National Observer Home > No. 60 - Autumn 2004 > Book Reviews Book Review: Mussolini: a New LifeThe hero of that minor movie classic Groundhog Day may have resented needing to endure the same twenty-four hours again and again, but others view such incurable chronological repetitiveness as positively desirable. Leftist English-language commentators on Mussolini, for example, seldom weary from contemplating the joys of 26 April 1945. For them, the treatment upon that date of the ex-dictator's bullet-riddled, mud-spattered, bloodied and generally befouled corpse (in Milan's Piazzale Loreto) is the perfect pill to purge melancholy. But since even the most assiduous leftist majoritarian cannot very well make an entire book out of one day's mob vengeance, it follows that few full-length guides in English to Mussolini exist, and that even fewer are reliable. Sadly, the two best Italian studies of Il Duce - one from the 1950s by Giorgio Pini and Duilio Susmel, the other and later production by Renzo De Felice - have never been translated. The most recent attempt in our tongue at a comprehensive life was that of Western Australia's Richard Bosworth: an attempt simultaneously pretentious and unsatisfying. Readers with no Italian (and with a healthy distaste for cold-eyed Marxist ideologues like Denis Mack Smith) have therefore needed to fall back on the 1962 volume by Christopher Hibbert: very well written, but inevitably outdated, and with all too sketchy a coverage of Mussolini's pre-war government. Now, at last, comes a grippingly recommendable modern account - in trenchant, sardonic prose - of Italy's longest-serving Prime Minister. Nicholas Farrell's Duce is a more complex figure than has been conveyed to us by (in Farrell's own words) "British historians of a certain age weaned on the wartime propaganda image of Mussolini as unprincipled opportunist and buffoon." Underlying the Farrell narrative, though never actually quoted, are two epigrams. One comes from the late chronicler and editor Sir Charles Petrie: "What made Fascism unpopular was not its tyranny but its failure." The second comes from the late novelist Alberto Moravia, who with his early satire shocked Fascist censors but received encouragement from Mussolini himself: "If he'd had a foreign policy as clever as his domestic one perhaps he'd be Duce today." Italian Fascism's great unknown is, of course, the impact of 1940. What if Mussolini, during and after Hitler's Drang nach Westen, had simply remained neutral (a policy that paid lifetime dividends for Franco and almost-lifetime dividends for Salazar)? Or, if a German alliance really had been unavoidable, what if Mussolini had made his military support dependent on Hitler moderating his racial hatred and tearing up the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact? This might even have healed the Duce's eventual breach with King Victor Emmanuel III, who willingly lamented the 1938 race laws, and who learned from experience what befell royals who irked the Nazis (his own daughter Mafalda perished in Buchenwald). Thanks to works like Zeev Sternhell's The Birth of Fascist Ideology, we now know that Jews were almost unbelievably over-represented among Italian Fascists, until the 1938 statutes chased them away from party ranks. Eighty-five per cent of all Jews in Italy survived the German occupation: a figure astonishingly high even by Denmark's standards, let alone Poland's or Romania's. Those who most loudly deplored anti-Jewish bloodshed included the Fascist philosopher Giovanni Gentile. Farrell is at his very best in dealing with Mussolini's pre-1922 and post-1943 actions. Unlike Lenin and Stalin, the Italian leader underwent real suffering in childhood - he never even learned to speak until he was three, a fact surely connected to his subsequent eloquence - and real poverty in youth. He revered imaginative literature (Dante remained a lifelong favourite) and also venerated sociology; during his years as a day-labourer in Switzerland he attended public lectures by Vilfredo Pareto, and he lost count of the number of times he had read Gustave Le Bon's Psychology of the Crowd. As a journalist he showed immense talent and possibly genius, dispensing with the ornate poeticisms that then typified Italian newspapers, in favour of pugnacious invective. When he took over the Socialist newspaper Avanti! it had a circulation of 28,000. He sent it soaring to an average of 60,000, and at times it reached 100,000. His move in 1914 from an anti-war to a pro-war attitude derived not from rejection of socialism, but from continued trust in it: "The bloodbath of war would be the midwife of revolution", he believed. Three years afterwards the Russian upheavals and the French army mutinies vindicated his belief. Moreover, most other European countries' Socialists - unlike Italy's - had been pro-war all along. Once Italy entered the conflict, Mussolini enlisted, confirming the physical courage that he routinely displayed elsewhere: notably in duels (one of them with his fellow Socialist Claudio Treves), in a near-fatal 1921 plane accident, and in the face of repeated assassination attempts once he had gained power. Of equal significance is the contrast between his comparative steadfastness in 1918-22, and the intricate bungling of mainstream parliamentary hacks. Between 1914 and the March on Rome, Italy had eight different Prime Ministers, all blatantly incompetent - save for the veteran Giovanni Giolitti, who was subtly incompetent - and unable to meet even the most basic Italian governmental obligation at the time, namely protecting private property against Socialist gangsterism. "The Socialist party", Mussolini accurately observed in 1920 (shortly before the Communists broke away to establish their own machine), "is a Russian army camped out in Italy." When treating Mussolini's own rule, Farrell (an Italian resident himself) is especially authoritative on aspects of Italian administrative life that Anglophone commentators are usually too parochial, and insufficiently conspiratorial, to consider. Among these aspects: the Fascist leadership's exceptionally decentralised structure, which vested great authority in each regional party chief (or ras, as Italians called him, adopting - ironically enough in view of later events - an Abyssinian word). Many a ras therefore could, and did, show an unscrupulous vigour that guaranteed an enduring headache for Mussolini himself. Roberto Farinacci and Italo Balbo, to name only two, governed their party branches as more or less independent kingdoms; Farinacci showed what he thought of the Duce by acting as the lawyer for the killers of Socialist parliamentarian Giacomo Matteotti. Farrell also excels in specifying the threat posed to Fascism by Freemasonry. No student of politics can hope to understand Italian lodges (or their counterparts in France, Spain, Portugal, and Latin America) if he thinks of them as equivalents to the gentlemanly dining-clubs of Anglo-Saxon experience. Since the French Revolution, Continental Freemasonry has comprised an extremely efficient network of anti-Christian thugs and infiltrators, differing in name rather than in substance from such celebrated humanitarian outfits as Hamas, Sinn Fein, Sendero Luminoso, and Irgun Zvei Leumi. Italy's chief Masons never forgave Mussolini for hitting them hard: just as Mafiosi never forgave him for the successes which one of his abler administrators, Cesare Mori, achieved during the 1920s in bringing organised Sicilian crime under control. (The Mafia owed its ensuing revival, need one say, to unctuous meddling by American invaders in 1943-44.) Like any other accurate depiction of Fascist Italy's drama, Farrell's writing pays due attention to that often overlooked spear-carrier who in the second-last act became a protagonist: the King. Mussolini mocked his diminutive sovereign repeatedly, calling him in private "the little sardine". "It's not my fault," the dictator snapped on another occasion, "that he's no better than a half-cartridge." Alas for the Fascists, Victor Emmanuel considered revenge to be a dish best eaten cold: as he demonstrated with bland irrevocability in the bloodless July 1943 coup that brought Mussolini down. Historians traditionally dismiss Mussolini's final role - the Presidency of that Nazi satellite state, the Salò Republic - as a boringly sordid anticlimax to his active life. Farrell demonstrates (by his words and his illustrations) the strength of the popular following that Salò, for good and ill, could sometimes inspire. Its eventual defeat, if not (like Waterloo) "the damnedest close-run thing", owed more to Stalinist partisans' terror tactics - and to the lightly veiled antagonism of such Teutonophil extremists as Farinacci - than to its own moral shortcomings, which included the judicial murder of Mussolini's own son-in-law, erstwhile Foreign Minister Galeazzo Ciano. Mystery still surrounds the exact circumstances in which Mussolini and his loyal mistress Claretta Petacci lost their lives. Walter Audisio, the Communist (and future Senator) who died in 1973 after boasting for years that he had presided over the shootings, may not have fired the fatal bullets. Rumours that Mussolini's assassin, or assassins, acted on instructions from Churchill remain mere unsubstantiated gossip. Farrell conjectures that one of the actual gunmen may have been Stalinist boss Luigi Longo, who as a former fighter for Republican Spain certainly spoke Spanish (which we know Mussolini's killer did). Shortly before his own death in 1980, Longo emitted various Delphic grunts - phrased in impeccably turgid Stalin-speak - which implied his own responsibility for the killings. The Italian Communist apparatchiks did well to keep their public utterances unspecific for as long as possible, given the role of womanhood in Italian culture. After all, Italy's Communist rank-and-file included many a respectable family man who, left to himself (and however prepared he might have been to give Mussolini the coup de grâce), would never have countenanced the butchering of poor, harmless, foolish Claretta in cold blood. After finishing Farrell's analysis it is hard to escape the verdict that Mussolini - like Machiavelli, whom he so much esteemed and so strenuously laboured to emulate - owed his notoriety not to his falsehood but to his truth-telling. Much anti-Mussolinian rage derives from the extent to which, on issues ranging from socialism to sex, he has been imitated by others today. Attacks on corporatism come oddly from champions of the New Deal. Denunciations of the Duce's erotomania acquire a grotesque sound when uttered by Camelot's and the Clintons' court toadies. Hymns to blasphemy and to adolescent violence, considered lamentable upon Fascist lips, are the very raison d'être of modern Hollywood (to say nothing of Mark Latham's world-view). And by what cognitive dissonance can geopolitical lying be reprehended when broadcast from Rome, but hailed as a moral triumph when broadcast from Boston? (There Roosevelt said in October 1940: "While I am talking to you mothers and fathers, I give you one more assurance . . . your boys are not going to be sent to any foreign wars.") Six decades before Francis Fukuyama reluctantly intimated that maybe the helots down on the plantation do not yet actually want unfettered laissez-faire, Mussolini boldly described laissez-faire as an unrevivable corpse. In this, he proved a better prophet than the legislators of our own time, who from Norway to New Zealand fling welfare benefit after welfare benefit at groups that include the idle and the villainous, but who meanwhile comically pretend to advocate "smaller government". At least Mussolini spelled out his credo: "Everything for the state, nothing against the state, nothing outside the state". Would that Bush or Blair could be so honest. R. J. Stove National Observer No. 60 - Autumn 2004 |
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