NEWS from one hundred years ago: FASCISM

Very few people in 1920 guess that the biggest new political wave in the western world this decade will be a startling sort of reactionary conservatism known as fascism. The Wairarapa Age today when it editorialises about the political and economic situation in Italy talks mostly about socialism and says nothing about radicalism on the right. ‘The trend of events in Italy,’ notes the newspaper, ‘is being watched with absorbing interest throughout the world.’ There has been ‘an enormous increase of revolutionary Socialism in the North of Italy.’ Socialists in the country are calling for ‘the overthrow of the Monarchy, the Papacy, and even Parliament itself.’ New Zealand observers can be forgiven for not seeing what is going to happen in Italy. The Partito Nazionale Fascista (National Fascist Party) will not be formed until more than a year from now. Fascism is already organising itself, however, as an attempt to mobilise the whole of society into a totalitarian, nationalistic, imperialistic, racist ‘corporate state.’ Benito Mussolini next year will say to a crowd in Bologna: ‘Fascism was born ... out of a profound, perennial need of this our Aryan and Mediterranean race.’

Wairarapa Age, 23 September
​Aaron Gillette, Racial Theories in Fascist Italy, Routledge, London and New York, 2001, p. 11.