Alexis de Tocqueville, a French philosopher who achieved prestige as one of the foremost observers and representatives of the Liberal tradition in defense of the American and French revolutions, in 1833:

The European race has received from Providence, or has acquired by its own efforts, so incontestable a superiority over all the other races which compose the great human family, that the individual, placed with us, by his vices and his ignorance, on the lowest step of society, is yet the first among savages. [8]

Theodore Roosevelt Jr., who would go on to be US president from 1901 to 1909, said in 1886:

I don’t go so far as to think that the only good Indian is the dead Indian, but I believe nine out of every ten are, and I shouldn’t like to inquire too closely into the case of the tenth. The most vicious cowboy has more moral principle than the average Indian. Take three hundred low families of New York and New Jersey, support them, for fifty years, in vicious idleness, and you will have some idea of what the Indians are. Reckless, revengeful, fiendishly cruel. [9]

Winston Churchill, who would go on to become the UK’s prime minister during the periods 1940–45 and 1951–55, said in 1902:

I think we shall have to take the Chinese in hand and regulate them. I believe that as civilized nations become more powerful they will get more ruthless, and the time will come when the world will impatiently bear the existence of great barbaric nations who may at any time arm themselves and menace civilized nations. I believe in the ultimate partition of China — I mean ultimate. I hope we shall not have to do it in our day. The Aryan stock is bound to triumph. [10]

As we can see, impulses we recognize as fascist today — genocidal violence and racial supremacy — were perfectly commonplace, held by highly influential policymakers in the era traditionally thought of as pre-fascist — the idealized Golden Era of competitive, entrepreneurial capitalism. Contrary to the liberal myth of boundless political pluralism, no domestic challenge in the US, the UK, or France ever rose to the stature of even a serious speedbump to the genocidal violence of primitive accumulation.

Events that happened today (October 28):

1897: Hans Speidel, Axis and then NATO general, existed.
1922: The Fascists marched on Rome and, with the monarachy’s permission, became part of the Italian government.
1940: Athens rejected Fascist Italy’s ultimatum; Fascist Italy consequently invaded Greece through Albania a few hours later.
1941: The Axis and its Lithuanian collaborators commenced massacring thousands of Jews from the Kaunas ghetto.
1944: The Axis lost Ukraine to the Soviets.
1945: Kesago Nakajima, Imperial lieutenant general who oversaw the Nanking Massacre, dropped dead.