(I spelt ‘humor’ Britishly to let you know that this time I am not kidding. I promise.)

Fascist humour included not only sick practical jokes but verbal ones as well. Quoting Dead Funny: Humor in Hitler’s Germany, chapter I:

The vast majority of political jokes during [the Fascist era] were basically uncritical of the system, playing on the human weaknesses of [anticommunist] leaders rather than on the crimes they were committing. Imperial Marshal Hermann Göring, for instance, was a popular target because of his pompous appearance and his love of glamour and medals. One typical joke ran:

Göring recently added an arrow to the many medals on his chest. It’s there as a directional sign: “To be continued on my back.”

Chapter III:

In official [Fascist] ideology, there was hardly any sin worse than homosexuality. In the male‐dominated militarized social order of the new régime, there was no room for “femininity.” And a number of stock “gay jokes” were adapted to feature Röhm personally. One example played on the German Po, baby talk for “ass,” also the name of a river in Italy:

Did you hear Röhm is taking his next holiday in Italy? He wants to spent a few days enjoying the warmth of the Po.

The quips had not been created for Röhm personally; they had already been pointed at similar figures under other governments in German history. They were only political insofar as they were recycled in order to highlight Röhm’s fatal weakness for his party comrades.

[…]

Long after the end of World War II and the demise of the Third Reich, a generation of Germans kept insisting that they knew nothing of the [Fascists’] crimes. But the jokes popular in the early years when the [anticommunist] régime was still consolidating its power suggest that such claims were untrue, even from the beginning of [1933].

Fascist antisemitic humour started in the 1920s (e.g. Joseph Goebbels’s facetious essays ‘And You Really Want to Vote for Me?’ along with ‘Germans, Buy only from the Jew!’) and only persisted in the decades afterwards. Chapter IV:

Another popular theme was Jewish rapacity and greed, and Der Stürmer’s readership came up with endless variations on it in the jokes they invented:

Pinkus and a Gentile are attacked in the forest, and as the highwaymen are about to frisk them, Pinkus takes out his wallet and says to his fellow victim: “Ah, I just remembered. I owe you 500 schillings.”

Jokes of this sort were in constant circulation and reinforced and confirmed popular anti‐Jewish stereotypes. And though the readership of the Stürmer may have collected and passed them on, anti‐Jewish jokes were also told by apolitical Germans. They were a symptom of the latent anti‐Semitism that had survived beneath the surface of German society and long before [1933 they] had laid the groundwork for the persecution of Jews in the Third Reich.

The line between harmless kidding and defamatory jokes full of resentment was blurry, and not every joke‐teller may have been aware of when he crossed the border from mere bad taste to injuriousness.

Nonetheless, even naïvely repeated clichés helped ostracize the once completely integrated Jewish minority. Once Jews were seen by the public as outsiders or intruders, the authorities could do with them what they wanted. In this sense, no anti‐Jewish joke, however mild, was harmless. Moreover, making light of Jews against the backdrop of their persecution, disappropriation, and forced exile was heartless and cyclical, and it gave a gloss of legitimacy to those acts of injustice.

The difference between [Fascist]‐era jokes about money‐mad Jews and the jokes about tightwad Scotsmen that were popular after the war (many of the latter were adaptations of the former), was that the Scots were not a persecuted minority in Germany, nor was there widespread resentment against them.

Jews were not only moneygrubbers, according to [Fascist German] wits, they were also Communists—another anti‐Semitic cliché. The following joke, recorded by a housewife in Westphalia, was very popular. It was probably invented by a [Fascist] newspaper editor:

Trotsky, Lenin, and Litvinov are walking through a small Russian town, and the children on the street shout, “We know who you are, we know who you are.” Trotsky turns proudly to his companions and says, “You see how famous we are. Even kids recognize us.” Whereupon the children run away, shouting, “You’re Jews, you’re Jews.”

Maxim Litvinov, the Soviet Foreign Minister, like Trotsky, did have a Jewish background, and that made him a favorite target for anti‐Semitic propagandists; the [Reich’s] press referred to him as “the Jew Finkelstein.” To the [German anticommunists], Litvinov embodied everything that was wrong with the world and was living proof of the intrinsic connection between Bolshevism and Jewishness. [Under Fascism], he was seen not as a human being but as a grotesque two‐dimensional parody of one—an evil cartoon.

There were even jokes that laughed at anti‐Jewish violence, and these were told not just by hardcore [NSDAP] supporters, but also by hordes of willing opportunists and March violets. According to one example, recorded in a variety of sources, the word RADIO stood for “Rein Arischer Darf Itzig Ohrfeigen”—“a pure Aryan is allowed to box Isaac’s ears.”

Fervent [Fascists] by no means had a monopoly on this kind of tasteless cynicism. The violent fantasies of most [German anticommunists] were shared by many “nonpolitical” Germans. The constant stream of anti‐Semitic propaganda likely contributed to this, but ordinary Germans seemed to have come up with the majority of anti‐Jewish jokes on their own—a troubling indication of a fundamental animosity toward Jews and Jewishness.

By no means was humor in [the Third Reich] confined to “whispered jokes” critical of the régime. The majority of jokes about contemporary affairs were entirely harmless and without any political message. But there was also a plethora of jokes colored by [Fascism], although after World War II nobody wanted to remember those. In contrast, judging by the recollections of those who were there, popular humor that was openly critical of the government was relatively rare.

Unsurprisingly, donning ‘Jewface’ (especially for theatric purposes) was phenomenal under Fascism. One example from Edward B. Westermann’s Drunk on Genocide, page 123:

Members of Police Battalion 101 integrated a skit depicting a policeman dressed as a Jewish smuggler during their 1940 Christmas celebration in Łódź, Poland. At the time of the party, the policemen had spent a month guarding the city’s Jewish ghetto, duty that included the shooting of Jews who were involved in smuggling or who came too close to the wire surrounding the ghetto. This picture epitomizes an act of ritual humiliation and the amusement taken by the perpetrators as they celebrated their duties involving the persecution and killing of Polish Jews.

The Chancellor hisself (sometimes misperceived as a humorless individual) joked on occasion:

Now I do not always do things just as the others want them done. I consider what the others probably believe, and then do the opposite on principle. So if Mr. Stalin expected that we would attack in the center, I did not want to attack in the center, not only because Mr. Stalin probably believed I would, but because I didn't care about it any more at all. But I wanted to come to the Volga, to a definite place, to a definite city. It accidentally bears the name of Stalin himself, but do not think that I went after it on that account.

The audience laughed. Whether or not the Chancellor laughed at Charlie Chaplin’s The Great Dictator, on the other hand, remains a mystery.

Humour became a means of facilitating oppression, yet the reverse is also true: many of Fascism’s victims used humour as a crude coping mechanism. When you are trapped in a prison and death is almost certainly near, there is usually not much that you can do but make light of the situation. Quoting Nikolaus Wachsmann’s KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps, chapter 10:

Dark jokes had a similar function, with sarcasm and gallows humor becoming typical traits of KL veterans. “The discovery of this humor,” David Rousset wrote later, “enabled many of us to survive.”⁹³ Humor was a defense mechanism that distanced prisoners—however briefly—from the horror of the KL.

Nothing was off‐limits, neither the food (in Sachsenhausen, a disgusting herring paste was known as “cat shit”), the SS humiliations (in Dachau, a strip shaved across the prisoners’ closely cropped hair was known as a “lice motorway”), nor death itself (in Buchenwald, prisoners joked about the shape of the clouds coming from the crematorium). There were plenty of jokes about fellow prisoners, as well, not least the new arrivals.

Those who expected that they would soon be released were goaded by more experienced prisoners: “The first fifteen years are the hardest. Then a man gets used to it.” In this way, the old hands bolstered their status as hard‐bitten veterans, standing above the newcomers, who still had everything to learn about the camps.⁹⁴

Further reading: Laughter in Hell: The Use of Humor During the Holocaust

Underground Humour in Nazi Germany, 1933–1945

Folklore Fights the Nazis: Humor in Occupied Norway, 1940–1945

It Kept Us Alive: Humor in the Holocaust

Jewish Humor in the Holocaust: Humor As a Survival Strategy

Antisemitism in Film Comedy in Nazi Germany

Pictured: The Zionist in question.

Quoting Faris Yahya’s Zionist relations with Nazi Germany, pages 57–8:

The agreements between the Zionist movement and [the Third Reich] were a well‐kept secret for many years. But once the scandal known as the Kastner case broke in 1953, the details began to come to light gradually.

The first secret agreement to be fully revealed was the one reached between Dr. Rudolf Kastner of the Jewish Agency Rescue Committee in Budapest and Colonel Adolf Eichmann (who had signed the 1938 emigration agreement with Moshe Bar‐Gilad), the official responsible for settling the “Jewish question” in Hungary, in 1944. The Kastner–Eichmann agreement concerned the fate of some 800,000 Jews in Hungary.

“The great bulk of Hungary’s Jews were without organisation. They belonged neither to Zionism nor the Jewish Agency. They belonged only to Hungary, its homes, streets, workshops, sports fields, cafés. Who could speak for these assimilated Jews, these Jews without chairmen? […] The organised Jews took over the entire rescue work for the whole 800,000 doomed.”^75^

The organised Jews were the Zionists, who set up the Jewish Agency Rescue Committee. Kastner and the other officials of this Committee, like Ginsberg and Bar‐Gilad, were officially recognised by the [Third Reich] as negotiators and representatives of the Zionist movement.

The truth about the activities of this so‐called “Rescue Committee” did not begin to come out until [a Jewish] writer named Malchiel Greenwald publicly denounced Kastner as a collaborator with [Fascism], maintaining that “Kastner’s deeds in Budapest cost us the lives of hundreds of thousands of Jews.”^76^ Greenwald was sued for libel not by Kastner but by [Zionism’s] Government, whose leaders had been Kastner’s superiors and had drawn up the policy he had implemented.

The trial did not go well for the [neocolonial] Government. Greenwald was cleared of the charge of libel, indicating that there was a firm basis for his accusation that Kastner’s Rescue Committee had collaborated with the [Fascists] and helped them to exterminate the bulk of Hungarian Jewry in exchange for being allowed to save more than 600 prominent Zionists and take them to Palestine.

(Mirror.)

The attitude of the Zionists towards the encroaching menace of fascist domination in Germany was determined by some common ideological assumptions: the fascists as well as the Zionists believed in unscientific racial theories, and both met on the same ground in their beliefs in such mystical generalizations as “national character[”] (Volkstum) and “race”, both were chauvinistic and inclined towards “racial exclusiveness.”

Thus the Zionist official Gerhart Holdheim wrote in 1930 in an edition of the Süddeutsche Monatshefte, dedicated to the Jewish question (a publication in which, amongst others, leading anti‐Semites aired their views): “The Zionist programme encompasses the conception of a homogeneous, indivisible Jewry on a national basis. The criterion for Jewry is hence not a confession of religion, but the all‐embracing sense of belonging to a racial community that is bound together by ties of blood and history and which is determined to keep its national individuality.”^10^

That was the same language, the same phraseology, as the fascists used. No wonder then that the German fascists welcomed the conceptions of the Zionists, with Alfred Rosenberg, the chief ideologue of the [NSDAP], writing: “Zionism must be vigorously supported so that a certain number of German Jews is transported annually to Palestine or at least made to leave the country.”^11^ With an eye on such statements, Hans Lamm later wrote: “..it is indisputable that during the first stages of their Jewish policy, the [Fascists] thought it proper to adopt a pro‐Zionist attitude.”^12^

[…]

The fascists rewarded the Zionists for their “restraint” and allowed the ZVFD to go on with its work unhindered. (This was at a time when all democratic and anti‐fascist parties and organizations in Germany were subject to the most rigorous persecution, with their officials and members behind bars in prisons and concentration camps.) At the same time, the fascists placed all kinds of obstacles in the path of the non‐Zionist organizations.

These hindrances struck at the CV above all, for prior to 1933, the fascists had already seen the CV as “their chief Jewish opponents,” as is indicated by numerous examples from the [Fascist] press.^24^ The CV had always charged the Zionists with showing little interest in the “struggle [against fascism] ... and that [Zionism] followed a policy of indifference [in the face of the encroaching fascist danger] because it did not feel itself involved.”^25^

[…]

After 1933, the [Third Reich] permitted the Zionists to continue with their propaganda. While all the newspapers in Germany were placed directly under the supervision of the Ministry of Propaganda (the newspapers published by the Communists or the Social Democratic Party or the trade unions and other progressive organizations were banned) the Zionist Jüdische Rundschau was allowed to appear unhindered.

Winfried Martini, the then correspondent in Jerusalem of the Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung who, according to his own testimony, had “close personal ties with Zionism” remarked later on the “paradoxical fact” that “of all papers, it was the Jewish [i.e., Zionist] press that for years retained a certain degree of freedom which was completely withheld from the non‐Jewish press.”^28^ He added that in the Jüdische Rundschau there was very frequently to be found a critical view of the [Fascists] without this in any way leading to the banning of the paper.

Only with the end of the year 1933 onwards did it lead to a ban on selling this paper to non‐Jews. The Jews should, according to the wish of the fascists, be converted to Zionism, even if this were done with arguments directed against the fascists. In this fashion, the circulation of this Zionist paper, which had until then been srnall,^29^ underwent a rapid swing upwards.

(Emphasis added.)

It is difficult for me to put together this excerpt, because almost everything in this paper is as eye‐opening as it is horrific, so I am going to go so far as to say that this is a must‐read for any serious anti‐Zionist.

Events that happened today (October 15):

1872: Wilhelm Miklas, Austrofascist, was born.
1893: Carol II of Romania, monarchofascist, blighted the earth.
1913: Wolfgang Lüth, Axis U‐boat captain, was brought into the world.
1935: Axum fell to the Fascists, and the Naval Gazette revealed that the Third Reich’s navy had already launched twenty‐one U‐boats.
1936: The Battle of Sigüenza ended in a fascist victory, Imperial Japan founded the city of Toyonaka, Osaka, and the Third Reich officially prohibited Jewish teachers from public schools.
1940: The Spanish fascists executed President Lluís Companys of Catalonia.
1944: The Third Reich replaced the Hungarian government because the last one announced an armistice with the Soviet Union.
1946: Hermann Göring, Axis politician and war criminal, ingested cyanide… no comment.
1959: Stepan Bandera, Ukrainian fascist, bit the bullet.

Quoting Lenni Brenner’s Zionism in the Age of Dictators, chapter 7:

It was only after his mother died, and he moved from provincial Linz to Vienna, that Hitler found occasion to question the glib assumptions of his youth. For there he wandered through the old inner city and encountered a Galician Hasid, ‘an apparition in a black caftan and black hair locks. Is this a Jew? was my first thought.’ But the more he thought about what he had seen, the more his question assumed a new form: ‘Is this a German?’^167^ It is in the context of his earliest ruminations on what was, for him, the central question of existence that he introduced Zionism into his opus.

And whatever doubts I may still have nourished were finally dispelled by the attitude of a portion of the Jews themselves. Among them there was a great movement, quite extensive in Vienna, which came out sharply in confirmation of the national character of the Jews: this was the Zionists.
It looked, to be sure, as though only a part of the Jews approved this viewpoint, while the majority condemned and inwardly rejected such a formulation. But… the so‐called liberal Jews did not reject the Zionists as non‐Jews, but only as Jews with an impractical, perhaps even dangerous, way of publicly avowing their Jewishness.^168^

There is no better proof of Zionism’s classic rôle as an outrider to anti‐Semitism than Hitler’s own statement. What more, the reader was to ask, could any reasonable person need? However, before 1914 Hitler had no need to concern himself further with Zionism, as the prospects of a revived Jewish state seemed very remote. It was the Balfour Declaration, Germany's defeat and the Weimar revolution that made him think again about Zionism.

[…]

By 1919 Rosenberg had already explained Zionism in his book, Die Spur des Juden im Wandel der Zeiten (The Trace of the Jews in the Wanderings of Time)[.] It was just another Jewish hustle; the Zionists only wanted to create a hide‐out for the international Jewish conspiracy. Jews were, by their racial nature, organically incapable of building a state of their own, but he felt that Zionist ideology served wonderfully as a justification for depriving Germany’s Jews of their rights and that, perhaps, there was the possibility of future use of the movement for the promotion of Jewish emigration.

Hitler soon began to touch on these themes in his talks, and on 6 July 1920 he proclaimed that Palestine was the proper place for the Jews and that only there could they hope to get their rights. Articles supporting emigration to Palestine began appearing in the party organ, the Volkischer Beobachter, after 1920, and periodically party propagandists would return to the point, as did Julius Streicher in a speech given on 20 April 1926 before the Bavarian Landtag.^169^ But for Hitler the validity of Zionism only lay in its confirmation that the Jews could never be Germans. In Mein Kampf, he wrote:

For while the Zionists try to make the rest of the world believe that the national consciousness of the Jew finds its satisfaction in the creation of a Palestinian state, the Jews again slyly dupe the dumb goyim. It doesn’t even enter their heads to build up a Jewish state for the purpose of living there; all they want is a central organisation for their international world swindle, endowed with its own sovereign rights and removed from the intervention of other states: a haven for convicted scoundrels and a university for budding crooks.^170^

Jews lacked the essential racial character to build a state of their own. They were essentially leeches, lacking in natural idealism, and they hated work. He explained:

For a state formation to have a definite spatial setting always presupposes an idealistic attitude on the part of the state‐race, and especially a correct interpretation of the concept of work. In the exact measure in which this attitude is lacking, any attempt at forming, even of preserving, a spatially delimited state fails.^171^

In spite of any early musings about Zionism’s efficacy in eventually promoting emigration, the [German Fascists] made no effort to establish any relationship with the local Zionists. On the contrary, when the Zionist Congress met in Vienna in 1925, the [German Fascists] were among those who rioted against their presence.^172^

(Those of us who have studied Fascism in depth know that such vacillations were usually only temporary, as we shall soon see.)

[T]he [German Fascists] primarily focused on denouncing the Jews, rather than explaining what they would do about them after they won. However, for decades ‘[insert slur here] to Palestine!’ had been the slogan of European anti‐Semitism, and the [Fascist] propagandists used it in their own agitation. In June 1932 the centrepiece for one of their largest anti‐Jewish rallies, in Silesian Breslaw, was a huge banner telling the Jews to ‘get ready for Palestine!’^174^ During the anti‐Jewish boycott on 1 April 1933, pickets at the department stores handed out an imitation ‘one‐way ticket to Palestine’ to Jewish‐looking passers‐by.^175^

[…]

Not only would wholesale Jewish emigration make Berlin unpopular among other capitals, but what would happen after the arrival of large numbers of Jews in any of the major cities of the world? They would incite others, and not just Jews, against the Reich and the effect they could have on Germany’s trade might well be devastating. It was within this context that the Zionists, Sam Cohen of Ha Note'a and the ZVfD in Germany, first appeared with their proposals.

Ha'avara had several obvious advantages to the [Fascists]. If Jews went to Palestine, they would only be able to complain to other Jews. In fact, they would even be a moderating influence there, since the fear of worse consequences for their relatives in Germany, if anything were done to make the [Fascists] cancel the Transfer, would make them reluctant to agitate on a large scale. But the most important use of the Ha'avara agreement was for propaganda. The [Fascists] now had something to show their foreign detractors who said they were incapable of any policy toward the Jews other than physical brutality.

[…]

[The Third Reich] regarded the will of the Führer as having the force of law, and once Hitler had pronounced, an avowedly pro‐Zionist policy developed. Also in October Hans Frank, then the Bavarian Minister of Justice, later the Governor‐General of Poland, told the Nuremberg parteitag that the best solution to the Jewish question, for Jews and Gentiles, alike, was the Palestinian National Home.^178^ […] Jews could still leave for any country that would have them, but now Palestine became the propagandists’ preferred solution to the Jewish question.

[…]

By 1934 the SS had become the most pro‐Zionist element in the [NSDAP]. Other [Fascists] were even calling them ‘soft’ on the Jews. Baron von Mildenstein had returned from his six‐month visit to Palestine as an ardent Zionist sympathiser. Now as the head of the Jewish Department of the SS’s Security Service, he started studying Hebrew and collecting Hebrew records; when his former companion and guide, Kurt Tuchler, visited his office in 1934, he was greeted by the strains of familiar Jewish folk tunes.^182

There were maps on the walls showing the rapidly increasing strength of Zionism inside Germany.^183^ Von Mildenstein was as good as his word: he not only wrote favourably about what he saw in the Zionist colonies in Palestine; he also persuaded Goebbels to run the report as a massive twelve‐part series in his own Der Angriff (The Assault), the leading [Fascist] propaganda organ (26 September to 9 October 1934). His stay among the Zionists had shown the SS man ‘the way to curing a centuries‐long wound on the body of the world: the Jewish question’.

It was really amazing how some good Jewish boden under his feet could enliven the Jew: ‘The soil has reformed him and his kind in a decade. This new Jew will be a new people.’^184^ To commemorate the Baron’s expedition, Goebbels had a medal struck: on one side the swastika, on the other the Zionist star.^185^

(Emphasis added in all cases.)

Events that happened today (October 11):

1879: Ernst Mally, Axis philosophist and educator, was delivered to the world.
1884: Friedrich Karl Rudolf Bergius, Axis chemist who worked for I.G. Farben, started his life.
1901: Masanobu Tsuji, Axis army officer and politician, was born.
1937: The Duke and Duchess of Windsor toured the Third Reich for twelve days and met Adolf Schicklgruber on 22 October.
1941: Axis‐occupied Macedonia faced a war of liberation.
1942: Off Guadalcanal, United States Navy ships intercepted and defeat an Axis force.
2013: Erich Priebke, SS commander who was responsible for the Ardeatine massacre, finally dropped dead after obstinately living long enough to become a centenarian.

I realize that it sounds elementary to most of us, but given the presence of some who are still willing to miscategorize the People’s Republic of China, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, and other people’s republics as ‘fascist’, I think that this point needs to be restated, this time more emphatically.

Quoting Daniel Guerin’s excellent Fascism and Big Business, page 63:

The idea of the class struggle, the basis of proletarian socialism, is at first not understood by the petty bourgeois. For him, unlike the worker, the capitalist exploiter “remains anonymous, unperceived, hidden behind the curtain of free transactions.”²¹ When he defends his threatened interests, he does it with the same mentality as the capitalist [whom] he opposes: one individual struggling against another individual. There is a conflict of interests; there is no class struggle.

The petty bourgeoisie struggles against some individual haut bourgeois, e.g. George Soros, but never against the haute bourgeoisie as such (unless you count the competition between businesses).

While many petty bourgeois may be critical of the haute bourgeoisie, they are never against it in any meaningful way. For them, the haute bourgeoisie simply needs some tuning: for example, a more fascist mindset, which entails more respect for small businesses, or at least the small businesses of the most preferred ethnic group.

Since most—if not all—of the petty bourgeoisie dreams of furthering its opulence, which necessitates eventually graduating to the haute bourgeoisie, it would be nonsensical for the petty bourgeoisie to seriously and meaningfully oppose its richer counterpart. (Microbusinesses consisting entirely of one person are an arguable exception.)

Guerin continued:

The position of the middle classes between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat explains why they tend to condemn all class struggle—that waged by the bourgeoisie against the proletariat as well as that waged by the proletariat against the bourgeoisie.

They are persuaded that class collaboration is possible, that there is a general interest above all antagonistic interests. And by general interests they mean their own interests, intermediate between those of the [haute] bourgeoisie and those of the proletariat.

They dream of a “state above classes,” which will not be in the service of either the proletariat or the bourgeoisie, and consequently will be in their own service. But while the proletariat proclaims the reality of the class struggle between capital and labor, the [haute] bourgeoisie carries on the class struggle behind the mask of “class collaboration,” and often succeeds in turning the middle classes away from socialism.

(Emphasis added in all cases.)

Somebody might claim that the People’s Republic of China follows a similar pattern with its conditional tolerance for billionaires, but this is a superficial analysis. The haute bourgeoisie in Italy and Germany institutionalized fascism to preserve its class and reinforce its political power, which was why capitalists such as Alfried Krupp received no punishment until Allied occupation, and even then only trivially.

The PRC’s bourgeoisie, which has less political power, is only shrinking despite whatever highly conditional tolerance that it receives. Class warfare against the bourgeoisie never came anywhere close to an official policy in the Fascist empires, but it did in the people’s republics. This is only one of the many reasons why we cannot categorize the PRC or the other people’s republics as ‘(neo)fascist’.

[S]ince its escape from the Red Revolution in 1918, Finland enjoyed an exceptional interest among Italians. In 1919, a significant number of Finnish officers joined the training service in Italy. Further visits to Italy were made in the 1920s and two first-rank Finnish generals were invited to a study trip by the Fascist régime in 1933 (Nevakivi 2006). The education of Finnish officers in Italy acquired a particular ideological dimension after the March on Rome.

Several extreme right-wing men like Lieutenant-Colonel Arne Somersalo, the very first head of the Finnish airforce, succeeded in visiting Italy. Somersalo and his fellows were potential top leaders of a pro-fascist Finnish movement and they were received by Mussolini. In fact, since its beginnings, the Finnish radical right had been inspired by the Italian example. In Finland, ‘fascism became a word of fashion meaning the anti-communist fight’ (Nevakivi 2006).

At the end of 1929, Attilio Tamaro was appointed ambassador (ministro plenipotenziario) to Finland and went to Helsinki.^2^ Being one of the most important representatives of Italian irredentism in Trieste, he declared that he shared the Finnish motivations for independence. But Tamaro admitted, during an interview to the newspaper Hufvudstadsbladet, that his knowledge about Finland came from English and German books, together with the Italian translation of the Finnish poem Kalevala.^3^

He was particularly fascinated by Finnish nationalism and their sense of freedom. In fact, some years before, Mussolini had supported the Finnish struggle against Bolshevism. It should not be considered a mystery that Italy sold weapons to Finland during the 1920s.^4^

Quoting Professor Gian Giacomo Migone’s The United States and Fascist Italy, pgs. 90, 94, and 121:

In studying the abundant and detailed documentation available on the issue of war debt, the lasting impression is that the biggest merit of Mussolini and his staff was to surround themselves with the best counsel and heed their advice.

Among all the possible interlocutors in the banking world, the Fascist government privileged J.P. Morgan & Co. becoming one of their principal clients. […] the House of Morgan was correctly judged to be best suited for guiding a foreign government such as that of Italy through the long and complex path leading to economic success, starting with the key first step of reaching an accord on war debt.

[…]

The services provided by the House of Morgan to the [Fascist] government, in sum, were not those usually offered even by the largest banks to important clients. […] the associates of the Morgan Bank became, even more than the bankers of the Fascist government, its financial and political counsel — those who could guide it through the thickets of the American power structure, avoiding congressional and isolationist pitfalls, to the point that their influence reached even into the Coolidge administration.

(Emphasis added.)

So much for fascism’s opposition to ‘international finance’…