Harvard University The Doctrine of Fascism Written by Mussolini Discussion

1,

What is fascism?

Read this short, but comprehensive, article with an interview to Ruth Ben-Ghiat (New York University):

https://time.com/5556242/what-is-fascism/

…and answer:

1) Which are fascism’s main principles in her view?

2) When and where did fascism begin?

3) Is fascism alive today? This activity should take you 90 minutes.

2,

Read “The Doctrine of fascism”, written in 1932 by Mussolini and the philosopher, G. Gentile: http://www.worldfuturefund.org/wffmaster/Reading/G…

Answer the following questions:

1) Why does fascism claim to be “spiritual”?

2) What does fascism reject and why?

3,

The question (I suggest you a 200 words’ answer) simply is:

How would you define “nation”?

4,

Primo Levi and the Holocaust

https://youtu.be/lA7Xa2ANx2c

This is an interesting interview with Primo Levi, a survivor of the Holocaust from Turin, my city. He was an Italian Jew and spent time as a prisoner in Auschwitz between 1943 and 1945. In 1947, he wrote If this is a Man, a book which made him internationally famous.

Please watch the interview, but you don’t have to answer. Perhaps it is better if we reflect in silence on this tragical experience. I just invite you to reflect on the idea of “rationality”, “planning”, of the Holocaust, on which he talks towards the end. This is how Bauman saw it, and in a sense, an even more tragical aspect. How can we plan other people’s death? This is a universal reflection.

5,

Ian Kershaw and Nazism

Interview with Ian Kershaw

“Hitler,” says Ian Kershaw, “had a deep-seated, lasting sense of revenge—something you don’t come across in history too often.” In Hitler, his magisterial two-volume biography now condensed into one, Kershaw caps 30 years of studying the führer and Nazi Germany in key works like The ‘Hitler Myth’: Image and Reality in the Third Reich and Hitler, the Germans, and the Final Solution. Here he painstakingly traces the many tangled contexts—historical, psychological, cultural—that enabled this incurious narcissist’s rise to power on the wings of revenge, and culminated in the horrors of World War II.

HistoryNet

Please find above an interview with Ian Kershaw, a renowned Sheffield historian of Nazism.

Answer:

1) Why was Nazism only possible in a modern society?

2) According to Kershaw, who was responsible for the Holocaust, the war, and other Nazi atrocities?

6,

Which is in your view the major cause of fascism? Answer in about 200 words. Choose fascism in general, Italian fascism, German nazism, or any other fascist experience you can think of.