Who Were the Sea Peoples?

MathMan wrote in the comments on my previous post on this topic: "A little while ago you had a post about how the left and the right often use the word capitalism in different ways, the right using it to mean the lack of government intervention in economic affairs, and the left using it a system designed to benefit the owners of capital. I think something similar is going on here. I think the left is using fascism to mean a system where society is controlled by the interests of big business..." Well, they might be using it that way (really, I think the word has just come to mean "yicky" when used by many on the left), but such usage makes no sense. That is because, historically, fascism was not a system controlled by the interests of big business. Fascism was a system where the interests of big business had to buckle under to those of the party and the movement. The over-riding characteristic of fascism is, in fact, ultranationalism expressed through a sing...

Some people have attempted to make a major issue of Mises's (limited) praise for fascism. Besides the fact that Mises immediately continued on with stern warnings not to trust in fascism, such criticism ignores the historical reality: fascism was really popular with a whole lot of people in the 1920s. This does not mean that all of these people were closet authoritarians; in most cases, it merely means that they were mistaken. Here is a sampling that took me about 20 minutes to collect; as you can see below, entire academic papers have been devoted to all of the praise Mussolini received. (And note: the smear implying that Keynes was a closet Nazi is as bad as this one thrown at Mises.) "[Mussolini has] rendered a service to the whole world"; "[a] Roman genius... the greatest lawgiver among men." -- Winston Churchill "Mussolini, without any of Napoleon's prestige, has done for Italy what Napoleon did for France..." -- George Bernard Shaw ...