Basic Tenets of Fascism

- Fascism was an amalgam of many strains of thought largely deriving from the nineteenth-century movement of social Darwinism, socialism, nationalism, and social Catholicism-born of pragmatism and opportunism as much as conviction.
- Fascism was nationalistic, capitalistic, emotional, voluntarist, and hierarchical. - Not surprisingly, given its founders' socialist past, fascism borrowed from Marxism a political strategy based on economics. But unlike
Marxism, fascism sought to preserve the capitalist system, overcoming the internal class struggle by appealing to nationalism as the basis for social harmony. (This was to be accomplished through the creation of mandatory national unions or corporations to organize all social forces business, labor, and agriculture to ensure a peaceful resolution of conflict through consensus under the watchful eye of the state, which was the juridical incarnation of the nation and the agent for raising national consciousness.)
- The nation was the highest good.
- As with socialism, it was only through the community in this case the nation that the individual could fulfill his or her potential. "The nations is an all embracing syndicate: the common interest of all who suffer, labor and produce within a territory defined by historic, linguistic, and cultural boundaries."

2.
After WWI, Italy was in critical condition, physically and economically. With little time for its economy to adjust out of wartime mode, Italy plunged into a recession. Inflation was also a large problem and many businesses went bankrupt. Socialist unions and various religious groups rapidly began collecting more followers, and the remaining members of the middle class who were loyal to the government feared revolution. The Prime Minister didn’t gain anything for Italy at the Paris Peace Conference, and veterans were mistreated when they returned from the war. Italy’s main administration wasn’t paid, so there were often problems with