What Is Fascism? The Definition They Won't Teach You
Larry Alex Taunton | 3 Oct. 2026
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Km7o6zZV5UE
Which is the Fascism you want defined?
Italian Fascism or the movement in large?
I hope you are not both enlarging it to include National Socialism and then narrowing it so as to make everything else if not outside at least irrelevant.
Italian Fascism was different things to different people. What Pius XI approved as a legitimate régime in 1929 was Fascism and what he condemned in Non abbiamo bisogno is also Fascism ... at least became elevanted by Il Duce to that after that encyclical, at the time it was an Education Minister's opinion on Fascism.
The general movement has more to do with what Pius XI approved.
1) Corporatismo (Italian sense, look it up, don't confuse with US usage of "corporations") is good in the case of a society divided into workers and employers for a large part of the population.
2) Dictatorship is at least licit as a form of government.
3) Abortion is banned, at least excepting the saving of a mother's life.
I agree with all three. I think Austro-Fascism and Franco express some aspects in a more Catholic way, but the Italian version for a time had some record of humane dealings with opposition and with punishment.
You are aware that Alessandro Serenelli was released on parole under Mussolini? He was not required to enter a monastery from the side of authorities, and he had lived on good terms with the victim's mother prior to that.
Crime, 1902. Sentence, 30 years. One year off for all, at WW-I victory for Italy (one in which the future Duce participated at the expense of my dear Austria, you know Southern Tyrolia). Two more years off for good behaviour. 27 years. 1902 + 27 = 1929. The year Il Duce and the Pope signed the Vatican treaty.
- justspazzin 64
- @justspazzin64
- Codsw
eallop. Fascism was BORN out of socialism. Socialism is LEFT-WING. Mussolini was a member of the Italian communist party. This is not rocket science.
- Hans-Georg Lundahl
- @hglundahl
- @justspazzin64 You are not a rocket scientist, I suppose.
You are not a historian, I know for certain.
Mussolini was a top member of the Italian Socialist Party, according to his own wikipedia, which links to PSI (Partito Socialista d'Italia), which says:
The Italian Socialist Party (Italian: Partito Socialista Italiano, PSI) was a social democratic and democratic socialist political party in Italy
This was in 1912. Both Fascists and Communists are split offs from this party, but different ones. In 1911 Mussolini to his great honour had protested against Italy's war in Libya which featured the first bombing from air planes, carried out against civilians. In 1913, Mussolini, while rooting for Marx, also rooted for John Hus (Giovanni Hus il veredico is a work of his from this time).
Now, Franco never was member of a Communist or Socialist party. Neither was Salazar. Neither was Dollfuss. Neither was Schuschnigg. THEIR common ground with Mussolini came from Catholic social teaching, not from Marx. A precursor of Franco in Spain, the gang leader José Antonio Primo de Rivera, considered Marx a "talented Jew, who saw the problem of Capitalism, but not the solution ..." (to Capitalism / to this problem).
I noted as a first question to the video whether Larry meant Italian Fascism or whether he meant Fascism as a more general movement. And found to my chagrin, he was so inept he extended Fascism all the way to Hitler (who actually was a Communist comrade of Eisner in the Munich Soviet) and then defined Fascism in general from Hitler, perhaps not surprising since he went to Berlin to study the subject and Berliners are so guiltridden for Hitler that they don't even clearly perceive any other Fascism except in a Hitler haze.
"In fascism, there is private property, but the private property is only a bit of an illusion because it's controlled by the state."
Wait, if the state can sue and heavily fine an employer for giving too low (or too high) wages, or for overworking the workers in hours, does that make "private property an illusion"?
If that's the case, private property has only existed since very recently even in the champions of it.
"there's usually a strong um anti-semitic element in fascism"
No antisemitism in Italy prior to 1938, and then it was basically, Jews converting to Catholicism can't marry ethnically Italian Jews.
1922 - 1942 = 20 years.
1938 - 1942 = 4 years.
No antisemitism in Portugal, meaning at all, under all the years of Salazar (1933 -- 1974).
No antisemitism in Spain, from 1939 to 1980 (formally the state type continued after Franco's death some years, by 1980 at least, Spain is Parlamentarian, though some resent it.
Both countries were countries of refuge for Jews under WW-II.
Some more antisemitism in the very marginal Integralismo of Brazil, which was never in power, and in Rexism, which was only in power as a puppet régime to Hitler. The same can be said of French Fascism as of Rexism.
The Swedish Fascist Engdahl, who was never in power directly, but claimed to have influenced Social Democracy through one who was member of both parties, took a very clear distance from Hitler after hearing of the camps, and his other remaining model apart from Il Duce, namely Perón, was not an antisemite either.
Did Larry Taunton learn his lore on fascism from some college conversation, or from the Marxist Umberto Eco's 14 points?
Austrofascism theoretically was antisemite, and didn't hurt Jews. He made some limitation on their, as on other ethnic minorities' rights to start new business (only if the extant ones were less than a certain percent of the branch). This was probably one of the reasons why Hitler hated Dollfuss and despised Schuschnigg. He also tortured Schuschnigg by psychiatric harrassment, after the Anschluss.
"Communism has always had a strong anti-semitic element and it may not be written into their you know into their you know equivalent to the Westminster confession But it's always it's always been there."
That's how they recruited Jews to Red Army officers and Cheka agents?
Stalin was antisemite, it was also he and Lysenko who rid Russian Communism of Eugenics, which Lenin had plotted on a research stage.
Austrian, Italian, Spanish and Portuguese Fascism, like Peronism, didn't have Eugenics unless you count pro-natalism and anti-abortion as that.
As in Italy, in Argentina the more extreme reproductive-social technologies associated with eugenics in northern Europe, especially sterilisation, met with considerable cultural, religious and political resistance, The eugenists within the Association followed the Catholic line from conviction and/or necessity. But since it was through women, or more precisely motherhood, that the future biotypological identity and health of the nation was seen to be mainly produced, eugenists developed their own form of negative eugenics for the regulation of female biotypes. Gender was in fact a critical variable, because it was through the socialisation of maternity towards eugenic goals that women’s proper role in the modem state was thought to be defined. The Argentine eugenists much admired Mussolini’s state rhetoric and programme of ‘family protection’, a programme whose pro-natalist, anti-abortion, and anti-feminist ideology was highly congruent with their own.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/019165999290087S/pdf?md5=78514568b005a672d10a46a947985b60&pid=1-s2.0-019165999290087S-main.pdf
3:25 Marx didn't want to get rid of people of Jewish background, perhaps ethnic distinctiveness, but he did attack the Jewish confession.
Some would count that as Antisemitism ....
3:34 Tell me again, when exactly were Italian small farmers forcefully collectivised in Italy?
You know, what Lenin did once, and Stalin did again to them.
Under Tito, small farmers weren't, large landowners were, even that didn't happen in Italy, unless you can give me news of it.
Under Franco, small farmers were fiscally disadvantaged and encouraged to sell to bigger farmers, to an extent that Carlism wouldn't have done, but Franco was not as bad as de Gaulle (let alone Mitterand) and the French weren't as bas as Swedes, and we in our turn weren't as bad as actual Commie régimes.
4:50 If you want to research Fascism, what were you doing in Berlin?
Hitler was in a Commie régime in 1919.
Mussolini, Franco, Salazar, Dollfuss and Schuschnigg never were that, nor was Perón.
(To be continued? I halt here, directly after a very obvious blunder!)
