxists and as opposed to the Marxists. Mussolini tried to build his popular support especially among war veterans and patriots by enthusiastically supporting Gabriele D'Annunzio, the leader of the annexationist faction in post-war Italy, who demanded the annexation of large territories as part of the peace settlement in the aftermath of the war. For D'Annunzio and other nationalists, the city of Fiume in Dalmatia (present-day Croatia) had "suddenly become the symbol of everything sacred." Fiume was a city with an ethnic Italian majority, while the countryside around it was largely ethnic Croatian. Italy demanded the annexation of Fiume and the region around it as a reward for its contribution to the Allied war effort, but the Allies – and US president Woodrow Wilson in particular – intended to give the region to the newly formed Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes (later renamed Yugoslavia).


title: Fascism and ideology

text: As such, the next events that influenced the Fascists were the raid of Fiume by Italian nationalist Gabriele D'Annunzio and the founding of the Charter of Carnaro in 1920. D'Annunzio and De Ambris designed the Charter, which advocated national-syndicalist corporatist productionism alongside D'Annunzio's political views. Many Fascists saw the Charter of Carnaro as an ideal constitution for a Fascist Italy. This behaviour of aggression towards Yugoslavia and South Slavs was pursued by Italian Fascists with their persecution of South Slavs – especially Slovenes and Croats.


title: Fascism and ideology

text: In 1920, militant strike activity by industrial workers reached its peak in Italy, where 1919 and 1920 were known as the "Red Years". Mussolini first supported the strikes, but when this did not help him to gain any additional supporters, he abruptly reversed his position and began to oppose them, seeking financial support from big business and landowners. The donations he received from industrial and agrarian interest groups were unusually large, as they were very concerned about working class unrest and eager to support any political force that stood against it. Together with many smaller donations that he received from the public as part of a fund drive to support D'Annunzio, this helped to build up the Fascist movement and transform it from a small group based around Milan to a national political force. Mussolini organized his own militia, known as the "blackshirts," which started a campaign of violence against Communists, Socialists, trade unions and co-operatives under the pretense of "saving the country from bolshevism" and preserving order and internal peace in Italy. Some of the blackshirts also engaged in armed attacks against the Church, "where several priests were assassinated and churches burned by the Fascists".


title: Fascism and ideology

text: At the same time, Mussolini continued to present himself as the champion of Italian national interests and territorial expansion in the Balkans. In the autumn of 1920, Fascist blackshirts in the Italian city of Trieste (located not far from Fiume, and inhabited by Italians as well as Slavs) engaged in street violence and vandalism against Slavs. Mussolini visited the city to support them and was greeted by an enthusiastic crowd – the first time in his political career that he achieved such broad popular support. He also focused his rhetoric on attacks against the liberal government of Giovanni Giolitti, who had withdrawn Italian troops from Albania and did not press the Allies to allow Italy to annex Dalmatia. This helped to draw disaffected former soldiers into the Fascist ranks.


title: Fascism and ideology

text: Fascists identified their primary opponents as the socialists on the left who had opposed intervention in World War I. The Fascists and the rest of the Italian political right held common ground: both held Marxism in contempt, discounted class consciousness and believed in the rule of elites. The Fascists assisted the anti-socialist campaign by allying with the other parties and the conservative right in a mutual effort to destroy the Italian Socialist Party and labour organizations committed to class identity above national identity.


title: Fascism and ideology

text: In 1921, the radical wing of the Italian Socialist Party broke away to form the Communist Party of Italy. This changed the political landscape, as the remaining Socialist Party – diminished in numbers, but still the largest party in parliament – became more moderate and was therefore seen as a potential coalition partner for Giolitti's government. Such an alliance would have secured a large majority in parliament, ending the political deadlock and making effective government possible. To prevent this from happening, Mussolini offered to ally his Fascists with Giolitti instead, and Giolitti accepted, under the assumption that the small Fascist movement would make fewer demands and would be easier to keep in check than the much larger Socialists.


title: Fascism and ideology

text: Mussolini and the Fascists thus joined a coalition formed of conservatives, nationalists and liberals, which stood against the left-wing parties (the socialists and the communists) in the Italian general election of 1921. As part of this coalition, the Fascists – who had previously claimed to be neither left nor right – identified themselves for the first time as the "extreme right", and presented themselves as the most radical right-wing members of the coalition. Mussolini talked about "imperialism" and "national expansion" as his main goals, and called for Italian domination of the Mediterranean Sea basin. The elections of that year were characterized by Fascist street violence and intimidation, which they used to suppress the socialists and communists and to prevent their supporters from voting, while the police and courts (under the control of Giolitti's government) turned a blind eye and allowed the violence to continue without legal consequences. About a hundred people were killed, and some areas of Italy came fully under the control of fascist squads, which did not allow known socialist supporters to vote or hold meetings. In spite of this, the Socialist Party still won the largest share of the vote and 122 seats in parliament, followed by the Catholic with 107 seats. The Fascists only picked up 7 percent of the vote and 35 seats in parliament, but this was a large improvement compared to their results only two years earlier, when they had won no seats at all. Mussolini took these electoral gains as an indication that his right-wing strategy paid off, and decided that the Fascists would sit on the extreme right side of the amphitheatre where parliament met. He also used his first speech in parliament to take a "reactionary" stance, arguing against collectivization and nationalization, and calling for the post office and the railways to be given to private enterprise.


title: Fascism and ideology

text: Prior to Fascism's accommodation of the political right, Fascism was a small, urban, northern Italian movement that had about a thousand members. After Fascism's accommodation of the political right, the Fascist movement's membership soared to approximately 250,000 by 1921.


title: Fascism and ideology

text: The other lesson drawn by Mussolini from the events of 1921 was about the effectiveness of open violence and paramilitary groups. The Fascists used violence even in parliament, for example by directly assaulting the communist deputy Misiano and throwing him out of the building on the pretext of having been a deserter during the war. They also openly threatened socialists with their guns in the chamber. They were able to do this with impunity, while the government took no action against them, hoping not to offend Fascist voters. Across the country, local branches of the National Fascist Party embraced the principle of squadrismo and organized paramilitary "squads" modeled after the from the war. Mussolini claimed that he had "400,000 armed and disciplined men at his command" and did not hide his intentions of seizing power by force.


title: Fascism and ideology

text: Beginning in 1922, Fascist paramilitaries escalated their strategy by switching from attacks on socialist offices and the homes of socialist leadership figures to the violent occupation of cities. The Fascists met little serious resistance from authorities and proceeded to take over several cities, including Bologna, Bolzano, Cremona, Ferrara, Fiume and Trent. The Fascists attacked the headquarters of socialist and Catholic unions in Cremona and imposed forced Italianization upon the German-speaking population of Trent and Bolzano. After seizing these cities, the Fascists made plans to take Rome.


title: Fascism and ideology

text: On 24 October 1922, the Fascist Party held its annual congress in Naples, where Mussolini ordered Blackshirts to take control of public buildings and trains and to converge on three points around Rome. The march would be led by four prominent Fascist leaders representing its different factions: Italo Balbo, a Blackshirt leader; General Emilio De Bono; Michele Bianchi, an ex syndicalist; and Cesare Maria De Vecchi, a monarchist Fascist. Mussolini himself remained in Milan to await the results of the actions. The Fascists managed to seize control of several post offices and trains in northern Italy while the Italian government, led by a left-wing coalition, was internally divided and unable to respond to the Fascist advances. The Italian government had been in a steady state of turmoil, with many governments being created and then being defeated. The Italian government initially took action to prevent the Fascists from entering Rome, but King Victor Emmanuel III of Italy perceived the risk of bloodshed in Rome in response to attempting to disperse the Fascists to be too high. Some political organizations, such as the conservative Italian Nationalist Association, "assured King Victor Emmanuel that their own Sempre Pronti militia was ready to fight the Blackshirts" if they entered Rome, but their offer was never accepted. Victor Emmanuel III decided to appoint Mussolini as Prime Minister of Italy and Mussolini arrived in Rome on 30 October to accept the appointment. Fascist propaganda aggrandized this event, known as "March on Rome", as a "seizure" of power due to Fascists' heroic exploits.


title: Fascism and ideology

text: Upon being appointed Prime Minister of Italy, Mussolini had to form a coalition government because the Fascists did not have control over the Italian parliament. The coalition government included a cabinet led by Mussolini and thirteen other ministers, only three of whom were Fascists, while others included representatives from the army and the navy, two Catholic Popolari members, two democratic liberals, one conservative liberal, one social democrat, one Nationalist member and the philosopher Giovanni Gentile. Mussolini's coalition government initially pursued economically liberal policies under the direction of liberal finance minister Alberto De Stefani from the Center Party, including balancing the budget through deep cuts to the civil service. Initially little drastic change in government policy occurred, and repressive police actions against communists and d'Annunzian rebels were limited. At the same time, Mussolini consolidated his control over the National Fascist Party by creating a governing executive for the party, the Grand Council of Fascism, whose agenda he controlled. In addition, the "squadristi" blackshirt militia was transformed into the state-run MVSN, led by regular army officers. Militant "squadristi" were initially highly dissatisfied with Mussolini's government and demanded a "Fascist revolution".


title: Fascism and ideology

text: In this period, to appease the King of Italy, Mussolini formed a close political alliance between the Italian Fascists and Italy's conservative faction in Parliament, which was led by Luigi Federzoni, a conservative monarchist and nationalist who was a member of the Italian Nationalist Association (ANI). The ANI joined the National Fascist Party in 1923. Because of the merger of the Nationalists with the Fascists, tensions existed between the conservative nationalist and revolutionary syndicalist factions of the movement. The conservative and syndicalist factions of the Fascist movement sought to reconcile their differences, secure unity and promote fascism by taking on the views of each other. Conservative nationalist Fascists promoted fascism as a revolutionary movement to appease the revolutionary syndicalists, while to appease conservative nationalists, the revolutionary syndicalists declared they wanted to secure social stability and ensure economic productivity. This sentiment included most syndicalist Fascists, particularly Edmondo Rossoni, who as secretary-general of the General Confederation of Fascist Syndical Corporations sought "labor's autonomy and class consciousness".


title: Fascism and ideology

text: The Fascists began their attempt to entrench Fascism in Italy with the Acerbo Law, which guaranteed a plurality of the seats in parliament to any party or coalition list in an election that received 25% or more of the vote. The Acerbo Law was passed in spite of numerous abstentions from the vote. In the 1924 election, the Fascists, along with moderates and conservatives, formed a coalition candidate list, and through considerable Fascist violence and intimidation, the list won with 66% of the vote, allowing it to receive 403 seats, most of which went to the Fascists. In the aftermath of the election, a crisis and political scandal erupted after Socialist Party deputy Giacomo Matteotti was kidnapped and murdered by a Fascist. The liberals and the leftist minority in parliament walked out in protest in what became known as the Aventine Secession. On 3 January 1925, Mussolini addressed the Fascist-dominated Italian parliament and declared that he was personally responsible for what happened, but he insisted that he had done nothing wrong and proclaimed himself dictator of Italy, assuming full responsibility for the government and announcing the dismissal of parliament. From 1925 to 1929, Fascism steadily became entrenched in power: opposition deputies were denied access to parliament, censorship was introduced and a December 1925 decree made Mussolini solely responsible to the King. Efforts to increase Fascist influence over Italian society accelerated beginning in 1926, with Fascists taking positions in local administration and 30% of all prefects being administered by appointed Fascists by 1929. In 1929, the Fascist regime gained the political support and blessing of the Roman Catholic Church after the regime signed a concordat with the Church, known as the Lateran Treaty, which gave the papacy recognition as a sovereign state (Vatican City) and financial compensation for the seizure of Church lands by the liberal state in the 19th century. Though Fascist propaganda had begun to speak of the new regime as an all-encompassing "totalitarian" state beginning in 1925, the Fascist Party and regime never gained total control over Italy's institutions. King Victor Emmanuel III remained head of state, the armed forces and the judicial system retained considerable autonomy from the Fascist state, Fascist militias were under military control and initially, the economy had relative autonomy as well.


title: Fascism and ideology

text: Between 1922 and 1925, Fascism sought to accommodate the Italian Liberal Party, conservatives, and nationalists under Italy's coalition government, where major alterations to its political agenda were made—alterations such as abandoning its previous populism, republicanism, and anticlericalism—and adopting policies of economic liberalism under Alberto De Stefani, a Center Party member who was Italy's Minister of Finance until dismissed by Mussolini after the imposition of a single-party dictatorship in 1925. The Fascist regime also accepted the Roman Catholic Church and the monarchy as institutions in Italy. To appeal to Italian conservatives, Fascism adopted policies such as promoting family values, including the promotion of policies designed to reduce the number of women in the workforce, limiting the woman's role to that of a mother. In an effort to expand Italy's population to facilitate Mussolini's future plans to control the Mediterranean region, the Fascists banned literature on birth control and increased penalties for abortion in 1926, declaring both crimes against the state. Though Fascism adopted a number of positions designed to appeal to reactionaries, the Fascists also sought to maintain Fascism's revolutionary character, with Angelo Oliviero Olivetti saying that "Fascism would like to be conservative, but it will [be] by being revolutionary". The Fascists supported revolutionary action and committed to secure law and order to appeal to both conservatives and syndicalists.


title: Fascism and ideology

text: The Fascist regime began to create a corporatist economic system in 1925 with the creation of the Palazzo Vidioni Pact, in which the Italian employers' association Confindustria and Fascist trade unions agreed to recognize each other as the sole representatives of Italy's employers and employees, excluding non-Fascist trade unions. The Fascist regime created a Ministry of Corporations that organized the Italian economy into 22 sectoral corporations, banned all independent trade unions, banned workers' strikes and lock-outs, and in 1927 issued the Charter of Labour, which established workers' rights and duties and created labor tribunals to arbitrate employer-employee disputes. In practice, the sectoral corporations exercised little independence and were largely controlled by the regime, while employee organizations were rarely led by employees themselves, but instead by appointed Fascist party members.


title: Fascism and ideology

text: In the 1920s, Fascist Italy pursued an aggressive foreign policy that included an attack on the Greek island of Corfu, aims to expand Italian territory in the Balkans, plans to wage war against Turkey and Yugoslavia, attempts to bring Yugoslavia into civil war by supporting Croat and Macedonian separatists to legitimize Italian intervention, and making Albania a "de facto" protectorate of Italy (which was achieved through diplomatic means by 1927). In response to revolt in the Italian colony of Libya, Fascist Italy abandoned the previous liberal-era colonial policy of cooperation with local leaders. Instead, claiming that Italians were a superior race to African races and thereby had the right to colonize the "inferior" Africans, it sought to settle 10 to 15 million Italians in Libya. This resulted in an aggressive military campaign against the Libyans, including mass killings, the use of concentration camps, and the forced starvation of thousands of people. Italian authorities committed ethnic cleansing by forcibly expelling 100,000 Bedouin Cyrenaicans, half the population of Cyrenaica in Libya, from land that was slated to be given to Italian settlers.


title: Fascism and ideology

text: The March on Rome brought Fascism international attention. One early admirer of the Italian Fascists was Adolf Hitler, who less than a month after the March had begun to model himself and the Nazi Party upon Mussolini and the Fascists. The Nazis, led by Hitler and the German war hero Erich Ludendorff, attempted a "March on Berlin" modeled upon the March on Rome, which resulted in the failed Beer Hall Putsch in Munich in November 1923, where the Nazis briefly captured Bavarian Minister-President Gustav Ritter von Kahr and announced the creation of a new German government to be led by a triumvirate of von Kahr, Hitler, and Ludendorff. The Beer Hall Putsch was crushed by Bavarian police, and Hitler and other leading Nazis were arrested and detained until 1925.


title: Fascism and ideology

text: Another early admirer of Italian Fascism was Gyula Gömbös, leader of the Hungarian National Defence Association (known by its acronym MOVE), one of several groups that were known in Hungary as the "right radicals." Gömbös described himself as a "national socialist" and championed radical land reform and "Christian capital" in opposition to "Jewish capital." He also advocated a revanchist foreign policy and in 1923 stated the need for a "march on Budapest". Yugoslavia briefly had a significant fascist movement, the ORJUNA, which supported Yugoslavism, advocated the creation of a corporatist economy, opposed democracy and took part in violent attacks on communists, though it was opposed to the Italian government due to Yugoslav border disputes with Italy. ARJUNA was dissolved in 1929 when the King of Yugoslavia banned political parties and created a royal dictatorship, though ARJUNA supported the King's decision. Amid a political crisis in Spain involving increased strike activity and rising support for anarchism, Spanish army commander Miguel Primo de Rivera engaged in a successful coup against the Spanish government in 1923 and installed himself as a dictator as head of a conservative military junta that dismantled the established party system of government. Upon achieving power, Primo de Rivera sought to resolve the economic crisis by presenting himself as a compromise arbitrator figure between workers and bosses and his regime created a corporatist economic system based on the Italian Fascist model. In Lithuania in 1926, Antanas Smetona rose to power and founded a fascist regime under his Lithuanian Nationalist Union.


title: Fascism and ideology

text: The events of the Great Depression resulted in an international surge of fascism and the creation of several fascist regimes and regimes that adopted fascist policies. What would become the most prominent example of the new fascist regimes was Nazi Germany, under the leadership of Adolf Hitler. With the rise of Hitler and the Nazis to power in 1933, liberal democracy was dissolved in Germany and the Nazis mobilized the country for war, with expansionist territorial aims against several countries. In the 1930s, the Nazis implemented racial laws that deliberately discriminated against, disenfranchised, and persecuted Jews and other racial minority groups. Hungarian fascist Gyula Gömbös rose to power as Prime Minister of Hungary in 1932 and visited Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany to consolidate good relations with the two regimes. He attempted to entrench his Party of National Unity throughout the country, created a youth organization and a political militia with sixty thousand members, promoted social reforms such as a 48-hour workweek in industry, and pursued irredentist claims on Hungary's neighbors. The fascist Iron Guard movement in Romania soared in political support after 1933, gaining representation in the Romanian government and an Iron Guard member assassinated prime minister Ion Duca. The Iron Guard had little in the way of a concrete program and placed more emphasis on ideas of religious and spiritual revival. During the 6 February 1934 crisis, France faced the greatest domestic political turmoil since the Dreyfus Affair when the fascist Francist Movement and multiple far-right movements rioted "en masse" in Paris against the French government resulting in major political violence. A variety of para-fascist governments that borrowed elements from fascism were also formed during the Great Depression, including in Greece, Lithuania, Poland and Yugoslavia.


title: Fascism and ideology

text: Fascism also expanded its influence outside Europe, especially in East Asia, the Middle East and South America. In China, Wang Jingwei's "Kai-Tsu p'ai" (Reorganization) faction of the Kuomintang (Nationalist Party of China) supported Nazism in the late 1930s. In Japan, a Nazi movement called the Tōhōkai was formed by Seigō Nakano. The Al-Muthanna Club of Iraq was a pan-Arab movement that supported Nazism and exercised its influence in the Iraqi government through cabinet minister Saib Shawkat who formed a paramilitary youth movement. In South America, several mostly short-lived fascist governments and prominent fascist movements were formed during this period. Argentine President General José Félix Uriburu proposed that Argentina be reorganized along corporatist and fascist lines. Peruvian president Luis Miguel Sánchez Cerro founded the Revolutionary Union in 1931 as the state party for his dictatorship. Later, the Revolutionary Union was taken over by Raúl Ferrero Rebagliati, who sought to mobilize mass support for the group's nationalism in a manner akin to fascism and even started a paramilitary Blackshirts arm as a copy of the Italian group, but the Union lost heavily in the 1936 elections and faded into obscurity. In Paraguay in 1940, Paraguayan President General Higinio Morínigo began his rule as a dictator with the support of pro-fascist military officers, appealed to the masses, exiled opposition leaders and only abandoned his pro-fascist policies after the end of World War II. The Brazilian Integralists led by Plínio Salgado claimed as many as 200,000 members, but following coup attempts they faced a crackdown from the Estado Novo government of Getúlio Vargas in 1937. In the 1930s, the National Socialist Movement of Chile gained seats in Chile's parliament and attempted a coup d'état that resulted in the Seguro Obrero massacre of 1938.


title: Fascism and ideology

text: Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany pursued territorial expansionist and interventionist foreign policy agendas from the 1930s through the 1940s, culminating in World War II. Mussolini supported irredentist Italian claims over neighboring territories, establishing Italian domination of the Mediterranean Sea, securing Italian access to the Atlantic Ocean, and the creation of Italian "spazio vitale" ("vital space") in the Mediterranean and Red Sea regions. Hitler supported irredentist German claims overall territories inhabited by ethnic Germans, along with the creation of German "Lebensraum" ("living space") in Eastern Europe, including territories held by the Soviet Union, that would be colonized by Germans.


title: Fascism and ideology

text: From 1935 to 1939, Germany and Italy escalated their demands for territorial gains and greater influence in world affairs. Italy invaded Ethiopia in 1935, resulting in condemnation by the League of Nations and widespread diplomatic isolation. In 1936, Germany remilitarized the industrial Rhineland, a region that had been ordered demilitarized by the Treaty of Versailles. In 1938, Germany annexed Austria and the Sudetenland region of Czechoslovakia. The next year, Czechoslovakia was partitioned between Germany and a client state of Slovakia. At the same time, from 1938 to 1939, Italy was demanding territorial and colonial concessions from France and Britain in the Mediterranean. In 1939, Germany prepared for war with Poland, but also attempted to gain territorial concessions from Poland through diplomatic means. Germany demanded that Poland accept the annexation of the Free City of Danzig to Germany and authorize the construction of automobile highways from Germany through the Polish Corridor into Danzig and East Prussia, promising a twenty-five-year non-aggression pact in exchange. The Polish government did not trust Hitler's promises and refused to accept German demands. Following a strategic alliance between Germany and the Soviet Union in August 1939, the two powers invaded Poland in September of that year.


title: Fascism and ideology

text: In response, the United Kingdom, France, and their allies declared war against Germany, resulting in the outbreak of World War II. Germany and the Soviet Union partitioned Poland between them in late 1939 followed by the successful German offensive in Scandinavia and continental Western Europe in 1940. On 10 June 1940, Mussolini led Italy into World War II on the side of the Axis. Mussolini was aware that Italy did not have the military capacity to carry out a long war with France or Britain and waited until France was on the verge of imminent collapse before declaring war, on the assumption that the war would be short-lived. Mussolini believed that Italy could gain some territorial concessions from France and then concentrate its forces on a major offensive in Egypt. Plans by Germany to invade the United Kingdom in 1940 failed after Germany lost the aerial warfare campaign in the Battle of Britain. The war became prolonged contrary to Mussolini's plans, resulting in Italy losing battles on multiple fronts and requiring German assistance. In 1941, the Axis campaign spread to the Soviet Union after Hitler launched Operation Barbarossa. Axis forces at the height of their power controlled almost all of continental Europe, including the occupation of large portions of the Soviet Union. By 1942, Fascist Italy occupied and annexed Dalmatia from Yugoslavia, Corsica and Nice from France and controlled other territories. During World War II, the Axis Powers in Europe led by Nazi Germany participated in the extermination of millions of Jews and others in the genocide known as the Holocaust.


title: Fascism and ideology

text: After 1942, Axis forces began to falter. By 1943, after Italy faced multiple military failures, complete reliance and subordination to Germany and an Allied invasion, Mussolini was removed as head of government and arrested by the order of King Victor Emmanuel III. The king proceeded to dismantle the Fascist state and joined the Allies. Mussolini was rescued from arrest by German forces and led the German client state, the Italian Social Republic from 1943 to 1945. Nazi Germany faced multiple losses and steady Soviet and Western Allied offensives from 1943 to 1945.


title: Fascism and ideology

text: On 28 April 1945, Mussolini was captured and executed by Italian communist partisans. On 30 April 1945, Hitler committed suicide during the Battle of Berlin between collapsing German forces and Soviet armed forces. Shortly afterward, Germany surrendered and the Nazi regime was dismantled and key Nazi members were arrested to stand trial for crimes against humanity including the Holocaust.


title: Fascism and ideology

text: Yugoslavia, Greece and Ethiopia requested the extradition of 1,200 Italian war criminals, but these people never saw anything like the Nuremberg trials since the British government, with the beginning of Cold War, saw in Pietro Badoglio a guarantee of an anti-communist post-war Italy. The repression of memory led to historical revisionism in Italy and in 2003 the Italian media published Silvio Berlusconi's statement that Benito Mussolini only "used to send people on vacation", denying the existence of Italian concentration camps such as Rab concentration camp.


title: Fascism and ideology

text: In the aftermath of World War II, the victory of the Allies over the Axis powers led to the collapse of multiple fascist regimes in Europe. The Nuremberg Trials convicted multiple Nazi leaders of crimes against humanity including the Holocaust. However, there remained multiple ideologies and governments that were ideologically related to fascism.