Daktoria wrote:Did you consider that this was a result of Italian nationalism?
The unification of Italy disintegrated social values where people forgot the Renaissance and city-state culture which thrived in Italy for centuries. Outside of the turn of the 16th century's doge bound Italian Wars, Italy has never been a country about fighting. It's been a country about discovery and exploration. Even Venetian and Florentine trade was about the mariner's lifestyle in navigating by the stars to accumulate far off treasures and bring them home to share in sophistication.
Decadence only arrives when people forget how treasures are made. Nationalism means commerce is no longer necessary, so people forgot how they accumulated what they had.
The Italian values that you mentioned thoroughly shaped Italian Fascism, which is why modern fascists consider it too "wimpy" (I disagree, but whatever), so I don't think Italian Nationalism had any adverse effect on them. You can't claim that those Italian values were incompatible with Fascism, since Fascism dedicates a lot of its ideological efforts to military exploration and innovation geared toward war and the shaping of the Fascist Soldier. British Fascists praised the English explorers who colonized and subdued foreign continents.
As for nationalism meaning commerce is no longer necessary, I don't find anything bad about autarky. If anything, it'll create even more national wealth which will ensure the financial survival of the nation.
I kind of agree, but not quite.
Ideally, no militaries would exist because nobody would have the bloodlust to go to war.
However, bloodlust does exist, so militaries are necessary to give psychopaths something to do.
That said, there's a difference between barbarism and honor. We shouldn't expand a military for expansion's sake. That only breeds psychopathy further.
So an American Marine fighting in the Pacific is the result of psychopathic policies?
... WTF
In essence, yes. You create a culture where children learn the hard way, and those who don't endure the gauntlet are forgotten.
No worse than children who fall to drug trade, prostitution and poverty in a liberal state. Opera Nazionale Balilla and the Hitlerjugend integrated children into something positively meaningful that hardened them. If some fail, the alternatives I mentioned above do not exist in a Fascist state.
Sceptic wrote:Just to clarify, realism refers to promoting the nation's good at all expenses, including that of other nation's whereas just war theory will only invade where strictly necessary, minimising civilian deaths.
I misunderstood your question, then. Fascists are definitely in the realist/realpolitik camp by virtue of their doctrine. Though, again, it depends on the goals of the nation's foreign policy and whether that nation has a tradition of expansionism.
So I am wondering whether fascism can ever have an international agenda of sorts and whether absence of national conflict could ever be considered as desirable.
International agenda in the sense of spreading the Fascist revolution and making other regimes friendly to the Fascist cause? Yes, and no. "Fascist internationalism," if you will, was only put to the test in the Spanish Civil War with Italy and Germany's assistance of Franco, and in that asinine 1934 instance when the setup of a Fascist International was attempted but bickering on the issue of international Fascist policy doomed it.
And strictly, no, absence of international conflict would be the death of Fascism ideologically (militarism would inflate as weapons would no longer be used; the fascist doctrine of combativeness and vitality would atrophy and so would humans; multiculturalism and liberalism would likely blossom once more). The absence of conflict would be the death of nations, not just of fascism.