The Origins of Fascism (Part I)

A War to End All Wars & An Italian Disaster

In an era in which all sides of the political aisle use the term “fascist” willy-nilly to refer to hundreds of millions of people, I’d like to spend some time considering what that term actually means.

Fascist ideology arose in Italy as a political, militaristic, and spiritual answer to complex social challenges in the wake of World War One (1914-1918), but its tenets continue to plague democratic societies today. Far from being a fringe term reserved for the history books, the popularity of fascism has experienced a resurgence in the twenty-first century for explicable reasons that many of us would rather ignore.

What we don’t understand don’t want to understand is if fascism remains, it’s because it remains attractive to many. Instead of accepting this, however, we prefer to pit “us” versus “them,” dismissing the fascist hordes with our sanctimonious conviction that we’re forever on the right side of history, oblivious to our own moralistic ignorance.

The truth is, few people in the twenty-first century who call others fascists would use the word if they knew what it meant, which is precisely why it’s so important to understand the term’s meaning.

This multi-part essay aims to re-examine the philosophical origins of Italian fascism to illuminate the all-too-human pitfalls of tyrannical thinking that continue to attract, confuse, and threaten civil society today. Because yes, just like I, too, have a “Nazi problem,” I believe there’s a little fascist within all of us, and it is clear that the real-life fascists are taking advantage of this fact today.

The Origins of Italian Fascism

Italian fascism arose after the Great War amid massive economic and social instability defined by disillusionment with not only the future of Italy but with the state of humanity as a whole. A better understanding of fascism’s allure thus necessitates an interdisciplinary approach because Fascism was more than a political or historical movement or an ideology—it was an ethos.

Italian fascism promised to alleviate national suffering and satisfy complex human desires by permeating the past, present, and future. It combined politics, philosophy, and spirituality into a comprehensive worldview that gave clear and present meaning to millions of Italians … at least for a time. To pretend, however, that fascism only appeals to the most uneducated and disenfranchised is to ignore the darkness lurking in our psyche. As a result, the value of psychoanalytic theory becomes paramount if we hope to better understand fascism’s appeal. Although psychoanalytic theory is primarily applied to individual cases, most human neuroses are socially constructed. As Viktor Frankl stated, “There is no psychotherapy without a theory of [humanity] and a philosophy of life underlying it.”¹

So, which psychoanalytic theories of human behavior might help us understand? I’d be remiss here not to first confess: I’m not, in fact, a social theorist or a psychoanalyst; I did, however, earn a master’s degree in social theory at University College London, where I focused on three psychoanalytical interpretations of human behavior: Sigmund Freud’s “death drive” and the will to pleasure; Alfred Adler’s “social feeling” and the will to power; and Viktor Frankl’s “logotherapy” and the will to meaning.

Italian fascism was attractive because it promised to satisfy these three “wills.” As we will learn in this essay, it promised, from the outset, to increase pleasure and deter suffering (Freud was particularly interested in our basest instincts); it championed the will to power by promoting social unity (Adler was interested in how humans sublimate our innate inferiority complex); and it instilled purpose and meaning through the ethos of the State (Viktor Frankl believed what makes human beings unique is that desire not just power or pleasure but purpose in life). These aren’t comprehensive explanations of the human condition (this is why they’re called theories), but they provide valuable insight into what makes human beings tick.

The War to End All Wars

“When society suffers, it feels the need to identify those responsible, so that it can exact vengeance for its disappointments.” Emile Durkheim, French sociologist

World War One was a watershed moment in human history. The carnage of approximately ten million dead on the battlefield and millions more civilian deaths was bookended by the Spanish Flu, which infected one-third of the world’s population and killed approximately fifty million people. Woof. Such numbers do little to convey the psychic reality of such carnage, and this is without even considering the violent revolutions (and their psychic effects) that ravaged much of the globe after the war, none more important than Russia’s Bolshevik Revolution (1917-1923). Add to these human catastrophes the disillusionment that accompanied the embers of Enlightenment ideals, and it’s clear that World War One signaled a paradigm shift in how individual human beings thought about existence.

Italy, of course, was no exception. Even before the war, it had been at a political crossroads (the “nation” of Italy had only existed since its unification in 1861). Still, following the military disaster at the Battle of Caporetto, the very idea of the “Italian nation” was at stake. When the frontline at Caporetto collapsed, a rout ensued, forcing the Italians to retreat 150 kilometers and abandon 20,000 square kilometers of the motherland, resulting in 11,000 dead, 29,000 wounded, 300,000 prisoners, and 900,000+ Italian civilians suddenly living under Austro-Hungarian rule. While Italian generals tried to peddle the myth that the brutal defeat was due to cowardice, it soon became clear that the debacle was caused by the high command’s complete disregard for human life. (According to the post-war investigation commission (Relazione della Commisione d’Inchiesta), “In the early months there were generals who, from afar, urged their men to break through barbed wire with their chests and with their teeth, or ordered them to climb over it, making a passage through enemy positions by piling up the cadavers of our own soldiers.”)

The Battle of Caporetto is essential in understanding the origins of fascism because the post-war narrative pitted the elites (the military command) against the working classes (the soldiers), further eroding trust in institutions and suggesting a fundamental “death of the motherland.” According to the scholar Claudio Fogu, an “image of an endangered motherland, dead or under deadly threat”² proliferated throughout Italy in the post-war years paired with political turmoil, communist revolution, and a legitimate inability to envision the future.

Although Italy was technically victorious in WWI, it paid a sobering price to avoid defeat: 600,000 dead, 1.48 billion lire of war debt (twice the total expenditure of Italian governments between 1861-1913), 2 million unemployed, and perhaps most importantly, Italy lost territory in Northern Italy, Galicia, and Southern Austria, leaving many wondering what, if anything, had been gained from the war, and if perhaps the motherland itself hadn’t been “stabbed in the back” by an “enemy within.”

Sound familiar? To make matters worse, there was a new threat in the communist revolution, which further uprooted political stability by splitting the left wing into multiple factions; however, the conservative system that had led Italy into war was also broken, and many blamed the wealthy elite for allowing the poor to die on the battlefield. At the same time, urban and rural working classes remained fearful of losing what little standard of living they had left, and middle-class industrialists and landowners feared socialist reform.

As is always the case in times of upheaval, most people long for an existence based upon something more than mere survival. Enter stage left right Benito Mussolini, a disillusioned communist socialist with a thirst for power, and Giovanni Gentile, an ultranationalist philosopher with a penchant for jingoist Roman mythology …

Next week, we’ll learn about the rise of Benito Mussolini. For now, let’s review a few cold hard facts about fascism:

Fascists are demagogues, by definition. They appeal to our basest, most selfish instincts and prejudices rather than create space for critical thinking and rational debate. Without exception, fascists are megalomaniacal and irredentist, a word that comes from the Italian word irredenta, unredeemed, i.e., obsessed with regaining what has supposedly been lost.

Fascists also provide simple solutions to complex problems via a process of populist xenophobic mythology and steadfast indoctrination. They are less interested in defining who they are than in who they are not. Fascists hate nuance, let alone complexity, because complexity requires critical thinking, and who has time to think critically with all of these emails and push notifications? and could you please subscribe? We must gain followers first to create leaders! And there’s a new war going on, and you must choose a side—act now! By the way, did you see what happened in [insert the latest location of a tragedy]? It’s time to decide what you stand for … don’t you believe in standing up for what you believe in? Don’t you want to feel proud again? To stand up and fight! Yes! It’s time to fight. Are you with us or against us? You have to be one or the other. Which side do you choose? Black or white? Red or Blue? Don’t let them take this away from us.

The more noise that surrounds us, the more complex the world becomes, and the easier it is for fascists to appeal to our basest instincts. Prejudice, fear, xenophobia, resentment, envy—these are just a few of the complex emotions forever swirling in our bellies.

And now, I shall leave you with a quote:

“I refuse to characterize as opinion a doctrine that is aimed directly at particular persons and that seeks to suppress their rights or to exterminate them.” Jean-Paul Sartre

1. Viktor E. Frankl, The Will To Meaning (New York: Meridian, 1988), 15.

2. Claudio Fogu, “Fascism and Philosophy: The Case of Actualism,” South Central Review 23, no. 1 (Spring 2006): 17.