HCR: The fall of fascism in Italy in 1944 and parallels with Putin/russian agression in 2022

[erronis]

https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/march-10-2022

On June 5, 1944, the day before the D-Day operation in which the Allied forces in World War II invaded German-occupied western Europe, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt gave his 29th Fireside Chat.

Roosevelt told the American people that Rome had fallen to American and Allied troops the previous day. He used the talk not only to announce this important milestone in the deadly war, but also to remind Americans they were engaged in a war between democracy and fascism. And while fascists insisted their ideology made countries more efficient and able to serve their people, the Allies’ victory in Rome illustrated that the ideology of fascism, which maintained that a few men should rule over the majority of the population, was hollow.

Rome was the seat of fascism, FDR told his listeners, and under that government, “the Italian people were enslaved.” He explained: “In Italy the people had lived so long under the corrupt rule of Mussolini that, in spite of the tinsel at the top—you have seen the pictures of him—their economic condition had grown steadily worse. Our troops have found starvation, malnutrition, disease, a deteriorating education and lowered public health—all by-products of the Fascist misrule.”

...

In 2019, Russian president Vladimir Putin told the Financial Times that the ideology of liberalism on which democracy is based has “outlived its purpose.” Multiculturalism, freedom, and human rights must give way to “the culture, traditions, and traditional family values of millions of people making up the core population.”

Hungary’s Viktor Orbán has been open about his determination to replace western-style democracy with what he has, on different occasions, called “illiberal democracy,” or “Christian democracy,” ending the immigration that he believes undermines Hungarian culture and rejecting “adaptable family models” with “the Christian family model.”

...

That authoritarian government, it turns out, depended on democracies. As businesses pull out of Russia, the economy has collapsed. The ruble is worth less than a penny, and the Russian stock market remains closed. Today, the Russian economic ministry announced it would take the property of businesses leaving the country. Notably, it claimed the right to take about $10 billion of jets that had been leased to Russian airlines, quite possibly a way to get spare parts for the airplanes the huge country needs and can no longer get.

Putin is trying to prop up his power by insisting his people believe lies: on Friday, he signed a law making it a crime for media to produce any coverage the government says is “false information” about the invasion. He is now pushing the false claim that the U.S. is developing biological weapons in Ukraine, and has requested a meeting of the U.N. Security Council tomorrow to discuss this issue. Pentagon spokesman John Kirby called the story “classic Russian propaganda.”

Enough quoting. This is a great column and the comments are chock full of excellent background information.
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/march-10-2022/comments

Link to tweet

[Hortensis]

1. Typical outrageous dishonesty that authoritarians can claim liberalism has failed

and autocracy is proven the better form when ALL the authoritarian states formed during the last century failed in comparison with liberal states. They all both declined and failed to develop with varying degrees of severity, and some failed dreadfully over decades with many millions of deaths and enormous suffering. Including of course, Russia.

During that same period, the liberal democracies lead the world forward by all measures that people want for themselves and by the positive measures that economists and social scientists study. Liberal democratic governments advanced humanity to unprecedented, previously unimaginable wellbeing around the planet -- and still do. They never performed a worthy purpose to outlive.

Without the benefits of the strength and prosperity of liberal democracies, the autocracies would have failed much faster and worse on their own, or at least done far more poorly, as Russia is threatened with now.

Even western governments that are light-authoritarian, even those that are democracies, lag liberal democracies in vigor, freedom, and their peoples' overall levels of wellbeing.

Liberal democracy is the only form proven, many times over, capable of fulfilling its worthy purpose.