Abyssinia). The military is used to secure power whilst the paramilitaries maintain their threatening presence on the streets through ‘extra-legal’ endeavours, or gangsterism. A hard line on crime and punishment is pursued but only for select criminals. Industry is focussed on building military strength, the corporate state benefits big business, and the state adopts capitalism when it is suitable. Working-class organizations are suppressed, unions are banned or controlled by the state, and workers are forced to collaborate. Whether they call themselves fascists, national socialists, nationalists, or patriots, fascist organizations embrace some or all of these principles, and anti-fascists must recognise and respond to them.
This book is divided into two parts and examines how anti-fascists have organised against fascist aggression in the hope of drawing lessons for the future.
Pre-Fascist Parties and Fascism in Europe
The first section of this book looks at the growth of ultra-nationalism and fascism across Europe from the late-nineteenth century to the 1940s. Italy, Austria, Germany, and Spain became fascist states whilst Hungary, Romania, Poland and France experienced an upsurge of fascist violence, and militants were forced to organise and counter this, with varying success. In all these countries, anti-fascists fought and died to protect their communities and institutions. The situation for anti-fascists in 1930s England was less drastic, and certainly less murderous, but still saw anti-fascists meeting violence with violence. It is surprising how few fatalities there have been in the battles pre-1939 and post-1945 in the UK.
Post-War British Anti-Fascism
The second part of the book specifically looks at anti-fascism in Britain and Ireland following 1945 when, despite the defeat of the fascist bloc (excluding Spain, of course), fascists still maintained a presence on the streets. Several waves of post-war fascism in Britain have been successfully countered by one of the strongest and most successful anti-fascist movements in Europe. The confrontations with Mosley, the NF, the BNP’s street campaign and the EDL are all testimony to a tradition of anti-fascism that is too little acknowledged, let alone documented, by political historians. But, as ever, even though the fascists may be defeated, they never really go away, and as we have seen so many times they merely reinvent themselves whilst their poisonous ideology remains relatively unchanged.
Endnotes:
1 Nicholas Fraser, The Voice Of Modern Hatred: Encounters with Europe’s New Right (London: Picador, 2000), 75.
2 Birchall, Beating the Fascists, 314.
3 Many thanks to Rachael Horwitz who wrote most of the section on fascism.
Italy: No Flowers For Mussolini
The concept of a united front of the more ‘subversive’ groups—socialists, communists, republicans and anarchists—[was] put forward by the anarchist Malatesta.1
On 11th September 1926, Gino Lucetti, an Italian anarchist, attempted to assassinate fascist dictator Benito Mussolini. As the dictator known as Il Duce drove past him, Lucetti threw a grenade, which bounced off the windscreen and exploded nearby, injuring several pedestrians. Lucetti, who was hiding in a doorway, was pounced upon by Il Duce’s bodyguards and severely beaten. He was found to be in possession of another grenade, a revolver loaded with dum-dum bullets, and a knife. As he was arrested, Lucetti said defiantly, ‘I did not come with a bouquet of flowers for Mussolini. I also meant to use my revolver if I failed to achieve my purpose with the bomb’.2 With his usual self-aggrandisement, Mussolini later claimed that the grenade had landed in the car and he had scooped it up and thrown it back at Lucetti before it exploded, but witnesses in the car stated that the windows were closed and Il Duce was most shaken by the event.3
After strenuous interrogation, during which he confused the police with a false name, Lucetti was sentenced to thirty years. His accomplices, Leandro Sorio, a waiter, and Stefano Vatteroni, a tinsmith, were sentenced to nineteen and twenty years respectively. Vatteroni served his first three years in solitary confinement. Lucetti, a lifelong anarchist and anti-fascist activist had been shot in the neck by a fascist during an altercation in a bar, and Perfetti, the fascist, was shot in the ear. Lucetti was unable to find sympathetic medical treatment so was smuggled onto a ship heading for France, where he plotted with exiled anti-fascist comrades to kill Il Duce. The plot had been approved by the influential anarchist Errico Malatesta, and it was agreed that the assassin would allow himself to be arrested, presumably to avoid the fascists rounding up ‘the usual suspects.’ This was not to be: hundreds of anarchists were arrested in reprisals.
Italian anti-fascists have speculated on what would have happened if Lucetti had been successful, but it is clear that the attempt had significant symbolic value: one writer said, ‘It is utterly pointless to debate what the assassination bids might have brought the country to…[but it] helped to keep public opinion alert and to give heart to anti-fascists and to the labour movement opposed to the regime’.4 Lucetti was in prison until September 1943, when he was killed by a shell after escaping.
Lucetti was not the only one intent on killing Mussolini. Shortly after this first attempt on Il Duce, Anteo Zamboni, the fifteen-year-old son of Bolognese anarchists, was stabbed then shot to death by fascist bodyguards under dubious circumstances. He had been accused of shooting at Mussolini, although the shot may have been fired by one of the dictator’s own entourage, extremist fascists who intended to force Mussolini’s hand. As Mussolini was standing in the back of an open topped car the bullet hit him in the chest. In typical style, he later claimed that ‘Nothing can hurt me!’ adding the story to his personal mythology. He forgot to mention the small and not insignificant matter of the bullet proof vest he wore beneath his uniform.5
In 1931, Michele Schirru and Angelo Sbardelotto were arrested before they could even attempt their assassination plan on Il Duce. Schirru was tried and sentenced to be shot. Sbardelotto was caught later and faced the same death sentence. Even approving of an assassination attempt could have severe consequences: after Lucetti’s attempt, two Roman workers were jailed for nine months for allegedly commenting that ‘they still haven’t managed to kill him’.6
Contemporary militant anti-fascists probably see the assassination of their foes as a tad extreme, but Italian fascism was founded in a climate of political violence, and anti-fascists had to resort to the most extreme measures as murders, beatings, arrests, and torturing escalated. Given such a situation, the assassination attempts by Lucetti and others become more understandable.
Italian Fascism
It is Mussolini himself who dates the beginning of fascism in 1914 after he had broken with the socialists and ‘was caught surprisingly off-guard when, during “Red Week” in June 1914, Italy came close to a real revolution with a million people taking to the streets’.7 Martin Pugh writes that ‘the Italian fascisti first appeared during the autumn of 1914. They were largely recruited from patriotic former Socialists who were determined their country should enter the First World War’.8
