The following quotes shall make antisocialists surer than ever before in their already unfalsifiable conviction that Fascism was socialism:
There can be a thousand shades of ideas among us, but upon one important point we are all agreed, and that is in regarding the Socialist manifestation as a bluff, a comedy, a speculation and blackmail.
Also we are all agreed in making a differentiation between the Socialist Party and the mass of the workmen. The Socialist Party has usurped up to yesterday the name of being a pure revolutionary organisation, of being the protector and the exclusive, genuine representative of the working masses.
This is all nonsense and must be cleared up. Referring to statistics, we find that out of forty-two millions of Italians, hardly sixty thousand were enrolled in the Socialist Party in the August of 1919, and the dominating element is a group composed of lower-middle-class people in the most philistine sense of the word.
As for the Socialists, the larger part of them are distinguished by physical cowardice. They do not like fighting, they do not wish to fight; fire and steel frighten them.
The Socialists themselves, realising what they have seen in Russia, recognise, when you question them, that that which has gone badly in Russia cannot be transplanted into Italy. Only they are wrong in not saying so openly ; they are wrong in playing with equivocations and deceiving the masses. […] What we oppose is the deceitful action of politicians to the detriment of the working classes; we fight these new priests who promise, in bad faith, a paradise they do not believe in themselves.
The Socialists had formed a State within a State. If this new State had been more liberal, more modern, nearer the old type, there would have been nothing against it. But this State, and you know it by direct experience, is more tyrannical, illiberal and overbearing than the old one; and for this reason that which we are causing to-day is a revolution to break up the Bolshevist State, while waiting to settle our accounts with the Liberal State which remains.
[…]
Among other absurd things, there has been that of baptising Socialism as scientific. Now there is nothing scientific in the world. Science explains the “how” of things, but does not explain the “why.”
If, then, there is nothing scientific in what are called the exact sciences, what is more absurd than to try and pass off as scientific a vast, uncertain, underground and dark movement such as Socialism has been, even though it may have had a useful function it first, when it directed the oppressed peoples towards new ways of life, because you will agree with me that there is no turning back?
I am not displeased, gentlemen, to make my speech from the benches of the Extreme Right, where formerly no one dared to sit.
I may say at once, with the supreme contempt [that] I have for all nominalism, that I shall adopt a reactionary line throughout my speech, which will be, I do not know how Parliamentary in form but anti-Socialist and anti-Democratic in substance.
We shall not even oppose experiments of co‐operation; but I tell you at once that we shall resist with all our strength attempts at State Socialism, Collectivism and the like. We have had enough of State Socialism, and we shall never cease to fight your doctrines as a whole, for we deny their truth and oppose their fatalism.
It is necessary, therefore, to consider how to replace this political class which has of late consistently surrendered to that swollen‐headed puppet, Italian Socialism.
This was the birthplace of Democracy, which had a period of glory before it became crippled and enfeebled by the influence of Socialism.
There was one Socialism, to-day there are four, and there is a tendency towards further divisions. And not only this, but each of these divisions claims to represent the authentic party. It is no wonder that the proletariat scatters, discouraged and disgusted by the attitude of Socialism.
As I have already said, the day of Socialism is not only past as a party, its philosophies and doctrines no longer stand. The Italians and the Western peoples in general must burst with logical criticism the grotesque bubble of international Socialism.
The economic policy of the new Italian Government is simple. I consider that the State should renounce its industrial functions, especially of a monopolistic nature, for which it is inadequate. I consider that a Government which means to relieve rapidly peoples from after-war crises should allow free play to private enterprise, should renounce any meddling or restrictive legislation, which may please the Socialist demagogues, but proves, in the end, as experience shows, absolutely ruinous.
Well, I tell you that abroad there is a difficult atmosphere for Italian Fascismo. Difficult for the parties of the Right, which, being formed of national elements, cannot feel enthusiasm for a movement that exalts our national qualities; difficult for the parties of the Left, because those elements are our adversaries from the social point of view, knowing that the Fascista movement is clearly anti-Socialist.
There was the bourgeois who had Socialistic airs, there was the Socialist who had become a bourgeois up to his finger tips. The whole atmosphere was made up of half tones of uncertainty.
Well, Fascismo seizes individuals by their necks and tells them: “You must be what you are. If you are a bourgeois you must remain such. You must be proud of your class, because it has given a type to the activity of the world in the nineteenth century. (Approval.) if you are a Socialist you must remain such, although facing the inevitable risk you run in that profession.” (Laughter.)
Mussolini […] praised Japan’s “high level of civilization” and warned young Japanese to turn away from socialism (“modern demagogic materialism”) and to be true to the “millenarian spirit of [their] race.”
Mussolini […] spoke of the staying power of the free market and ridiculed the Socialist illusion that capitalism was on its last legs. Mouthing still stranger words, the ex‐Socialist denounced “state control” and “paternalism” and praised the proven wisdom of individual “initiative.”¹
— Mussolini and Fascism: The View from America
Fascism is therefore opposed to socialism, to which unity within the State (which amalgamates classes into a single economic and ethical reality) is unknown, and which sees in history nothing but the class struggle. Fascism is likewise opposed to trade unionism as a class weapon.
— Benito Mussolini and Giovanni Gentile, 1932
Antisocialists shall be untroubled by all of these quotes because of their redefinition of socialism as ‘state intervention’. That, and Benito Mussolini was an ex-socialist (like Ronald Reagan), which, as everybody knows, is the same thing as being a socialist. What more evidence could you possibly need?
Click here for events that happened today (November 14).
1935: After lengthy argument Berlin published a supplement to the German Citizenship law, which laid down that Germans with two Jewish grandparents, were Orthodox Jews, were married to Jews, or were the offspring of a marriage with a Jew, were legally ‘Jewish’. (Those who had only one Jewish parent or grandparent remained German citizens…for now.) Thus, those who were either legally or traditionally Jewish lost their voting rights and the right to hold public office, even if they were WWI veterans.
1938: Rome commissioned Artigliere into service.
1939: Around the same time that Tōkyō dismissed Kenkichi Ueda from the Army General Staff, Berlin added the Netherlands back to its invasion plan for Western Europe as the Luftwaffe stressed the importance of having airfields in the Netherlands, and Berlin named Theodor Eicke the commander of all SS Death’s Head units; Richard Glucks was to take over Eicke’s former position as the concentration camps’ inspector. In Vienna, Austrian detachments of the SS‐Verfügungstruppe placed stocks of hand grenades at synagogues to set them on fire.
1940: The Imperialists assigned Kamoi to the 24th Air Flotilla and Axis bombers raided Alexandria, Egypt, sinking Egyptian steamer Zamzam, but as Greek troops began to cross into Albanian borders, the Axis suffered its first land defeat of the war. A massive night time raid on Coventry, England by 437 He 111 bombers, dubbed Operation Moonlight Sonata, massacred 568, injured 863, and destroyed 60,000 buildings (including the city’s 14th Century cathedral) with 450 tons of high explosive bombs, fifty parachute bombs, and 36,000 incendiary bombs; the Axis lost only one bomber.
1941: Axis torpedo damage from yesterday successfully took out HMS Ark Royal, Axis submarine U‐561 sank Panamanian ship Crusader in the North Atlantic, massacring 33 and leaving only one alive. Comandante Cappellini conducted a trial out of La Pallice, and Morosini successfully departed Bordeaux for Le Verdon‐sur‐Mer only after the heavy fog passed. Tatsuta Maru departed Yokohama and Kaga exited the drydocks at Sasebo Naval Shipyard around the same time that Tōkyō relieved Shokaku of her status as the flagship of Carrier Division 5.
1942: Axis submarine facilities at Saint Nazaire suffered a bombing raid, but two transports containing a total of 2,500 Jews from Poland’s Ciechanow ghetti arrived at Auschwitz Concentration Camp; 633 men and 135 were registered into the camp, and the remaining 1,732 were massacred in gas chambers. On the same day, 1,500 Jews from Bialystok District 2 in Poland arrived at the same camp; 82 men and 379 women were registered into the camp, and the remaining 839 were massacred in gas chambers.
Finally, the SS doctors of Auschwitz Concentration Camp sent 110 prisoners from the Auschwitz I hospital to Birkenau Concentration Camp to be massacred in the gas chambers. In East Asia, the Kinkaseki Prisoners of War Camp opened, and the Taihoku Prisoners of War Camp № 6 near Taihoku (now Taipei) opened; on the same day, British prisoners of war from Singapore arrived on Taiwan via Kirun (now Keelung), destined for this camp.
1943: Destroyer Yukikaze departed Kure, Japan to escort transport Irako to Truk, Caroline Islands; Irako departed Yokosuka, Japan at 1400 hours in convoy № 3115.
1944: Horst Wessel and Albert Leo Schlageter sailed in rough waters near Rügen: Albert Leo Schlageter struck a mine, damaging its starboard bow, so Horst Wessel took Albert Leo Schlageter in a stern tow to prevent Albert Leo Schlageter from sinking. In the Kurile Islands, the Axis lost a small vessel to Allied fire.