Why Is The March On Rome So Infamous?
How it happened. Why it happened. Who actually was Mussolini?
In October of 1922, a singular event kicked off a chain of events that would change Italy’s political landscape for decades to come. To fully understand the magnitude of what was to come, one must first go to the grand old year of 1914. This was the year young, and ambitious Benito Mussolini decided to start supporting WW1 and the attempted Italian expansion into parts of the Austro-Hungarian empire.
In 1915 he was conscripted into the Italian army but was discharged after only nine months because of a near-fatal accident that left him in the hospital for over six months.
After being let from the hospital in August of 1917, he was without a doubt convinced that socialism was a system of failure. In the Fall of 1917, he was hired by the British secret service to write pro-war propaganda in his self-run newspaper. Sir Samuel Hoare, Mussolini’s boss, once recorded him saying that he wanted to “send Italian army veterans to beat up peace protesters in Milan,” which was the precursor idea for the infamous ‘Black Shirts.’ It is safe to assume that this arrangement was dissolved shortly after the war.
In 1919, Mussolini formed the Fasci Italiani di Combattimento (Italian combat fascists), a radical political…
