Fascism

Fascism is a political ideology associated which originated with Benito Mussolini in Italy during the period after the First World War.

Quotes by Fascists

• The Fascist accepts life and loves it, knowing nothing of and despising suicide; he rather conceives of life as duty and struggle and conquest, life which should be high and full, lived for oneself, but not above all for others -- those who are at hand and those who are far distant, contemporaries, and those who will come after.
  • Giovanni Gentile, signed and aproved by Benito Mussolini in 1932. Excerpt from The Doctrine of Fascism.

• Fascism was born to inspire a faith not of the Right (which at bottom aspires to conserve everything, even injustice) or of the Left (which at bottom aspires to destroy everything, even goodness), but a collective, integral, national faith.
  • José Antonio Primo de Rivera founder of the Falange on the nature of fascism.

• The struggle between the two worlds [Fascism and Democracy] can permit no compromises. The new cycle which begins with the ninth year of the Fascist regime places the alternative in even greater relief- either we or they, either their ideas or ours, either our State or theirs!
  • Benito Mussolini. Quoted in "Fundamentals of critical argumentation" - Page 263 - by Douglas Walton - Philosophy - 2005

• If relativism signifies contempt for fixed categories and those who claim to be the bearers of objective immortal truth, then there is nothing more relativistic than Fascist attitudes and activity. From the fact that all ideologies are of equal value, we Fascists conclude that we have the right to create our own ideology and to enforce it with all the energy of which we are capable.
  • Benito Mussolini in his 1921 essay Diuturna (The Lasting).

Miscellaneous

• [Fascism is] a genuinely revolutionary, trans-class form of anti-liberal, and in the last analysis, anti conservative nationalism. As such it is an ideology deeply bound up with modernization and modernity, one which has assumed a considerable variety of external forms to adapt itself to the particular historical and national context in which it appears, and has drawn a wide range of cultural and intellectual currents, both left and right, anti-modern and pro-modern, to articulate itself as a body of ideas, slogans, and doctrine. In the inter-war period it manifested itself primarily in the form of an elite-led "armed party" which attempted, mostly unsuccessfully, to generate a populist mass movement through a liturgical style of politics and a programme of radical policies which promised to overcome a threat posed by international socialism, to end the degeneration affecting the nation under liberalism, and to bring about a radical renewal of its social, political and cultural life as part of what was widely imagined to be the new era being inaugurated in Western civilization. The core mobilizing myth of fascism which conditions its ideology, propaganda, style of politics and actions is the vision of the nation's imminent rebirth from decadence.
  • Roger Griffin, The palingenetic core of generic fascist ideology.

• What a man! I have lost my heart!... Fascism has rendered a service to the entire world... If I were Italian, I am sure I would have been with you entirely from the beginning of your victorious struggle against the bestial appetites and passion of Leninism.
  • Winston Churchill quote on Benito Mussolini and Italians Fascism, after a visit to Rome (1927)

• Spend most of the day reading fascisti leaflets. They certainly have turned the whole country into an army. From cradle to grave one is cast in the mould of fascismo and there can be no escape...It is certainly a socialist experiment in that it destroys individuality. It destroys liberty.
  • Harold Nicolson in his diary (6 January, 1932).
  • Source: Harold Nicolson, The Harold Nicolson Diaries: 1919-1964 (Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 2004), pp. 87-8.

• Marxism has led to Fascism and National-Socialism, because, in all essentials, it is Fascism and National Socialism.
  • F. A. Voigt, Unto Cæsar (1939), p. 95.

• Fascism is a religion of the state. It assumes the organic unity of the body politic and longs for a national leader attuned to the will of the people. It is totalitarian in that it views everything as political and holds that any action by the state is justified to achieve the common god. It takes responsibility for all aspects of life, including our health and well-being, and seeks to impose uniformity of thought and action, whether by force or through regulation and social pressure. Everything, including economy and religion, must be aligned with its objectives. Any rival identity is part of the "problem" and therefore defined as the enemy. I will argue that contemporary American liberalism embodies all of these aspects of fascism.
  • Jonah Goldberg, Liberal Fascism (2008), p. 23.

Quotes by Communists

• The movement in Germany is analogous mostly to the Italian. It is a mass movement, with its leaders employing a great deal of socialist demagogy. This is necessary for the creation of the mass movement. The genuine basis (for fascism) is the petty bourgeoisie. In Italy, it has a very large base—the petty bourgeoisie of the towns and cities, and the peasantry. In Germany, likewise, there is a large base for fascism.
  • Leon Trotsky, FASCISM: What is it and how to fight it.

• In all the countries where fascism became victorious, we had, before the growth of fascism and its victory, a wave of radicalism of the masses—of the workers and the poorer peasants and farmers, and of the petty bourgeois class. In Italy, after the war and before 1922, we had a revolutionary wave of tremendous dimensions; the state was paralyzed, the police did not exist, the trade unions could do anything they wanted—but there was not party capable of taking the power. As a reaction came fascism. In Germany, the same. We had a revolutionary situation in 1918; the bourgeois class did not even ask to participate in the power. The social democrats paralyzed the revolution. Then the workers tried again in 1922-23-24. This was the time of the bankruptcy of the Communist Party—all of which we have gone into before. Then in 1929-30-31, the German workers began again a new revolutionary wave. There was a tremendous power in the Communists and in the trade unions, but then came the famous policy (on the part of the Stalinist movement) of social fascism, a policy invented to paralyze the working class. Only after these three tremendous waves did fascism become a big movement. There are no exceptions to this rule—fascism comes only when the working class shows complete incapacity to take into its own hands the fate of society.
  • Leon Trotsky, FASCISM: What is it and how to fight it.

Attributed

• "Fascism is a religion. The twentieth century will be known in history as the century of Fascism."
  • Benito Mussolini

• "...the word ‘Fascism’ is almost entirely meaningless. In conversation, of course, it is used even more wildly than in print. I have heard it applied to farmers, shopkeepers, Social Credit, corporal punishment, fox-hunting, bull-fighting, the 1922 Committee, the 1941 Committee, Kipling, Gandhi, Chiang Kai-Shek, homosexuality, Priestley's broadcasts, Youth Hostels, astrology, women, dogs and I do not know what else... almost any English person would accept ‘bully’ as a synonym for ‘Fascist’."
  • George Orwell

• "When and if fascism comes to America it will not be labeled 'made in Germany'; it will not be marked with a swastika; it will not even be called fascism; it will be called, of course, 'Americanism.'"
  • Halford E. Luccock

• "When fascism comes to America, it will come wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross."
  • Sinclair Lewis

• "Fascism is not defined by the number of its victims but by the way it kills them."
  • Jean-Paul Sartre

• Fascism is capitalism in decay
  • Vladimir Lenin

• "Fascism is capitalism plus murder."
  • Upton Sinclair

• "Fascism is nothing but capitalist reaction."
  • Leon Trotsky

• "To be insulted by these Fascists is so degrading"

• • David Bowie ("It's no game {part II}" from Scary Monsters and Super Creeps)

• "Fascism still survives, in a matter of speaking, through the Catholic Church's continued existence. Catholicism remains the greatest threat to Democracy today."
  • Simon Wiesenthal

• "Fascism was really the basis for the New Deal. It was Mussolini's success in Italy, with his government-directed economy, that led the early New Dealers to say 'But Mussolini keeps the trains running on time.'"
  • Ronald Reagan