We are the year 2022. 100 years ago, 1922, is when fascism really begins in Europe. 1922 is the year
of something called the "March on Rome. It was Cctober of 1922 when Mussolini led the "March
on Rome" and took over in what was basically a coup d'etat. [He] took taking over the Italian
government, and he then instituted a fascist regime. It lasted from 1922 until around 1944.
At that point, it came to an end, and Mr. Mussolini was hung upside down in the street
and killed by the people that he had led, which tells you something about fascism, hopefully,
you will remember. The next case of fascism happens 11 years later. It's January 1933,
and in Germany, the government there turns itself over. Didn't require quite the coup d'etat,
but it took not that different a form. Turned the government over to the leader of a fascist
political party, like Mussolini in Italy, only his name was Adolf Hitler, and he was head of
the Nazi party. And a few years later, in 1936, a democratically elected government in Spain
was overthrown by an illegal military revolt of general Franco who waged a civil war,
displaced that government and established Spanish fascism, which lasted several decades.
And then he died, and Spain reverted back to a non-fascist arrangement. Those are the three major
fascisms we know about, and what I'm about to tell you is what we know from what they actually did.
Before each of them capitalism, the dominant economic system in each of those three countries,
was content with and satisfied with what we are familiar with as parliamentary, democratic
government. Elections every year. People elected to one or two house legislature like our Congress.
And going about the normal business of running a capitalist society. Everybody gets to vote.
We pay a lot of attention, but the people with the money, the capitalists, the wealthy, the
big CEOs- they run the show because they donate to the parties. They donate to the candidates. Their
lobbyists help write the laws. We're all familiar with that, because we're used to that here too.
The problem is in each of those countries, the capitalism that was normally perfectly
happy with conventional, representative, electoral democracy was falling apart.
The capitalism was producing such suffering, such anger, such bitterness among the mass of
people that there was a developing anti-capitalist movement. And this scared the capitalist class,
the owners of the enterprises, the big CEO's. They could see the handwriting on the wall. In Italy,
just before fascism, you had the greatest general strike in the history of the country in Torino,
led by a then obscure communist named Antonio Gramsci who becomes one of the
great communist theoreticians of the 20th century- terrified people. In 1917, a few years before,
an anti-capitalist revolution in Russia succeeded. Terrified capitalists everywhere in the world.
Here in the U.S. too. So, there was this sense it's falling apart, our system.
And when that happens there's a strong push- doesn't always succeed but a strong push-
to push aside representative democracy, all of that, and have the iron heel, the iron fist.
Change the government from that game to one where its job is to control the society, repress every
critic of capitalism you can find, do it all in the name of the race, or the nation, or patriotism
to give it all a better sounding name than saying, "We're gonna save capitalism by crushing everybody
who disagrees with it, everybody who has turned against it." So, it is done in the name of
the nation. Nationalism- it's a good way of covering it over. Everything we're doing is
not about preserving capitalism. That's the real agenda. It's about preserving the nature,
or preserving white America if you bring it over into us, or preserving the Italian soul,
or preserving genuine Spain. Whatever it was, it was always the same. And here's what it involved.
You crush the labor unions. You either kill them- that happened often- jail them, exile them. No
more labor unions. You go after the socialists. You go after the communists. Antonio Gramsci,
the leader of the Communist party in Italy, the leader of that great strike, was imprisoned by
Mussolini and spent the last 20 years of his life in jail. Hitler killed people, so that was easier,
and in the Spanish civil war vast numbers of people were killed as well. So that's what it is.
It's capitalism enforced. You still have employers and employees like capitalism before. The leaders
of the capitalist industries remain there unless they were deemed to be not part of the nation.
Don't be fooled. Underneath the veneer of the government coming in is the ultimate purpose:
protect capitalism. That's why it's there. That's why this is done. It's the extreme
of capitalism having produced its own negation, its own opposition, its
own self-destruction that calls forth the fascist alternative to come in there and deal with things.