Musilini started out a socialist, an ardent vociferous socialist.

Like many of his fond Siakla contemporaries, he saw history and politics in Marxist terms as a struggle between

the ownership class and the great majority of working people.

But right around the start of World War I, there was a kind of schism in socialism. Nietzsche was in the air, the idea of

the Uber Mench in market contrast with the idea that only worker solidarity could bring

forth mankind's true promise.

And as the great powers lined up against each other in 1914, it wasn't exactly clear what the

workers of the world were supposed to unite either for or against.

Passivism?

Not monarchism, surely, but not capitalist imperialism either.

egalitarianism and class struggle didn't really

acquit with the hot-blooded feelings of the man on the street anymore.

Suddenly it felt like country came first and countrymen even more.

If Italians were going to war with Austro-Hungary, yes it would be to destroy the Habsburgs,

not for some abstract global workers' paradise, but for Italy.

Mussolini invented fascism, at least in the modern sense entirely on the fly out of shards.

His insight was to upend the dialectic of class struggle

to unite Italians rich and poor in a shared sense of cultural and racial

chauvinism. It was not only workers who could form the revolutionary vanguard but

any patriotic Italian.

Violence and domination were natural human conditions, necessary prophylactics against rot and

decadence, and Mussolini institutionalized them as part of a new social order of conformism, xenophobia,

...