The word ‘fascist’ gets banded around a lot these days. It gets applied by the Left to everything from those who want Britain to have secure borders right through to populists and those campaigning for freedom of speech. It is a ‘snarl word’ like the word ‘racist’ and which has become devalued from overuse and from inappropriate use. This in my view is dangerous as there might one day be a time when these words are needed to describe something that is actually racist or fascist but because ‘wolf’ has been cried so many times, nobody will heed the warning that is given.

One hundred years ago this October a real fascist party, led by Benito Mussolini manouvered its way into power in Italy. Although not as outrightly genocidal as Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Party that took power in Germany in 1933, Mussolini’s fascism was similar in that it employed murderous political terror to keep power once it had outwitted the relatively liberal governments of the day in their nations.

But Italian fascism came from a place that today does not exist. Back then there were a massive amount of tensions between capital and labour all of which were enhanced by the chronological closeness, compared to today, of 1920’s Italy to the Russian Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. That is not to say that fascism of a sort could not reappear in the modern world but that the conditions both social and political that greatly aided the creation of Italian Fascism do not exist today.

The writer Tim Black has, over at Spiked Magazine, done a magisterial examination of the rise of Italian Fascism and put it in its historical and political context. This is well worth a read as it busts through many myths about the rise of Italian Fascism, such as the ‘March on Rome’ being a singular key event rather than part of a series of events. Mr Black’s article also explains how Mussolini was not the great outsider from the political Establishment that he has often been painted as being. Mussolini was instead a political insider who was invited into government by an Establishment that was quite rightly worried about the rise of Communism, but where Mussolini made extra great demands of the Government of Italy at the time and which were granted.

Mr Black said:

Facism was born amid the cataclysmic experience of the First World War. This was an event, a socio-political rupture, for which we have no comparison today. It effectively marked the end of an entire societal existence. It finished off the long 19th century, consigning a palling liberalism to the past. And it pulled the now threadbare rug out from under the ruling elites. ‘A civilisation perished in 1914’, recalled the historian, EH Carr, in the 1970s, ‘and no return is possible’. What was a distressing moment for some was an emboldening moment for the likes of Mussolini.

Italy’s war experience was doubly painful. It joined the conflict late, in 1915, on the side of the Allies. Over half a million Italian soldiers lost their lives, and 250,000 were crippled for life. Worse still, all the slaughter and maiming was for nothing, despite Italy being on the triumphant side – the Allied powers reneged on the Treaty of London, in which Italy was promised substantial territories in the Austro-Hungarian empire and beyond.

The war’s impact on Italy was devastating. Italy’s leaders were humiliated, the last vestiges of their authority gone; the economy was in ruins; and civil order was breaking down. Liberal Italy was in its death throes.

Italian Fascism did not wholly create itself. It’s growth was assisted by a fear of Communism, a large amount of ex-service personnel being available to be muscular support for the Fascists, being shafted by the WWI allies over the promise of to Italy of former Austro-Hungarian Empire lands and social and economic problems. A whole gamut of problems assailed post WWI Italy, problems and circumstances that do not exist today. We are not in the aftermath of one of the greatest cataclysms to afflict humanity which the First World War was and neither do we have the spectre of an expansionist Soviet Union propelling the business classes towards the idea of a Fascist state that would protect their interests.

Of course there could be future authoritarian movements arising, movements that promise to put right some of the disasters that some believe have been inadvertently created by modern day liberal thinkers and politicians. But it will mostly likely not be a re-run of Italy in 1922. The Fascist takeover of Italy was the result of specific and unique conditions that don’t apply today and I believe that it is foolish in the extreme to expect history to repeat itself exactly. Mr Black’s piece is a fabulous explanation of how Italian Fascism arose and is somewhat of a warning to the Left against using the word ‘fascist’ to describe anything that they do not like. I heartily recommend tht you read Mr Black’s piece as it will fill in many gaps in people’s knowledge about the rise of Italian Fascism.