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WHAT IS FASCISM?
Fascism is a very complex and confusing set of ideological positions. Often fascist ideas are contradictory and subject to change, and few fascisms are completely alike. This differs from Soviet communism, which attempted to impose uniformity in thinking across the communist world. This is Gabrielle DAnnunzio, soldier, poet, philosopher and fascist. He shared ideas about nationalism, war, sacrice and duty with men like Mussolini and Hitler, but was also far removed from the type of fascism that eventually manifested itself in Germany.

A range of affiliated ideas based around the nation or community

Is it more than a party? It is a movement not just based around one core idea but a set of ideas or more to the point values and ideals. part of Comintern and had travelled to Moscow for training and help The birth of European extremism cannot be divorced There was a cultural context to from the disaster of World War Italian fascism, such as the One, Eric Hobsbawm argues Italian futurists. that WWI saw the destruction of a pre existing European Communism is based around the civilisation, the death of four writings of Karl Marx, fascism empires, and political extremism doesn't really have an equivalent. manifest itself in all four successor states Fascism, as a reactionary ideal, is a response to communism. Leon Gabrielle D'Anunzio was a Trotsky believed that capitalist prime example of the notions societies and the middle classes and ideals that were deep within would inevitably create fascism fascism. A nationalist, romantic, when they felt threatened by his occupation of Fiume causes communism. the Italian government to go to war against him in order to Italian fascism should be seen in preserve the Versailles the context of the Russian Settlement, which he could Revolution, the revolution that portray as being a betrayal of happens in 1917 galvanised the Italian people communist parties across Europe, many of whom became

The issue of nationhood and national identity is a fraught one, there are strong regional identities, but in some cases only a very weak sense of their being a national identity. The war radicalised nationalism in many cases and temporarily fused Italy together in a spirit of shared sacrice and struggle Democracy, which had particularly shallow roots in Italy, was portrayed as being unpatriotic There had been a long tradition in Italy in the countryside of peasant unrest being violently suppressed by the Maosi, and the blackshirts operated in a similar manner, attacking workers and peasants associations.

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The era of extreme Jewish intellectualism is now at an end...The future German man will not just be a man of books, but a man of character. It is to this end that we want to educate you. As a young person, to already have the courage to face the pitiless glare, to overcome the fear of death, and to regain respect for death this is the task of this young generation. And thus you do well in this midnight hour to commit to the ames the evil spirit of the past. This is a strong, great and symbolic deed a deed which should document the following for the world to know Here the intellectual foundation of the November [Democratic] Republic is sinking to the ground, but from this wreckage the phoenix of a new spirit will triumphantly rise..."
Joseph Goebbels

Anti Intellectualism A key shared trait of Fascism

By Nick Shepley

Fascism represents a strange contradiction to us as historians. Because it tends to be based around nationalist myths, it looks back into the glorious imagined past in each nation to nd answers and solutions to the present. Therefore it is often dismissive of the cutting edge of modern thinking that is required to drive society forwards. In addition to this, many of its most loyal adherents in the 20s and 30s came from lower middle class and working class backgrounds, they lacked an elite academic education and felt excluded and alienated from academia and all too happy to attack and belittle it. Many German Nazis had been just slightly too young to ght in the First World War and felt they had missed out on the action, hence their enthusiasm to join up to a great paramilitary cause in the 1920s. Others who had seen war and left it traumatised believed that actions speak louder than words, so the combination of these factors led to a movement that was powerfully dismissive of intellectual thought and equated it with the left. Intellectuals were liable to be liberals, or even worse, communists. Even though the likes of Hitler a Goebbels hated intellectualism, they both

considered themselves to be great thinkers, and while they used a combination of medieval rhetoric and symbolism to create their propaganda system, they still sought cutting edge technologies for their industries and war machine. By 1942 the German war production system was in a complete shambles and it was only rescued by Albert Speer, perhaps the only truly intellectually gifted member of Hitlers regime. Is this potential evidence that Hitlers anti intellectual and anti modernity stance had fatally compromised the regime?