Who Is Italy Racist?

War is inevitable, as it is simply the manifestation of the strength and vigour of the Italian people that wishes to expand itself, never looking back. Peace was considered as merely a “mask to surrender and cowardice.” Mussolini stressed that Italians required “forces, duty, and sacrifice” in order to rise again to their former greatness, that of the Roman Empire. This is also Mussolini’s rationale for harsh and severe actions against any who would resist or try and undermine fascism.

The economic issues in Italy lead to the rise of fascism. Mass unemployment meant that the socialists were rising in number. This meant that powerful industrialists turned to fascism as they would stop the trade unions from deciding workers’ rights. This leads to funding for the fascists helping them gain power. The economic crisis had brought about a huge rise in the support of socialism. The fascists became ever more appealing as their policies were anti socialist. They were not weak like the liberals in tackling socialism as they used

Both of these political leaders took over and used the ideas of fascism as their type of government, the people gravitated towards them especially during times of need. To start, Benito Mussolini who was a newspaper editor and politician who pledged to rescue Italy during their time of desperate need. Fascism was on the rise in Italy, it was fueled by their disappointment and failure to win large territorial gains. People gravitated towards the new and vastly improving idea of Fascism. Italians wanted a leader who would take action and they found their answer in Benito Mussolini. Mussolini had vowed to provide strong leadership to the Italian people during this time. Mussolini had founded the Fascist Party in the year of 1919. When Italy’s economic problems continued to worsen, Mussolini’s power would considerably grow. Mussolini’s number one weapon during his rise to power was fear, he used the fear of people to take control over them. Soon thereafter, Mussolini and 30,000 of his Fascist supporters marched to Rome demanding the King step down and hand over his total power to Mussolini. The King gave in to their demands and gave Benito Mussolini full control over the Italian government. Mussolini became the Il Duce, or leader, and he made fascism the ruling political party in

Mussolini consolidation of fascist power in Italy in the years 1922-1929 could have been mainly due to the use of force and intimidation. However this was not a straightforward process, since fascism was a new thing. In the years 1922 to January 1925 marked the transition from the liberal parliamentary system to the fascist state. Like many political transitions, it was an untidy and complicated process. Although from the start Mussolini’s intentions were quite difficult to establish, however it could be that Mussolini wanted to set up from the beginning a totalitarian one party state.

Within Italy, The Great War caused many problems and a great amount of distress. As a result of this, hundreds of new fascist groups started to emerge. In October 1922, Benito Mussolini became the Prime Minister of Italy and contributed a lot to the nation. He developed his power by forming the Fascist National Party in 1923 and eliminating political opposition. Mussolini and his followers ruled Italy through an authoritarian dictatorship. He made it clear that the war was a turning point for Italy and the returning of combat soldiers would form a new elite and bring about a new type of state to transform Italian politics and society. Mussolini set many

As a result of how Italy was created but not fully unified, the new Italian state suffered from a variety of weaknesses which the new liberal state was unable to tackle these. This made Italy susceptible to the appeal of fascism, and therefore aided Mussolini’s rise to power.

This downfall wounded Italy’s national pride, it led to depression and high unemployment rates; as well as a social unrest and an increase in street violence. As a result, Mussolini knew Italy needed a new doctrine in order to redeem itself. When world war one ended in 1919, Mussolini stated that “Socialism, as a doctrine, was already dead”, this influenced him to use national unity and order to create a new political movement known as fascism. Mussolini explained, “Fascism was not the nursling of a doctrine previously drafted at a desk, it was born of the need of action, and was an action … an anti-party and a movement.” Mussolini began with the creation of a band of young men, called the black shirts, who fought for national unity. These men would “fight both technical and spiritual rear-guirdism” and would not be “fainthearted”. As a response, Italy began giving Mussolini and his men financial support. On October 1922, his men mobilized through the parliamentary government, leading the king to declare Marshall law and making Mussolini the new leader of Italy. Now holding all the power in his hands, Mussolini marginalized the parliament. There was a destruction of organized labor and an elimination of all political parties except fascism. Fascism promoted the leader principle, which meant one leader would smooth over everyone, in this case Mussolini. He wanted dictatorship and violence was his way of achieving it. It enforced the ideology of action, it was ready to deal with all the problems by its own policies. Fascism was born from violent struggle and not politics, in this case violence was a good thing to Mussolini and he was all for it. Fascism did not believe in possibility nor utility of peace, any doctrine that promoted peace was contradicting fascist beliefs. It also opposed all doctrines of liberalism, which was the idea of

The economic instability of Europe developed totalitarian goverments that began rising during the depression in the late 1920’s and early 1930’s. Germany, Italy, and Japan all became countries subjected to the rule of dictated military rule leaving no room for opposition. Benito Mussolini came to power in Italy in 1922 (Calvocoressi, Wint, p 777, 1999). Mussolini had his own philosophy that his destiny was to rule over Italy as Caesar in a more modern version while re-creating the Roman Empire. In his attempts in

Meanwhile, Italy, who at the time was considered liberal, endorsed the inferior National Fascist Party, led by Benito Mussolini, from a fear of a socialist revolution inspired by the ideas of the Russian Revolution. After struggling several years, in October 1922, there was a fascist coup attempt named “March on Rome”; and even though it was an inferior fascist force, the king ordered the army not to intervene. Italy quickly formed an alliance with Mussolini, convincing the liberal party to endorse what would be a fascist-led

Giolitti’s government was extremely unsuccessful in promoting political stability in Italy. It seemed that the Italian liberal state suffered from political divisions all over the country; this was something no other Liberal western power had experience in the years 1903 to 1914. However under the ‘political divisions’, Giolitti was trying to reform and modernise Italy during his periods in power as Prime Minister. Giolitti and his government attempted to broaden support for Liberalism by appealing to traditionally hostile groups such as the Catholics and the working-class, created a grand trasformismo (a key concept used to

Italy experienced a tumultuous inception and its history has followed the same path. The rebellions that resulted in the formation of Italy as a state did not often go as planned. Giuseppe Mazzini tried to start the unification of Italy but failed every time. However, his follower Camillo Benso, the Count of Cavour, was able to lead a successful rebellion that unified Italy. Shortly thereafter, the peasants of the South wanted to disband the new state because of a tax. There was the problem with the Papal States and territory disputes. In later years, Italy eventually made the decision to join World War I, once again entering war. As the Fascists came into power following WWI, there was still fighting between Mussolini and the Pope. They had the overcome a history of disdain and of competing personalities.

Like in Germany, the Italian public perceived the Treaty of Versailles as unfair since it allowed them no reparation payments for the war despite the fact that they switched sides and aided the Allies at the end of the war. In his An Encyclopedia of Pacifism Aldous Huxley, a writer living in Italy during the 1930s wrote, "The fabric of Russian society [has] been reduced to chaos by the impact of the war. [This] gave the revolutionaries their opportunity; violently, they seized it." (Backman 214) Like Russia after the war, Italy was also reduced to chaos. The government was unable to effectively solve the problem of impoverishment the Italian nation was facing. This, along with the Italian government's inability to negotiate better terms in the Treaty of Versailles, caused the Italian people to become disillusioned with their government. Benito Mussolini grasps this opportunity, like in Russia, by violence in the form of the Blackshirt march on Rome. He demanded to be made Prime Minister and was met with little resistance.

This created an extremely volatile political environment Italy which consisted of a virtual plethora of viable political parties including the dominant United States backed and funded Christian Democrats and the Partitio Communista Italiano also known as the PCI. There was a strong conflict of interest that arose between the formal antifascist constitution and the material one imposed being imposed on them by the escalating international situation. On one side there was the pro-Western stance of the main Italian governing party, the Christian Democrats and on the other side they were faced with the PCI’s dependency on the Soviet Union, these issues were soon to become the major boiling points of the Italian republic. The PCI’s alliance with the Soviet Union provided them with resources much need by the PCI and much maligned by the United States as stated in this dispatch from the Director of Western European Affairs in Feb. of 1952, “The Communist Party apparently has unlimited funds to finance its activities and is becoming increasingly active in the South. (p.1572)” In a way Italy was attempting to be seen as a country bridging the ever widening gap between the United States and the Soviet Union. The Italian government in 1952 was under the rule of Christian Democrat premier, Alcide De Gasperi. The US had seemed faithful at first that the Christian Democrats

Italy’s problems started with the fact that it didn’t have one main ruler, but two people and a concept, resulting in a different approach to the unification. Gulseppe Mazzini had a radical program focusing on a centralized democratic republic based on universal suffrage and the will of the people. Vincenzo Gioberti, who was a catholic priest called for a federation of existing states

The Importance of the Economic Factors in the Rise to Power of the Fascist Party in Italy