The Polish anticommunists of the short 20th century were very impressed with Fascism

yadda.icm.edu.pl /yadda/element/bwmeta1.element.ojs-doi-10_12775_APH_2021_123_06/c/APH.2021.123.06-29350.pdf

Fascism spawned substantial numbers of Mussolini fans in Imperial America, the Empire of Japan, and elsewhere. Poland was no exception:

Before the March on Rome, **the Polish nationalist press yielded a sheer inundation of mentions and larger journalistic pieces whose purport for the Italian fascism was enthusiastic.**¹⁸ Among the opinion‐making periodicals, Warsaw‐based Myśl Narodowa took primacy in delivering the news on the situation in Italy.
Ignacy Oksza‐Grabowski, the biweekly’s leading commentator (and editor‐in‐chief for some time), argued that fascists were essentially active and involved conservatives (“traditionalists, of a deep Italic culture”), just militant and struggle‐oriented (“acting rather than talking”), putting national slogans into practice (“pure sang nationalists”).¹⁹
[…]
The crest of the wave of interest in the biweekly was marked with Myśl Narodowa’s issue dedicated to Italy, opening with a poem by Rosa di Mario, ‘the Poetess of the Fascists’, entitled To Poland and written “to the nation’s honour”.²¹ The Poznań‐based Przegląd Wszechpolski spoke in a similar spirit; its authors saw a universal message in the Italian incidents: fascism is, they believed, a “powerful reaction against the disintegration trends”, a “national movement which, in the name of rescuing the Homeland from decay, embarked on fighting against communism”.²²

(The ‘disintegration trends’ in question probably referring to Italy’s ‘mid‐1921 […] class‐based trade unions, through to anarchistic and social‐democratic groups and the communist parties emerging at that very time.’)

The Przegląd Wszechpolski editors believed that the situation in Italy was part of a more general wave that would spread all over Europe, while the concept of fascism described a broader, supranational phenomenon. […] Fascist Italy was depicted as the mainstay of “civilisation, and of social and political peace in Europe”, Kurier Poznański, Greater Poland’s largest nationalist daily, wrote of an attempt at the “greatest man of Italy and humanity” (p. 172).
[…]
In his correspondence cycle preceding the collection of writings entitled Amica Italia, Władysław Jabłonowski ascertained that fascism was an “intensified activity in the area of national expansion”. Apart from taking prevalence in Italian public life, he pointed to new colonial conquests as another objective of fascism.⁶¹
It is thanks to fascism, he argued, that the Italians have been born anew, or biologically and spiritually reborn (“the strength of a tribe bustling with a mighty life is seen breaking through”); they are bringing about “an act of great importance, indeed a historical act … of passing from a small to a grand colonial epoch” (p. 3).

(Some emphasis added.)

7 comments

What do you mean "were", they still are.
- Lel, nice one.
  I could retitle the thread to something like ‘Polish anticommunists in the 20th century were very impressed with Fascism’ to be less misleading. This paper focusses on the interbellum period and doesn’t go all the way up to the third millennium. I am less familiar with contemporary Polish anticommunism, hence the title.
  ETA: It’s fixed now.
- True, sadly. And in the case of the "confederation" party, they openly say that they do not want Jews, UE, LGBT+, etc., so they are even too stupid to be crypto-fascists, like other parties of this kind in the West.
  
  I kinda appreciate the Konfederacja party, in a polemic leninist sense - lowest dregs of polish politics gathered in one place and openly allied for all to see that they are really one group: monarchists, libertarians, nazis.

Would one of you be able to explain to me what this means? “powerful reaction against the disintegration trends”. And this “It is thanks to fascism, he argued, that the Italians have been born anew, or biologically and spiritually reborn. These 2 things have seriously confused me right now.
- Sure. The ‘disintegration trends’ is likely a reference to the lower‐class forces who were making gains under the prefascist order. Fascism smashed the unionizers, strikers, and communists who were winning concessions from the upper classes, and undid all of those concessions. Fascism also created a spectacle that emphasized Italian nationality, glorified the military, further privileged the Catholic Church, and romanticized the past; it lead to a vast increase in neoclassical works (sculptures, architecture, and so forth), many of which remain today.
  In short, Fascism transformed the Kingdom of Italy into a (more) formidable empire.