John T. Flynn, 1944: "Fascism originated on the the Left"

I can't get over the fact that Antifa uses the exact same tactics and rhetoric of the original fascists in Italy, down to dressing in black. Mussolini had a paramilitary wing of the National Fascist Party who dressed in black shirts, ergo the name "Blackshirt".

In his classic 1944 book on Fascism, As We Go Marching, John T. Flynn explains that Fascism originated on the Left not the Right:


"The commonly accepted theory that fascism originated in the conspiracy of the great industrialists to capture the state will not hold. It originated on the Left. Primarily it gets its first impulses in the decadent or corrupt forms of socialism—from among those erstwhile socialists who, wearying of that struggle, have turned first to syndicalism and then to becoming saviors of capitalism, by adapting the devices of socialism and syndicalism to the capitalist state. The industrialists and nationalists joined up only when the fascist squadrons had produced that disorder and confusion in which they found themselves lost. Then they supposed they perceived dimly at first and then more clearly, in the preachments of the fascists, the germs of an economic corporativism that they could control, or they saw in the fascist squadrons the only effective enemy for the time being against communism. Fascism is a leftist product—a corrupt and diseased offshoot of leftist agitation."

[link to mises.org (secure)]