Mussolini Past and Present

Much consternation was stirred amongst right-thinking people (that is, left-thinking progressives) by the triumph of the robustly right-wing Fratelli d’Italia (Brothers of Italy) in the recent Italian general election. The Brothers gleaned more than 26 per cent of votes to become the largest elected party. Shocked and dismayed, the media called the Brothers “far right” or “extreme right”, an exaggerated condemnation based on the relativity of the media’s own progressive position.

This review appeared in a recent Quadrant.
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The Brothers will stir up a bit of trouble to reassure its supporters of its anti-establishment position, but likely not much; even before the election, Giorgia Meloni, the party’s leader, had already made emollient noises to Italy’s European Union paymasters, promising not to challenge their authority or main diktats in any major way. Nonetheless, the scare-mongers could not help themselves, shrieking about the Brothers’ distant neo-fascist roots and declaring that the new government will be “the most far-right since the Second World War”. This was, of course, a direct reference to Benito Mussolini, fascist dictator of Italy from 1922 until 1943. To listen to the media, one would think that he has now returned, having transitioned into Meloni.

This makes the publication of Paul Corner’s book Mussolini in Myth and Memory so timely. Corner, an expert on European fascist dictatorships, especially Italy’s, is keen to dispel recent trends in some quarters to view Mussolini more benignly and acceptingly and to place him squarely in the frame with his even more notorious colleagues Hitler and Stalin.

Despite the minatory concerns over a resurgence of Mussolini-tinged fascism, especially in Italy, Corner offers no evidence of this, instead referring vaguely to current affairs without any demonstration of in-depth knowledge. This might have been easily rectified with reference to some modern literature, not least David Broder’s excellent, if overstated, First They Took Rome: How the Populist Right Conquered Italy (2020), which addresses Italy’s recent politics. The title is a reference to the march on Rome of Mussolini and his fascists in 1922, the event that led to his taking power. In the history of fascism, all roads lead to Rome—and Mussolini. Corner’s point, as laid out in his own subtitle, is that Mussolini was the first totalitarian dictator and in the same vein as his later counterparts in Germany and Russia.

The results are mixed but always interesting. The book succeeds effectively on some levels while falling short on others; in that regard it can be frustrating. On the one hand it is written with admirable lucidity and assured knowledge; on the other that knowledge needs to be presented more fully, as do his modern parallels. Unfortunately, these parallels see dangers only from the Right, and not from the authoritarian Left. As Corner points out, as recently as 2019, 75 per cent of Russians had a favourable disposition towards Stalin. Dictator nostalgia is alive and well.

Repeatedly while reading this book, I was struck by how our current world, with its draconian Covid mass incarcerations and denial of free speech, is (one hopes unwittingly) emulating many of Mussolini’s policies. But for Corner the contemporary dangers are tiresomely represented by the likes of Donald Trump, too historically illiterate to know a jackboot if it kicked him up the backside. Thus, early on we groan as we read: “If the behaviour of Trump has raised the spectre of a new Fascism at the international level, his Italian epigoni have put Fascism back on the possible political agenda.”

This is the caricatured territory of Sinclair Lewis’s novel It Can’t Happen Here from 1935, in which a truly Trumpian politician with the truly flatulent Trumpian name of Buzz Windrip becomes a populist president, then fascist dictator of the United States. (The original cover depicted the imperial Roman fasces: a bundle of rods attached to an axe, originally denoting a magistrate’s authority, adopted by Italian fascists. Large fasces can be seen on either side of the flag of the House of Representatives in Washington.) Why is it that many historians, rigorous and brilliant in their scholarship, abandon those qualities when it comes to indolently accepting modern regurgitated memes without questioning them? One assumes it is because it readily sates their predisposed leanings.

In the wake of the First World War, the former socialist Mussolini turned to fascism and took power in Italy in 1922. He ruled for twenty years—the ventennio fascista—during which time it is claimed by many today that his achievements outweighed his “one great mistake”: his alliance with Hitler in the Second World War. These achievements include creating arable land by draining marshes, restoring lost Italian pride, providing pensions, modernising the country and, of course, making the trains run on time. Even Antonio Tajani, former President of the European Parliament, avowed that Mussolini “did many good things”. (But then the EU knows a thing or two about anti-democratic practices.) Corner exposes these actions and others as the myths and distorted memories of “the good dictatorship”, as people in our modern times lose faith in politicians and look for easy answers in nostalgia for the old days when rulers such as Mussolini governed with a firm but effective hand.

Corner achieves this effortlessly—a little too effortlessly in places when he fails to furnish examples to support his contentions. He knows inside-out these examples to support his arguments, so it is a mystery why he does not deploy them. Too often he assumes that the general reader knows the details of Mussolini’s regime; Corner frequently says the events are too well-known to bother describing. That is a lost opportunity to make this otherwise engaging book more relevant to a wider readership. Thankfully, Corner’s initial reluctance to provide supporting details decreases a little as the book progresses.

The chapter titled “Things Were Better When HE Was In Charge” offers most of these corrections. The people—certainly the masses of the agricultural and industrial classes—did not live better under Mussolini’s regime. Many advances—transport, radio, cinema, land reclamation, pensions—were already under way when he came to power, as they were elsewhere in Europe. Yes, the trains did seem to run on time (but only on the main tracks, not the regional ones): drivers faced fines for tardiness. But, as ever, “the utopian vision of theoreticians” was no match for harsh reality. It is telling that a coffee shortage led to riots.

Authoritarian klaxons sounded in my mind throughout the book, but perhaps never as loudly as when Corner discusses the explosion of bureaucracy in Mussolini’s Italy. The intervention of the state into all forms of life meant an addition of some 600,000 white-collar jobs in government and its agencies, ensuring the gratitude, loyalty and complicity of the middle classes and those aspiring to that status as they now had an investment in the regime. This new social category of public administration, which gave new opportunities for women, provided “the backbone of fascist support”. Is not today’s grievance industry achieving a similar enforced conformity?

The law also, of course, reinforced the regime. How about this for a modern, Covid and Net Zero era: laws meant that “‘normal’ life became that of a permanent state of emergency”? Politicised judicial killings were minuscule compared to Germany and Russia. It was abroad that the real carnage took place, in Ethiopia, Greece, Northern Africa: Mussolini’s dream of a new Roman imperium resulted in nearly a million dead. Not that this makes him a fascist: had these wars taken place only a generation earlier he would instead have been labelled not a dictator but a ruthless colonialist, and even then, not in the same league as the monstrous King Leopold II of Belgium.

Social benefits (and advancement), limited as they were, depended on good behaviour, akin to China’s current social credit system. Nonetheless, these too helped with support for the government.  

Corner stresses the “engineered amnesia” of Italians to the rule of Il Duce (The Leader). He acknowledges that support for the regime at the time was far from universal, but nor was it limited: “Benefits made conformism the obvious—even the unavoidable—choice for many, particularly for those with families.” Sticks and carrots kept the population under control: fear, advancement, punishment, benefits, ostracism, acceptance—the usual authoritarian stuff. For a generation, “Fascism was the norm, the only reality available, and—a not unimportant consideration—the only path to social promotion.”

Silence was not consensus. The police and its secret-service equivalent (the OVRA) and network of informants ensured a large degree of self-censorship, “creating what all authoritarian regimes hope to realise—the self-surveilling society”. Gosh, aren’t we lucky to avoid any of that in our modern liberal democracies, especially in our time of Covid coercion, Net Zero theology and unhinged wokery? No snitching or non-platforming here.

To evade later culpability, Italy has focused on its partisan resistance to Mussolini and his Nazi enablers, and the country’s turning towards the allied forces from 1943. The dictatorship was something that happened to them, without their approval: “Victimhood suited almost everybody, rightly or wrongly.” Besides, Mussolini’s rule was now considered one of “good-natured fascism”, ultimately well-intentioned even if it meant breaking some eggs in the process of making an omelette.

The regime was a brutal one based on violence, something Corner emphasises repeatedly. But he provides only one detailed account of this violence—the very public beating, stabbing and shooting to death of the farmer Giuseppe Valenti—a revolting episode but insufficient to capture the sustained viciousness of a twenty-year rule.

Nor is the important diplomatic event of the Concordat with the Catholic Church explained. This Lateran Treaty guaranteed the Church’s independence and, importantly, a financial settlement for the loss of the Papal States to the new Italian nation in 1870. It also marked the establishment of the sovereign Vatican State. In return, the understandably anti-communist Church pledged permanent neutrality. It was not the Church’s finest hour. Corner makes a comparison between the two authoritarian institutions that then dominated Italy, referring to “clerico-fascism”. I don’t think he sees the humour here when discussing “mass society” and “mass consensus”.

Corner concludes that Mussolini was “a very astute politician” but “a weak dictator”. He faced a similar end to Gaddafi and Ceausescu: a quick field trial ending in a firing squad and his body strung upside down from a petrol gantry.

One might want to dispute whether Mussolini really was the first totalitarian dictator—Lenin surely fits the bill for that one? Despite Corner positioning Mussolini alongside Hitler and Stalin, Il Duce really was not in their league. A vicious, thuggish, cruel and narcissistic creature, he nonetheless lacked the total psychotic pathology of the great dictators. A student put it beautifully to me: Mussolini was the boy who would set off the school’s fire alarm and take delight in the chaos that ensued; Hitler would have burned the whole school down and proudly proclaimed his responsibility.

Mussolini in Myth and Memory: The First Totalitarian Dictator
by Paul Corner
Oxford University Press, 2022, 179 pages, $43.95

Sean McGlynn is Lecturer in History at the University of Plymouth at Strode College in England and a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. He taught at the Open University for over a decade.