Behind the Bastards - Behind the Insurrections - Mussolini's March on Rome: The First Fascist Insurrection

Episode Date: January 14, 2021

Behind the Insurrections Episode 1: Travel back to the very birth of fascism in this episode about the March on Rome. You'll learn how the first trailblazing fascist dictator took power and destroyed a democracy.FOOTNOTES: https://warfarehistorynetwork.com/2018/02/01/benito-mussolini-the-fascist-march-on-rome/ https://www.wnyc.org/story/cautionary-lessons-mussolinis-march-rome/ https://www.wkms.org/post/history-democracy-mussolinis-rise-power-italy#stream/0 https://scholar.valpo.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1241&context=jvbl https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/j-clark-three-way-fight https://books.google.com/books?id=BrjNJoMD9bQC&pg=PA177&lpg=PA177&dq=the+arditi+del+popolo%27s+action+has+to+be+defensive.+but+defense+means+above+all+to+prevent&source=bl&ots=NHbNEGFHWd&sig=ACfU3U1kdM8t-IV8pIREqrxIrH-V_FERXw&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwimk6m8ypruAhUcFjQIHeZnAMoQ6AEwAHoECAQQAg#v=onepage&q=the%20arditi%20del%20popolo's%20action%20has%20to%20be%20defensive.%20but%20defense%20means%20above%20all%20to%20prevent&f=false https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00FWSK9PQ/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_d_asin_title_o01?ie=UTF8&psc=1 Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse look like a lot of guns. But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science?

And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price? Two death sentences in a life without parole. My youngest? I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What's overthrowing my democratically elected state? I'm Robert Evans. This is Behind the Bastards, a podcast about the worst people in all of history. And we are, of course, recording in the immediate wake of what I think can fairly be called an insurrection by fascist-dominated right-wing militants. And in the immediate wake of that, I sat down with my producer Sophie, say hi.

Hello, friends. Not literally sit down together because of the plague, but we got on a text chat and I was like, you know, this fascist insurrection against a democratically elected government has a lot of similarities with other fascist insurrections against democratically elected governments. Perhaps we should talk about the history of fascist insurrections against democratically elected governments in order to better prepare people for what needs to be done in the wake of this to stop them from succeeding the next time. And of course, once we had that idea, the only person we could possibly bring on was our good friend, Jason Petty, a.k.a. Prop. What up? What the lick read? What's up with that failed nation state? How y'all feeling? Quite literally. I think I text Prop and I was like, hey, I want to do this. And like, it was like, yes.

Yeah, no brainer. There's like, there's so like, you know, Robert, myself, anybody else who has like a seventh grade level understanding of history has been like kind of flaring their arms like crazy scientists in every movie. That's like, y'all, the aliens are coming guys. I don't understand how come nobody is seeing us telling y'all we're standing on our heads yelling at you like this is point for point like bar for bar point for point. We've seen this before and I don't understand what you don't understand. Yeah. How did this? Because I've been warning about this for quite a while and that it could happen here that it could happen here and people continuously are like, I can't believe you predicted this is like nobody predicted this. Everyone who was paying attention was like, oh, this is obviously going to happen because thousands of people are promising to do this. Yes, it's like, my favorite one, my favorite meme going around was one with Ron Burgundy. He was like, wow, that escalated slowly over the past 10 years. Yeah.

Like, yeah, I know. I can't believe these people did exactly what they said they was going to do. This is crazy. Yeah, it's it's very frustrating. Yeah. And so, you know, the reason we decided to do this special miniseries behind the insurrections is that I think historical name, by the way, that's what this is called that you're listening to. Insurrection. Yeah. You and I did a similar thing last year when the uprising against the police started where we kind of talked about the history of the police. I thought that was useful to inform people both the context of why folks were angry for a lot of folks who maybe had never really thought that much about the police and didn't understand all the hatred. And I also thought it was useful because understanding, you know, the history of something that you want to fight is useful in fighting it, whether it's the police state or a fascist insurrection. And understanding what other fascists have done throughout history and where they've succeeded and failed and how the people opposing those fascists have succeeded or failed is important both for us to know what's coming next

and to avoid making the same mistakes that other people made in the past that led to them being ruled by fascists, which I'd like to avoid. I would love to avoid that. So, naturally, we're going to start with Rome, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah, we're going to be starting with my old friend Benito M. Big Benny, as no one has ever called him. Big Benny Mo. Yeah, the thing that like, I mean, we're going to get into this, but like off jump that in my hopes to like, you know, help people figure out ways to inroads to, you know, they family members who have been cooked by this like fascist movement is like, is dig inside of you and understand what it feels like to be disenfranchised and what it feels like to feel like you've been left behind by those that are supposed to take care of you.

If you can understand that, you know, coupled with a person having really non powerful antennas to know that they being fed bullshit, you know what I'm saying? I feel like you're like, you're starting to get an owner's manual as to like how to not let yourself in you trying to stop a fascist regime, not in sensing and creating martyrs out of them and confirming their feelings that, you know, everybody against them. You know what I'm saying? It's just, it's a matter of like getting behind that and being like, okay, if this election was stolen, that would suck. You're right, that would suck if that was true. Yeah. Not though. It's not.

Yeah. It's not. It's just not though. It's like, we'll cue it on. Yeah. I mean, if a bunch of Satan worshipping pedophile wizards were eating all of our children, that would be a problem. We should fight that. But that's not happening.

It's just not true, bro. Yeah. Yeah. The real pedophiles in power are more like the guy you think is the second coming. In. Yeah. So let's talk about old Benito Mussolini. I started thinking about Benito as I was watching live stream footage of people breaking through the capital barricades and into offices with zip ties and weapons.

And I know that while this was happening, in the immediate wake of it, a lot of people started bringing up historic comparisons. And unfortunately, I think a ton of those historic comparisons were bad, were the wrong ones to make. And a good example of this would be a ton of people who compared the events of the sixth to Kristallnacht, the night of broken glass. Yeah. And I think everyone here knows what that is. For those that don't listening, it was a pogrom, which is a racial, a mass racial assault, like on members of a specific race, basically. Yeah. That was instituted by the Nazi government against Jewish people in Germany.

Hundreds of synagogues and Jewish owned businesses were burnt down in the space of a night. Hundreds of people were killed. And it was a nationwide racial attack carried out at the government's behest. Right? Yeah. That's not what we saw on the sixth. That's not this. Right?

That's not this. Yeah. And yeah, probably the most prominent person to make that comparison was our current governor or former governor of California and current Arnold Schwarzenegger, Arnold Schwarzenegger, whose video otherwise had some really good stuff in it about. Yeah, I was going to say, I kind of dig it in the sense of like the way he was talking about the remorse of people that was a part of it. I think if he was going to pull the Austria card, like it would have been a better, although at least Lini's a better parallel. But yeah, when, when they burnt the parliament right before. Yes.

Yeah, that's a more better comparison. You know what I'm saying? Yeah. Then Kristallnacht. Yeah. Absolutely. But yeah. Kristallnacht has great TikTok content.

He's got like a pet donkey that falls him around. I'm sure he does. Look at him. I'm sure he does. For a laugh. He's definitely like the, like the meme of like, you know, when it's heartbreaking that the worst person you know, it's an excellent point. It makes a really good point. It's a great point, bro.

Yeah. And I think his best point was just like how, you know, the victims of fascism continued long after the war, including the children of Nazis who, you know, were abused by parents and stuff. Great point to make. Wrong about Kristallnacht. Yeah. When we're talking about actually good historic comparisons and valuable ones to what happened on the 6th in DC, there are a few. One of them, as you noted, was the burning of the Austrian parliament, which I think we're going to talk about a bit later in this series. But other folks have kind of much more aptly, I think, compared what happened in the 6th to the Munich beer hall push, which was Adolf Hitler's first attempt to seize power.

And there's a lot of good reasons to compare that to the 6th. It's not really a perfect comparison. None of them are, in part because when Hitler tried to overthrow the government starting in Munich, he was a political rabble rouser with no power who was trying to spark a mass revolution. And on January 6th, it was like tens of thousands of the president's fans, including a lot of police officers, active duty soldiers, and elected leaders who tried to take over the capital. It's a bit different. So if we're looking for a better historic parallel to January 6th, I think we might be better served by going back a year before the 1923 beer hall push when a completely different fascist Benito Mussolini led what came to be known as the March on Rome. A lot of really good comparisons to what's happening, a lot of good lessons in the March on Rome. It's also good before you start is just if you could, it's you never really want to like reach into the past and draw like direct lines, if you will.

But if you could think to yourself just as a general grid, if in the story, you won't decide a Mussolini, you probably on the wrong side of history. I think we can say that completely. So now as you continue, think about your position in this. Yeah. And that might be able to tell you which side of history you should be on right now. And if you're rightfully on the side of history that's like, well, I don't want to stand with Mussolini, which I think the vast majority of people listening to this are already there. I think one of the things this teaches is why the people who didn't want Mussolini to wind up in charge failed. And it's important to know that as well.

So most people are probably broadly familiar of Benito Mussolini. But because of how history went down, he tends to be remembered mostly as like Hitler's ridiculous and kind of sad sidekick, like the least threatening dictator on the Axis side. Mussolini doesn't wind up as like the frightening villain in a lot of movies, right? Yeah. I never thought of it like that. But yeah, because it's like, you're just like, oh, yeah, you Hitler light. Unless you was unless you was in unless you was in Italy. Yeah.

I mean, even then Italy would have been it had been better to be, you know, a Jewish person in Italy than in Germany. Not a high bar, you know, the lowest bar in history, actually. Bare minimum. Yeah. But yes, he gets this kind of reputation of just being like incompetent and the junior partner to Hitler and not very frightening. And that really misses a lot of the history and what what people at the time when Mussolini rose to power thought. Because Hitler actually in some ways idolized Mussolini and he patterned his career off of Mussolini's career. The Munich Beer Hall Putsch was inspired directly by the March on Rome.

Mussolini was not just the first like Mussolini was the first fascist dictator. He was the man who created fascism as a political ideology that actually took power. Right. We talked about Gabriel de Nunzio who kind of invented a lot of the ideas that became fascism and who was a contemporary of Mussolini's. But Mussolini is the guy who made fascism work for the first time. And when I say work, I mean actually seized power, not a good government or anything. He was the first fascist who seized power from a functional democracy. So he's he is not an incompetent buffoon and you kind of you it behooves you to understand how he succeeded in the way that he did.

We're going to do a full set episodes on his life at some point on behind the bastards. But since we're just focused on the March on Rome today, I'm going to give a little cliffs notes of Benito's life prior to him coming to power. So Benito Amalcar Andrea Mussolini, which is quite a name. Yo, that is a mafia boss right there. Except for the Andrea, right? Except for the Andrea. That's a little lot. When he got baptized is christening.

They gave him Andrea. Yeah, either that or it's like a boy named Sue's situation. And it turns out that's actually a bad idea. Yeah. Yeah. So he was born on July 29th, 1883 in a small Italian town that I'm not going to try to pronounce right now. His father, Alessandro, was a blacksmith and a socialist. He named Benito after Mexican president Benito Juarez, who's the namesake of Juarez and who was the first indigenous president of Mexico.

And was a famous liberal, you know? I thought that was interesting. I had no idea. Super interesting. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. In 1902.

So that's like his background. He was very left wing, right? Like your parents are naming you after the liberal indigenous president of Mexico. That's quite a thing. That's a flex right there. Yeah. What a pivot. Yeah.

Yeah. This guy is one of the great all time historic pivots, you know? Yeah. In 1902, Benito fled to Switzerland to avoid compulsory military service. He became active in the Italian socialist movement from afar and he grew obsessed with the writing of syndicalist Georges Morel, who believed that capitalist democracy needed to be overthrown by a combination of general strikes and violent direct action. So he's a socialist, he's a leftist, but he's a fan of these guys who are like, we need a revolution and violence is okay in that revolution, right? That's like a big chunk of his early ideological upbringing. Yeah.

In 1904, Benito returned to Italy under a general amnesty for draft dodgers, in exchange for which he had to serve in the military for two years. He did his time. He got out and he became a left wing journalist and a firebrand, participating in a 1911 riot, protesting Italy's imperialist war in Libya. He did night or five months in prison for this. So not just like a talker, like he puts a skin in the game and he does time protesting an imperialist war. Dang. All right. Okay.

Yeah. Yeah. He was not like wishy-washy about this stuff, I guess is the point I'm making. So as a hardcore leftist, Mussolini hated the monarchy, which in Italy at the time was similar in its kind of power to the British monarchy. Italy is a constitutional monarchy at this point. Okay. It's not just a democracy, but they've got a king and he has some power. In 1912, Mussolini stated, the king is nothing more than a useless citizen and the Italian flag is fit only for a dung heap.

Sheesh. Yeah. Burn it all down, Mussolini. Burn it all down kind of guy. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Very much.

Okay. Very much. Now it may seem odd that the first fascist dictator was a committed left wing activist of his youth, but it's really not that strange. This is a pattern that we see repeating itself over and over throughout the history of fascism. In more recent times, just to talk about stuff that's happened in the last like four years, Jason Kessler, who's the fascist who planned and organized the first Unite the Right Rally in Charlottesville, got his start in political activism at Occupy in New York. You can find in Unicorn Rights Discord chats him talking about being very into Occupy at the time. Wow.

Andrew R. Enheimer, Weave, who's a neo-Nazi hacker and a prominent member of the fascist movement in this country, claims to have been an organizer at Occupy Wall Street. I found discussions in Unicorn Rights Archive where Weave debates with other Nazis who were there about how Occupy could have been handled differently and been more successful. And for a lot of these Nazis, the failure of the Occupy movement to garner any real change and the ease with which the police swept it aside were major factors in radicalizing these guys to the far right. One fascist that I found in a Discord conversation said, quote, I was at Occupy Wall Street in 2011. It was blackpilling as fuck, by which he means the experience was so disheartening that it pushed him towards fascism. And that's really what we see with Mussolini. He's very involved in left-wing politics. He gets arrested for them and he sees them continue to fail, right?

They don't succeed in overthrowing the government. They don't succeed in pushing the changes that he believes are necessary and it starts to embitter him. I often think that some of that happens in the black community with just also still trying to wrap my brain around. Saw a video of Crips for Trump at the insurrection earlier. It was like Crips for Trump, West Side, something, something. And I could not wrap my brain around how this will work, but I think a lot of it does have to do with the fact that we've tried so hard. We put our flag in the sand with this particular way of approaching political change and it not working. That you're like, well, forget it.

You know, and then like, well, maybe this will work, maybe this going this direction speaks more to like, since the empire, the machine just met us with might and just overpowered us with might because they just, they're just more powerful. Your only recourse is to be like, well, I need to be more powerful than that. I don't know. Yes, yes, that's exactly when you when you're I think you're really on to something like when you're when you're getting it. You're ass kicked. And I think some of this is like, yeah, I think it's probably more common with males who are kind of male. And you get your pride is harmed by getting the shit kicked out of you repeatedly by the repeated failure to win to advance by the sheer strength of your opponents. I do think that that can have the effect of pushing people in that kind of more violent authoritarian direction where you're like, well, I just want to win.

Like, yeah, I wouldn't be surprised if that has if that's a part of what's going on. And I think it is for Mussolini because the switch for him really happens as a result of World War One. So basically what you've got with World War One, Archduke Franz Ferdinand get shot dead along with his wife. And it starts this this series of events right where Austria is going to invade Serbia and Russia is going to come in on the side of backup. And like it starts this whole domino effect. And so there's months between his assassination and the actual outbreak of the war where everyone knows that Europe is gearing up for a war. And prior to that happening, the international left, the communist international largely had been very anti war, very united across national boundaries. But as soon as a mass European war becomes a reality, shit starts to splinter.

There are a lot of folks who had been socialist leftist like workers who instead of kind of siding with workers solidarity are like, well, I'm going to side with my country on this. And, you know, that's not the only thing that's happening. There's also like this, the second international tries to organize like some sort of worker strike or something like there's a couple of ideas about how they might stop the war by organizing workers. And all of these ideas fail. And, you know, all of these ideas fail and Europe lurches towards war. And it's kind of like this moment where this big international left wing movement shows it that it's toothless in the eyes of at least the eyes of a guy like Mussolini. Like we said, like this, we weren't going to let this kind of thing happen. And now it's happening.

Yeah. So that that for one thing is a source of frustration to a lot of people. Mussolini is more directly enraged by something that happens earlier in 1914, something called Red Week, which was when a bunch of workers, there was a big mass workers revolt in Italy that was brutally put down by Italian police and the Royal Army. And this had kind of convinced him that the bourgeoisie leaders of left wing political parties, the actual like liberals and socialists and government didn't really support revolution and he did. So all of this stuff is kind of in the mix, leading to him getting kind of blackpilled to use the words of that other Nazi. And Benito doesn't come out as against the war as a result of this. Instead, he decides to become incredibly pro war because he thinks it's going to accelerate the collapse of the Italian state and lead to a revolution, right? Yeah.

So in mid September, after Italy announced her neutrality in the war, Benito tells the staff of the newspaper he worked at Avanti, which was a socialist paper. That he'd become convinced that war alone could bring revolution to Italy. So yeah, he's kind of like an accelerationist. We need to go to war because that's going to force a revolution. It's the only way. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

When you it's it's I've always in at least in my head, like I've kind of let go of the like linear swing of like, you know, far right, far left in my brain. I know we use that because that's how we understand the world right now. But like, it seems much more like circular to where it's like they ended authoritarianism at the end of the day. They end with a with a strong dude. Like so. So it was crazy. Like, yeah. So like the further left you go, you're still going to end at a dude overpowering everyone.

I think, yeah, I, which I was going to say, which which why, like, I'm now leaning more towards thinking in anarchist ways of being like, you got to get off this loop. It's just this the the whole it's there. We're going to land in the same place at some point. Somebody's going to get oppressed, you know. Yeah. And what your so there's a couple of things, a couple of terms that are used a lot for the kind of thought process that you just explained. One of them is horseshoe theory, which is this idea that the left and the right when you go far enough come around to the same place. And I, I don't subscribe to that because I don't think that left wing ideals and far right ideals are super similar.

But I do think that what you see that looks like that the reason why the far left and say Soviet Russia under Stalin and the totalitarianism of Hitler have a lot of similarities and similar body counts. Is because authoritarians always. That's what I'm trying to say. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. It's the authoritarian left, authoritarian right and Mussolini is always an authoritarian leftist. So it's easy to go authoritarian right. Yeah.

If you're anti authoritarian, it's a lot harder to wind up at that. We should have a dictator. Yeah. Absolutely. Get off the loop because if it ends at authoritarianism, then this is not where I need to be. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. If it ends with like all of the power being in one dude or a tiny number of people's hands.

Yeah. No. That's not what I want. No. It's like somewhere on this horseshoe. I knew that that wasn't a good idea. You know what I'm saying? Yeah.

Yeah. We need to get off the ride and Mussolini is very much just a guy who he's, he's, he's of that. He's, he's always been kind of an authoritarian in part because he is very in love with his own ideas and thinking. Same when he's on the left as when he's on the right. And you know, it's not a clean process of him going from socialist to fascist, but it happens over the course of not just World War One, but ramping up to getting Italy involved in World War One. So Italy had prior to the outbreak of hostilities been allied with the, the central powers. So they should have come in the war on Germany's side, but they very intelligently were like,

no, no, we're not, we're not doing this. This doesn't seem like a good idea. But, and that's why so they say we're not getting involved in the war. And Mussolini becomes a pro war activist trying to force Italy to come into the war on the side of the allies. So fighting against the people they'd been allied with before. And I'm going to quote now from a write up in 1914 to 1918 online, which is a World War One encyclopedia. It's a very good resource on all this. Wow.

After his late October editorial demanded Italian intervention, socialist outrage prompted Mussolini's resignation. So he's forced to resign from the party he'd been a member of. When his pro interventionalist newspaper, Il Popolo d'Italia, the Italian people, I think, is what it stands for. Well done. Yeah, not. Appeared in mid-November, the party expelled him. Mussolini concealed its funding by industrialists, the French, his wealthy lover Margarita Safrati, and possibly Russian agents. For six months, through editorials and demonstrations, he promoted the interventionalist movement, collaborating with syndicalist Filippo Coradoni.

Mussolini demanded war against Italy's allies, Germany and Austria-Hungary, to demolish bulwarks against European Revolution. A victorious war would forge a national mass movement demanding political change. If the government rejected war, Mussolini threatened revolution. Most Italians favored peace, but Vittorio Emanuel III, King of Italy, forced a war declaration on 24th of May, 1915. So there's a lot of interesting stuff that's happening there. One of them is that Mussolini has an ideological reason for wanting war because he thinks it's going to lead to revolution. Another is that he's very likely getting paid by foreign powers in order to incite Italy to come in on their side. Kind of like our ad sponsors who pay us.

You know who does come in sponsored violence against... Accelerate our wallets. Yeah, yeah, accelerate your wallets. Accelerate our wallets, Robert. Accelerate our wallets. There we go. We hit it. We landed on it. Here's products. During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations. And you know what? They were right.

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Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial. To discover what happens when a match isn't a match, and when there's no science in CSI.

How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus? It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Lance Bass, and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991, and that man, Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost.

This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space. 313 days that changed the world. Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Ah, we're back. So yeah, we're talking about Mussolini becomes this very much like interventionalist figure, and there's a mix of ideology and foreign backing that kind of pushes him towards it. And I could talk about websites like the Grey Zone and their weird Russian funding and how they're ostensibly left-wing, but also pro-imperialist intervention when some countries do it. But I won't, because we need to move on to the story of Benito Mussolini, but we've seen these patterns happen recently as well. So Mussolini was obviously just one very prominent voice in favor of war. He was a major pro-war figure, but he was probably not the only one.

And he was probably less influential than Gabriel de Nunzio, who again, we covered in a two-party that I'd recommend people listen to. And to his minimal credit, after helping to monger his nation into war, Mussolini joined the army and fought as a bursiglieri, which is like a marksman. It's almost like a special forces unit, right? Like it's an elite military unit, kind of like the Army Rangers, it seems. And he was wounded at the front by an exploding mortar in one of Italy's many bloody stalemates with Austria. Since he'd become a very public face of the pro-war movement, the king came to visit him twice while he was in the hospital. Benito became a bona fide celebrity, and when the war ended, this provided him with a great deal of political capital. He moved further and further right, pulled in by the spell of Gabriel de Nunzio's proto-fascist rhetoric.

When Italy was screwed over by her allies with the spoils of war, because Italy had come in on the side of the allies, but they didn't really get shit at the end of it. They wanted a lot more territory, more of Austria, and they kind of got fucked out of it. And that pisses off the Italian right, who feel like we fought in blood and lost our comrades for this, and we didn't get anything. And it's because of our lame-ass left-wing government. That's how a lot of folks feel. And Mussolini is basically, by the time the war ends, is pretty entrenched in the growing far-right in Italy. And he supports Gabriel de Nunzio when de Nunzio leads an army of Italian special forces veterans to occupy the city of Fium. And this is, again, we talk about this in our episodes on de Nunzio, but Fium is this city that was part of Yugoslavia.

Yugoslavia gets created at one of World War I ends, and they get this city that Italy thought should be theirs. So de Nunzio leads an army of retired special forces veterans to take it. And they turn it into this weird, it's like this melting pot. Because in, you know, 1918, 1919, you've got all these ideologies that are like still kind of forming anarchism and communism and fascism are popular in a lot of like similar circles of people. There's a lot of interplay between them at this period, because they're all kind of new ideologies being developed. And the same kinds of people who are interested in radical politics are all hanging out together. Yeah. Yeah.

So Fium is like a big melting pot for all these kinds of things. And it winds up being the place where a lot of what becomes fascism gets cooked up. You know, it's like, that's interesting you say it, because like I do picture it as like this like, yeah, like planets for like nebulous balls of gas where it's like, it's all the same elements. And like, you know, you're, it's still like, yeah, all this stuff is still kind of coalescing and stuff like that. But I also think this particular moment in history for me is, is it's, it should be very anchoring or calibrating for all of us because what it tells you is that borders are bullshit. Like, yeah, yeah, like it's not real borders are real. So I'm saying like, somebody just decided that fumes in Yugoslavia like use Yugoslavia came out of this plot of land has been here the whole time. Awesome.

So I drew a line around it. You know what I'm saying? So like a large chunk of the city's population are Italian. Yes. Yeah. All of a sudden they just woke up in another country. You know what I'm saying? So like that to me, like I need everybody to remember that when we're talking about our modern politics, like the shit came from here and it's made up.

Well, and when we're talking about why so many people, because one of the things you see in this period is a lot of people who were anarchists become fascists and a lot of fascists become anarchists. And it's because in part because when you, when you live through a thing where suddenly tens of millions of people wake up one day in a completely different country than they went to sleep in. Yeah. Everything's more malleable, right? Everything's more malleable. And it's not obviously like fascism and anarchism are not similar ideologies, but people who are into both may be drawn to certain similar things. For example, a major aspect of fascism is the cult of action for action's sake, the beauty of violence and physical exertion and speed. And a lot of anarchists were also into direct action, physical violence, fighting.

Like, and so if you've got communities that are kind of embracing this idea of action for action's sake, some of them are anarchists, some of them are fascists, but a lot of times they're going to wind up at the same fucking places. You know, which is kind of you also, if you look at Germany prior to Hitler's rise to power, there were times when the communists and the fascists fought alongside each other against the cops. It happened. It's a thing that occurred. Yeah. Just this understanding that like whatever we have right now isn't working. Exactly. Like I'm saying like, and so you're all going to be in the same space.

Yeah. And a lot of people in fume, they're not, they maybe have called themselves a fascist or an anarchist at the time or a communist. It wasn't really settled in their minds. They just knew that what they had grown up with was wrong, you know? Yes. And yeah, so fume is one of the things that comes out of this experiment in fume is the Italian fascist movement gets like solidified in a lot of ways. But it, it starts before, like there's thinkers pushing it before then. And while Denunzio is off on his adventure in fume, Benito Mussolini forms a fascist party in March 23rd of 1919.

Now, a lot of the impetus behind the early fascists in Italy were demilitarized army veterans and particularly special forces guys. Most of the fighters who accompanied Denunzio to fume were members of the Arditi, which is like the Italian equivalent of like special forces guys. Like they were very elite soldiers. Mussolini had served in an elite unit of marksmen. There were a bunch of like the guys who followed Denunzio, the Arditi were like trench like stormers. They were do like what the German stormtroopers would do. And they were terrifying people. They would go into battle with like knives in their teeth and grenades in both hands, like running directly ahead of artillery barrages.

And like this is where like a lot of that cult of action for action sake. These are adrenaline junkies. That's a huge part of early fascists in Italy and Germany. These are guys who became addicted to adrenaline during the war and can't stop fighting when they get back home. And it's a thing that is a factor in our modern fascist movements, right? A lot of a lot of vets and cops and stuff wind up in that. I'm also interested in just the whenever somebody says I started a political party. I'm like, logistically, what is that look?

Was there like paperwork you file? Like, how do you start? Like, I still think like, yeah, start a party. We'll talk about that in just a second. I want to talk a little bit more about some of these demilitarized vets. Yeah. There's no form online somewhere. Yeah.

Yeah. The RDD had been formed in June of 1917 as a special forces unit in Italy. And they were like when they were like sort of like new, one of their commanding officers addressed the unit. These very young men, most of whom came from a peasant background who had gotten to be very good at fighting, extremely experienced veterans. And he tells his soldiers, you are the first, the best, the future owners of Italy, the new Italian generation, fearless and brilliant. You will prepare the great future of Italy, the smile of the beautiful Italian woman as your award. Yeah, you can't tell. You can't tell no little like young, hungry, violent dude that.

No, exactly. Right. Like you see the seeds of this. Like why so many of these guys become fascists. And as an aside, one of the emblems on their uniform that they wore on their hats was a skull in crossbones, which is the same basic emblem that the Nazi SS, which started as like Nazi street fighters before they were a military unit, you know, what they wore, right? Like a lot of the same shits happening.

These guys, the RDD are famous for giving the stiff armed Roman salute, the Sig Heil, as most people know it. Like so a lot of this stuff, again, you see it all cooking up in World War One. And by the time the war came to an end, the liberal political elite in Italy knew that these young guys were terrifying, that like, oh, shit, we trained up an entire generation of incredibly violent and competent at-violence young men. And now we have nothing for them to do. And that they realized this is a problem. They disband the RDD like immediately after the war ends. It takes less than a month.

But these guys are still all out there and they have no plan for demilitarizing them. And I could again make some comments about what happened in Iraq after we dissolved the entire Iraqi army. Yes, I was gonna say like, we living in that now. It's never a good idea. You have to take care of these people afterwards. Otherwise, they murder people in the streets sometime or become the nexus of a fascist political party. So again, four months after the armistice ended World War One, three months after the RDD are disbanded. On March 23, 1919, Benito Mussolini puts together a group of 100 angry young men,

a mix of Italian war veterans, a lot of them special forces type guys, former socialist elected leaders and journalists. They meet in Milan and they declare the formation of the fascist party. So that's how it happens. You get 100 dudes together and you're like, we're a fucking political party now, start recruiting. And one of Benito's first moves is to start recruiting from the disaffected ranks of former soldiers. He brings in hundreds of these guys and he reorganizes them into paramilitary squads. Uniformed in black shirts and red fez caps.

Mussolini's black shirts start going after their political opponents in the street. Now, in May. Yeah. That's just like the formula, Doc. Find somebody angry and give them a uniform. Give them a uniform. Tell them it's OK to go out and beat the shit out of people they already don't like. Yeah, I'm already angry.

I'm already pissy and you say those dudes are your problem. And there's in any society that has just gone through a war and is dealing with economic inequality, which Italy is at this period and economic collapse and incompetent political leadership, you will be able to find tens. Sorry, you will be able to find tens of thousands of those. Yeah, I'll make this my whole life. Absolutely. Oh, whatever.

Fred Perry shirts. Fuck it. Let's do it. Yeah. I'll storm the capital. Like, yes. It's very easy. Um, yes.

So Mussolini forms the fascist party. He starts organizing all these squads of black shirts. And for an idea of how fast this gets out of hand. In 1919, Mussolini starts the fascist party with 100 men. By 1921, there were 300,000 members. Sheesh. Yeah. So I'm going to pause here for another little rant about modern anti-fascism,

because this is something that's also relevant to us. Over the last four years, since Antifa became a household name after the first Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, liberal celebrities and politicians have repeatedly urged people not to confront fascists in the streets. Some have even complained about doxing, which is the public naming and shaming of fascist activists who are caught in the wild doing Nazi stuff. Now, the general argument tended to go something like this. People showing up to fight them just emboldens them and brings more of them out.

Ignore them and they'll go away. This was more or less the attitude of most but not all American liberals throughout much of the Trump administration. Antifa tended to be condemned as often as groups like the Proud Boys. Police were given a free hand to use violence on anti-fascists, while fascist street movements were ignored or directly enabled by law enforcement. And by political parties, well, a political party. These organizations, as a result, grew steadily in power and reach for several years.

Now, on January 2nd, 2021, liberal activist Amy Siskind tweeted, If you live in D.C., stay off the streets on January 6th. Let the D.C. police take care of the white supremacists like they did in Oregon yesterday. I actually think it will be fun to watch LOL. Woo! LOL. Yeah. Not a take that aged well.

Woo! Mm-hmm. Woo! Yeah. Yeah. Now, when anti-fascists say fascist movements have to be confronted immediately and often with physical force, they're not always, at least, using bluster or bravado. They're certainly adrenaline junkies within the ranks of men.

Totally. I've met a few of those people. Absolutely. But that's not entirely or even mostly what that is. It is, in fact, a calculation based on a century of documented history. Yeah. Again, from 100 to 300,000 in about two and a half years. Yeah.

Wow. Because ain't nobody say nothing. Yeah. Because not enough was said. Or not enough was said. Yeah. Yeah. It's crazy when you're dealing with, like I said, you are already angry.

You're already like, all you understand is might. And it's like you can't reason with somebody that only understand might. Yes. But then if I go meet you with might and I don't beat you. Yeah. Then I, we all wasted our time and you, you feel vindicated because I wasn't able to stop your, it's just, yeah, this, the whole, the whole concept just puts everybody in a pickle. It's not an easy thing to solve.

Yeah. You can't solve it. You know what I'm saying? Yeah. I'd like, I mean, The best solution is to oppose them with overwhelming numbers because that actually drastically diminishes the amount of violence that there will be because none of these guys want to get into a fight if they're outnumbered 300 to one.

That's not when the violence happens. It's when they have the numbers or there's parody of numbers, you know? Yeah. Yeah. And that's why people were saying like, what if tens of thousands of people who showed up in the streets of DC to protest, I don't think they would have made it through the capital barricades. Now it's a pandemic.

None of this is a simple situation and it wasn't simple in Italy. And we'll talk, we're going to talk now about the anti-fascist resistance in Italy. Because in Italy, like Italian fascism did face substantial resistance from anarchists and other anti-fascists. And we're about to talk about why that didn't wind up working out. Much of the anti-fascist resistance in Italy also came from members of the Arditi, from other like elite soldiers who just like weren't Nazis, right? Yeah.

Like hadn't, or fascists who hadn't been pushed right, who'd gone left instead, or who just didn't still believed in the idea of democracy. Yeah. Because again, anti-fascists in Italy, there's a mix of like the hard left, but also just like people who are Republican, right? And I mean that in like the sense of, I support a Republican form of government. Not like our Republicans. Yeah.

Not like a modern Republican. Yeah. Totally different. Yeah. So the inciting incident for the violence between anti-fascists and fascists in Italy is generally seen as having been an attack Mussolini ordered on April 15, 1919 against the newspaper he used to write for, Avanti, which was the socialist party newspaper. Now Italian fascists were courageous and often well organized, but they had to contend with

not just fascists, but the police and the army. This meant that the deck was stacked against them from the beginning. Meanwhile, events in fume caused Mussolini to realize that he had an advantage in the fact that the police and the army were inherently sympathetic to fascists. So again, we talked about Dononzio's occupation of fume in another episode, but a brief refresh here is worthwhile. In short, he occupies fume for about 15 months. There's all sorts of art and weird sex and political churning.

Yeah. Things go a little wild. And eventually the king of Italy like is forced to do something. So King Victor Emmanuel III, whose nickname was Little Sword, because he's a tiny guy. At least he. Why dude? All things to be called. I know.

Right. Little Sword. Little Sword. Yeah, yeah, you know, I mean, they're Italians. You know what they're saying. Yeah. That's called it. You can't be the king and called Little Sword.

You got to like, dang, that's. He's not a very good king, so he's very sympathetic to what Dononzio is doing. He wants Italy to control fume, right? So he thinks that Dononzio and his proto-fascists are in the right, but also fume went to Yugoslavia by international treaty and he's not about to go to war with the rest of Europe over a city of 60,000 people. So he has to send in the army and navy to clear Dononzio out in December of 1920. Now after this, Dononzio's spell over the Arditi and the other really hardened war veterans

who had like gone to him en masse, like their, his spell over them is broken and they switched their allegiance to Mussolini. So these guys, the best fighters like Mussolini's early guys aren't really as competent. The people who had taken fume who were like really actually hard and dedicated to fucking shit up. They make those people start swarming over to Mussolini en masse after December of 1920 and they expand the ranks of the black shirts significantly. And Mussolini doesn't just benefit in that way.

He also takes a really important lesson away from what happens in fume. And I'm going to read a quote from the warfare history network who did a great write up on all of this. This is them describing what Mussolini learns from this occupation. The police would often overlook fascist depredations in favor of attacking their traditional leftist enemies, the socialists. The police would also fire on opponents of the monarchy. More importantly, the Duce observed, which is Mussolini's nickname, so would the military.

Therefore, he realized he had to win over the king, the police and the armed forces by a clever mix of both public bluster and behind the scenes old fashioned political maneuvering to attain appointed or elective office by legal means. In other words, Denunzio, he realizes Denunzio is able to get this far and occupy the city because the army wasn't willing to fight him. The police weren't willing to stop him while he was marching there because they're sympathetic. But when Denunzio put himself in opposition to the Italian crown and the will of the government, the police and the army cracked down.

They did their duty because they're loyal to the state inherently. So if he's going to win, he can't be fighting them and he can make use of the fact that they're sympathetic if he just becomes part of the government. That's the way Mussolini realizes fascism is not going to win by a revolution. It's going to win by democratic means because the deck is stacked in our favor if we try it that way. If we try to like lead a violent revolution, they'll murder us like they would anyone trying to lead a violent revolution.

If we become part of the government, they'll help us crush our enemies and we'll gain power. Dude, yeah, the finessing because it's yeah, it's when you lay it out, it's pretty logical. You know, like, yeah, a monarch, we're talking about something that's lasted thousands. It's in their DNA, dog. Like you can't, you know what I'm saying, like just it's too, it's like it's too much to ask. Yeah. You know what I'm saying?

That's too much to ask of these people to try to like go against their very nature to be like, but if you, if you include the crown, oh no, you keep your king, we're just going to get rid of the left. Yeah. Like them anyway. Do you help us kill them? Like, yeah. You're a fascist now.

Yeah, exactly. It's very sad. And this is again, why I think people need to have more of the kind of like respect for Mussolini as opposed to seeing him as this buffoon is he's the first. He figures it out. He figures out how fascists are going to win anyway. So Mussolini decides, okay, I have to, I can't do with the anarchists and the communists and the left to do and try to like overthrow the government.

That's not going to work. My path to victory is going to be finding a way into the government. And this was not hard for him to do. He runs for office and in May of 1921, he's elected to the chamber of deputies in Rome, along with 34 other fascist party members. That is quick. Very quick and they're kind of in the middle of the pack in terms of how many elected leaders they have, but they're, they're in the government now.

And Mussolini barely ever showed up in chamber because he thought any governing body based around him compromising was dumb and not worth listening to, but he liked the legitimacy that elected office gave him and his party. And it's not a coincidence that 1921 is also the year when the Royal Italian Army joined the police and cracking down on anti-fascists because now the fascists are part of the government, right? So we can. Yeah.

Now we are guys becoming an elected leader also gave Mussolini immunity from prosecution while he was in office. This was helpful because while the fascist party gained electoral power, Mussolini's black shirts were increasingly committing murder. And I'm going to quote now from a study in the Journal of Values Based Leadership. Fascists agitated against the left in streets and neighborhoods across Italy. Socialist offices, institutions and party newspaper headquarters were attacked and burned. Militias organized throughout the country in anti-Bolshevik crusades, breaking up strikes

and fighting labor unions and farmer co-ops. The fascist squads dressed in black shirts and uniforms were supported by the local police, landowners, merchants and industrialists. They used violence to destroy any organization they felt could be an opposition to the doctrine of fascism. Thousands of people were beaten, killed or forced to drink castor oil and run out of town. Hundreds of union offices, employment centers and party newspapers were looted or burnt down.

In October of 1920, after the election of a left administration in Bologna, fascists invaded the council chamber causing mayhem and nine deaths. The council was suspended by the government later. So again, a left wing administration is elected in this city. This invade the council and kill nine people and it's suspended by the government. Later, socialists and Catholic deputies were run out of parliament or had their houses destroyed. The two black years, 1921 to 1922, destroyed opposition to the fascists.

Union organizations were crushed. The Fedetera, farmers co-op, shrank from some one million members to less than 6,000 in less than five years. Unable to defend basic democratic rights or prevent the criminal activities of a private militia that operated openly and nationwide, the state had lost all credibility. Yo gang bang it. Any of that sound familiar? Yes, it does.

Yes. It's like, oh, God, doc, like you as something as something that fascinated me as you was reading this is like really helping you get into the brain of like a fascist to where it's like the government's not the head but an appendage. Yeah. Like you're just, you're a tool that I wield just like the population, the labor unions, the military, the street guys, they're all just appendages. These are arms, they're tentacles, but your means to an end.

So I'm getting into the government not because I feel like that means I made it. It's just, no, I just need to wield the government for my, and that like, to me, that's like a, you just like, oh, it's like your relationship is transactional. Like it's a functional. This isn't the goal. I just need that. You're my sword. And I'm like, yes, yes, exactly the government is just a sword.

Yeah. Yeah. This is my weapon that I use on you. It's not a list of, as I think a lot of liberal seat, it's not a series of obligations. It's not a social contract. It's a gun. It's a gun. Yeah.

It's a gun. And when you, yeah, that's crazy. They listen. These, these gangsters, y'all. Everything we just read that the Black Shirts did has been the goal for years of the American fascist movement, not just of groups like the Proud Boys, but of more extreme and explicitly Nazi organizations. You can see evidence of this in attempted actions of men like Coast Guard Lieutenant

Christopher Hassan, who was caught with an arsenal and a list of Democratic lawmakers he planned to murder. This is very much what groups like the Proud Boys wanted to do to left-wing organizations nationwide. It's why you saw so many groups of right-wing counter protesters from malicious show up at BLM rallies, right? Yeah. Before 2020, they were showing up at left-wing anti-fascist events.

It's what you saw during the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, leftists surrounded and assaulted en masse for standing against fascists. One of the great successes of the anti-fascist movement in the United States that was not something that we saw in Italy has been the fact that they actually did succeed in the widespread disruption of particularly the leadership cast of different fascist organizations. Especially everyone involved in planning Unite the Right had their life ruined, and most of them are no longer relevant on the streets. Nobody talks about Jason Kessler anymore.

Nobody talks all that much about Richard Spencer anymore. Some of them are in jail like, fuck, what's that guy's name? The crying not, Chris Cantwell. That was homie that got kicked off a tinder? Yeah, I think that happened to him too, and a lot of them like Richard Spencer's drowning in legal fees from lawsuits from people, and in 2018, not just angry at court cases, but angry at the fact that his speeches were continuously disrupted by anti-fascist activists, Richard Spencer complained that having these gatherings was no longer fun and quote, Antifa is winning.

Now, he wasn't precisely right about that because January 6th showed that the fight is very far from won. But Spencer was beaten, and most of the original wave of fascist leaders, the people who wanted to do what Mussolini did, whose goal was to do what Mussolini did, guys like Spencer, they've been fucking sidelined, which means that most of the people who are prominent now have not been prominent in a position of leadership for all that long. So while you have groups like the Proud Boys that have been around this whole time, militias that go back quite a while and more extreme groups that go back quite a while, a lot of

the leaders have been disrupted one way or the other, have had their lives fucked up, and it's stopped them from doing in some ways what maybe they might have otherwise done. It's stopped them from gaining as much power. It stopped their organizations from being as cohesive. Some organizations have been shut down like Identity Europa. So this has been, if we want to look at like successes of a modern anti-fascist movement, that's been one of them. And I think we can credit that for the fact that the attack on the Capitol on the 6th was

not better organized or more cohesive because there has been disruption of these movements. I want to know what else would be a disruption of our movements right now, Robert. That was horrible. Is going to an ad break. Capitalism. I really didn't know. Because that is going to disrupt my train of thought significantly, yeah. I don't like that I decided to do that, but America.

It happened. I'm going to eat a chip. That's a good call. Everybody eat a chip. During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations, and you know what, they were right. I'm Trevor Aronson and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys. As the FBI sometimes, you got to grab the little guy to go after the big guy.

Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation. In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver. At the center of this story is a raspy voiced, cigar-smoking man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse was like a lot of guns. He's a shark. And on the gun badass way, nasty sharks. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying

to get it to happen. And Alphabet Boys on the iHeartRadio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences in a life without parole.

My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus. It's all made up. Welcome to CSI On Trial on the iHeartRadio App, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get

your podcasts. I'm Lance Bass, and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991, and that man, Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message

that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space, 313 days that changed the world. Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeartRadio App, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. We're back. So, Prop, I think you had something on your mind before we...

Damn it. What the hell was I going to say? Thanks, Sophie. We're not to add break. Can you wait a shift? What was I going to say? Oh, there's something that I think these all-school fascists did, all-school, wow, that these new guys haven't done.

Yeah, I think that's... It's one of those things. It's a fine distinction, because I do think there's a lot of value in showing these people as as absurd and as sad as they are. You have to do it without also making them feel like they're not a threat, which is hard. Yes. Uh-huh. And thankfully, I think one of the positives of how bad everything went on the sixth is

that as absurd as it is, and one of the difficulties about talking about this movement to people for a while has been that folks were like, okay, well, these are just a bunch of kooks on the internet wearing dumb t-shirts about Q. Why should I take this seriously? Like, that's why you should take it seriously, because they're that crazy. Yes, you just... Yeah, it's something again like... They're dangerous.

Yes. When you... That's what I said earlier. It's like somebody hungry and angry, like, if somebody tell you they willing to die, believe them. You know what I'm saying? Like, you should believe them. You take...

You underestimate something you learn living in just the inner city. You don't underestimate anybody. Like, if they presented it to you like, I just... I don't know how hungry you are. I might look like you're lunch. Now, if I can overpower you, or is a whole other scenario, but you write like, I'm not going to underestimate you. And I really feel like, you know, fast-forwarding or yeah, bringing us back to now is that I'm

not sure, you know, oh, oh, oh, oh, Joe Biden really understand how serious your situation is. I don't think he does. They was going to kill you because like, I don't think you understand. That meant somebody coming to a Capitol building with a Viking horn, that man don't care about his life. He going to kill you. Yeah.

Exactly. And I think, I don't know, that is again, one of the problems is I think a lot more people are taking it seriously, but I don't think Joe Biden is. I don't think... I don't think you... I don't think you understand, bro. Yeah. I don't think you understand the severity of the situation.

It's not done on the 20th big dog. No. Like, we're not done. Yeah. There's a bunch of people out there who, if they had gotten, who, if they get their hands on you, will do great harm to you. And they almost did it once in their heads, at least, you know, practice run on me. Yeah.

So let's talk about... We got a little bit of a tangent there, but I want to talk about the Italian anti-fascist. So we just talked about kind of what I see as one of the big successes of the American anti-fascist movement. I want to talk about why the Italian anti-fascist movement did not succeed. So the Italian anti-fascists began to raise their own proper army in July of 1921. Because again, the fascists had an army. The Blackshirts were an army, and it was doing great damage to not just like anarchists,

but to all left-wing movements around the country. So they formed their own army. The Arditi del Popolo, like the people's Arditi, I think. So again, they're still using that norm. A lot of them are veterans. And they were a heterogeneous mix of anarchists, syndicalists, socialists, communists, republicans, and other non-authoritarian ideologies. The Arditi del Popolo were popular among the lower classes, among poor Italians, because

they had no party affiliations, and they offered protection from the fascists, who were basically a violent gang. Now there were other militia-style groups that confronted fascists, including the Arditi Rossi, which was a communist organization. But the local communist party forbade them from allying with the anarchists and the republicans and the like, because like, you guys aren't our friends either, right? This is again, you see this happening in Germany. Now there were communists who were part of the Arditi del Popolo, but they weren't like

party communists, you know? There's a difference between those two things. And communists in this era is used a lot for people who were like very anti-authoritarian. A lot of folks would consider them basically anarchists today, and also for people who were like Stalinists, you know? And they weren't Stalinist yet, because it was, you know, 19... I was like, wait. 21.

But like, yeah, that's where they were headed. Yeah. So, on July 25th, 1921, the Arditi del Popolo held their first national congress. One of their leaders, a guy named Argo Secondari, outlined the organization's goals in a speech. And this is Argo here. The Arditi del Popolo's action has to be defensive. But defense means above all to prevent and to render impossible any harm that can be caused by the adversary.

The Arditi del Popolo do not carry out punitive expeditions, but perform acts of justice. They do not carry terror into the population, but defend the people and organize their security. That is why the Arditi del Popolo welcome members of various parties and contain representatives of all political beliefs. They do not intend to make politics, but leave this to the already existing parties and economic organizations. The Arditi del Popolo must act like a worker's army and give the proletariat defense and protection.

Oh, that's not going to work. Yeah. Yeah, they tried. Now, you want to guess why it didn't work? They had no actual goals. They were just like, they're like, oh, no, there's no, in my head, I'm like, there's no platform. You just said, we're going to lead that to the government.

Y'all, we're just going to make sure it's like, no, full of governments. Compromise. Anyway, tell me the answer. That is a great, that is a great, you know, that didn't even occur, but you're right. Like these guys are saying our only goal is to defend you from the fascists, but that's not nearly as popular as saying, hey, here's what we, we're the fascists. Here's what we believe. Here's our platform.

Yeah. We have this army, right? Yeah. Like that is, that is a very good point. Like you, like you said, they're leaving the platform up to the government who is not on their side. They don't like you. Yeah.

Yeah. Now, that's not everybody, right? There's a lot of anarchists and stuff who aren't saying like, I think we should leave it to the government, but they are saying like, I'm not going to, I think that fighting fascism with these other people is more important than, you know, pushing my own political beliefs in this, in this area, which is, I think a respectable thing to take, but it was a problem that there was not a concerted organized counter left-wing movement that was like, that had like a solid platform to the extent that the fascists did, right?

There were different left-wing groups that confronted them and had platforms, but it was not like what, it was not on the same, on the same scale, you know? And that's a problem that anti-fascists still have today, right? There's a strength in saying like, hey, if you're a communist, if you're an anarchist, if you're just a libertarian who's not an authoritarian, if you're a Democrat, like come join us. We're just trying to fight the fascists, but there's a weakness in, well, but also we don't agree on anything other than that.

Totally. Yeah. And then it's like, okay, cool. So what if you win? Yeah. What do we do after that? Yeah. Or how do you win?

If they have a thing they believe that they're fighting for and you're mainly fighting against them, that is true. There's a good point to that. And there's obviously, there's a lot of anti-fascists who do, who wrap their anti-fascism in, this is part of the struggle against capitalism. This is part of the struggle for a better world. This is part of a revolutionary. That's a lot of it today.

And those people did exist in Italy at the time, but this large organized, the Arditi del Populo, isn't really doing that. And it's part of their downfall, I guess, because the government starts spying on them. As is always the case, whenever this organized in any government. Government undefeated, boy. Yeah. Italy's FBI equivalent actually did confirm in a report to the government that the Arditi del Populo had, quote, only one principal aim that is to react against fascism with

the same means that are employed against them, i.e. armed defense. So the, the Italy's like FBI equivalent is like, these guys are only there to, for defensive purposes. But despite this, the government orders a crackdown on the Arditi del Populo. They enforce anti-paramilitary laws against them. They dissolve local cells. They imprison many leaders and members. And by October, the organization is essentially defunct.

Now, no such actions were taken against the black shirts. And as a result, by the end of 1921, Mussolini's fascist party had more than a quarter of a million members or like 300,000 members, something like that. Yeah, bro. This is one of those situations where like, yeah, your house is getting broken into and you call the police and the police arrest you. Yeah. Like, bam, this is my house.

Like I'm telling you, I'm not the problem. I don't understand this. I'm telling you, this is the issue and we're going to book them, Dano. It's like, oh man, like, I feel like, I don't know, that's what it sounded like to me. I'm like, you infiltrating the wrong hood right now. Yeah. The police crack down pretty in the army, cracked down exclusively on the anti-fascists. And the fascists are allowed to continue to organize.

And they say, like, they use the same laws against them. They could have used on the fascists for having the black shirts. They just don't choose. They choose not. And especially, and a part that don't make sense and continues to not make sense is, like you said, the fascists are telling you they platform. This is our plan. We finna overthrow you.

And put all our guys in power. And that's our dude. That's our plan. Mm hmm. Oh, you want our side? OK, cool. Like, yeah. Yeah.

It's because they it's, you know, it's it's it's because hatred of the left unites the fascists and the people who wouldn't necessarily be whole hog in on fascism, but are because they hate the left. Which is, you know, why this this keeps happening and why, yeah, it's it's it's frustrating. We deal with versions of the same problem today. And this is why I don't suggest people who are talking about, like, well, in the wake of the sixth, we need a new anti-domestic terrorism statutes, like that's only going to be used on the left.

Like they'll do they'll use it once on a couple of proud boys and then it will be used against leftist for decades. That's the way it's going to happen. And Muslims, you know, anyone who's not a white conservative, oh, man. So as we know, the problem is white people. Yeah. Yeah. Although in Italy, white people, basically everybody's white, so that's really pretty

easy to say. Yeah. Yeah. So I'm just kidding. By the best is listeners. I'm just kidding. I'm much more nuanced than that. I'm not kidding behind the bastard's listeners.

So 1921, end of 1921, early 1922, the anti-fascist resistance has been heavily, like, not completely eliminated, but very badly broken. The fascists are ascendant. They have hundreds of thousands of members. They have elected leaders in government. Now, again, they're kind of middle rung when it came to their actual number of elected leaders. They're not in charge at all.

But Benito didn't care about how many actual elected deputies they said. He famously stated, I prefer 50,000 rifles to 50,000 votes. What mattered to him was having a presence in the halls of power, which would enable him to get those rifles on his side. And of course, the government's already shown that they're going to let him accrue rifles while they stop his opponents from getting rifles. Yeah. Now, Mussolini starts in 1922, sketching out the dimensions of an ambitious and daring

plan for a power grab. He had spent the last year or so placing strategic groups of fascists around the country, replacing shattered left-wing trade unions with their fascist equivalent, which allowed him to organize postal workers, cab drivers, and other working communities. He expanded the black shirts into a force of tens of thousands, a veritable paramilitary army. On October 16th, 1922, he convened a meeting in Milan with his most trusted deputies, including the three commanders of the black shirts and two retired Italian army generals.

He announced that he was planning to organize a mass march on Rome. He would gather a force of tens of thousands of black shirts and march to occupy the capital and force a change of government. At this stage, Mussolini did not think that he was going to be the head of that government. Instead, his goal was to force a coalition, a liberal prime minister with five fascist ministers, basically like cabinet secretaries kind of, who would be the real power behind the scenes. So he wanted to have a liberal like in front and have it all be run by fascists, right?

So the actual inspiration for the march on Rome came not from Mussolini, but from the secretary of the national fascist party, Michel Bianchi. Bianchi wanted an armed fascist insurrection to force the liberal ruling class to hand over power to Mussolini himself, rather than even paying lip service to the idea of liberal democracy. And Bianchi eventually like convinced everyone to go with his plan. Now true to form, Mussolini took credit for it later, claiming that the march, the plan for the march on Rome had come to him after a rally in September when his supporters

had chanted to Rome to Rome. But in any case, by October of 1922, he's ready to do this shit. So Mussolini gives a speech to about 60,000 of his followers at a fascist Congress in Naples on October 24th, and he tells them, our program is simple. We want to rule Italy. Now as he spoke on the 24th, units of his black shirts were fanning out to occupy key locations around Italy in preparation for this march on Rome. In all, some 26,000 fascist paramilitaries assembled with illegal arms and ammunition

from the Warfare History Network, quote, illicit stores of arms and ammunition were received secretly from sympathetic police stations and some army barracks, while armories and even museums were raided for antique firearms. The overall array of weaponry included shotguns, muskets, powder-loaded pistols, golf clubs, scythes, garden hose, tree roots, table legs, dynamite sticks, dried salt codfish, and even an ox's jawbone. Just whatever they can beat someone with, if they can't get a gun, it's anything they can hit someone with.

And imagine an antique weapon already in 1923. Yeah, that's an old gun. That's an old gun, boy. This is so weird. It's just whatever they can get their hands on. So that was, you actually answered one of the questions I had. I was like, so if they're marching to Rome, where are they coming from? So they're coming from everywhere.

He's in Naples right now, but they're coming from everywhere. They are coming from everywhere. And they have horses and carts, trucks and wagons. They even have a race car with the machine gun mounted to it. And they have guys riding on trains. That style in finesse. You feel me? There's some style in the machine gun race car.

You gotta give it to them. You gotta give it to them. Yeah. And a lot of people are just marching on foot, too. Now, obviously, this is a cause for concern for some people in the government. Two days after the Naples speech, former Italian Prime Minister Antonio Salandra becomes aware of Mussolini's plans and he warns the current prime minister that the fascist leader was organizing an armed march on the capital.

Salandra's intelligence told him that Mussolini planned to demand the prime minister's resignation and demand that he be appointed head of the government instead. So the prime minister obviously is also worried by this. He goes to the king with this warning and he asks the king for permission to use the police and military to suppress the fascists. The king refuses. So the reason the king says no is that he had just sat down with his minister of war, General Armando Diaz.

Now the general, who was basically a fascist, tells the king that if he asks the army to stop Mussolini, quote, the army will do its duty, but it would be better not to put it to the test. Basically he's like, another of the army likes these guys that you really shouldn't try it. So King Victor Emmanuel III, the little sword, was not like an ideological fascist. I know. It's very silly. Oh man, what if that was his like tender profile, so little sword.

He's not a fascist in the sense that he doesn't believe in fascism. He believes in a monarchy and more specifically he believes in a monarchy where he's the monarch. Now by 1922, the kingdom of Italy is in bad financial straits. World War I had been a disaster for the country, not the Great Depression, but like an economic collapse has hit Europe as a result of the end of the war. It's horrible in Munich in this period of time too, right? Political violence in the streets had reached a fever pitch, largely thanks to Mussolini's black shirts, and the king was afraid there might be a civil war.

More than anything, he was worried about the rising Italian left. The Socialist Party had 146 members in the Chamber of Deputies, and the Communists had 11. They were bringing them together nearly five times as much elected representation as the Fascists. Now, Communists and Socialists aren't big fans of kings, and Victor Immanuel crudely calculated that the Fascists would let him continue to be the king. He also, and this is important, calculated that the middle class would back the Fascists

if it meant crushing the left, and he was right on both counts. Some of the king's generals did push back and demand he sign orders to send the army out after the black shirts. The king threatened to abdicate at this, insinuating that this would put Italy in the same position as Russia had been in when the Tsar abdicated. Basically, if you forced me to use the army on these Fascists, I will leave the throne, and you saw what happened to Russia when the Tsar left the throne. You don't want those scary Bolsheviks being in charge, so let the Fascists in.

Come on, man. Yeah. Dang. It's like, see, that's what, like, at the end of the day, to me, that's like the problem with, like, when you only understand the world via, like, power, your brokering, and might, you know, like, in my mind, like, I take, it's a weird comparison, but if you take, like, Mike Pence's, like, position right now, like, with the 25th Amendment or President being impeached, it's like, he, for lack of better term, either way, he's a bitch, because

it's like, first of all, it's not like Donald Trump has ever respected you, because you do what the hell he tells you to do, you know what I'm saying? So it's like, this man, this man was finna let these, they was yelling to kill you, and he didn't stop it, and you ain't do shit, Mike. You ain't do shit. You let this man, and you still going back this man? You're a bitch. You hear what I'm saying?

The one time he publicly disagrees with you, and then he calls for your head and they want to take it. Yeah. That's the chance they want to. And you didn't say nothing? You're a bitch. You know what I'm saying? So it's like, I mean, I'm saying that tonguey, do you understand what I'm trying to say?

Yeah. So it's like, you're okay. So then Nancy Pelosi and with the Democrats with the impeachment being, and so it's almost like them saying, yo, get your boy before we do, right? So then, so now, and then if he doesn't, if he doesn't stop the impeachment, you're a bitch again. You know what I'm saying? If you don't call for the 25th Amendment, you're a bitch.

You feel me? So it's just like, no matter what the moral of the story is, you should have never signed up to play with this man. You know what I'm saying? So it shouldn't have got here in the first place because all these people understand is power-brokering. So when you, so if you King Little Sword, you feel me, you set yourself up to a situation where these people only understand power, either way, you're a bitch, you know what I'm

saying? Like I just, I don't, I mean, I'm, I hate saying it like that. I just, because it's like, I'm not trying to like throw shrapnel towards, you know what I'm saying? A derogatory term sort of female. You know what I'm saying? That's not what I'm trying to say, but I am saying just in street terms, that's what we mean.

There's, you can't, you've put yourself in a position where you can't leave this unscathed. Yep. Yeah. And it's, yeah, that's kind of where we are here. And so the King and also a lot of liberal elected leaders are like, okay, let's like, let's let these people in. Let's let them do it. They're not as scary as these leftists.

So let's let the fascists into the government. Can you imagine being, you imagine being a King where it's like my bloodline go back to the 1500s and I'm the one that's about to lose the, I'm not going to lose this crown. Do you know what I'm saying? Yeah. I get the calculation. It's just you're, it's just you're the, you're the punk in this. Yeah.

You're starting the ball of fascism rolling in Europe because you want to keep a throne and because a lot of other elected leaders. So when his, so his prime minister resigns when it becomes clear that the King is not going to stop the fascists and a bunch of former prime ministers, many of them liberals start petitioning the King to make them the prime minister again so that they can make Mussolini their vice minister to placate the fascists. So like, again, establishment politicians cannot wait to make a deal with the fascists. Yeah.

Like couldn't do it fast enough. Wow. Yeah. The King says no though, because the King has decided that Mussolini's going to be the new premier, right? That he's just going to give him straight to the big job. And while all this is going on, the black shirts are marching. So years later, Mussolini would claim to have marched on foot with his soldiers all the

way to the Capitol. The reality is that he stayed in Milan for the first day, a few days of the March. He was seen at the theater. Just in case. In a row. Yeah. He's not. I'm going to stay back here just in case.

Well, it's like how Donald Trump tells his crowd to like march on the Capitol and then goes back home. He's like, that's the problem. Like, do y'all see this man behind bulletproof glass telling, no, they got guns over there. I'm not doing that. You know, like, why you follow this man? Yeah. Yeah.

Feel like one of you might get shot anyway. Good luck. Yeah. Yeah. I'm good though. You see this glass. You ain't gonna shoot me. Yeah.

So, yeah, he stays in Milan. He keeps a getaway car gassed up and ready, prepared to flee to Switzerland, actually more ready to flee for Switzerland than he is to actually go to Rome because he's sure they're going to crack down on this. He's just making a gamble. Just in case, homie. He doesn't think it's going to work. I got a plan B.

Eventually, though, after several days, he realizes that the king is not going to institute martial law to stop the march and that he'd won. Like this is a dawning realization while he's in Milan that like, oh, shit, we're getting away with this. So that has to be Donald Trump. There's some similarities where he was like, wait, wait, what, wait, what? We did it. So kind of shocked that this had worked.

Mussolini starts scrambling to dress himself up as the revolutionary leader. It now kind of seemed like he was. And I'm going to quote now from the Warfare Historical Network. Mussolini's own Milan newspaper office, where he was staying, was barricaded with huge rolls of newspaper and barbed wire and guarded by a curious mix of fascist police and army troops. His second floor offices featured hand grenades and desk trays, and the flustered Duce himself was seen brandishing a rifle. Melodramatically, he wrote in his 1928 autobiography, there was a rapid exchange of shots.

I had my rifle loaded and went down to defend the doors. It's whizzed around my ears. This is all a lie. The reality is that the Milan police chief refused to even arrest him. The mayor and commander of the royal guard asked for a truce with the fascists and withdrew their men from around his office. There was no real crackdown taken on Mussolini directly whatsoever. Now while his militia marched, they took over telephone switchboards, telegraph offices,

waterworks and other government buildings. Very little resistance to this. About seven black shirts are shot dead by the army in various skirmishes during this period of time, and about a dozen people die over the course of the march on Rome. Mussolini gets increasingly confident as phone calls start coming in from the royal palace from the king, but he refuses the first three calls from the king because Mussolini does understand how power works, and he knows that when you got him on the ropes, you want to bring him a little bit closer, right?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. You're willing to make a call? I'm going to take that first call. I'm going to take that second or that third call either. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Get him close. Get him close. That's how you do it.

Yep. So, eventually, he decided that his men had occupied enough territory that he felt confident the king was not going to turn around and shoot him as a traitor if he showed up in Rome. So on the night of October 29th, Benito Mussolini took a sleeper train from Milan to Rome. For the soon-to-be dictator, the march on Rome consisted of a single 14-hour train ride, so he does no marching. He takes a train right into the capital while his guys are marching and fighting.

Kid me, that's a long walk, bro. No, I'm not marching to Rome, what the fuck are you talking about? 20th century, bro, I'm not marching. We got trains. Now, Benito would later lie about every major aspect of the march on Rome. The reality is that about seven black shirts, again, were shot and a dozen people died. Once they were in power, the fascists claimed that 3,000 people had been killed in vicious fighting for control of the capital, which, again, just a lie to make it seem heroic.

Yeah. I finally met the king Mussolini's first words were, your majesty will forgive my attire. I have come from the battlefield. Oh, my god. Which skin? You came from Milan, dude. Yo. Two points per style, darling.

Yeah, no, it's a good line. It is good. Forgive me, I just came from battle. What did you do? Yeah. At the buffet like? Yeah. Where were you fighting?

Where were you battling? I told the army not to fight you. Yeah. So, Victor Emanuel has to have known Mussolini was lying about that, but he liked Mussolini. He considered him a, quote, man of purpose, and he appointed him as Premier Foreign Minister and Interior Minister. On October 31st, the day after Mussolini's meeting with the king, his black shirts finally arrived in Rome.

He had them turn around immediately and march to the train station so they could go home. As the fascist columns withdrew, the king declared, Mussolini has saved the nation. That is hilarious, but they recapped that for a second. I sent y'all, got what I needed, then I sent you back. You saying I saved? I love that. Yeah. It's great.

It's a great position to be in if you're Mussolini. Yes. He's really riding high right now because a lot of Italians agreed that he'd saved the nation because people are really fucking dumb. And again, you have to assume very little access to accurate news about what was happening. Where is your antennas? Yeah. Now, the Roman middle class was overjoyed by the lack of violence and by the fact that

the dreaded anarchy and the threat of a communist revolution had been avoided. The stock market rose on news of Mussolini's power grab. And I should note here that on January 6th, 2021, the Russell 2000 Index of Small Capitalization stocks rose 3.7% while the S&P 500 rose 0.6%. Now this had less to do with the stock market loving the fact that there had been an attempt to take over the capital and more to do with it loving stability because January 6th ended with everybody repudiating the president and the certainty that there would be a transfer of power.

But that's kind of the same reason why the stock markets raised when Mussolini like took power. It's because someone was in power. There was certainty. Yeah. I love that. I love that you brought that up because if you want to talk about big corporations, one percenters, high money, they are still beholden to a stable government that will affirm and

support their contracts. If I got contracts all over the place and you breached this contract, I want to be able to sue the crap out of you. So I got to take you to a court. That means I have to have a government stable enough that says so it has no moral value either way. I just need y'all to chill. If there's somebody that could stop it, now that y'all agree, cool, I'll care what you

agree with as long as y'all agree so that my money can keep coming. So that point about the stock market, that's the type of stuff that like, you know, I always always cringe anytime, any leader, I don't care who you are, say, well, the stock market rose. This is like, man, what the fuck? I got to do nothing. They just want y'all to... You know what I'm saying?

That's not the indicator that you say it is. Yep. It's not. It's not. Yeah. It's a sign that the people who are rich are confident they're going to continue to be rich. This is all it is.

That's where fascism's power traditionally comes from. And not as much from the rich as it does from the middle class. The middle class of Italy backed Mussolini for the same reason. He meant stability, right? Maybe they weren't all fascists. Most of them weren't. Most of them had never really like, hadn't supported the fascist pride of him coming into power.

But now that he was in power, it means the communists don't kind of admit when, means I'm not going to lose my business. I'm not going to lose like whatever, like because I'm in the middle class, I got shit to lose, right? Yes. That's what the middle class is. You're the shit to lose class. Yes.

Now, yeah, the middle class was in Italy as it has been in every country that's been taken over by fascists, the chief base of fascist support. And this is true. Again, everywhere fascism gains political power. In March of 2016, an NBC survey found that only about a third of Trump supporters in the primaries had a household income at or below the national median income of $50,000 a year. And that stayed more or less the same for the election.

And again, you can look at the same kind of things happened in Germany. Yeah. It was the same class that supported him. Yeah. Like it's important. And again, another thing I love, you just brought this up too, because it's like when you're talking about somebody that lives below the poverty line, you don't have time to be listening to whatever the fuck the politicians are saying.

Like I'm trying to secure my next meal. So there's not a, you don't have the luxury to go lobby and canvas and do all the things that someone who has liquid capital, like leisure capital, be able to do. So that's the middle class, you know what I'm saying? So yeah, it's just, yeah, it's the same thing like us critiquing our own silo to be like, man, don't, you can't just call this, you can't just say it was all these poor, these poor wives who put them in power because they hungry. They working.

Yeah. These poor people working. They ain't got time for audits. You don't say anything. It's the fucking, what the fascists are saying to the middle class, to the comfortable is saying like, you see that poor motherfucker who doesn't have time to think about any of this because he's living a hand in mouth. The communists are going to make that be you, you know, that's the fucking pitch.

And it works every time or it works well enough that it becomes a problem every time. Maybe it's not going to work this time, we'll fucking see because Trump was leading middle class support in 2020. I don't know. We'll see. It really was, man. Yeah. So that's good.

We owe that to behind the bastards. Thank you. Yeah, I take total credit for Biden's victory. Thank you so much. So yeah, fascism generally cloaks itself as a working class movement of laborers and hard men doing hard jobs. It's always the image, right? The imagery of like a guy working at a steel mill or some shit, but that's not where there's

support actually comes from. The support of fascism comes from a lot of like the middle class and a lot of the affluent, not all of the affluent because a lot of the very rich are more establishment people. They're not going to back. They'll back a fascist when they're in power because again, they don't want to lose their shit. Needs stability. It's all you need.

Yeah. They're up until it becomes clear the fascists are going to win. They're going to back whatever the order was previously. The middle class is scared and anxious and always being pushed from both directions. So they're the ones who really will go with the fascist. And the first person in history to really lay this out was Luigi Salvatorelli. Now he was an editorial writer for an anti-fascist newspaper named La Stampa. I'm going to quote now from an article on the March of Rome by scholar Emilio Gentile

talking about Luigi Salvatorelli and how he came to this conclusion, quote, a year before the March on Rome, Salvatorelli understood that fascism was a new revolutionary movement and that it organized and mobilized a new social class, the petite bourgeoisie, equally hostile to the proletariat and the upper middle classes. Salvatorelli had labeled fascism reactionary Bolshevism, a danger today infinitely more real than communist Bolshevism. He had sensed that fascist ambitions went beyond the bourgeoisie anti-proletarian reaction and the protection of the middle class.

The dictatorial ambition of fascism, Salvatorelli wrote in December 1921, had already shown its face in parts of Italy, where the fascist party was imposing its dictatorial will by crushing opponents to whom they denied any political or civil right, including the right to live. In July 1922, when not even Mussolini had thought about taking over power, Salvatorelli denounced the ongoing anti-state attack perpetrated by fascism that was endangering the very existence of the Italian state in order to establish a regime of violence throughout the country. Shortly after the march on Rome, Salvatorelli stated that the fascist government was determined

to establish a one-sided dictatorship because it did not want any political activity to be carried out outside of fascism. Salvatorelli saw in fascism, as he wrote on November 1, 1922, the true and proper characteristic of a political movement, of a party organized for its own ends, of a specific social class, and that aimed at the conquest of power on its own, was determined to fling itself against the existing state in the name of the presumed greater good of the nation. I needed to breath after that one. Yeah, it's a lot there.

There's a lot there. He suggested something that the thought in that, that the thought never crossed my mind that as there were so many big words, it's hard for me to nail down exactly where I heard it, but he's almost suggested the possibility of a two-party system in a fascist state. When he was like, this fascism impresses, it was almost like it sounded redundant, where he was kind of like this one-party power fascist state as if it's possible to have a two-party system in a fascist. Because at the time, fascists were a part of the government, right?

And a lot of people, even a lot of liberals were like, well, they're not that dangerous, they're just one other party, they have their view. It's that old thing of like, well, they have an opinion and everybody gets to have their view and we have to listen to them. They get the freedom to speak their peace, and what Salvatorelli is saying is their peace, what they're saying they believe is that only their opinion matters and they'll kill you if you have a different one. Got it.

If we let them in the government. So he's trying to say, are y'all hearing what he's saying? Yeah. Did you hear what he just said? I feel like y'all ain't here what he just said. If we let them, they will be the only party, right? Got it. And he's also saying like, their strength comes from a class, right?

Because a lot of the communists at the time had been like, had written off the fascists as any kind of real movement, and had even written off the march on Rome. We'll talk about that later in the series. We're going to do a big episode at the end on sort of what we can learn from all this. But there was a big failure among a lot of people in the left and even anti-fascists to see fascists as the threat that they really were, because number one, they were so darned silly. But number two, like, well, you know, I'm looking at this from this Marxist analysis

and it tells me that all these classes, like, it informs, I don't see this as a legitimate political movement that is speaking to a class that has a large body of the populace behind it. Yeah. So, okay, that was the piece I was missing. When you add the Marxist like glasses on there and you go, oh, yeah, well, who's where do they fit? Like, where's the car?

This can't be real because they don't fit in with none of these. I got you. And there's, there's this attitude. Again, we'll talk about this later among a lot of Marxists that like, well, fascism is just the inevitable in the state of capitalism. And one of the things Salvatorelli is saying, and a lot of things will say is like, that's not exactly true. Capitalism is pro-capitalism a lot of the time.

It's also anti-capitalism, a decent chunk of the time, and that's how it gets a lot of people on board with it. Yeah. It's, it's, it is speaking to a specific class in the country who feels edged out by both sides, who feels oppressed by the rich and who feels that the left is coming for what little they do have, right? That's who gets on board with this shit and you have to see that they are looking out for their, that, that, that they have legit, like interests that they see being threatened,

like that this is not just some sort of like plot by the bankers to take power for themselves, right? Yes. The fascists are speaking to legitimate, you know, even if they're wrong, legitimately felt. Exactly. Those are like, those are legitimate, yeah, those are legitimate emotions that, that you are actually in your body experiencing, whether that's the reality.

Like I always say that about like, there's this, this, you know, this discussion about like, well, you know, race is a social construct, therefore it's not real, therefore racism is not real. And I'm like, okay, yes, you're right, race is a social construct. But what I'm experiencing in my body is real. It's, you know what I'm saying? So I love it. I love that.

Cause it's like, that's, that's what you can't dismiss about these people that are so riled up that they would storm a capital is it's that what they're experiencing in their bodies is what you said is being, is, is you're pressed on both sides and you feel that way at least feel it at least. This person is saying, yeah, these group of people are saying, I feel you and I have an answer for you. Yeah. And I have an answer for you and it's let's kill the left and take over the government.

You know, like, yeah, easy. Yeah. And that's why, you know, the sixth happened. So Mussolini, uh, uh, takes office, um, two weeks after the march on Rome on November back from the buffet, come back from the buffet war, ready to leave. Marriott. Uh, November 16th, 1922. He stands before the chamber of deputies to present his new list of ministers.

So he picks out all the people who are going to run the government, all fascists. Um, now the new prime minister, uh, Mussolini begins his speech to the chamber of deputies by attacking the nation's elected leaders, calling them old and deaf and incompetent. And he even threatened them with violence, stating, with 300,000 armed men determined to carry out my orders, I could have punished those who have vilified and tarnished fascism. I can make this deaf and gray hall filled exclusively with fascists. I could, but I have not, at least not for now. Shut up.

Shut up, Gramps. I'll slap the shit out of you. Now, he promised his assembled deputies that his new fascist Italy would ensure law and order, strengthen the military and crush the left. The next day, the chamber of deputies conducted a vote of confidence, which Mussolini won 306 to 116. So again, he, he says, like, I can fucking kill you if I want to. Yeah.

And they're like, yeah. Thumb up. I put it. Yes. I, I, a voting eye for you may just threaten your life. Yeah. I'm going to read a quote from an article by Emilio Gentile, uh, about, um, anti-fascism in Italy and about the march on Rome, quote, Benito Mussolini could now claim that power

was bestowed on him by democratic means, even though it was claimed that many votes were cast out of terror and intimidation from the fascists, which he had literally threatened the entire chamber. Benito, Benito was the man of the hour. He was in fact, imminently a product of a particular crisis. Before war one and a special social class, the petty bourgeoisie Mussolini's capture of power was classic. He was the right national leader at the right moment.

By 1923 Mussolini's consolidation of power was complete. Italy was a fascist state and any resistance to the regime from then on would take the form of mere insurgency. In total, between 1918 and 1923, Italian anti-fascists killed some 428 fascists. Meanwhile, Mussolini's black shirts murdered at least 3000 people in the same period. Most of those people were not anti-fascists. They were members of trade unions, journalists, local politicians, anyone who stood in the way between fascists and ultimate power.

And again, we've talked a bit about why the Italian anti-fascists didn't succeed and that's a longer conversation than we can have today. I think you're right that a lack of a, a lack of something with momentum to oppose fascism, true momentum was a part of it. A lack of state support is another part of it. There's a thing that some folks on the kind of, who are anti-fascist and anarchist activists in particular, we'll talk about called the three way fight, which is the idea that we're not just fighting against the fascists, we're fighting against the state and we're fighting

against the fascist because the state is also deeply harmful and deeply injurious to life. That was particularly very strongly felt by people during the BLM uprisings of 2020, right? Like we have these fascists, these proud boys and stuff coming in the street to do violence to us. We also have the cops doing it. We're in a three way fight, right? Very valid way to look at things. It's also an almost impossible situation to win because the fascists aren't in a three

way fight. The fascists, if they're smart, they're not dumb, fascists sometimes are. And maybe our fascists have taken a turn for the dumb. Let's hope. But the smart fascists get to power with some degree of legitimacy and legality and then use the state to crush their enemies because they don't want a three way fight. Right? That's a problem.

Yeah. Yeah. Because yeah. Because the government's just a weapon. It's not. Yeah. Because the government's just a weapon. It's not the end goal.

It's just a weapon. Yeah. Yeah. Wow. Sheesh, man. I need a shower. Yeah. Oh, please tell me you're done.

Yeah. No, I'm done. That's the end of episode one. Yeah. Dog. It's like the, it's just the party that feels like these people give you this, when you're trying to stop, when you're the ones trying to stop an insurrection, it's like, these people give you no, you have no safe, they give you no breaks like that.

You can never stop and take a breath because they're going to read that as weakness. And then next thing you know, somebody tying up Nancy Pelosi. And it's not that I'm a Nancy Pelosi fan, it's just you shouldn't be able to tie Nancy Pelosi up. Yeah. That's not how that should happen. That's not how it should happen. You feel me?

Like, I just this, and it's not that I'm a fan of the US government, however, however, there are worse things to live under. There are worse things. Yes. So it's just like, there's, yeah, like you said, like you feel like you in a three-way fight and my fight is, is especially as someone who would say organizationally and factually my black life matters, right? Is that that's all I'm trying to say is nigga, can I live like, God damn it, man, can I live?

You know? And so you, you, my goals, I feel like in a lot of ways, if it comes to like, how do I say this, like, I'm not looking for, as a, as a black person, if you will, I'm not, I'm just looking for my rights to be honored. Yeah. That's all I'm trying to say. Just honor my rights. Like I have no, there's no platform of a reconstruction of the government short of just stop fucking

killing him. Like, let me just be a citizen like you, dog. Like, that's all I'll trust. Can you just let me be a citizen like you bro, like that's all I'm saying. So, so when you, when you try to, when you pit me against a fascist movement that's saying, well, no, our goal is to overthrow this whole thing and be in charge and no, you don't get rights. And somehow the government choosing you, it's like, it's hard.

It's almost like all, all I get to do now is I got homeboys that live in Atlanta and what they say and is they finna just grab a popcorn and watch the civil war between these fascists and the, and the police. Like I'm just gonna, cause it's like, I don't, I want to be on the side of the government, but the government on the side of me either. You know what I'm saying? So it's just, you just in this weird predicament, but I know who I don't want to win. Yeah.

And this is where we get to the problem of the side opposing the fascists has done a lot of good and it is important to oppose fascists, what's actually needed to beat them opposing one thing and it can slow them down. What's needed to beat them is to provide something else that is not the state as it exists because that's not working. But that you can also get people on enough people on board with the fascists don't have oxygen anymore. Right?

Yeah. It's like a fire, right? Where you've got a bunch of dry fucking brush and trees and shit and oxygen. And as long as you have those things, the fire is going to spread. But the way to counter that is to fucking pour some fucking water on it. You know? No. It's a good.

It's a good. That's a good analogy, man. Yeah. You need to reduce the area in which it can spread and it's human terrain, right? Yeah. The only way to reduce the human terrain the shit can spread in is to give people something else. Yes.

Yes. Because they don't have anything right now. Yes. That's what I was going back to when you was asking me like, why did this fail? I was like, they didn't give them nothing else. Yeah. They said, don't do this. Well, then, well, what do we do?

Because this shit that we got now ain't working. Yeah. So either the government that led us into World War One or some people who are saying we should do what they're doing in Russia right now, and that doesn't look great. And you know, most of the liberals are like on the side of like, well, just we'll just keep tweaking the system that got us into World War One. And a lot of people are like, that doesn't seem good. It doesn't seem good either.

I need an option D, Jake. Yeah. I'm poor. My government sucks. It sucks. I have no hope for the future. So, Jake. This guy is saying it'll be different.

Dr. Jake. Let's see if it's different. Yes. Exactly. It's like when you're watching a basketball game and it's your two least favorite teams playing and you want both of them to lose, but there isn't a way for one of them not like somebody has to win. So there has to be.

Somebody has to win. There's some sort of interference that makes it so that the game can't even happen. Yeah. Otherwise, you're going to just pick your Joe Biden. You get stuck with Joe Biden. So you got stuck with Joe Biden. Otherwise, you get Joe Biden. Yeah.

Nobody wants that either. That's bad. That's what I'm like, look, Doc, like, don't do not say, and I'm glad nobody has suggested that Joe Biden is just a left wing version of Trump to where I'm like, no, he is a consolation prize. He's the consolation prize of the consolation prize. We settled for Joe Biden. Like this nigga ain't the common Messiah.

He the disciple Bartholomew at best. You know what I'm saying? Barely conscious. He not even Peter John, my nigga, he was like, this is so funny. That's a deep cut, boy. You're not even Paul, because you Timothy, you ain't even writing no book in the New Testament. I'm tearing up and my whole face is red.

This is so funny. That's it. That's it. That's it. That's it. That's the evangelical joke. So that's the first part of this behind the insurrection series, part mother fucking one.

Prop. Where can people follow you? Oh, Lord, please follow me at prop hip hop on all them things. Yeah. All of the Twitter's and Instagram's. You could my website profit pop.com backslash coffee. Yeah. That is my website.

And we do coffee stuff there. Got some pods politics will prop, which is political analysis just from like, you know, if you survived eighth grade, you get you understand geopolitics, you know, I just kind of giving you political analysis. Yeah. So that's, that's, that's my, that's my thanks. And we'll, we'll, we'll be back soon, Robert. We will be back soon.

We'll be back to talk about the Munich Beer Hall Putsch next week. And then we'll talk about some other shit. And then we're going to end this talking in broad about why fascists win when they win and why fascists lose when they lose your gift to the world, Robert, like, like, like socks and nice pair of socks. Robert doesn't know how to take compliments. I'm just going to run away from my computer now. Goodbye.

That's the episode. Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse was like a lot of guns. But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen.

Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Did you know Lance Bass is a Russian trained astronaut? That he went through training in a secret facility outside Moscow, hoping to become the youngest person to go to space? Well, I ought to know, because I'm Lance Bass. And I'm hosting a new podcast that tells my crazy story and an even crazier story about a Russian astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down.

With the Soviet Union collapsing around him, he orbited the Earth for 313 days that changed the world. Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science, and the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price? Two death sentences in a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday.

Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.