Italian fascism
[37] The fascists quoted Italian national hero Giuseppe Garibaldi who said: "Corsica and Nice must not belong to France; there will come the day when an Italy mindful of its true worth will reclaim its provinces now so shamefully languishing under foreign domination".
[42] Claim was also raised on the basis that areas now part of Graubünden in the Mesolcina valley and Hinterrhein were held by the Milanese Trivulzio family, who ruled from the Mesocco Castle in the late 15th century.
[43] Also during the summer of 1940, Galeazzo Ciano met with Hitler and Ribbentrop and proposed to them the dissection of Switzerland along the central chain of the Western Alps, which would have left Italy also with the canton of Valais in addition to the claims raised earlier.
Knickerbocker contrasted his treatment with the inevitable torture and execution under Stalin or Hitler, and stated "you have a fair idea of the comparative mildness of the Italian kind of totalitarianism".
The deaths of one-tenth of the population of the Italian colony of Libya occurred during the fascist era, including from the use of gassings, concentration camps, starvation and disease; and in Ethiopia during the Second Italo-Ethiopian War and afterwards by 1938 a quarter of a million Ethiopians had died.
While corporations still could earn profits,[73] Italian fascism supported criminalization of strikes by employees and lockouts by employers as illegal acts it deemed as prejudicial to the national community as a whole.
[88] After being removed from office and placed under arrest by the King in 1943, with the Kingdom of Italy's new non-fascist government switching sides from the Axis to the Allies, Italian fascism returned to republicanism and condemnation of the monarchy.
[94] In 1929, the Italian government signed the Lateran Treaty with the Holy See, a concordat between Italy and the Catholic Church that allowed for the creation of a small enclave known as Vatican City as a sovereign state representing the papacy.
[96] Hence, the Doctrine's Weltanschauung proposes the world as action in the realm of humanity – beyond the quotidian constrictions of contemporary political trend, by rejecting "perpetual peace" as fantastical and accepting Man as a species continually at war; those who meet the challenge, achieve nobility.
[96] To wit, actual idealism generally accepted that conquerors were the men of historical consequence, e.g. the Roman Julius Caesar, the Greek Alexander the Great, the Frank Charlemagne and the French Napoleon.
[104] As the leader of the National Fascist Party (PNF, Partito Nazionale Fascista), Mussolini said that democracy is "beautiful in theory; in practice, it is a fallacy" and spoke of celebrating the burial of the "putrid corpse of liberty".
[109] In that time, assassination was not yet the modus operandi norm and the Italian fascist Duce usually disposed of opponents in the Imperial Roman way: political arrest punished with island banishment.
At the Paris Peace Conference in 1919, the Allies compelled the Kingdom of Italy to yield to Yugoslavia the Croatian seaport of Fiume (Rijeka), a mostly Italian city of little nationalist significance, until early 1919.
Moreover, for campaign financing in the 1920–1921 period the National fascist Party also courted the industrialists and (historically feudal) landowners by appealing to their fears of left-wing socialist and Bolshevik labor politics and urban and rural strikes.
Moreover, toward the end of 1920, fascism began to spread into the countryside, bidding for the support of large landowners, particularly in the area between Bologna and Ferrara, a traditional stronghold of the Left, and scene of frequent violence.
Socialist and Catholic organizers of farm hands in that region, Venezia Giulia, Tuscany, and even distant Apulia, were soon attacked by Blackshirt squads of fascists, armed with castor oil, blackjacks, and more lethal weapons.
[119] World War I inflated Italy's economy with great debts, unemployment (aggravated by thousands of demobilised soldiers), social discontent featuring strikes, organised crime[109] and anarchist, socialist and communist insurrections.
[122] Signed in early August 1921, Mussolini and the Italian Socialist Party (PSI) agreed to the Pact of Pacification, which was immediately condemned by most ras leaders in the squadrismo.
[109] To depose the weak parliamentary democracy, Deputy Mussolini (with military, business and liberal right-wing support) launched the PNF March on Rome (27–31 October 1922) coup d'état to oust Prime Minister Luigi Facta and assume the government of Italy to restore nationalist pride, restart the economy, increase productivity with labor controls, remove economic business controls and impose law and order.
[127][128] Until 1925, when the liberal economist Alberto de' Stefani, although a former member of the squadristi, was removed from his post as Minister of Economics (1922–1925), Italy's coalition government was able to restart the economy and balanced the national budget.
Stefani developed economic policies that were aligned with classical liberalism principles as inheritance, luxury and foreign capital taxes were abolished;[129] and life insurance (1923)[130] and the state communications monopolies were privatised and so on.
[133] In 1924, a private business enterprise established Unione Radiofonica Italiana (URI) as part of the Marconi company, to which the Italian fascist Government granted official radio-broadcast monopoly.
[135] After 1929, the fascist regime countered the Great Depression with massive public works programs, such as the draining of the Pontine Marshes, hydroelectricity development, railway improvement and rearmament.
[109] Especially after the 1936 League of Nations sanctions against Italian invasion of Ethiopia, Mussolini strongly advocated agrarianism and autarchy as part of his economic "battles" for Land, the Lira and Grain.
As Prime Minister, Mussolini physically participated with the workers in doing the work; the "politics as theatre" legacy of Gabriele D' Annunzio yielded great propaganda images of Il Duce as "Man of the People".
British wartime records from the National Archives in Kew also confirmed Profima SA as the Vatican's company which was accused during WW II of engaging in "activities contrary to Allied interests".
Mussolini's establishment of law and order to Italy and its society was praised by Winston Churchill,[152] Sigmund Freud,[153] George Bernard Shaw[154] and Thomas Edison[155] as the fascist government combated organised crime and the Sicilian Mafia.
[170] The Italian General Confederation of Labour (CGL) and the PSI refused to officially recognize the anti-fascist militia and maintained a non-violent, legalist strategy, while the Communist Party of Italy (PCd'I) ordered its members to quit the organization.
Many Italian anti-fascists participated in the Spanish Civil War with the hope of setting an example of armed resistance to Franco's dictatorship against Mussolini's regime; hence their motto: "Today in Spain, tomorrow in Italy".
The song originally aligned itself with Italian partisans fighting against Nazi German occupation troops, but has since become to merely stand for the inherent rights of all people to be liberated from tyranny.
