Understanding History

Read here an interesting article about English Catholics and Fascism.

This is a beautiful reinforcement of the points I have made very often on this blog: Fascism was good for Catholicism, it was good for Italy and it was, in fact, so successful as a model for 15 years that many English Catholics were quite impressed. The mutual admiration and pen friendship between Winston Churchill and Benito Mussolini will, here, remain unmentioned.

Now, a couple of things must be clear, and I have also made them clear several times here: the Fascist experience was a (brilliant) reaction to particularly troubled times, but cannot and should not be taken as example of what should happen today. Whether we discuss Putin or Napoleon, Caesar or Pinochet, Franco or Mussolini, we must put things in their own historic , religious and cultural context, without which we are guaranteed to not understand anything of anything.

The Italy going out of the First World War was an Italy not only ravaged by an extremely taxing war, but deeply wounded in its social structure. For two years (which are remembered as the biennio rosso, the “two red years”) the Communist made a factual bid for a revolution, ultimately not succeeding but certainly managing to complete a stage rehearsal for it. Up to one thousand violent deaths a month witness a situation of creeping civil war.

The creeping, slowly mounting civil unrest was finally stopped by the inept, indecisive, politically correct, cowardly and sheer incompetent Liberal government in the Summer of 1921, as it became clear even to them that the time of posturing and positioning for political advantage had gone and decisive action was now urgently required. Calm came back in the Country.

But at that point, something had been irremediably broken. The relationship of trust between many Italians (particularly the “haves”) and their elected rulers had been broken, even as the recently introduced universal suffrage showed the devastating potential of giving the vote to masses of angry “have nots”.

When a new, very violent, at that time clearly anti-clerical, but fiercely anticommunist force began to emerge, they met the approval of great part of the middle class, who understood that they might not escape so well a second attempt of the Communists to get in power and simply did not trust the State to protect them against it. Suddenly, the very efficient Fascist cudgel appealed to teachers, lawyers, managers, army and police officers, even little employees. The Italian Democracy died not of violence, but of moral and political bankruptcy.

The successful end of the March on Rome was, also, certainly not the start of the dictatorship. Mussolini’s power after becoming Prime Minister was rapidly consolidated by his decisive action, the rapid liquidation of the Communist menace, and a clear sense of accomplishment as the Italians gradually noticed that these guys could deliver. The events from Summer 1924 to January 1925, which led to the start of the proper dictatorship, once again showed the Italian people that between Fascists and Liberals it was, really, a no-brainer. The rest is, as they say, history, and gave us a wonderful social, economic, and religious run.

Knowing what I know of Italy, I can see parallelisms with modern Russia. In both cases, an inept democracy followed by a strong man gradually persuaded people that a failed democracy isn’t worth renouncing to a brilliant autocrat; and in both cases, the new guy united a very sensible economic policy with an even more sensible religious one, amassing more and more support as the years go by.

Most of my readers come from the Anglo-Saxon space, where democracy is simply ingrained and every other form of government considered evil. But the rest of the world does not have such robust democratic traditions, and I fully understand them. Democracy is not my religion, Catholicism is.

Give me Putin over Yeltsin, and Benito Mussolini over Luigi Facta (who wasn’t even the worse of them) every day.