Fascism

Fascism is a political ideology and mass movement that first appeared in Italy after the First World War. Historians disagree about how to define it precisely, but most agree on a core set of features: extreme nationalism, the rejection of liberal democracy and Marxism, a single party led by one leader, the glorification of violence and war, and the aim of creating a reborn, unified national community. The name comes from the Italian word fascio, meaning a bundle or group, and the ancient Roman fasces, a bundle of rods symbolizing state authority. Fascist regimes in Italy and Germany led to war, mass repression and, in the German case, genocide.

Benito Mussolini founded the Fasci di Combattimento in Milan in 1919, drawing on war veterans, nationalists and former revolutionary syndicalists. Fascist squads attacked socialists, trade unions and peasant leagues. After the March on Rome in October 1922, the king appointed Mussolini prime minister. Following the murder of the socialist deputy Giacomo Matteotti in 1924, Mussolini moved to full dictatorship, banning other parties and the free press. The philosopher Giovanni Gentile helped write The Doctrine of Fascism, published under Mussolini's name in 1932. The regime signed the Lateran agreements with the Vatican in 1929, invaded Ethiopia in 1935, passed antisemitic racial laws in 1938 and entered the Second World War as Nazi Germany's ally in 1940. Mussolini was removed from power in 1943 and was killed by partisans in 1945. In the 1920s and 1930s, movements inspired by Italy appeared across Europe, including the British Union of Fascists, the Iron Guard in Romania and the Arrow Cross in Hungary.

Italian Fascism stressed the all-powerful state and corporatism, in which employers and workers were grouped into state-controlled bodies. German Nazism made racial antisemitism its central doctrine and is usually treated as the most extreme form. Clerical forms, such as the Iron Guard, mixed fascism with religious mysticism. After 1945, neo-fascist parties such as the Italian Social Movement tried to adapt fascist ideas to electoral politics.

Critics across the democratic spectrum argue that fascism destroyed civil liberties, free elections and independent institutions, and that its cult of violence and expansion led directly to aggressive war and atrocities. Liberals and socialists point to the persecution of opponents, minorities and trade unions. Economists and historians note that fascist corporatism often protected large business interests while banning strikes. Historians also stress that fascist promises of national greatness ended in military defeat and the destruction of the countries that adopted it.

Fascist Italy ruled from 1922 to 1943, using a secret police, political prisons and internal exile against opponents. In Ethiopia and Libya, Italian forces carried out mass killings and used poison gas. Nazi Germany carried fascist ideas to the extremes of the Holocaust and a war of conquest that killed tens of millions. After the Second World War, fascism was discredited, and several countries, including Italy and Germany, wrote bans on reviving fascist or Nazi parties into law.