Lauren McCain’s Reviews > Blackshirts and Reds: Rational Fascism and the Overthrow of Communism > Status Update

After WWII, Western capitalist allies did little to eradicate fascism from Italy or Germany, except for putting some of the top leaders on trial at Nuremberg.

Within a year, almost all Italian fascists were released from prison. Under the protection of U.S. authorities, the police, courts, military, & bureaucracy remained staffed by those who had served the former fascist regimes— as is true to this day.

Along with serving capitalists, fascist leaders served themselves. Their personal greed & their class loyalties were two sides of the same coin.

Hitler is usually portrayed as an ideological fanatic, uninterested in material things. In fact, he accumulated a fortune, much of it in questionable ways.
He invented a "personality right," that enabled him to charge a fee for every postage stamp with his picture on it.

In both Italy in the 1920s and Germany in the 1930s, old industrial evils, thought to have passed permanently into history, re-emerged as labor conditions deteriorated. In the name of saving society from the Red Menace, unions & strikes were outlawed. Union property & farm cooperatives were confiscated & handed over to rich private owners. Minimum-wage laws, overtime pay, & factory safety regulations were abolished.

To maintain profits, landowners & industrialists would have to slash wages & raise prices. The state would have to provide them with subsidies & tax exemptions. To finance this corporate welfarism, the populace would have to be taxed more & social services and welfare would have to be cut.

But the government was not completely free to pursue this course. By 1921, many Italian workers & peasants were unionized.

True to form, the Social Democrat leaders refused the Communist party's proposal to form an eleventh-hour coalition against Nazism. The Social Democrats would sooner ally themselves with the reactionary Right than make common cause with the Reds.'

In January 1933, just weeks after the (1932) election, Hindenburg invited Hitler to become chancellor.