Water by Giulio Boccaletti

Author:Giulio Boccaletti [Boccaletti, Giulio]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2021-09-14T00:00:00+00:00

Fascism Is Born

Russia had produced real communism through the electrification of its rivers. But the transformation of Russia into the Soviet Union was not the only water-led response to the consequences of the First World War.

The disruption of international trade due to the Great War had been economically disastrous for an export-oriented, largely agrarian country like Italy. America was its principal trading partner, but it had embraced protectionism. Italian-American communities in the United States, previously buyers of Italian products, had developed their own production. Pasta exports, as one example, dropped by a factor of thirty between 1913 and 1924. During the war, Italy’s trade deficit grew. By the early 1920s Italy was importing twice as much food as it was exporting.

Trade was not its only problem. Before the war the United States had been a demographic valve for southern Europe. After the war, an increase in American nationalism led to immigration quotas. Only 10 percent of immigrants could come from southeast Europe, which eliminated a crucial outlet for rural, overpopulated Italian regions. To add to the demographic time bomb, more people faced fewer employment prospects. The war economy had pushed the emergent Italian manufacturing sector to unprecedented levels, but had also changed its structure, redirecting it towards higher productivity and away from mass employment.

The Italian population had turned politically more radical, as enthusiasm for the internationalism of Woodrow Wilson’s League of Nations faded. Liberalization had struggled to provide the promised benefits, and socialism was spreading fast among the peasants of rural Italy. It was a combustible mix: international finance was applying pressure to increase profits by turning to a low-employment, high-productivity industrial sector, while a society under immense strain due to both chronic unemployment and increasing demands sought redistribution and state intervention. The unfortunate resolution of that tension ended up being fascism.

In October 1922, at a moment of particular difficulty for the Italian government, Benito Mussolini organized the infamous March on Rome. By then, he was the powerful leader of a movement that called itself the National Fascist Party. He threatened a siege of Rome unless he received a mandate to form a new government. The king, unwilling to test the military’s resolve to protect the capital, and frankly more fearful of a socialist revolution than of the fascist threat, invited Mussolini to come to Rome to do just that.

Mussolini, named after Benito Juárez, the mid-nineteenth-century Mexican president, was by formation a radical. His political education had been shaped by unionism, nationalism, and futurism. At a young age Mussolini became a prominent voice of radical socialism, but was expelled from the socialist party because of his interventionist stance during the First World War. By then, however, his ideas had already begun to evolve towards a form of “national socialism.” He had collected around him the disenfranchised and those returning from the bloody experience of the First World War. Violence was his principal credo.

In Mussolini’s own definition, fascism was born without a real doctrine. Its ideological roots were shallow, focused on half-baked ideas like the celebration of youth, nation, and imperial power.

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