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Also see: Nationalism; patriotism; politics; Adolph Hitler;
Jump to: 2016; 2018;
Undated: Benito Amilcare Andrea Mussolini (Italian: [beˈniːto mussoˈliːni];[1] 29 July 1883 – 28 April 1945) was an Italian politician and journalist who was the leader of the National Fascist Party (Partito Nazionale Fascista, PNF). He ruled Italy as Prime Minister from 1922 to 1943; he constitutionally led the country until 1925, when he dropped the pretense of democracy and established a dictatorship.
Known as Il Duce ("The Leader"), Mussolini was the founder of Italian Fascism.[2][3][4] In 1912, Mussolini had been a leading member of the National Directorate of the Italian Socialist Party (PSI),[5] but was expelled from the PSI for advocating military intervention in World War I, in opposition to the party's stance on neutrality. Mussolini served in the Royal Italian Army during the war until he was wounded and discharged in 1917. Mussolini denounced the PSI, his views now centering on nationalism instead of socialism and later founded the fascist movement which came to oppose egalitarianism[6] and class conflict, instead advocating "revolutionary nationalism" transcending class lines.[7] Following the March on Rome in October 1922, Mussolini became the youngest Prime Minister in Italian history until the appointment of Matteo Renzi in February 2014. After removing all political opposition through his secret police and outlawing labor strikes,[8] Mussolini and his followers consolidated their power through a series of laws that transformed the nation into a one-party dictatorship. Within five years, Mussolini had established dictatorial authority by both legal and extraordinary means and aspired to create a totalitarian state. In 1929, Mussolini signed the Lateran Treaty with the Vatican, ending decades of struggle between the Italian state and the Papacy, and recognized the independence of Vatican City.
After the Abyssinia Crisis of 1935–1936, Mussolini invaded Ethiopia in the Second Italo–Ethiopian War. The invasion was condemned by the Western powers and was answered with economic sanctions against Italy. Relations between Germany and Italy improved due to Hitler's support of the invasion. In 1936, Mussolini surrendered Austria to the German sphere of influence, signed the treaty of cooperation with Germany and proclaimed the creation of a Rome–Berlin Axis. From 1936 through 1939, Mussolini provided huge amounts of military support to Franco's forces in the Spanish Civil War. This active intervention further distanced Italy from France and Britain. Mussolini had sought to delay a major war in Europe, but Germany invaded Poland on 1 September 1939, resulting in declarations of war by France and the UK and the start of World War II. On 10 June 1940—with the Fall of France imminent—Italy officially entered the war on the side of Germany, though Mussolini was aware that Italy did not have the military capacity and resources to carry out a long war with the British Empire.[9] He believed that after the imminent French armistice, Italy could gain territorial concessions from France, and he could then concentrate his forces on a major offensive in North Africa, where British and Commonwealth forces were outnumbered by Italian forces.[10]
However, the British government refused to accept proposals for a peace that would involve accepting Axis victories in Eastern and Western Europe; plans for an invasion of the UK did not proceed and the war continued. In October 1940, Mussolini sent Italian forces into Greece, starting the Greco-Italian War. The invasion failed and the following Greek counter-offensive pushed the Italians back to occupied Albania. The Greek debacle and simultaneous defeats against the British in North Africa reduced Italy to dependence on Germany.
Beginning in June 1941, Mussolini sent Italian forces to participate in the invasion of the Soviet Union, and Italy declared war on the United States in December. In 1943, Italy suffered one disaster after another: by February the Red Army had completely destroyed the Italian Army in Russia; in May the Axis collapsed in North Africa; on 9 July the Allies invaded Sicily; and by the 16th it became clear the German summer offensive in the USSR had failed. As a consequence, early on 25 July, the Grand Council of Fascism passed a motion of no confidence for Mussolini; later that day the King dismissed him as head of government and had him placed in custody, appointing Pietro Badoglio to succeed him as Prime Minister. After the king agreed the armistice with the allies, on 12 September 1943 Mussolini was rescued from captivity in the Gran Sasso raid by German paratroopers and Waffen-SS commandos led by Major Otto-Harald Mors.
Adolf Hitler, after meeting with the rescued former dictator, then put Mussolini in charge of a puppet regime in northern Italy, the Italian Social Republic (Italian: Repubblica Sociale Italiana, RSI),[11] informally known as the Salò Republic. In late April 1945, in the wake of near total defeat, Mussolini and his mistress Clara Petacci attempted to flee to Switzerland,[12] but both were captured by Italian communist partisans and summarily executed by firing squad on 28 April 1945 near Lake Como. His body was then taken to Milan, where it was hung upside down at a service station to publicly confirm his demise.[13]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benito_Mussolini
-- 2016 --
February 28: Trump explains tweeting Mussolini quote
Donald Trump said on NBC’s “Meet the Press” that he retweeted a quote from Benito Mussolini, the Italian fascist dictator, because he wants to “be associated with interesting quotes.”
“Chuck, it's OK to know it's Mussolini. Look, Mussolini was Mussolini. It's OK to — it's a very good quote, it's a very interesting quote, and I know it,” he said Sunday morning. “I saw it. I saw what — and I know who said it. But what difference does it make whether it's Mussolini or somebody else? It's certainly a very interesting quote.”
Trump posted the tweet early Sunday morning from @ilduce2016: “It is better to live one day as a lion than 100 years as a sheep.”
When asked if he wanted to be associated with a fascist, Trump said: “No, I want to be associated with interesting quotes. And people, you know, I have almost 14 million people between Instagram and Facebook and Twitter and all of that. And we do interesting things. And I sent it out. And certainly, hey, it got your attention, didn't it?”
Benito Mussolini took power in Italy in the early 1920s and ran the nation for more than two decades, until being toppled from power in 1943 as Alliied forces fought their way up Italy. "Il Duce" was allied with Germany's Adolf Hitler during World War II, and his armies invaded a number of nations, including Ethiopia, Greece and Yugoslavia. Mussolini was captured and executed in April 1945.
https://www.politico.com/story/2016/02/trump-tweets-interesting-mussolini-quote-219932
-- 2018 --
April 24: Fascism -- Madeleine Albright Warns of a New Fascism—and Trump
Mussolini called on his followers to believe in an Italy that would be “prosperous because it was self-sufficient and respected because it was feared,” Albright writes. “This was how twentieth-century fascism began: with a magnetic leader exploiting widespread dissatisfaction by promising all things.” Il Duce [Mussolini], who was Italy’s Prime Minister from 1922 until 1943, said that his mission was “to break the bones of the democrats . . . and the sooner the better.” He used the term “drenare la palude,” or “drain the swamp.” He had a talent for theatre, Albright notes, and was a poor listener who disliked hearing other people talk. He discouraged cabinet members from “proposing any idea that might cause him to doubt his instincts,” which, he insisted, were always right. He also promoted the idea of national self-sufficiency “without ever grasping how unrealistic that ambition had become.”
Adolf Hitler catapulted to power in Germany using similar tactics in a similar environment—a craving by the people for direction that conventional politicians weren’t providing. He “lied incessantly about himself and about his enemies,” Albright writes. He convinced millions that he “cared for them deeply when, in fact, he would have willingly sacrificed them all.” Even Winston Churchill was duped, she recalls. In 1935, Churchill described Hitler as highly competent, with “an agreeable manner, a disarming smile, and few have been unaffected by a subtle personal magnetism.” Hitler and Mussolini were different, however, in a pivotal way: Hitler had an ideology—Nazism. Mussolini did not; his appeal was pure nativist populism.
The United States was not immune to the temptation of Fascism. In 1939, Fritz Kuhn, who led the Nazi-affiliated German American Bund, famously attracted twenty thousand followers to an event at Madison Square Garden, which echoed with shouts of “Seig Heil.” (He ended up serving a four-year prison stint for tax evasion.) Senator Joe McCarthy, a Wisconsin Republican, was a showman who had “the mentality of a Fascist bully” and “the instincts of a Mussolini,” but lacked the intellect, Albright writes. McCarthy fooled many by using the demagogue’s trick: “repeat a lie often enough and it begins to sound like it must—or at least might—be so.” In 1940, the America First Committee included Nazi sympathizers—and claimed eight hundred thousand members within its first year.
The premise of Albright’s book is that the Fascism of a century ago was not atypical. “In hindsight, it is tempting to dismiss every Fascist of this era as a thoroughly bad guy or a lunatic, but that is too easy, also dangerous,” she writes. “Fascism is not an exception to humanity, but part of it.” In the early twenty-first century, authoritarian demagoguery and nativist populism are making inroads in Egypt, Hungary, North Korea, the Philippines, Poland, Russia, Turkey, and Venezuela. It’s part of a global trend. Worldwide, seventy-two nations had limited freedoms and a decline in democratic health according to The Economist’s Democracy Index published in 2017.
“Anti-democratic leaders are winning democratic elections,” Albright writes, “and some of the world’s savviest politicians are moving closer to tyranny with each passing year.”
https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/madeleine-albright-warns-of-a-new-fascism-and-trump
October 24: "I Am a Nationalist": Donald Trump Apes Mussolini in Drive to Destroy America [see government dismantling]
It is important that everyone understand how dangerous what Trump said is.
Trump proudly says he is a “nationalist.”
He is, of course, saying this to shore up support among white nationalists. The Nazi sites on the web were all having wet dreams in the aftermath.
From the 1990s, polling has found that about 10% of Americans support far right militias. These are the white nationalists. Trump came to power by mobilizing that 10% and combining it with Republicans and independents
It is not an accident that Benito Mussolini called his party “Nationalist Fascism.” The two go together. Trump performs the “fascist” part of this two-part term every time he does a rally, so he doesn’t have to say “I am a Nationalist Fascist,” i.e. a Mussolini-ist.
https://www.commondreams.org/views/2018/10/24/i-am-nationalist-donald-trump-apes-mussolini-drive-destroy-america
Undated: Nationalism is a political, social, and economic ideology and movement characterized by the promotion of the interests of a particular nation,[1] especially with the aim of gaining and maintaining the nation's sovereignty (self-governance) over its homeland. Nationalism holds that each nation should govern itself, free from outside interference (self-determination), that a nation is a natural and ideal basis for a polity,[2] and that the nation is the only rightful source of political power (popular sovereignty).[1][3] It further aims to build and maintain a single national identity—based on shared social characteristics such as culture, language, religion, politics, and belief in a shared singular history[4][5][page needed]—and to promote national unity or solidarity.[1] Nationalism, therefore, seeks to preserve and foster a nation's traditional culture, and cultural revivals have been associated with nationalist movements.[6] It also encourages pride in national achievements, and is closely linked to patriotism.[7][page needed] Nationalism is often combined with other ideologies, such as conservatism (national conservatism) or socialism (socialist nationalism) for example.[2]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nationalism
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