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Notes -
All good points.
I skipped over the economic angle and indeed fascist economics is significant, it's all about advancing national interests rather than pure marketism or collectivism as you say. I think the key element is the demographic part though, fascism isn't about making the country rich but about making the people strong and populous too, Mussolini had his 'Battle for Births' and as usual, the Nazis and Japan did a better job at it with their pro-natal campaigns.
While Italy wasn't terribly racist by Axis standards, they did heavily suppress Libya and went in very hard against Ethiopia with gas and such. But it's hard to be that racist if you can't actually conquer very much. They wanted to resettle Italians to Libya and Ethiopia and parts of Dalmatia but didn't get around to it with wartime difficulties.
Yeah China's an odd one, they've got the economics but not the foreign posture. Rhetorically, diplomatically, they're still third-worldist and anti-imperialist.
Yeah but a lot of the China rhetoric stuff is paying tribute to the legacy that led them to the current moment and sufficient undercurrent of 'if you do not pay lip service, you will not advance'. At an individual level from having chatted to a decent amount of Mainlanders there's a collectivist spirit but anything that your standard Westerner would call 'communism' is fairly dead on the ground.
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