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military point of view is therefore both interesting for understanding the dynamics of Fascist ideology and its centrality to the development of Fascist foreign policy. In order to assess it, it is particularly interesting to analyse the reports of Italian military attachés in London, mid-ranking officers who enjoyed a direct contact with British military culture. As we will see, they also had a remarkable influence on the higher ranks of Italian military and political elite. Before the Great War, British martial aptitude was widely admired. The Italian attaché in London
Steffek and Francesca Antonini underlined: the biennium 1935–1936 represented a crucial watershed in the history of Italian Fascist ideology [. . .]. Corporativism turned from being seen as the basis of a new and potentially universal economic system to being simply a ‘crutch’ of Italy’s policy of autarky, while the universalistic references closely related to this doctrine now became mere propaganda tools.64 The sincerity of the regime’s support for corporatist ideas abroad has been debated. However, the firm belief that the Fascist model was superior, and that Britain
upset the international balance of power after 1933.3 Much valuable work has also been done on Fascist propaganda abroad. Pier Giorgio Zunino’s comprehensive analysis of Fascist ideology as a 1 2 Introduction global force, for example, placed Mussolini’s foreign policy between ‘Americanism and Bolshevism’ but did not devote much space to Britain.4 While Claudia Baldoli, Francesca Cavarocchi and Tamara Colacicco have described Fascist cultural efforts to use the Fasci Italiani all’Estero and Italian intellectuals in order to reinforce the image of Fascist Italy
Anglophobia in Fascist Italy traces the roots of Fascist Anglophobia from the Great War and through the subsequent peace treaties and its development during the twenty years of Mussolini’s regime. Initially, Britain was seen by many Italians as a ‘false friend’ who was also the main obstacle to Italy’s foreign policy aspirations, a view embraced by Mussolini and his movement. While at times dormant, this Anglophobic sentiment did not disappear in the years that followed, and was later rekindled during the Ethiopian War. The peculiarly Fascist contribution to the assessment of Britain was ideological. From the mid-1920s, the regime’s intellectuals saw Fascism as the answer to a crisis in the Western world and as irredeemably opposed to Western civilisation of the sort exemplified by Britain. Britain was described as having failed the ‘problem of labour’, and Fascism framed as a salvation ideology, which nations would either embrace or face decay. The perception of Britain as a decaying and feeble nation increased after the Great Depression. The consequence of this was a consistent underrating of British power and resolve to resist Italian ambitions. An analysis of popular reception of the Fascist discourse shows that the tendency to underrate Britain had permeated large sectors of the Italian people, and that public opinion was more hostile to Britain than previously thought. Indeed, in some quarters hatred towards the British lasted until the end of the Second World War, in both occupied and liberated Italy.
Franco’s Spain, Hitler’s Germany and Mussolini’s Italy. It is possible to argue that Nazism’s extreme racism, for example, makes it an ideology in its own right and not merely an extreme form of fascism. Fascists themselves have compounded the problem by emphasising, and even glorying in, its non-rational essence. A clear, authoritative, internally consistent exposition of fascist ideology simply does not
project for the re-establishment of the glory of ancient Rome – a notion that would be at the core of Benito Mussolini's Fascist ideology, used to instil a sense of national pride and collective pursuit. The Italian colonial occupation was especially brutal during what is known as the ‘pacification of Libya’ (1922–32) under Mussolini's rule. The atrocities committed in this period include the use of chemical weapons and concentration camps, which resulted in the genocide of the Senussi population in Cyrenaica that was fighting
, 2010: 25). For Copsey this is because the EDL ‘is not driven by a fascist or neo-fascist ideological end goal’, while for Allen (2011: 294), the movement’s successful inclusion of ‘some Jews, gays and others normally excluded by the far right’ is the distinguishing factor. What it ‘is’, however, remains an object of academic, and political, dispute. Jackson (2011a: 7) recognises that the EDL’s self-representation as not traditionally far right, not anti-Semitic and having a multicultural constituency of support and membership is true ‘to an extent’, but he
war Fascist ideology and social policy radically changed the historical path of the Italian nursing profession when compared with the previous 172 A sample of Italian Fascist colonialism courses of nursing studies established in 1906 together with the first training course for nurses of the Red Cross in Milan, and in 1908 with the first psychiatric nurses’ school. In 1925 only women were allowed to attend nursing schools and it was compulsory for students to live together in a boarding-school system for the entire duration of their training. The approach Fascism took
). 28 Finn Stepputat Nevertheless, as Borneman’s and several other chapters in this volume show, the living are often not very successful in their attempts to govern the dead. Borneman argues that the dead, like the Lacanian real, produce affect. This may be seen as having effects in terms of displaced aggressions, repetition compulsion, the compulsive moving around of dead bodies and even the belief that the dead can, and indeed should, be governed. Borneman uses the case of communist leaders and the Marxist ideology, which, in stark contrast to fascist ideologies
the postwar period connected scientific racism and fascist ideologies to the forms of cultural racism that, particularly, black migrants experienced when they started arriving in Italy ( 2013 : 274). My fieldwork was replete with obsessive talk, sometimes directed at women and sometimes emerging in discussions between Neapolitan and migrant men, about women who spent too much time in public spaces such as street markets, where their presence was not respectable and was potentially threatening to their honour. The status of women in public spaces was connected to