Reply #32: Wow, you are just all over the map here [View All]

[Ms. Clio]

Every time I rebut one of your tangential arguments, off you go down another rabbit hole. What does your name have to do with anything, or your degrees? You are the one who orginally quoted from the Hudson Institute in another thread, and that bunch is just neocon nuttiness in, well, a nutshell.

And "the fasci" were not Fascists. They were indigenous to Sicily and a product of the political and economic conditions of that place and time (the 1890s):

"The Fasci Siciliani (1891-1894) was a popular movement, of democratic and socialist inspiration, which arose in Sicily between the years 1891 and 1893 and whose aim was the collective organization of farmers, workers and miners, especially in the areas rich with sulphur.

Attempting to establish a new sort of organization in Italy, somewhere between the political societies common to the age and the trade unions, between traditional mutualism and cooperation, the Fasci, led by Rosario Garibaldi Bosco (in Palermo), by the physician Nicola Barbato (at Piana dei Greci), by Bernardino Verro (at Corleone), and by Giuseppe de Felice Giuffrida (at Catania), gained the support of the poorest and most exploited classes of the island by channelling their enormous frustration and discontent with the existing order into a coherent program based on vast economic transformation and the establishment of new rights. Consisting of a hodgepodge of traditionalist sentiment, religiosity, and modernist consciousness, the fruit of a mature socialist culture, the movement touched its apex in the summer of 1893, when strong, new conditions were presented to the landowners and mine owners of Sicily concerning the renewal of share cropping and rental contracts."

Honestly, I don't know where you get your information. Not from any recognized historical source, let alone documents from the period, like Mussolini's own words. As a historian those are the sources upon which I rely.

On edit: Here, for example is Gramsci in 1921: The Fasci di combattimento emerged, in the aftermath of the War, with the petty-bourgeois character of the various war-veterans' associations which appeared in that period. Because of their character of determined opposition to the socialist movement - partly a heritage of the conflicts between the Socialist Party and the interventionist associations during the War period - the Fasci won the support of the capitalists and the authorities. The fact that their emergence coincided with the landowners' need to form a white guard against the growing power of the workers' organizations allowed the system of bands created and armed by the big landowners to adopt the same label of Fasci. With their subsequent development, these bands conferred upon that label their own characteristic feature as a white guard of capitalism against the class organs of the proletariat.

http://www.marxists.org/archive/gramsci/1921/08/two_fascisms.htm