THE FASCIST MOVEMENT

Hawke's Bay Tribune, Volume XVIII, Issue 180, 14 July 1928, Page 9

THE FASCIST MOVEMENT

ITS GROWTH AND DEVELOPMENT. Professor Salvemini, a political exile in Britain and a distinguished historian, has recently published the first volume of a study of the Fascist movement, and while allowance must naturally be made for some of the views of the ex-Soviet deputy, many interesting sidelights are thrown on the devSopment of the system.

Three main phases of the growth of Fascism are distinguished by the writer. The first arose from the apprehension amongst the intellectual and middle classes of the possible ravages of Bolshevism. One has to remember the Italian temperament, and how easily what Gustave le Bon called the “mass mind” can be created in moments of panic. The earliest Fascisti were principally youths on fire with patriotic zeal, out to do combat with the Russian menace. The sum total of 160,000 discharged officers—“restless, chimerical spirits”—is mentioned by the historian, as constituting the backbone of Italy's uncontrolled defence against the insidious and disintegrating propagandists of Communism a la Russe.

In November, 1920, i.e., after the second post-war general election, the leader of the country would seem to have held a brief for patriotic lawlessness, and at all events allowed it to go unpunished. Thus arose the second phase, when the unscrupulous members of society, amongst whom were many industrialists, landowners and business men, seized the opportunity to manipulate the licensed forces of lawlessness for their own ends and against trades unionism.

The third phase developed through anti-Bolshevism and anti-Unionism to anti-Parliamentarianism. Here the writer, from his own point of view, has some things to say derogatory of the military interests which lent their support to the final phase. It was after that, in October, 1922, that Benito Mussolini, in an almost military sense, stormed and captured Rome by the force of his personality and 'it is his title to greatness that he was able to find a common slogan and a unified faith for all the sections of Fascism The foregoing is the merest outline of the main contentions of a book that should not le overlooked by any interested in modern developments in Italy.