QUOTE(dtobias @ Thu 24th July 2008, 10:31am)
But it was Mussolini who (supposedly) made the trains run on time. People seem to be confusing Italian Fascism with German Nazism.
Not "people"-- Chip Berlet. He's been causing problems in the fascism articles, since he really doesn't know anything about fascism (political philosophy of Mussolini). All he knows is that it's bad, associated with the axis in WW II and thus with Hitler, and thus must be politically similar.
It doesn't help that Hitler and Mussolini helped each other out in WW II, but that was some time after the initial statement of fascism by Mussolini. Hitler called Mussolini "my teacher" for showing him how to construct an authoritarian state. But the idiologies for WHY one would want to do such a thing, were originally quite different. Mussolini's ideas, which came well before German Socialism, are not particularly Nazi-like. Unless you group any political system in which the state plays a heavy hand as "politically similar." But then you can't tell left from right, and you're really on a libertarianism vs. everybody else scale. That's the famous
Nolan axis, which measures personal freedom, and is orthogonal to the usual Left/Right scale.
Anyway, to understand Mussolini, you actually have to read Mussolini, which Berlet appears unwilling to do. In the early days, Mussolini has some complementary things to say about Jews, for example. It was only when WW II got his cookies in the fire and he was forced to rely on German military help, that the Italian fascists began to support the German extermination programs. They didn't start out that way, with racism as a core of their political philosophy, which of course the Nazis did.