Revolution from the Right: Fascism - School of Arts and Humanities ...

assumption that they could ‘tame’ it and dispense with its help once stability had returned to
political and economic life.
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In terms of actual world-view and specific policies as well vast differences separate
Fascism and Nazism, just as the personalities of Mussolini and Hitler were in many respects
poles apart. Yet such contrasts merely emphasize how the same ideological myth of national
renewal can assume highly diverse surface manifestations. Moreover, there was much in common
in the institutional changes the two regimes made to the state apparatus and in the social
engineering they undertook to revitalize the ‘national community’. 13
The mythic core of the fascist revolution
If what we are suggesting is true, and fascism should be approached as revolutionary form of
nationalism, why, then, does the term ‘fascist’ for most people now have purely negative
connotations of totalitarianism, destructiveness, nihilism, and inhumanity? First, it should be
noted that this has not always been the case. Until Italian Fascism started forging an ever closer
relationship with Nazi Germany, it was a common view in Europe and the USA that Mussolini
had performed wonders for his country. A popular American love-song of the 1930s went
‘You’re the tops, you’re the great Houdini. You’re the tops, you’re like Mussolini!’
The creation of the ‘Axis’ between Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany in 1936, the brutal
involvement of both countries on the side of Franco in the Spanish Civil War, and the fact that
Italy was allied to the Third Reich when it started the Second World War, and thus became linked
to the unimaginable scale of atrocities committed by the Third Reich permanently changed the
image, not just of Italian Fascism, but fascism in general.