Facts about Fascism
Throughout Europe, numerous aristocrats, conservative intellectuals, capitalists and industrialists lent their support to fascist movements in their countries that emulated Italian Fascism.
A key element of fascism is its endorsement of the leadership of a dictator over a country.
The only purpose of government in Mussolini's fascism was to uphold the state as supreme above all else, a concept which can be described as statolatry.
Fascism uses explicit populist rhetoric; calls for a heroic mass effort to restore past greatness; and demands loyalty to a single leader, leading to a cult of personality and unquestioned obedience to orders (Fьhrerprinzip).
The Italian Fascists was promoted fascism as the patriotic "third way" to international socialism and capitalism.
Mussolini's Fascism held that cultural factors existed to serve the state, and that it was not necessarily in the state's interest to interfere in cultural aspects of society.
Nazism differed from Italian fascism in its emphasis on race as the defining feature of its political and social policies.
The term fascismo was coined by the Italian Fascist dictator Benito Mussolini and the Neo-Hegelian philosopher Giovanni Gentile.
Fascism universally dismissed the Marxist concept of "class struggle," replacing it instead with the concept of "class collaboration."
Originally, the term "fascism" (fascismo) was used by the political movement that ruled Italy from 1922 to 1943 under the leadership of Benito Mussolini.
Initially, the Soviet Union supported a coalition with the western powers against Nazi Germany and popular fronts in various countries against domestic fascism.
Free market economists, principally those of the Austrian School, like Ludwig Von Mises argue that fascism is a form of socialist dictatorship similar to that of the Soviet Union.
The Nazis have been estimated to have guillotined some 40,000 people in Germany and Austria—possibly more than were beheaded during the French Revolution.
A synthesis of these two opinions, states that German Nazism was a form of racially-oriented fascism, while Italian fascism was state-oriented.
Fascism won support as an alternative to the unpopular liberalism of the time.
Mussolini defined fascism as a collectivistic ideology in opposition to socialism, classical liberalism, democracy and individualism.
Fascism in Italy combined elements of corporatism, totalitarianism, nationalism, militarism and anti-Communism.
Historian Gaetano Salvemini argued in 1936 that fascism makes taxpayers responsible to private enterprise, because "the State pays for the blunders of private enterprise….
Most historians view fascism as a response to these developments, as a movement that both tried to appeal to the working class and divert them from Marxism.
A number of nationalist fasci later evolved into the twentieth century movement known as fascism.
Stanley Payne's Fascism: Comparison and Definition (1980) uses a lengthy itemized list of characteristics to identify fascism, including the creation of an authoritarian state; a regulated, state-integrated economic sector; fascist symbolism; anti-liberalism; anti-communism; anti-conservatism.
According to a biographer of Mussolini, "Initially, fascism was fiercely anti-Catholic"—the Church serving as competitor for dominion of the people's hearts.
Where fascism talked of state, Nazism spoke of the Volk and of the Volksgemeinschaft.
Organski, argue that Nazism is not fascism–either because the differences are too great, or because they believe fascism cannot be generic.
Historians, political scientists, and other scholars have engaged in long and furious debates concerning the exact nature of fascism and its core tenets.
Economic policy in the first few years of Italian fascism was largely liberal, with the Ministry of Finance controlled by the old liberal Alberto De Stefani.
The attitude of fascism toward religion has run the spectrum from persecution, to denunciation to cooperation.
Fascism exalts the nation, state, or group of people as superior to the individuals composing it.
Benito Mussolini claimed to have founded fascism, and Italian fascism (in Italian, fascismo) was the authoritarian political movement that ruled Italy from 1922 to 1943 under Mussolini's leadership.
One position is that religion and fascism could never have a lasting connection because both are a "holistic weltanshauungen" claiming the whole of the person.