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International Law: A Very Short Introduction

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Vaughan Lowe

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“The totalitarian movements aim at and succeed in organizing masses—not classes, like the old interest parties of the Continental nation-states; citizens with opinions about, and interests in, the handling of public affairs, like the parties of Anglo-Saxon countries. While all political groups depend upon proportionate strength, the totalitarian movements depend on the sheer force of numbers to such an extent that totalitarian regimes seem impossible, even under otherwise favorable circumstances, in countries with relatively small populations. After the first World War, a deeply antidemocratic, prodictatorial wave of semitotalitarian and totalitarian movements swept Europe; Fascist movements spread from Italy to nearly all Central and Eastern European countries (the Czech part of Czechoslovakia was one of the notable exceptions); yet even Mussolini, who was so fond of the term "totalitarian state," did not attempt to establish a full-fledged totalitarian regime and contented himself with dictatorship and one-party rule. Similar nontotalitarian dictatorships sprang up in prewar Rumania, Poland, the Baltic states, Hungary, Portugal and Franco Spain. The Nazis, who had an unfailing instinct for such differences, used to comment contemptuously on the shortcomings of their Fascist allies while their genuine admiration for the Bolshevik regime in Russia (and the Communist Party in Germany) was matched and checked only by their contempt for Eastern European races.”

CommunismFascismDictatorshipTotalitarianismNazismMassesPolitical Movements1967Party PoliticsMussolini
Book:The Origins of Totalitarianism
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“With this warning, Mussolini demanded and was given authority to do just about whatever he wanted; but his initial priority, surprisingly, was good government. He knew that citizens were fed up with a bureaucracy that seemed to grow bigger and less efficient each year, so he insisted on daily roll calls in ministry offices and berated employees for arriving late to work or taking long lunches. He initiated a campaign to drenare la palude (“drain the swamp”) by firing more than 35,000 civil servants. He repurposed Fascist gangs to safeguard rail cargo from thieves. He allocated money to build bridges, roads, telephone exchanges, and giant aqueducts that brought water to arid regions. He gave Italy an eight-hour workday, codified insurance benefits for the elderly and disabled, funded prenatal health care clinics, established seventeen hundred summer camps for children, and dealt the Mafia a blow by suspending the jury system and short-circuiting due process. With no jury members to threaten and judges answerable directly to the state, the courts were as incorruptible as they were docile. Contrary to legend, the dictator didn’t quite succeed in making the trains run on time, but he earned bravos for trying.”

FascismTrumpismMussolini2018Drain The Swamp
Book:Fascism: A Warning
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“During the Cold War between the democratic West and the Soviet Union, there were, of course, many in the West who said, ‘Better dead than Red [communist]’; but many others subscribed to the slogan associated with Bertrand Russell, the twentieth century’s leading atheist philosopher: ‘Better Red than dead.’ Russell’s slogan was consistent with that of much of the well-educated class in Britain. On February 8, 1933, right after Hitler came to power in Germany, the Oxford Union Debating Society held a debate on the resolution, ‘This House will in no circumstances fight for its King and Country.’ The resolution passed 275–153. The vote made an impression on Hitler and Mussolini, as it revealed that many of England’s best educated would prefer to live under Nazism or Fascism than to fight for freedom and risk death.”

FascismCold WarHitlerMussolini
Book:The Rational Bible: Exodus
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“What had Hitler achieved with his gospel of racial superiority and the hellish hatred it generated? How many millions of people lost their lives to that hatred? So that the Aryan race will retain its purity? What was the final outcome? Hitler had to die like a rat in its hole. He had to fire a bullet into his own temple in order to escape the ignominy that his friend, Mussolini, met with in the end.”

RacismKarmaFascismDharmaRetributionHitlerMussoliniRacial Purity
Book:Black Hole
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“​"So it will be appropriate to offer a brief exposition of the subject. We can speak of three factors that led Mussolini to confront the problem of race in 1938. [181] On 5 August 1938, an official document [182] declared, ‘The climate is now ripe for an Italian racism’, for which the Grand Council outlined the fundamental directives the following October. The first legislative provisions ‘for the defence of the Italian race’ were promulgated the following month. Of the three factors, the one that concerned the Hebraic problem was the most incidental. There are few or no references to this problem in Mussolini’s early writings. One can only cite an old article that mentions a well-known theme, that the Hebrew, subjugated and deprived of the usual means to compete directly in the modern world, had recourse to the indirect means constituted by money, finance and intelligence (in the profane sense) to exercise power and for self-affirmation. In addition, in an article from 1919, Mussolini wondered whether Bolshevism, which was supported in its origins by Jewish bankers in London and New York and counted (at that time) numerous Hebrews among its leaders, did not represent ‘Israel’s revenge against the Aryan race’. [183]"​”

RaceIsraelHebrewJewsBolshevismMussolini
Book:Fascism Viewed from the Right
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“Why did the king thus rescue Mussolini from a rashly overplayed hand? Mussolini had cleverly confronted the sovereign with a hard choice. Either the government must use force to disperse thousands of Blackshirts converging on Rome, with considerable risk of bloodshed and bitter internal dissension, or the king must accept Mussolini as head of government. The most likely explanation for the king’s choice of the second option is a private warning (of which no archival trace remains) by the army commander-in-chief, Marshal Armando Diaz, or possibly another senior military officer, that the troops might fraternize with the Blackshirts if ordered to block them. According to another theory, the king feared that if he tried to use force against Mussolini, his cousin, the duke of Aosta, reputed to be sympathetic to the Fascists, might make a bid for the throne by siding with them. We will probably never know for sure. What seems certain is that Mussolini had correctly surmised that the king and the army would not make the hard choice to resist his Blackshirts by force. It was not Fascism’s force that decided the issue, but the conservatives’ unwillingness to risk their force against his. The “March on Rome” was a gigantic bluff that worked, and still works in the general public’s perceptions of Mussolini’s “seizure of power.”

FascismMussoliniMarch On RomeMussolini S Rise
Book:The Anatomy of Fascism
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