Benito Mussolini admitted that his fascism was nothing more than communism

Benito Mussolini admitted that his fascism was nothing more than communism

Benito Mussolini confided to Alfred Mitchell Bingham during his visit to Italy in 1931 that: "Fascism is the same thing as communism." The Fascists even realized that Communism was cut from the same socialist and collectivist cloth. Both aspired to construct a classless society as an ultimate goal. In 1933, the leftwing Fascist theoretician Ugo Spirito noted that “One does a disservice to Fascism in conceiving it as antithetical to Bolshevism as one might oppose good and evil or truth and error. If today the energies of the political orientation (of our time) find expression in Fascism and Bolshevism, it is clear that the future belongs not to that regime which negates the other, but that which, of the two, has shown itself capable of incorporating and transcending the other in a more advanced form. The Soviet Union and Fascist Italy also forged close trade relations, which included mutual exchanges of weapons and strategic goods. Both the Soviet Union and Fascist Italy engaged in varying degrees of heavy state interventionism within the economy. Joseph Clarke wrote that “The Soviet and Italian economic organizations similarly called for more national regulation. Production controls, including those directed toward capital costs, profits, and wages, inevitably were bound up with trade regulations and credit policy. Trade unions in both ideocracies became part of the state machinery and acted only within the framework of new institutions resting on the foundations of the corporative cooperation of workers, employers, and state in Italy, or on the socialist cooperation of party and state in the Soviet Union.” Former Soviet GRU General Alexander Barmine recalled that “Soviet technicians came to the conclusion that Italy, which they had always considered a backward nation, had made enormous strides since the war and now possessed up-to-date industrial equipment. We bought Fiat cars, airplane engines, dockyard equipment, and ships. At Venice, Genoa, and Trieste the naval yards built merchant ships for us. I traveled all over the country and met several leaders of Italian industry. I had to negotiate the purchase of a number of ships with old Admiral Count Ciano. He offered three-year credits, but we wanted five. We could come to no agreement. My dealings with Senator Agnelli, of the Fiat Works, and with Signor Benni, of the electrotechnical industry, were more successful.” Italy exported destroyers for the Soviet Navy, while the firms Fiat and Ansaldo supplied weapons to the Red Army. REFERENCE: Nevin Gussack, The Red-Black Alliance: Fascist-Communist Cooperation (1914-1941), p. 4.