What Is Fascism

<p><em>What Is Fascism </em>by Sergio Panunzio (originally published in 1924 as <em>Che cosʼè il fascismo</em> in Italian) is as the title suggests an attempt to explain and define not only what the term fascism means but also the political movement it named together with the historical circumstances that led up to it.</p><p></p><p>Of Fascism Panunzio says it is a movement unto itself original atypical... essentially historical [in] nature... the product of two crises: the general crisis of Socialism throughout Europe... [and] the crisis of war and post-war Italy... until the Blackshirts entered Rome. In other words Fascism is and was preeminently Italian in nature; it was both revolutionary and conservative at the same time.</p><p></p><p>The book also discusses what Panunzio calls the Italian Revolution - a bloodless revolution in contradistinction to the Russian one - which began in May 1915 with the intervention of Italy in World War I and which culminated in the March on Rome in October 1922.</p><p></p><p>Sergio Panunzio (AD 1886-1944) - an Italian jurist political scientist philosopher and journalist - was a leading authority on and proponent of Revolutionary Syndicalism which later transformed into National Syndicalism before finally informing and merging with Italian Fascism. He was one of the main ideologues of Italian Fascism under Benito Mussolini.</p>