Biden or Benito?

[Legion]

There’s a tendency today to see Benito Mussolini as a pathetic sideshow, an incompetent blusterer who went from Adolf Hitler’s idol to his lapdog.

Yet in many ways, Mussolini’s notion of fascism has become increasingly dominant in much of the world, albeit in an unexpected form: in the worldview of those progressives who typically see “proto-fascism” lurking on the Right.

Mussolini, a one-time radical socialist, viewed himself as a “revolutionary” transforming society by turning the state into “the moving center of economic life”. In Italy, fascism also brought with it, at least initially, an expanded welfare state much as we see today.

Indeed, Mussolini’s idea of an economy controlled from above, with generous benefits but dominated by large business interests, is gradually supplanting the old liberal capitalist model.

In the West, for example, the “Great Reset,” introduced by the World Economic Forum’s Klaus Schwab, proposes an expanded welfare state and an economy that transcends the market for the greater goal of serving racial and gender “equity”, as well as saving the planet.

Wherever it appears, whether in the early 20th century or today, fascism — in its corporate sense — relies on concentrated economic power to achieve its essential and ideological goals.

In 1922, for instance, large corporations and landowners helped finance Mussolini’s Black Shirts for their March on Rome. Confindustria, the leading organisation of Italian industrialists, was glad to see the end of class-based chaos and welcomed the state’s infrastructure surge.

Capitalist countries have historically resisted such concentrations of power, but this process seems inexorable after a pandemic which devastated small businesses yet saw the ultra-rich grow richer and the largest firms record eye-watering profits.

A handful of giant tech corporations now account for nearly 40% of the value of the Standard and Poor Index, a level of concentration unprecedented in modern history.

Companies like Amazon, with influence over a vast array of industries, from online retail to cloud computing, the food business, media and even space travel are echoes of Mussolini's public-private partnerships. Once such firms may have adhered to free market capitalism, but they have increasingly grown to see the value of a larger, more centralized and pervasive state.

This parallels with the alarming transformation of the DEMOCRATS, the putative “party of the people” , now increasingly a subsidiary of the corporate elite.

Among financial firms, communications companies and lawyers, Biden out-raised Trump by five-to-one or more.

Today’s oligarchs are particularly keen on the progressive non-profit sector, which provides important support for their political and social advocacy — a means for them to make politically correct statements about 'climate change', gender and race, while still obtaining enormous profit margins and unprecedented wealth.

But whereas the old fascism sought greater prosperity, its new form, at least in the West, supports only an expanded welfare state that keeps the beleaguered middle and working classes both quiescent and stripped of aspiration.

Indeed, the widely hailed Club of Rome report in 1972 — “The Limits to Growth” — was financed not by green activists but by the Agnelli family from Fiat, once a linchpin of Mussolini’s original corporate state.

And these woke oligarchs, like their fascist counterparts before them, see little use for democracy. Eric Heymann, a senior executive at Deutsche Bank, suggests that to reach the climate goals of Davos, corporations will have to embrace “a certain degree of eco-dictatorship”.

After all, it would be difficult to get elected officials to approve limits on such mundane popular pleasures as affordable air travel, cars, freeways and suburbs with single-family houses, unless they were imposed by judicial or executive fiat.

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Discuss.




https://unherd.com/2021/07/how-the-democrats-fell-for-mussolini/

 

[Legion]

Consider this, from Ackroyd's Innovation:

"Mussolini made short work of his political opposition, altering the electoral law to his party's advantage...he then proceeded to suppress all other political parties and non-Fascist news sources, and locked up political dissenters. By these means, and with the connivance of the elite, Mussolini established a totalitarian Fascist state...It also restricted personal freedom, with the threat of arrest to any intellectual who opposed Mussolini in word or deed."

Now, replace "Mussolini" with Biden, and "Fascist" with DEMOCRAT.

It all fits, doesn't it?


https://www.amazon.co.uk/Innovation-History-England-VI-Book-ebook/dp/B08YZ5M9RF/ref=tmm_kin_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1644714275&sr=8-1

 

[Legion]

Despite their riches and technical know-how, the oligarchic elites face widespread and growing skepticism towards both the traditional and social media outlets under their control.

Similarly, it’s also unlikely many in the middle class will embrace their program of race indoctrination, or accept a marked decline in living standards.

So they need to steal elections to stay in power.

 

[Legion]

Turns out Mussolini and leftists have more in common than they think

NO PROTEST ALLOWED - MUSSOLINI WOULD HAVE BEEN PROUD​

“You’re a fascist!” Today this is a label as commonly hurled as it is poorly understood. President Donald Trump, that progressive New York guy, is a fascist, we’re told.

Then there’s the Antifa (“anti-fascist action”) movement, which “fights” the F-threat by committing violence in the streets like Brownshirts. Well played.

The Online Etymology Dictionary, generally sober in its rendering of information, amusingly writes of “fascism” that it was applied to certain groups’ ideology from 1923 and has been “applied to everyone since the internet.”

In reality, however, the term’s misapplication didn’t start with the virtual world but with virtual history. Yet since I’m fairly sure at least a few of us aren’t fascists, let’s examine what the ideology is, starting with what it isn’t.

Authentic fascism never had, contrary to popular belief, a racial agenda. Its primary founding father, Italian dictator Benito Mussolini, said in 1932, “Race? It is a feeling, not a reality. Ninety-five percent, at least. Nothing will ever make me believe that biologically pure races can be shown to exist today… National pride has no need of the delirium of race.”

The fascists considered racialism destructive of one of their chief aims: national unity. In fact, when Mussolini deferred to Adolf Hitler and enacted some anti-Jewish laws (strictly speaking, these weren’t “racial” laws, but reflected their spirit) just prior to WWII, they were often decried as anti-fascist.

Mussolini had always been a socialist. He’d actually been the chief editor of the Italian Socialist Party’s newspaper Avanti! (in Italian, “Forward!” which, interestingly, became one of Barack Obama’s slogans). He was expelled at WWI’s start—but not for rejecting socialist dogma. Rather, while the party opposed the war, Mussolini was among a group of dissident leftists who wanted to fight Germany and Austria-Hungary to, you might say, “make the world safe for socialism.”

While a spurned child of the ideology, one of its progeny he remained. At the 1914 Milan Socialist Party meeting where his expulsion was announced, he shouted, “You cannot get rid of me because I am and always will be a socialist. You hate me because you still love me.”

He had a point. Vladimir Lenin said before a delegation of Italian socialists in 1922, “What a waste that we lost Mussolini. He is a first-rate man who would have led our party to power in Italy.”

Writer George Bernard Shaw, a Fabian Society socialist, might have seconded this endorsement. He once said of the dictator, “Mussolini was further to the left in his political opinions than any of his socialist rivals.”


















https://observer.com/2017/05/what-is-neo-fascism-democrats-mussolini/

 

[Legion]

UC Berkeley Professor of Political Science Emeritus Anthony James Gregor, known for research on fascism and Marxism, has called Mussolini “a Marxist ‘heretic.’”

Having said this, there’s debate and confusion over whether Mussolini (and Hitler) was left or right largely because the terms themselves are confusing—and relative.

Originating with the French Revolution in 1789, the designations were born because monarchists sat on the right side in the National Assembly, while republicans (that is, those endeavoring to create a republic) occupied the left.

Of course, rightists today don’t espouse monarchism, and American leftists fight republicans—at least the capital “R” variety.

Noting that “right” and “left” correspond with “conservative” and “liberal,” also consider that while 1950s American conservatives were staunchly anti-communist, a conservative in the Soviet Union was a communist.

And today, European “conservatives” are far more “liberal” than ours.

The explanation is that the only consistent definitions of “conservative” and “liberal” are, respectively, a “desire to maintain the status quo” and a “desire to change it;” thus, as the status quo varies from time to time and place to place, so do the actual beliefs represented by the two political terms.

So the first question is not whether fascism is left or right (in fact, its adherents called it “the Third Way”), which can be a distraction.

Before we can place it anywhere on any political spectrum, we must ask: What are actual fascist beliefs?

Do you even know?

 

[Celticguy]

well ion the sense that Benito was a fascist who was, at least somewhat competent while Biden is a fascist who is utterly incompetent then it makes sense.

 

[Legion]

well ion the sense that Benito was a fascist who was, at least somewhat competent while Biden is a fascist who is utterly incompetent then it makes sense.

But both Fascists harnessed the combined power of the state and mega-corporations.

Benito was "Il Duce", and Biden is "ILL Douche" , but the party each led destroyed freedom and democracy.