The actual history of fascism, no one seems to talk about.
In Italy in the early 19th century there was a division amongst the communists as to whether they should join WW1 or not.
Those who wanted to join were called interventionalists (including Mussolini, who was a communist at the time, running a communist newspaper) and there was a big rift between the interventionalists and the “regular” communists who were using organized worker strikes to cripple the Italian economy.
The merchant class, tired of hemmoraging money to general labor stikes, approached the interventionalists with money to hire them to break up the communists who would strike, violently (many of the interventionalists were previously soliders)
The origional fascist movement was all communists who felt they weren’t using enough violence.
Overall there is not a hairsbreadth difference between them. Hayek saw this in the 30s and 40s:
Although our modern socialists’ promise of greater freedom is genuine and sincere, in recent years observer after observer has been impressed by the unforeseen consequences of socialism, the extraordinary similarity in many respects of the conditions under “communism” and “fascism.” As the writer Peter Drucker expressed it in 1939, “the complete collapse of the belief in the attainability of freedom and equality through Marxism has forced Russia to travel the same road toward a totalitarian society of un-freedom and inequality which Germany has been following. Not that communism and fascism are essentially the same. Fascism is the stage reached after communism has proved an illusion, and it has proved as much an illusion in Russia as in pre-Hitler Germany.”
No less significant is the intellectual outlook of the rank and file in the communist and fascist movements in Germany before 1933. The relative ease with which a young communist could be converted into a Nazi or vice versa was well known, best of all to the propagandists of the two parties. The communists and Nazis clashed more frequently with each other than with other parties simply because they competed for the same type of mind and reserved for each other the hatred of the heretic. Their practice showed how closely they are related. To both, the real enemy, the man with whom they had nothing in common, was the liberal of the old type. While to the Nazi the communist and to the communist the Nazi, and to both the socialist, are potential recruits made of the right timber, they both know that there can be no compromise between them and those who really believe in individual freedom.
— F.A. Hayek, The Road to Serfdom
The Left does not believe in individual freedom, they are consistent there.
Right.
They were generally motivated (additionally) by the work of Georges Sorel. Sorel wrote a book titled Reflections on Violence, which of course promoted the idea that its alright and perhaps at times preferable to throw a molotov or two.
New audiobook release: Reflections on Violence, by George Sorel
https://freerepublic.com/focus/f-bloggers/4358124/posts
You mean early 20th century.