What is fascism?
A history...
You’ve seen “fasces” a number of times, but you very likely didn’t know what you were looking at. For example, a pair of them flank the rostrum of the U.S. House of Representatives. They look like this:
They are symbols that date from the original Roman Republic, which was established after defeating the existing monarchy in 510BCE. The Republic of Rome was distinguished by the election of senators who served as legislators and a judiciary for disputes at law. The Roman Republic was the model Jefferson and the other founders had in mind when they set out to construct our constitutional government
The fasces is a military battle axe surrounded by a bundle of rods; the rods symbolize members of the senate, wielding the power of the state, governed by its laws; the motto of the Republic was “SPQR:” Senatus populusque Romanus or “The Senate and the People are Rome”
The Roman republic ended, after nearly five centuries, in 27BCE, replaced by an autocracy—literally, rule by one (person)—after the military defeat perpetrated by Julius Caesar
In 1922 Mussolini led a march on Rome by black-shirted thugs he’d named fasci di combattimenti—“combat bands”—aiming to overthrow the King Victor Emmanuel; the king agreed to name Mussolini prime minister and, with that, fascism was created
Mussolini appropriated the ancient Roman image, taking it to symbolize the concentration of state power in the person of one leader; a decade later Hitler adopted the same approach, consolidating control of all government in one Fuhrer [German for “leader”]
TO BE CONTINUED…