50 Fun Facts About Fascism

The fasces, the ancient emblem that gave fascism its name, appears on the reverse of which old American coin?

The Mercury dime, minted from 1916 to 1945, shows the bundle of rods with an axe as a sign of unity and strength. Its design predates Mussolini's movement, which later made the emblem notorious.

Before founding the Fascist movement, Benito Mussolini edited Avanti!, the newspaper of which Italian political party?

The Socialists expelled Mussolini for urging Italy to enter the First World War. He was called up in 1915, was wounded in 1917, and came home to build a movement that fought his old comrades.

Benito Mussolini is popularly, but wrongly, credited with making which Italian service run on time?

The trains owed most of their repairs to work done before Mussolini took power in 1922. Their famous punctuality under his rule was more propaganda than reality.

The 1929 Lateran Treaty, signed by Benito Mussolini's government, created which tiny independent state?

Vatican City settled a quarrel that had run since Italy annexed Rome in 1870, leaving popes who refused to recognise the kingdom. The deal won Mussolini the goodwill of many Catholics.

A stiff-arm salute Americans dropped in 1942, as it looked fascist, had accompanied which patriotic recital?

The Pledge of Allegiance was recited with an outstretched arm, known as the Bellamy salute, from 1892. Congress replaced the gesture with a hand over the heart in December 1942.

Which English novelist was shot in the throat by a sniper while fighting fascists in the Spanish Civil War?

George Orwell was wounded in 1937 while serving with a small Marxist militia on the Aragon front. He told the story in Homage to Catalonia, which ends with his escape to France.

Which Picasso painting protests the 1937 bombing of a Basque town by German and Italian aircraft?

Guernica was first shown at the Spanish pavilion of the 1937 Paris exposition. It then stayed abroad, mostly at New York's Museum of Modern Art, and reached Spain only in 1981.

Which New York venue hosted a pro-Nazi German American Bund rally of more than 20,000 people in February 1939?

Madison Square Garden's stage carried a huge portrait of George Washington flanked by swastikas. Outside, protesters tried three times to break through the police lines guarding the rally.

Benito Mussolini's Italy hosted and won which sporting tournament in 1934, exploiting it as propaganda?

The FIFA World Cup of 1934 ended with Italy beating Czechoslovakia 2–1 in the final. Holders Uruguay stayed away, the only time the reigning champions have not taken part.

Which Italian anti-fascist folk song, dedicated to the wartime partisans, found new fame through the series Money Heist?

Bella Ciao may descend from a protest song of the women who weeded northern Italy's rice fields. The partisan version became widespread only after the Second World War had ended.

Which nickname, taken from the colour of their uniform, was given to Benito Mussolini's paramilitary squads?

The Blackshirts modelled their dress on the Arditi, Italy's elite assault troops of the First World War. In 1923 the squads were turned into an official state militia.

Which African country did Benito Mussolini's forces invade in 1935, driving Emperor Haile Selassie into exile?

Ethiopia was overrun with the help of mustard gas dropped from aircraft, in breach of the 1925 Geneva Protocol. Resistance never stopped, and the country was liberated in 1941.

Which title did Benito Mussolini use as the leader of Fascist Italy?

Il Duce is a cognate of the English word duke. Admirers had given the same title to Giuseppe Garibaldi during Italian unification in 1860, long before Mussolini made it his own.

Which 1997 film set in Fascist Italy stars Roberto Benigni as a Jewish father shielding his son in a camp?

Life Is Beautiful won three Academy Awards, including Best Actor for Benigni. The story drew partly on his own father's two years in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.

Which worldwide economic slump fuelled the extremism that carried Adolf Hitler to power in 1933?

The Great Depression pushed German unemployment to nearly 30 per cent, because the country depended heavily on American loans. Hitler's party took office in January 1933.

Adolf Hitler's failed 1923 coup, inspired by Mussolini's March on Rome, began in what kind of Munich venue?

A beer hall called the Bürgerbräukeller held 3,000 people listening to Bavaria's leader when Hitler and his men marched in. By the next morning the putsch was going nowhere, and it ended in gunfire.

Which Asian empire joined Germany and Italy in the Tripartite Pact, signed in Berlin in September 1940?

Japan's envoy Saburō Kurusu signed beside the German and Italian foreign ministers while Hitler looked on. Several smaller European states added their names in the months that followed.

Which German democracy, informally named after the city where its assembly met, did the Nazis dismantle in 1933?

The Weimar Republic got its nickname because the national assembly gathered there to escape street fighting in the capital. Its official name was simply the German Reich.

Benito Mussolini gave 'Iron Prefect' Cesare Mori sweeping powers in 1925 to crush which criminal organisation?

The Mafia faced mass arrests once Mori took up his post in Palermo, with some 11,000 attributed to his rule. He stayed in office until 1929 and is still known in Italy by that nickname.

In which city, the 1919 birthplace of the Fascist movement, was Benito Mussolini's body hung upside down in 1945?

Milan's Piazzale Loreto was the square where fifteen partisans had been shot and left on display in August 1944. The dictator's body hung from the girder of a service station there.

Benito Mussolini's blacksmith father named him after Benito Juárez, a reforming president of which country?

Mexico's liberal hero appealed to the elder Mussolini, a committed left-wing radical. The boy's middle names, Amilcare and Andrea, honoured two Italian politicians of the same stripe.

Which greeting did Fascist Italy's party secretary denounce as bourgeois, urging a Roman salute instead?

The handshake was meant to vanish from Italian life, and party secretary Achille Starace praised the raised arm as more hygienic. No ancient Roman text actually describes such a salute.

Which Ernest Hemingway novel follows an American volunteer sent to blow up a bridge in the Spanish Civil War?

For Whom the Bell Tolls grew out of Hemingway's time covering the war as a newspaper reporter. Its hero, Robert Jordan, is a Spanish teacher from Montana working with anti-fascist guerrillas.

Which 2006 Guillermo del Toro fantasy is set in Francoist Spain in 1944, with a brutal army captain as villain?

Pan's Labyrinth follows ten-year-old Ofelia, whose stepfather Captain Vidal hunts the guerrillas still resisting the regime. The film won three Academy Awards.

Which former Labour minister, later a villain in Peaky Blinders, founded the British Union of Fascists in 1932?

Oswald Mosley had sat in Parliament as a Conservative, an independent and a Labour member before turning to fascism. He was interned without charge during the Second World War.

Which prince did Francisco Franco name in 1969 as his successor, only for him to steer Spain to democracy?

Juan Carlos was chosen over his own father, whom Franco thought too liberal. Once king, he helped dismantle the dictatorship he had been picked to preserve.

António Salazar's authoritarian Estado Novo, often likened to fascism, ruled which country until 1974?

Portugal's regime fell to the Carnation Revolution, a coup by left-wing army officers on 25 April 1974. Salazar had rejected the mass-mobilising party that marked truly fascist states.

Which Italian city's film festival, the oldest in the world, once gave a top prize called the Mussolini Cup?

Venice launched its festival in August 1932 under a founder who belonged to the Fascist Party. The Mussolini Cup was the top award from 1934 to 1942, for both Italian and foreign films.

Which world body voted sanctions on Italy over its 1935 African invasion, yet left oil off the list?

The League of Nations never fully applied its sanctions, and Italy ignored them and walked out of the organisation. The crisis is generally regarded as having discredited the body.

Which king's refusal to sign a state-of-siege order in 1922 cleared Benito Mussolini's path to power?

Victor Emmanuel III feared bloodshed and overruled his prime minister, Luigi Facta. He kept his throne through two decades of dictatorship and abdicated only in 1946.

Benito Mussolini's squads humiliated political opponents by force-feeding them large doses of which laxative?

Castor oil was a favourite tool of intimidation because the violent diarrhoea it caused humiliated the victim. It remains the remedy's most notorious use as a punishment.

German paratroopers freed Benito Mussolini from a mountaintop hotel in 1943 after landing in which aircraft?

Gliders set the raiders down beside the Hotel Campo Imperatore, high in the Gran Sasso range. A tiny Storch plane then flew the dictator out.

Benito Mussolini's son Romano, who first performed as Romano Full, made his name in which music genre?

Jazz made Romano Mussolini a respected pianist, and he also worked as a painter and film producer. He took up the stage name when he began performing after the Second World War.

Violet Gibson, daughter of Ireland's Lord Chancellor, shot Benito Mussolini in 1926 and wounded which part of his face?

His nose was bandaged and he carried on with his parade, calling the wound a mere trifle. Gibson spent the rest of her life in a psychiatric hospital in England.

Which American poet made radio broadcasts for Fascist Italy and was later held in a US Army cage near Pisa?

Ezra Pound recorded hundreds of paid propaganda talks attacking the American government and was indicted for treason in 1943. After his arrest he spent three weeks caged in the open air at a military detention camp.

Which author of The Name of the Rose set out fourteen typical features of 'Ur-Fascism' in a 1995 essay?

Umberto Eco wrote the text as a speech for a conference at Columbia University. The New York Review of Books printed it in English that June, and an Italian edition followed the same year.

Which art movement was launched by Filippo Marinetti, who went on to co-write the 1919 Fascist Manifesto?

Futurism announced itself in a 1909 manifesto that glorified speed and war. The movement mixed anarchist and Fascist elements, and Marinetti later became an active supporter of Mussolini.

Which force of foreign volunteers fought against Francisco Franco's army in the Spanish Civil War?

The International Brigades drew their largest contingent from France, with many exiles from Italy and Germany alongside. They existed for two years, from 1936 until 1938.

Which country marks Ohi Day each 28 October, recalling its 1940 rejection of an ultimatum from Benito Mussolini?

Greece then stopped the Italian invasion just inside its territory by mid-November and drove the attackers back the way they had come. The holiday's name means the anniversary of the no.

Which label did the critic Giovanni Amendola pin on Benito Mussolini's rule in 1923, only for the regime to embrace it?

Totalitarian began as a critic's description of a leader who personally held total power. The regime's philosopher Giovanni Gentile then used the word with pride in The Doctrine of Fascism in 1932.

Which name did the 1939 military alliance of Germany and Italy take after 'Blood' was dropped from the title?

Pact of Steel was Mussolini's own suggestion once he was told the first title would go down badly in Italy. Foreign ministers Ribbentrop and Ciano signed it on 22 May 1939.

Which economic doctrine, a main tenet of Italian Fascism, did the regime set out in its 1927 Charter of Labour?

Corporatism promised to merge the rival interests of employers and workers into the state for the common good. In 1939 a Chamber of Fasces and Corporations replaced the lower house of parliament.

Which poet seized Fiume in 1919 and devised the balcony speeches and salutes Benito Mussolini later copied?

Gabriele D'Annunzio set out with 186 grenadiers, was joined by troops from other units, and set up his own short-lived state in the city. He has been described as the John the Baptist of Italian fascism.

Which Sardinian-born Marxist filled more than 30 Prison Notebooks while jailed by Benito Mussolini's regime?

Antonio Gramsci was arrested in 1926 despite his immunity as a member of parliament. Moved to a clinic as his health collapsed, he died in 1937, six days after his sentence ended.

Which East London thoroughfare gave its name to the 1936 clash in which crowds blocked a British fascist march?

Cable Street ran through a district then home to a large Jewish population, so the planned route was seen as a deliberate provocation. Police sent the marchers west toward the Embankment instead.

Which Spanish fascist party was co-founded in 1933 by José Antonio Primo de Rivera, the son of a former dictator?

The Falange took a name that translates as the Spanish Phalanx. In February 1934 it merged with the JONS, a like-minded national-syndicalist group whose initials it added to its own.

Which Italian deputy was kidnapped and killed by a Fascist squad in 1924 after denouncing the regime?

Giacomo Matteotti was seized eleven days after his speech. His death, and the address of 3 January 1925 in which Mussolini took responsibility, are generally seen as the start of the dictatorship.

Which Romanian fascist movement did Corneliu Codreanu found as the Legion of the Archangel Michael?

Iron Guard was the name that stuck for a movement Codreanu founded in 1927 and led until his assassination in 1938. It was strongly anti-democratic and antisemitic.

Which lakeside town gave its informal name to the German-backed republic Benito Mussolini led from 1943 to 1945?

Salò, a small town on Lake Garda, housed Mussolini and his foreign ministry while Rome stayed the capital on paper. The state was little more than a puppet dependent on Germany.

Italian partisans captured the fleeing Benito Mussolini in April 1945 near Dongo, a village beside which body of water?

Lake Como's western shore road was the escape route for his convoy, which set off north around four in the morning on 26 April. He was caught the next day with his mistress, Clara Petacci.