"The nation’s right wing — swelled by disgruntled military veterans and those with a penchant for violence — had grown increasingly restless that fall, with occasional street clashes between these reactionaries and anti-fascists on the left. Finally, the leader of the right bloc — a big man who strutted on stage, sometimes buffoonishly — massed his followers and urged them to march on the capital and fight for their country, even though in the end he didn’t march with them.
Instead, Benito Mussolini would get in a car and drive to Rome in October 1922, where he again met up with the throng of as many as 60,000 who’d marched there after the future dictator’s speech to them in Naples. This was the-now notorious March on Rome, and the intimidation of Italy’s ruling elites by this large, angry mob and its 'strongman' leader worked beyond anyone’s wildest dream. By month’s end, King Victor Emmanuel III had ceded all political power to Mussolini and the fascists, who would not relinquish it for two decades.
Just four months before the 100th anniversary of what is now seen as the lift-off of modern fascism, we have seen in dramatic fashion how the concept and underlying terror tactics of Mussolini’s March on Rome never went away, but lived on to be modernized by a reality-TV star who’d faked his way into the White House and was determined to stay there.
Tuesday’s riveting testimony before the House Jan. 6 Committee by former Donald Trump White House insider Cassidy Hutchinson — an afternoon that will be long remembered by historians and political fanatics, just as those hot June days when John Dean blew the whistle on Richard Nixon in 1973 — revealed just how close Trump came to a true Mussolini moment: His own plan to “march” on the U.S. Capitol." (our emphasis) -- Will Bunch in the Philadelphia Inquirer, detailing how the Malignant Loser's fraudulent "Stop the Steal" insurrection on January 6 was a replay of Italian fascist Benito Mussolini's Black Shirt -led March on Rome in 1922, where he seized power. Beginning with the opening paragraphs, the similarities Bunch draws are striking. The whole article is well worth a read.
Today's Black Shirts compare with the extremist Proud Boys, Oath Keepers and other right-wing militia groups, resorting to violence to achieve their illegitimate political aims. They, along with hundreds of gullible goons, were exhorted to storm the Capitol to change the outcome of the election, and install the latter-day Mussolini in power, most certainly for longer than a 4-year term.
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