XI: Obama as Social Fascist 405Benito Mussolini, in some ways the inventor of fascism and the first fascist dictator, was
anything but a typical right-wing reactionary. He was born in 1883 in the Romagna, an area of Italy
which was noted for its radical, left-wing and anti-Roman Catholic politics. His parents admired the
Mexican leader, Benito Juarez, for whom they named their son. Mussolini was an elementary
school teacher and a leading member of the Italian Socialist Party (PSI). He worked as a newspaper
editor in the city of Trieste, which at that time was part of the Austrian Empire; he was expelled by
the Austrians because of his militant Italian nationalist viewpoint. He was part of the self-styled
revolutionary and anti-reformist leadership group which took control over the PSI in 1912. At this
time he and his associates received the enthusiastic endorsement of no less a personage than the
Russian revolutionary leader V. I. Lenin, who shared Mussolini’s dislike for parliamentary
methods. Mussolini became the editor of the PSI daily newspaper, Avanti! Mussolini broke with the
PSI official line of anti-militarism and non-interventionism after the start of World War I; in mid-
November 1914, he launched his own newspaper, called Il Popolo d’Italia, with money from the
British, the French, and from the arms manufacturers and other pro-war business interests. This new
daily paper campaigned incessantly for Italy to enter the war on the side of Britain and France. In
May 1915, Mussolini helped to organize the Radiant May (maggio radioso), a series of
demonstrations in Rome designed among other things to attempt to discredit former Prime Minister
Giolitti, the main moderate conservative nationalist, and to intimidate the parliament into declaring
war, which soon occurred.
MUSSOLINI FOUNDS ITALIAN FASCISM, MILAN, MARCH 23, 1919
The foundation of the first Italian fascist organization is widely agreed to have occurred in
Piazza San Sepolcro in Milan on March 23, 1919 with the creation of a new revolutionary
nationalist movement called the Fasci Italiani di Combattimento (very roughly, Italian fighting
groups) at a meeting attended by some 200 persons. The majority of those present were either
leftists or former leftists who had gone over to more nationalistic agitation. The participants in this
landmark meeting would largely be drawn from four distinct groups. The first were revolutionary
syndicalists and national syndicalists, people we might today call extremely aggressive trade union
militants with anarchist, antistate (or “libertarian”) and anti-politician overtones. There were a
number of former members of the Italian Socialist Party who had left that party in order to support
Italian entry into World War I. Among these was Mussolini himself. A third important group were
the Futurists, who were members and political supporters of an important school of visual arts and
literature, sometimes also called the cubo-futurists. We can think of these people as avant-garde
painters, writers, and composers; the most famous of them was Marinetti. A fourth and final group
were the arditi, veterans of the special forces commando units of the Italian Army during World
War I. Many of them still wore their distinctive black uniforms, and this launched the idea of
fascism as black-shirts, giving rise to the notion of fascism as a shirt movement with each national
group favoring shirts of a special color. The majority of the participants were between 20 and 40
years of age, and the largest single professional group represented were the writers and journalists –
quite possibly the media whores of the day. The creative class, as we can see, turned out in force to
help found fascism. Mussolini described this new group as an “anti-party,” and criticized
customary political methods as rigid and sterile. The program of this new group has been described
as “basically leftist, sometimes revolutionary,” and is a far cry from what organized fascism later
advocated. It was in any case a program explicitly presented in support of Italian imperialism. At
this early phase, Mussolini was primarily concerned with recruiting large numbers politically naïve
young people from the widest possible area of the left and the center. “The Fasci were in fact
neither fish nor fowl, nationalist but leftist....” (Payne 89 ff.)