“The March on Rome was not the conquest of power that Mussolini later called it but rather a transfer of power within the framework of the constitution, a transfer made possible by the surrender of public authorities in the face of fascist intimidation.”
We at MidMO JBGC spend a fair amount of time looking to history for clues about what to expect as American society continues to unravel & reset. I’m sure we are not alone in this. As examples, although Trump’s regime has often been compared to 1930’s Germany, one of us wrote in 2017 that comparing the rise of Trumpism to 1920s Germany and the Friekorps (before Nazism was born) might be more apt. Similarly, Mid-MO JBGC author Alan Buddug has examined the KKK in the 1960s and also compared today’s decline to previous examples of collapse in places such as Sri Lanka.
In recent weeks the US far right has called for insurrections prior to and on January 20th 2021 at every capitol of all 50 states as well as at the US capitol. Given previous attempted kidnappings of state governors, a previous storming of at least one state capitol, and an attempted takeover of the US capitol, what might we expect on January 20th ? And what might we expect afterwards?
Let’s look at one end of the continuum: organized & coordinated attack by force, similar to or worse than what we saw on January 6th 2021 in Washington D.C.
Like the US today, Italy in the early 1920s was divided & torn from war, economic stress, and cultural divide. Incipient socialist movements and general strikes brought fear to Italy’s middle class; socialists had actually performed well in 1919 elections, but overall the liberal coalition that had previously held a government together failed; “widespread social discontent, aggravated by middle-class fear of a socialist revolution and by disappointment over Italy’s meagre gains from the peace settlement after World War I, created an atmosphere favourable for Mussolini’s rise to power.” Fascists planned an insurrection to take place on October 28 1922, whereby Mussolini’s blackshirts would march on Rome and capture strategic locations in Italy. The army could have easily stopped it, but the king refused to sign an order for a state of siege, so the army was not called upon to oppose the organized fascists, which numbered some 30,000; the king then handed power over to Mussolini, who wielded it until the collapse of Italy under the Allied invasion of 1945.
Does the far right in the US have the ability to muster a somewhat-competent force like Mussolini’s blackshirts? Or would it be a cluster of middle-aged guys with paunches and neck beards wearing antlered headdresses? According to the SPLC, the Oath Keepers, one of the most radicalized constitutional militia groups, has boasted of having up to 30,000 members. While the levels of dedication and organization inside such borderline fash groups are likely variable and dubious–and there’s often a temptation to laugh at pot-bellied militia members–there are plenty of deadly examples indicating they should be taken seriously.
Still, until Charlottesville, most deadly attacks were isolated lone-wolf type incidents, such as church killings in Charleston in 2015. In earlier times, when a contained far right lacked US Executive-branch support and was confined to the background, they largely made due with smaller-scale terrorist actions such as those originating from the Pacific Northwest in the 1980s or in Oklahoma City in 1995.
Can they still organize, especially after the fallout from January 6th? Or have they had a change of heart? My opinion is yes to the first and no to the second. Word is that even though seriously deplatformed on social media, far-right groups have successfully migrated to other and encrypted platforms. And while one might think that 5 deaths would prompt some serious self reflection, a casual glance at the Facebook feed of any MSM TV station shows perpetual denial of factual events from rightist sympathizers. Proclamations of “AntEEfa” as cause of the January 6th capitol violence were rife online in the days following the event, and while I have nothing quantitative with which to back this up, to my eyes the mindset of denial remains as prevalent now as anytime in the past 4 or more years, whether about climate change or masks.
Prior to the election, historian Mark Bray criticized the media’s inability to think bigger, saying about widespread civil disorder that the dominant media “have no framework to interpret such a threat.… They are ill-equipped to contextualize this threat within the broader fascistic politics of Trump and his supporters.” While the unthinkable (by some, not us) has now happened, and while the MSM remain titillated and “amazed,” they mostly seem to think it’s over. David Ignatius of the Washington Post is typical, saying that January 6 events marked an “inflection point,” that the insurgency “didn’t achieve its objective” but then contradicting himself to say that “there is an insurgency in the United States… those angry people mean it. And they’re not going to go away.”
So… which is it? Are they driven back to loan wolf status, or will we seen an updated version of Mussolini’s march on Rome?
Our general expert opinion is: we don’t know. But you had better not underestimate them, and you had better not take anything for granted, especially given the larger contexts of climate change, financial collapse, and global pandemic. Perhaps the best summary might be this expanded take by Mitch of Armed Margins, which we simultaneously excerpt, quote, and paraphrase here:
“I do think this era of symbolic protest within contested public space is dying… since Charlottesville we’ve managed to drive the alt right underground… but the right was still able to make inroads into the Republican masses, the Donald Trump administration, the Republican party… all those extremist views [are now] legitimized in the hands of [the] right-wing masses.”
As the Italian war effort failed in 1943, Mussolini was removed but then rehabilitated by a German occupation until, in late April 1945, after 23 years of authoritarian rule and 2 years of civil war, Italian partisans captured Mussolini and his mistress and executed them by firing squad. Reportedly their bodies were kicked, spat upon, and even urinated upon, hung upside down from the roof of a gas station, and then stoned from below by civilians.