The Looming Threat of Fascism - Part One: The March on Rome
In the years between Adolf Hitler’s accession to chancellorship in Germany and the outbreak of World War II, when the threat of Fascism and Nazism loomed large on the world stage, many in America did not shrink from identifying what seemed to be fascist threats at home. Indeed, there were many in America, especially among the wealthy, who openly admired Mussolini’s brand of authoritarian government, even apparently conspiring to overthrow President Roosevelt and replace him with a similar strong man leader in a planned insurrection called the Business Plot or Wall Street Putsch. And there were outright Nazi sympathizers within the U.S. as well. The organization Friends of New Germany was actually organized by the Nazis and run by Nazi agents, and this organization transformed by 1936 into the German American Bund, which worked tirelessly to promote Nazism and make Hitler palatable to the American public. Many in this organization would go on to be very active in the America First Committee, which lobbied to keep America out of Hitler’s war. In this, the heyday of literal fascists, it was a matter of duty and vigilance among those who recognized fascism as the threat it was to point out when any American leader seemed to tend toward authoritarianism. With unabashed fascists abroad and at home, it was no idle threat. Amidst this turmoil, in 1935, Nobel prize winning author Sinclair Lewis dramatized the threat in his classic novel, It Can’t Happen Here, in which a populist demagogue rises to the U.S. presidency with promises of making the country great again, and once in office becomes a brutal authoritarian tyrant. It was a timely and timeless warning, and in those years, it was not uncommon or uncalled for to point out when a politician was looking like a fascist. Ironically, though, while Italian Fascism and Hitler’s Nazism were both inherently right-wing extremist movements, here in the U.S., while forces on the far right pretty openly plotted to bring about their own literally fascist regimes, it was politicians on the left who were called fascists. One, of course, was Louisiana senator Huey Long, who was called “the Hitler of one of our sovereign states,” and who some said would “Hitlerize America.” The comparisons were so common that one supporter of President Roosevelt said “Hitler couldn’t hold a candle to Huey.” Now, Long certainly can reasonably be described as a demagogue, and he did have authoritarian leanings, but I’ve argued before that painting him as a fascist misses the mark and shows a lack of understanding of what fascism is. Long was not alone in being compared to Mussolini and Hitler, though. In 1933, when FDR took office, a New York Times reporter described the support for Roosevelt as “strangely reminiscent of Rome in the first weeks after the march of the Blackshirts.” It may seem absurd to compare FDR to Mussolini, since Roosevelt moved the country out of neutrality in his efforts to fight the threat of the Rome-Berlin Axis. Also, there is the fact that his greatest enemies were the wealthy, many of whom saw Roosevelt as a traitor to his class and they themselves wanted fascism because of its protection of business aristocracy. But because of some superficial similarities between his sweeping New Deal programs and some economic recovery programs enacted by both Mussolini and Hitler, he was called a “fascist dictator” on all sides, by the Communist and Socialist Parties and left-leaning publications, as well as by his critics on the right, most vocally by the Republican president he had unseated, Herbert Hoover. While this characterization of Roosevelt may not have stood the test of time, it was not out of bounds as political rhetoric. In fact, staying actively vigilant against such threats was very necessary and would remain so, even after the war. In 1946, the U.S. War department, recognizing the continuing threat of fascist movements within the U.S., produced an educational film called Don’t Be a Sucker, in which it compared those who are taken in by fascist movements to marks duped by swindlers. In it, a man stands listening to a speaker on the street who is spewing hate speech and nativist rhetoric, and a Hungarian immigrant points out that it is very reminiscent of the Nazi rhetoric that he saw take root in Germany. He goes on to convince the other man that such divisive rhetoric is dangerous, because it enables the rise of brutal authoritarianism, something that all Americans need to remain vigilant against. This short film went viral in 2017, after the white supremacist rally at Charlottesville that saw anti-racist counter-protester Heather Heyer murdered by vehicular homicide and then President Trump seemingly defending the neo-Nazi demonstrators as also having “very fine people” among them—a remark recently deemed by Snopes to have been taken out of context, but which still seems unmistakable when examined within the context of the press conference in which it was uttered.
The rediscovery of the 1946 film Don’t Be a Sucker speaks to the fact that we again live in a time when there is a growing threat of nationalist authoritarianism in the world. According to the last several Freedom in the World reports, there has been a “global decline in freedom” for the last 18 years, and according to the latest Democracy Report, for the first time in the last three decades, “The world now harbors more closed autocracies than liberal democracies.” However, even though we are in the midst of another period of increased danger justifying increased vigilance against the rise of fascist movements, it has become gauche to draw comparisons between current political movements and fascists or Nazis, or between prominent political figures and Mussolini or Hitler. It is called lazy, and it is said to trivialize the Holocaust. In fact, Mike Godwin, in 1990, coined Godwin’s law, the idea that any online argument will inevitably devolve into baseless name-calling and comparisons to Hitler. In many cases this is true. If one makes groundless comparisons of those one disagrees with to Nazis, it is certainly toxic rhetoric and it definitely can trivialize the Holocaust. Case in point, when actor Gina Carano posted a tweet comparing the experience of being conservative to the experience of Jews in the Holocaust being beaten in the streets by Nazis. It’s unsurprising that she received backlash over this comparison. But it was not for the simple act of making a Nazi analogy. Many right-wing pundits defended her by saying critics of Trump had been comparing him and his supporters to fascists for years, crying double standard, but Carano is not a good example. She just made a bad taste comparison, and since her job relied on her remaining publicly palatable, she was held accountable for her own sentiments in a pretty standard way. Don’t stir controversy and then complain when you come to be viewed as controversial. A more valid example of Nazi analogies made by those on the right is Donald Trump himself saying that Joe Biden is “running a Gestapo administration,” or when he promised at a rally to “root out the communists, Marxists, fascists, and the radical Left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country,” which is quite an interesting statement, since he is trying to identify fascism with its almost diametric opposite, communism, and in the same breath calling those he demonizes “vermin,” a word famously used by Hitler for those he demonized, Jews, whom he explicitly identified with Communists. Trump is criticized for making these analogies, just as are those who compare him with Hitler or Mussolini. The difference is that there are simply more parallels when comparing him and his movement to fascism. He has simply given the world more reason to identify him as a fascist threat. To equate the analogies on all sides is misrepresent them. As we have seen, there is a long history to making such analogies and scrutinizing leaders and movements for the whiff of fascism, and with the current rise of authoritarianism in the world, there is again strong reason to be skeptical of any politician or party that stinks of fascism. It is more important than ever to really look at why these comparisons are made and to evaluate them seriously. Is there a Holocaust or pogrom being perpetrated against Republicans, as Carano suggested. Obviously no, so her comparison was odious, to say the least. And what reason does Trump have for comparing the current administration to Nazis? Simply that he has been prosecuted under its auspices, but Trump has been investigated not only by the Justice Department, but also by district attorneys in New York and Georgia, and indicted in every case based on evidence by grand juries composed of citizens, not Justice Department officials. The comparison to the Gestapo just falls apart in the face of the truth of the criminal cases against him. So much for the right calling the left fascist. Now let’s look at the parallels that compel critics to suggest that Trumpism looks a lot like fascism. Though Godwin’s Law has sometimes been misconstrued as suggesting that any time someone makes such an analogy they must automatically be disregarded, Mike Godwin himself rejected this, saying that his law “should function less as a conversation ender and more as a conversation starter,” and urging that any who make such comparisons “develop enough perspective to do it thoughtfully…. and not be glib.” “If you think the comparison is valid,” he says, “and you've given it some thought, do it.” So here goes.
Concerns that Donald Trump’s candidacy represented a fascist threat to American democracy first appeared before the 2016 election. During the run up to Election Day, a non-profit documentary made by college students in Canada and called It Can Happen Here went through fourteen defining characteristics of fascism as defined by Dr. Lawrence Britt and examined their presence in Trump’s campaign trail rhetoric. These characteristics are: Powerful and continuing expressions of nationalism: disdain for the importance of human rights, identification of enemies/scapegoats as a unifying cause, the supremacy of the military/avid militarism, rampant sexism, efforts to control mass media, an obsession with national security, religion and the ruling elite being tied together, the power of corporations being protected, the power of labor being suppressed or eliminated, disdain for and suppression of intellectuals and the arts, obsession with crime and punishment, rampant cronyism and corruption, and fraudulent elections. At the risk of equating both sides, some of these characteristics, like protection of corporations and militarism, are arguably true of the American political system generally, regardless of the party in power, and that should give us pause. But certainly, over the course of the last 9 years, Trump and his MAGA movement have demonstrated again and again their anti-intellectualism in their attacks on science and academia, their sexism in their misogynist rhetoric, their nationalism masquerading as patriotism, their mafia-like corruption, their demonization of political opponents, as well as immigrants and minority groups, as “enemies” to unite against, and perhaps most obviously, their intention to marry church and state. While such early warnings as this documentary may have seemed premature or alarmist at the time, they have proven prescient. Just before the election, in my very first podcast episode, I too wanted do my part to sound a warning against Trump’s candidacy, which I worried then was dangerous, even though I had no real platform to speak of at the time. I was not yet ready, however, to call Trump a fascist. Instead I focused on his phony populism and nativist rhetoric, identifying him as a demagogue and comparing his movement to the anti-immigrant Know-Nothing party of the 19th century. And though some listeners dislike my political takes, the fact is that I rarely mentioned Trump at all during his term in office. During my episode on the Reichstag fire, I did not compare him to Nazis; rather, I only mentioned there were fears that he may exploit some attack as a kind of modern Reichstag Fire, just as there had previously been fears and arguments that Obama and George W. Bush would do or had done likewise. I only vaguely mentioned Trump’s conspiracy-mongering and efforts to undermine trust in the press with his use of the term “fake news” in my episode on newspaper hoaxer Joseph Mulhatton. But after Charlottesville, I felt moved to more directly address his egregious remarks and called him out for his assertion that protesters of confederate monuments were “changing history” in my episode on the Lost Cause Myth of the Confederacy. After that, I did not again make mention of him until the lead-up to the 2020 election, when I again felt moved to use my by then somewhat bigger platform to caution listeners about the danger of his conspiracism and claims about a “deep state,” placing them within the long history of baseless political conspiracy mongering going back to the Bavarian Illuminati. My episodes were more and more political following Trump’s election defeat, as threats to democracy seemed to loom with his baseless claims of election fraud, proven lies that came to a head with the capitol insurrection on January 6th 2021. I have since written more than one piece comparing January 6th to other incidents in American history, one of them an explicitly fascist plot, the Wall Street Putsch, and I am not alone in comparing January 6th to a fascist coup attempt. That is because it bears such a striking resemblance to the first fascist coup, led by Benito Mussolini.
The January 6th U.S. Capitol attack should be foremost in the minds of all American voters this Election Day. It was incited not only by Donald Trump’s election denialism but also by an explicit campaign, organized by Trump strategists Roger Stone and Steve Bannon and bankrolled by Trump’s donors, which included robocalls to muster participants, the organization of over 80 buses to transport the participants, and the apparent recruitment of march leaders, like conspiracist Alex Jones, and collusion with the principal instigators of violence, the militant Oath Keepers and Proud Boys, many of whom have since been convicted of seditious conspiracy. That very day, on social media, Trump was suggesting that his supporters could prevent the peaceful transition of power, and in a rally that morning not far from the Capitol, he invoked violent rhetoric, telling them to “walk down to the Capitol,” and asserting that “if you don't fight like Hell, you're not going to have a country anymore.” He said that he too would march with them on the Capitol, though this did not happen. During the ensuing storming of the Capitol, one protester was shot and killed while trying to unlawfully enter a building. 174 police officers were injured, 15 hospitalized, and one afterward died, suffering two strokes after having been assaulted with bear mace. Four Capitol Police officers who responded afterward committed suicide. In the days before the attack, Steve Bannon reportedly remarked that he was actively involved in a “bloodless coup,” but this certainly was not bloodless, and the historical reference should not be lost. Mussolini’s March on Rome in October of 1922 was also called “bloodless” when it too was very violent. The parallels between Mussolini’s March on Rome and the January 6th insurrection were not lost on the media. The Capitol attack was variously called “Trump’s abortive March on Rome” and “Trump’s Half-Baked March on Rome.” It was not the first time that Trump was linked to Mussolini. Early in his 2016 Presidential campaign, he came under fire for retweeting a Mussolini quotation, “It is better to live one day as a lion than 100 years as a sheep.” In an interview, he insisted that he knew who had said it and that he didn’t much care. It was a rather striking parallel to when Louisiana Senator Huey Long was asked by a radio broadcaster if he was a fascist and responded in kind. “Fine. I’m Mussolini and Hitler rolled into one. Mussolini gave them castor oil,” he said, laughing as he referred to a violent force-feeding incident during the March on Rome. “I’ll give them Tabasco, and then they’ll like Louisiana.” Just as Long’s exasperated joke in the face of direct accusations of fascism didn’t make him a fascist back then, Trump’s unrepentant admiration of Mussolini’s quote also didn’t make him a fascist. But then Trump went and fomented an insurrection with numerous parallels to Mussolini’s historic fascist coup, which his own organization gave the very similar name “March to Save America.” The “march to the Capitol,” as many participants called it, was eerily similar to Mussolini’s Marcia su Roma, or March on Rome, which was also a march on the capital of the Kingdom of Italy.
Louisiana Senator Huey Long, who was also called a Fascist, but who never fomented an open insurrection.
Much like Donald Trump, who famously said on television more than a decade before securing the Republican presidential nomination, that “[i]n many cases, I probably identify more as Democrat,” Benito Mussolini did not start out as a far-right political figure. He was, in fact, prominent in the Italian Socialist Party. He considered himself a Marxist, but he leaned more toward authoritarian communism, rejecting socialism’s egalitarian principles, and as he drifted more toward militarism in support of Italian intervention in World War One, he was expelled from the Socialist Party. At that point, his politics devolved into rabid nationalism. He built his political ideology in direct opposition to socialism. He stood in opposition to democracy, admiring Friedrich Nietzsche’s concept of an Übermensch, or superman, seeing in it an ideal national leader, a supreme aristocratic figure who could lead Italy through strength. In 1919, he formed the Italian Combat League. The Italian word for “league” being fasci, a term referring to a sheaf or bundle, representing strength in unity. The word had been used in the late 19th century to refer to many and various political groups. Mussolini’s use of it was rather mundane, but because of his actions, the word would take on sinister meaning. His political group formed armed squadrons, or squadristi, known as blackshirts for their choice of attire, and this far right militant faction engaged in violence directed at all leftist groups, from Social Democrats and Socialists to Communists and anarchists, and because of a perceived threat of a potential communist revolution, owing to worker strikes in recent years, the government did not respond to the violence perpetrated by Mussolini’s squads. Soon, the National Fascist Party was formed and Mussolini was elected to the lower house of the Italian parliament. A year later, he directed his squadristi to march on Rome and was summarily appointed Prime Minister by King Victor Emmanuel III in what was widely represented as a bloodless revolution. Before we further examine the remarkable parallels between Mussolini’s March on Rome and the January 6th attack, we can acknowledge its differences without taking away from the point. Mussolini came by his leadership of militant squads somewhat honestly, having volunteered for military service in World War I. Trump, on the other hand, dodged military service in Vietnam through a medical deferment. While it is true that, in his youth, Mussolini too avoided military service by fleeing to Switzerland, in the Great War, he fought through nine months of trench warfare and was eventually discharged after being wounded in a mortar explosion. And Mussolini did not hide his direct command of or responsibility for the blackshirts and their violence. Certainly the violent militant groups the Oath Keepers and the Proud Boys have been likened to Mussolini’s blackshirts, but Trump has been insulated from direct contact with them. Ties between Trump associates and these extremist groups have been probed, and the January 6 panel was presented evidence of coordination between Trump allies and these groups, and we all saw Trump on television choosing carefully his coy phrasing, telling the Proud Boys to “stand back and stand by” rather than condemning their violence. Certainly these groups believe that he at least tacitly approves of their actions, though, even if he is not directly issuing them commands. Additionally, Trump’s insurrection on January 6 could better be described as a self-coup than a coup. He had attained power through legal means and incited an autocoup, an illegal attempt to remain in power. Mussolini’s, on the other hand, was more of a traditional coup d'état, seizing power he did not already have. In fact, Mussolini’s seizure of power was essentially legal, as the King granted him his position. He really did not seize absolute dictatorial power for another few years, and in that case, his too was a self-coup. Finally, perhaps the most crucial of differences, but one that should encourage our vigilance rather than comfort us and make us complacent, is that, while Mussolini’s March on Rome succeeded, Trump’s failed. That does not mean, however, that such a coup cannot possibly succeed in the United States.
While the differences cannot be denied—such as the differences of time and place and culture, which I don’t even mention—the similarities between Trump’s March on the Capitol and Mussolini’s March on Rome should also not be denied or ignored. In both cases, the attempted coup came in the wake of unrest and mass demonstrations of a more leftist character, which those on the right feared as revolutionary. In America, the unrest preceding the insurrection was the George Floyd protests, which I am reluctant to characterize as political in nature, since they were protests for civil rights and human rights, which rightly should not be considered political, but rather a matter of human decency and justice. Certainly the widespread demonstrations were treated as political, though, and Trump himself, in an official statement, described those protesting for police reform in the wake of George Floyd’s murder as “professional anarchists, violent mobs, arsonists, looters, criminals, rioters, Antifa, and… dangerous thugs,” generalizing the demonstrations as “acts of domestic terror,” though 93% of them were not violent or destructive, according to Armed Conflict Location and Event Data. Similarly, during the years before Mussolini’s March on Rome, there were mass demonstrations over inequities in working and living conditions. Most notable was the so-called “Red Week,” during which the Italian Socialist Party called a general strike in the wake of three unarmed socialist protesters being massacred by police in the town of Ancona. These mass labor demonstrations across two northern and central regions of Italy were viewed as an attempted Communist revolt, so the government sent 100,000 soldiers to quell the rioting, resulting in the further killing of 17 protesters as well as the injuring of thousands. Once again, when making historical comparisons, we cannot pretend that a one-to-one, perfect likeness exists. Red Week was actually years before the March on Rome, whereas the George Floyd protests occurred less than a year before the January 6th attack. Also, whereas Trump was the one sending soldiers to quell the unrest in 2020, in 1914, Benito Mussolini was actually an organizer of the general strike during Red Week. When the strike was called off, Mussolini began to view the socialist movement as failed and began his drift to the political right. While it’s true that riots during Red Week took on an insurrectionary character, destroying railways and bridges and taking control of entire towns. In contrast, even in the few cases when Black Lives Matter protests did degenerate into riots and looting, there was never an insurrectionary character. They never attempted to disrupt the government or seize the reins of power. Nevertheless, the parallel here is important because in both cases this unrest affected the response to the later insurrections.
A Blackshirt Action Squad in 1922
Whereas the general strike during Red Week was responded to swiftly and violently, the Italian military and gendarmerie mostly looked the other way when blackshirts began their campaigns of violence and terror and did almost nothing to oppose them in their March on Rome. Likewise, BLM protesters demonstrating in Washington, D.C., on June 1st, 2020, were met with strong and violent law enforcement response, including SWAT teams and mounted police as well as the presence of federal agents, Secret Service, and the National Guard, even though they never attempted to breach the Capitol, or the White House, outside of which they were protesting. In contrast, on January 6th, 2021, with a crowd of comparable size initiating an overt attack on the Capitol building while representatives were tallying and certifying electoral college votes, only Capitol police were present, and eventually some metropolitan police, all in meager numbers. The Capitol Police twice refused reinforcements, but with nearly 2000 sworn officers and its own bomb squad, it should still have been up to the task, as evidenced in previous crisis situations, such as during Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearings two and a half years earlier, when they managed to clear demonstrators from buildings and arrested 73. On January 6th, only a few hundred Capitol Police officers were on duty, while others were teleworking, and of those on duty, some were nowhere to be seen, while others posed for pictures with insurrectionists and in some cases appeared to let rioters enter buildings. Numerous officers certainly acted heroically that day, and among these, there was a sense that they had been set up for failure, as one officer afterward stated, “I feel betrayed. They didn’t even put us in a position to be successful.” Certainly the disproportionate law enforcement response compared to previous riots is a major parallel between January 6th and the March on Rome. Another is that insurrectionists involved in both incidents, as well as their apologists, relied on direct comparisons between themselves and protestors on the left. In the wake of the Capitol siege of 2021, when legislators convened for the historic purpose of impeaching the already once impeached President Trump, Republicans more than once compared the insurrectionists to Black Lives Matter protestors, drawing a false equivalence and denying the insurrectionary character of the Capitol siege. Likewise, in Italy, fascist violence had long been excused as only a countermeasure to potential socialist revolution and similar in character to socialist labor demonstrations, and Mussolini too denied the insurrectionary character of his March on Rome, claiming that it was not anti-democratic. His March was no coup, he insisted, though he was careful to make explicit the continuing threat that it could be, saying in a speech to the Italian parliament the next month, “I could have made this drab silent hall into a camp for my squads…I could have barred the doors of parliament and created a government which was only made up of Fascists: but I didn’t want to, at least for now.” January 6th apologists similarly insist that their siege of the capitol was not anti-democratic. They did not seek to overthrow the government, according to their defenders, just to prevent the certification of the election. Of course, if they had succeeded, and if Donald Trump had unlawfully remained in power despite election results, then he would have been in a similar position to Mussolini, an unelected leader who had taken his power through a show of force, with the implicit threat that he could take more if he wanted to, a threat on which Mussolini, eventually, made good.
A similarity that has been previously noted between Trump and Mussolini is that, while both clearly roused their followers and paramilitant bad actors to march on the capital with the clear intention of seizing power, or in Trump’s case, maintaining power, neither was physically present. Neither participated himself. Testimony presented before the House committee investigating the attack revealed that Trump actually seems to have genuinely intended to join the insurrectionists, believing that a televised march on the capitol with the President at its head might pressure legislators to give in to his demands that the election results not be certified. He appears only to have relented when his Secret Service security detail, unprepared for such an affair, were unable to get roadblocks set up on short notice, with Capitol police already struggling to deal with the crowds Trump had sent their way. According to one White House aide, he even climbed into his limousine and throttled a Secret Service agent who refused to drive him to the Capitol. On the other hand, Mussolini seems to have never had any intention of joining his blackshirts in their March on Rome. Instead he remained near the Swiss border, in Milan, ready to flee if his coup went south. He only came to Rome by train once he was assured that his forces controlled the city, after he had been invited by the king to form a cabinet. Once there, he took a propaganda photo showing him marching with his blackshirts in the street, but he was not actually present during the days of violence that had preceded his arrival. It has been theorized that, if Trump had personally led his insurrectionists, his coup may have succeeded, as Capitol police may have ceased all efforts to hold back the mob when faced with the President, and lawmakers may have bent to his demands if he had marched into the room with a squad of paramilitants in tow. This counter-factual analysis of January 6th is very common of coups both successful and unsuccessful. Long have historians analyzed Mussolini’s coup through similar what-if scenarios. It is often asserted that if the Italian army had been called in, if there had been a concerted effort to actually confront the blackshirts, then the March on Rome would not have succeeded. This is one talking point of a certain view on Mussolini’s coup that places blame entirely on the king. The problem is, we don’t know, we never know, what might have happened in some given incident if circumstances had been different. Certainly the blackshirts would have been outnumbered, but they had always been outnumbered and that had never stopped them from seizing power or control in other cities during the years leading up to their march on the capital. Mussolini’s squadristi had managed to overthrow the local governments of almost 300 towns, and earlier that summer, they had marched on Ravenna and taken control of the entire region. Since neither the police nor the military put up the resistance necessary to halt fascist seizure of weapons, vehicles, and buildings during the three years of blackshirt terror prior to their March on Rome, there is no clear reason to believe the military would have been effective in stopping them or even motivated to do so. A more troubling and pressing counterfactual premise to ponder is whether January 6th would have been more successful if red-hat rioters had demonstrated their willingness and capacity to disrupt local governments and seize public buildings countless times before their march on the capital, as had blackshirts. As it was, anti-masking and anti-lockdown demonstrations prior to January 6th are not comparable to the fascist violence before the March on Rome. Only once, just three months before the Capitol attack, did right-wing militiamen storm a state capitol during Covid lockdown protests, in Michigan, in what is seen as a kind of dry run for the later insurrection in Washington.
A newly arrived Mussolini posing for pictures with his insurrectionists after days of violence in Rome.
This depiction of the March on Rome as no real threat is part and parcel of the larger portrayal of the Fascist coup as being harmless and legal. This was a view of the March on Rome that Mussolini himself promoted. While his blackshirts were still marching on the capital, he gave an interview to The Times in which he claimed no violence was taking place. Mussolini was a longtime writer for newspapers and was even working for Hearst News Service at the time of the March. He was adept at spinning the press narrative, and this is a big reason why many in America viewed him and his party favorably following his seizure of power. In fact, this perspective of the March on Rome would be immortalized in history books for a long time. It was simply easier to blame the collapse of democracy on the weakness of the king rather than on the threat of a violent minority of extremists. So the insurrectionary march on the Italian capital was characterized by historians as bloodless and farcical, more of a joke than a serious coup. In many historical representations, it was mere choreography, purely symbolic, a bluff that paid off. And how could it not be? The Fascist marchers were not an army, but rather citizens, and their march was therefore a lawful demonstration since, again, it was peaceful according to the history that the victors had written. The blackshirts were poorly equipped, a “rag-bag” crowd, it was said, and their display was a “parody,” a “grotesque.” In this way the threat and the violence of the fascist insurrectionists in Italy was downplayed, and indeed, Mussolini would even go so far as to pretend that, when there was violence, his blackshirts were themselves the victims, painting them as martyrs, comparing them to fallen French revolutionaries. “We should remember… that the insurrection was bloody,” he said, not shying from calling it what it was, an insurrection, but reversing the true direction of the violence that had taken place: “There were dozens of Fascist dead…many more than fell during the sacking of the Bastille.” In reality, as later historians who set the record straight have revealed, the Fascist March on Rome was anything but peaceful. Most notably, a Communist party official, Giuseppe Lemmi, was abducted, shaved, and forced to drink more than a pint of castor oil. He was then paraded through the streets, his head painted with the colors of the Italian flag, with a card hung around his neck labeling him a deserter, and he was forced to shout “Long live Fascism!” Beyond this clear example of violence, there were countless others. Blackshirts had lists of names, targeting specific Communist and Socialist political figures as well as liberals and trade unionists generally for execution. They burned homes to the ground. They destroyed the presses of opposition newspapers. They occupied whole neighborhoods that were seen as leftist strongholds, and when anyone resisted them, throwing insults or the occasional brick their way, they opened fire, killing more than one innocent bystander, like an elderly man who was out on his balcony when someone in his building shouted down at the blackshirts. The violent nature of this coup cannot be denied, and yet it was, convincingly. The January 6th riot and breach of the Capitol was also undeniably violent. About 140 police officers were assaulted that day, according to the Department of Justice, and dozens of those were severely injured, according to the Associated Press. The violent intentions of the insurrectionists were clear. They set up gallows and announced their intention to kill the Vice President. They stormed the Capitol with firearms, knives, clubs, pepper spray and bear mace. Some were photographed carrying zip tie handcuffs, and they too had a list of targets. Besides the Vice President, they were explicitly searching the building for the Speaker of the House, who was hiding under her desk with other lawmakers. Yet Republican politicians claim it was only a peaceful and lawful protest. They downplay its violence, its organization, and its effectiveness, pretending the rioters were never a real threat. Donald Trump claimed that there were “no guns whatsoever,” but court records and news reports have proved this was strictly false, as numerous defendants were charged with possession of firearms on the Capitol grounds. Trump and other insurrection apologists, as well as the press generally, also portray the January 6th rioters as “rag-tag” and not a real threat, or as heroes and martyrs, pointing specifically to the killing of Ashli Babbitt, who ignored warnings from law enforcement not to enter the Speaker’s Lobby through a shattered window, beyond which legislators were being evacuated, and was shot in her left shoulder. Despite later claims that she was unarmed, crime scene investigation showed she was actually carrying a knife. While Babbitt’s death is tragic, the shooting was ruled justified. The point to emphasize here is that, in the downplaying of the insurrectionists’ violence and the threat they posed, as well as in their misrepresentation as victims and martyrs, the parallels between January 6th and the March on Rome are hard to deny.
Since 2022, when more and more information was revealed not only about the Capitol attack but also about Trump’s illegal fake elector scheme, many in the press and media, as well as political analysts, began to raise the alarm about what they called a “slow motion coup” or “slow moving coup,” because of Republican efforts to get election denialist Trump supporters elected as the chief elections officers of numerous states. With the further push to place election deniers into positions as poll workers and elections officials all over the country, it appears that the groundwork is in place to prevent the certification of election results before they ever reach Congress. But Mussolini’s Fascist coup in Italy was not swift either. When blackshirts marched on the capital, it was the culmination of three years of similar insurrections in cities and towns across Italy, dress rehearsals for their storming of the seat of political power, and in all of the preceding insurrections, similar violence took place. Neither was their coup complete when Mussolini was named Prime Minister, nor did their violence cease. Before the end of the year, in Turin, blackshirts attacked local labor leaders who resisted their domination, killing at least eleven and maybe as many as two dozen. Still, for the next year and a half, Mussolini ruled with the trappings of democracy, under a coalition government, slowly but surely working toward consolidating his power. Crucial to his machinations was getting a law passed that would allow for minority rule, awarding the party with the most votes in an election a majority of seats in parliament, even if the party receiving the most votes only had a quarter of them. In the 1924 elections, blackshirt intimidation and violence at polling places ensured Fascist control of the legislature. That year, an outspoken critic of Fascism, the socialist deputy Giacomo Matteotti, published a book called The Fascisti Exposed: A Year of Fascist Domination, and he spoke more than once before the Chamber of Deputies and Parliament, denouncing Fascist interference in the election and declaring the results invalid. Within several days of his last such speech, he was abducted on his way to parliament by members of Mussolini’s secret police, and he was stabbed to death, his corpse abandoned outside of Rome and discovered two months later. The murderers were later discovered and put on trial, and there was much suspicion of Mussolini’s direct involvement. In a famous speech, early in 1925, Mussolini took responsibility for the murder and all other Fascist violence and essentially dared anyone to do anything about it. He soon outlawed opposition parties and did away with all pretense of democracy. This was the beginning of his outright dictatorship, more than two years after the March on Rome and more seven years after Mussolini first organized a Fascist Action Squad. So it seems, even by definition, according the original historical example, we should expect fascist coups to be relatively slow-moving.
Socialist Giuseppe Lemmi following his torture by Blackshirts.
I’m certain that I have probably picked up some new listeners who may not have gone back to listen to my more politically charged episodes, like 2022’s “The Perils of American Democracy.” To any who take umbrage with my comparison of Trump with Mussolini in this episode, though its unlikely you have made it to the end, I would reiterate what I said back in 2022. After January 6th, this is no longer a partisan argument. This is about concern for the future of our Republic and its democratic system, as many Republicans, to their credit, have themselves come to realize. I am not the first to have compared the former president to Il Duce. His style of politics and posturing of strength, lend weight to the comparison. It is hard to listen to reports about Rudy Giuliani saying in the days before January 6th that “We’re going to the Capitol. It’s going to be great. The president is going to be there. He’s going to look powerful,” without thinking of the original strongman, Mussolini. Mussolini and Trump both came to power on anti-establishment populist movements, as demagogues. While in power, they both leveraged mouthpiece media platforms to propagandize. Trump’s “America First” doctrine, regardless of its historical connection to fascism, can’t be viewed purely as a neutrality doctrine, like that for which the phrase was originally coined. Though in part it colored his isolationism and protectionism in trade policy, it most clearly expresses a sentiment about American nationalism, and in that sense, it is very similar to Mussolini’s description of Fascism: “Everything within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state.” When criminal investigations into his political and business wrongdoing began, Trump called prosecutors “radical, vicious, [and] racist” and called on his supporters to rise up if legal action was taken against him. Some have compared this to the Matteotti Crisis, as it has been revealed Giacomo Matteotti was investigating Mussolini’s corruption in connection with Standard Oil when he was assassinated. And last but not least, in the wake of the recent assassination attempt on Donald Trump, when a gunman apparently knicked his ear and he wore large bandages on the minor wound during subsequent public appearances, it was widely compared with a similar incident in April 1926, when an Irish woman named Violet Gibson, otherwise an avowed pacifist, shot at Mussolini and grazed his nose. As was the case with Donald Trump, this attempt to destroy him, which must of course be condemned in a civil and lawful society, had the opposite effect of strengthening his cult of personality. Mussolini afterward appeared to the public on numerous occasions, waving to his Fascist mobs wearing an oversized bandage that covered not only his nose but spread across both his cheeks, a symbol of his strength in the face of opposition that could be seen even from very far away. Considering all of the, dare I say, weird parallels that can be made between Trumpism and Fascism, it is clearly not an inane or reckless comparison. There is a definite likeness that must make every American wary and influence their decision at the polls in November. Nor are these the only parallels that we all need to be aware of lest a dark passage of history repeat itself. For those of you who take issue with me comparing recent history to the rise of Italian Fascism, you’ll see that I can indeed take it further, as in part two I will compare recent events to the rise of Nazism in the Weimar Republic. So, yeah, I’m going there, and not fallaciously, but rather with serious and sober critical thought.
This election year, remember, even if we cannot fairly call Trump an outright fascist, it is undeniable that he has for the last 9 years followed the fascist playbook in numerous ways. And that should be enough for all of us to shut him out of American politics forever.
Further Reading
Ben-Ghiat, Ruth. “An American Authoritarian.” The Atlantic, 10 Aug. 2016, www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/08/american-authoritarianism-under-donald-trump/495263/.
Ben-Ghiat, Ruth. “Mussolini, Trump and What Assassination Attempts Really Do.” Politico, 3 Aug. 2024, www.politico.com/news/magazine/2024/08/03/assassination-attempts-mussolini-trump-00171825.
Ben-Ghiat, Ruth. “Trump’s Promotion of an Image of Strength After Assassination Attempt Borrows from Authoritarian Playbook.” The Conversation, 25 July 2024, theconversation.com/trumps-promotion-of-an-image-of-strength-after-assassination-attempt-borrows-from-authoritarian-playbook-235038.
Blinder, Stephen, “The Tragic Myth of America’s 2021 ‘March on Rome.’” Spectrum, no. 12, 4 June 2024, doi: https://doi.org/10.29173/spectrum251.
Bosworth, R.J.B. “The March on Rome 1922: How Benito Mussolini Turned Italy into the First Fascist State.” History Extra, 14 Feb. 2023, www.historyextra.com/period/20th-century/march-on-rome-mussolini/.
Foot, John. “The March on Rome revisited. Silences, historians and the power of the counter-factual.” Modern Italy, vol. 28, no. 2, 6 March 2023, pp. 162-177. Cambridge University Press, doi:10.1017/mit.2023.5
Greenway, H.D.S. “Trump’s Mussolini roots.” Boston Globe, 21 Oct. 2022, www.bostonglobe.com/2022/10/21/opinion/trumps-mussolini-roots/.
Marantz, Andrew. “Why We Can’t Stop Arguing About Whether Trump Is a Fascist.” The New Yorker, 27 March 2024, www.newyorker.com/books/under-review/why-we-cant-stop-arguing-about-whether-trump-is-a-fascist.
McGreevy, Nora. “The Little-Known Story of Violet Gibson, the Irish Woman Who Shot Mussolini.” Smithsonian Magazine, 22 March 2021, www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/1926-irish-woman-shot-benito-mussolini-and-almost-altered-history-forever-180977286/.
Nichols, John. “Trump Steals a Strategy From Mussolini’s Playbook.” The Nation, 1 Feb. 2022, www.thenation.com/article/politics/trump-texas-pardons/.
