In June 1914 the newshound Mussolini was to the fore in playing up the social disturbances known as ‘Red Week’, at the peak of which revolutionaries,… - R. J. B. Bosworth

Fascism, with its habitual use of the language of aggression—not for nothing did Mussolini regularly rejoice in his own savagery, seeing himself as a cat who walked by itself at night ready to scratch, claw and kill—deeply tinctured such thoughts and assumptions. Yet Fascism did not by itself create its bleakly Darwinian view of the functioning of the international system.

To the dismay of some ras, Mussolini suddenly announced that he wished to frame a deal with those socialists who might be willing to treat, especially with their trade unionist wing, end the social war burning through the countryside and, by implication, look to the formation of a grand coalition of new mass parties and organizations in order to overthrow the liberal system, be it embodied in parliament in Rome or in the institutions of civil society.

The fasces pledged national unity above all; each of the sticks represented a sector of society, organically bound into the corporate system. No class, gender, regional or other form of division could weaken a Fascist state, locked together as it was, a proletarian nation, needing to end subjugation by the plutocratic, established, great powers, in a Darwinian struggle of the national fittest; one Italian people, one Fascist state, one Duce at the head.