Mussolini and the Intellectuals
Gregor, A. James
"Mussolini and the Intellectuals" The habit of dismissing hard evidence in favor of personal impressions was elevated to a high art by the many British pilgrims who were granted audiences with the Fuehrer. Whether they...
...It would seem that the admiration of some intellectuals for Mussolini was as much a consequence of their personal IVeltanscbauungen as it was anything about Mussolini himself...
...As a case in point, even if Ezra Pound were resident in Italy no one has suggested that his enthusiasm for Mussolini was anything other than the consequence of his own personal and studied conviction...
...Mao Tse-tung was born on Boxing Day, 1893 in landlocked Hunan province...
...Such arguments, of course, are hopelessly flawed...
...Spengler continued to see only the "conservative" in Mussolini, just as Churchill continued to see him only in the guise of an "anti-Bolshevik...
...The only counsel past experience affords under such circumstances is a sober and cautious skepticism...
...There were intellectuals--not few in number--who saw in Mussolini the hope crf the century...
...The "revolutionaries" of the time who sought to resolve those issues with such self-assurance were hardly heroes--and the enthusiasts who entertained us with contemporary accounts of the revolutionaries' special virtues were wrong, more often than not...
...All of which suggests some rather sobering conclusions, however speculative and discursive: Admiring intellectuals are not very helpful at a time when political judgments become forced and momentous...
...at the same time, however, they mutilate the contents of the revolutionary theory...destroy the revolutionary vanguard and vulgarise [the revolution...
...In the world's time of troubles, the enthusiasts bring laymen little more than confusion...
...Whether he ceased to consider Mussolini a "conservative" as a consequence remained obscure...
...7. lbid.,p...
...That Mussolini had destroyed every vestige of socialist political or labor union activity on the Italian peninsula, and had been branded "renegade" by almost every living socialist, did nothing to deflect the enthusiasm of Drieu La Rochelle...
...For many enthusiasts, their special image of the world and their judgments about the special men who dominate it, are abandoned only when the dense reality of the world becomes so evident that even laymen can perceive it...
...What apparently struck Bartlett most, however, were Hitler's eyes: "so large and brown one might grow lyrical about them ff one were a woman...
...Here, we can only scan a few specimens of what has been said about him by those who should have known better, and quote some of the reams of evidence to the contrary, much of it from the dragon's own mouth, which refutes the prevailing hagiography and which fashionable China charlatans have never, it seems, set eyes on...
...Rowse, Appeasement: A Study in Political Decline, 1933-1939 (New York, 1961), p. 30...
...Telling the truth about Hitler's Germany, one British official complained with bitter humor, "was to put the cat among the stool-pigeons...
...This and Hitler' s repeated expressions of admiration for the man who had defeated Germany earlier, sent the old-timer away burbling in gratitude...
...We are driven to suspect that many of them, consciously or unconsciously, accept the principle, articulated by the historian Gioacchino Volpe, that "Victory and defeat are like judgments of God...
...It is also absurd to compare the Communists' achievements (as is usually done) with the chaos of 1949, which they had a hand in creating...
...Perhaps, under the dictatorship, Italian intellectuals could not pursue their trade without a Fascist passport...
...Lenin, State & Revolution...
...Mussolini surfaces in the Cantos, and Pound, to the best of my knowledge, remained forever his admirer...
...C. Adie Mao: Poet and Hero What separated Mao from the masses was an immense gulf of power, which is precisely what attracted his worshippers abroad...
...It includes such notables as Ezra Pound, Hilaire Belloc, George Santayana, Werner Sombart, Curzio Malaparte, Georges Sorel, George Bernard Shaw, Oswald Spengler, Rainer Maria Rilke, and T.S...
...That so acute an intellect should so falter suggests that it was not operating under full power...
...8. Both quotations from Franklin Reid Gannon, The British Press and Germany, 1936-1939 (Oxford, 1971), p. 19...
...Rosental could produce an involved account of the "epistemology" of Stalin, and just as Richard Oehler and Alfred Baeumler could compose searching and illuminating accounts of Hitler's "philosophic" profundities...
...Hilaire Belloc, for example, was convinced that Mussolini sought to free us all from the trammels of Jewish high finance...
...Spengler's enthusiasm cooled somewhat when Mussolini made what Spengler considered the "fatal" tactical and political error of invading Ethiopia...
...We approach Mao through minefields of fallacies...
...Arnold Toynbee returned from a oneand-three-quarter-hour visit...
...James Strachey Barnes suffered ostracism and lonely death...
...Now it so happens that Mussolini was very little of a traditional conservative, and his anti-Bolshevism was of a very peculiar sort...
...It is only then that enthusiasts like Margherita Sarfatti remember the "Special Tribunals" that silenced, exiled, and sometimes killed the Leader's opponents...
...First of all, the list of intellectuals who publicly admired the Dune is both long and impressive...
...So many intellectuals, whose trade it is to think, have shown themselves to have been so profoundly in error, on so many issues, for so long a time, that laymen have every right to their confusion and consternation...
...Nor does anyone seriously imagine that George Bernard Shaw's defense of Mussolini was prompted by anything other than his own assessment of the man and the events within which he was protagonist...
...By that time, of course, laymen will have little need for the guidance that intellectuals are presumably expected to provide...
...His officially and unofficially published works and other Party documents reveal him to be full of unresolved "contradictions," like the Party and China themselves...
...In the United States during the 1930s, such good liberals as John Dewey were denounced as "running dogs of fascism" by the Left for having concluded that reports of Stalin's purges were correct...
...Perhaps the most pathetic case involved David Lloyd George, the elderly British statesman who had been Prime Minister during the Versailles negotiations...
...9. A.L...
...Pound suffered his enthusiasm until his death...
...Almost always, however, they must ultimately abandon their positions with considerable loss of credibility and at least as much loss of dignity...
...And see Arnold Offner's American Appeasement (Cambridge, 1969...
...I only wish we had a man of his supreme quality at the head of affairs in our country today...
...By his own candid admission, he was no philosopher...
...There were so many Italian intellectuals who saw only virtue in the Dune until 1943, or perhaps (if they were made of sterner stuff or located in the wrong part of Italy) until 1945, that a recitation that attempted to cite them all would be as unkind as it would be tedious...
...It is always interesting to track the trajectories of this kind of enthusiasm...
...But sometimes we are chastened by bitter experience, and so there might be some profit in rummaging about in our own all-too-recent intellectual past...
...Mussolini's intellectual pretentions, in fact, were exceedingly modest...
...A. James Gregor Mussolini and the Intellectuals Many enthusiasts saw in the Duce the hope of the century...
...That Mussolini had suppressed Catholic Action and significantly impaired the political capabilities of the Roman Church--that the Pope himself had directed Encyclicals against the impostures of the totalitarian state--had no apparent impact on Barnes' enthusiasm...
...But again, like Pound, Belloc seems to have espied in the mote in the Duae's eye, the beam in his own...
...For any number of reasons there always seem to be enthusiasts for whom this new "leader" is the answer to all the ills of our time...
...Rowse has written, "until they were throttled black in the face...
...Some of my colleagues reassessed, within the space of an undergraduate's career, the "profundity" of the "revolutionary thought" of Kwame Nkrumah --but only after Nkrumah was deposed...
...Such claims as his exemplify a peculiar sort of myopia which has caused otherwise intelligent men to attribute a unique moral superiority to Mao and his China...
...Among them, there is a still more restricted subset that not only survives, but compulsively seeks out yet another Doppelgaenger in whom they might see themselves reflected...
...1. Quoted in Raymond Gram Swing, Forerunners of Fascism (New York, 1935), p. 34...
...For Pound, Mussolini was the pragmatic egalitarian cut in the mold of Thomas Jefferson...
...In his words, he was part monkey and part tiger...
...The appeasers in Great Britain wanted peace with Germany, also a noble ideal, and in pursuing it they were willing to distort and suppress facts they found uncomfortable, and to engage in the crudest sophistries to deny that which was growing increasingly apparent...
...Somewhat less exaggerated are the tomes devoted to the "political acumen," the "military strategy," the "prose style," and "poetry" of such "world historical" figures...
...We discover that the issues of those times were neither simple, nor were any of the solutions self-evident...
...Such people went on being "convinced of Hitler's sincerity," A.L...
...That is, why do so many distinguished journalists and scholars, including veteran Sinologists, systematically rationalize (and even dissemble) when it comes to Mao and China, encouraging 1) a right-wing Sinophilia of those who abhor what they think they know of the system, but for the same reasons think it necessary to "balance" Russia, and 2) an equally flawed Sinophilia of those "who see inherent virtue in a society which combines a maximum of unfreedom with a maximum of inefficiency" ? This lacquering of Mao's image has been done both abroad and within China...
...Unluckily, Mao was temperamentally and intellectually incapable of diagnosing the causes of this Soviet-type oppression and so he could not find a cure...
...11) The journalist Vernon Bartlett came away from a forty-minute interview not only convinced of Hitler's peaceful nature but that he intended to get rid of the concentration camps "without much delay...
...12 The Alternative: An American Spectator August/September 1977...
...After the debacle, Paolo Monelli could discover that Mussolini's journalistic style, which he identified as "lapidary," "passionate," and "sage" in 1933, had become "pettybourgeois" and "sballow" in 1950...
...Eliot, to mention only the most prominent and those who come immediately to mind...
...4. Robert James Maddox, William E. Borah and American Foreign Policy (Baton Rouge, 1969), p. 235...
...Most have simply recanted, and repented the error of their ways...
...convinced of his [Hitler's] sincerity in desiring peace...
...Pound's ill-starred and public enthusiasm for the Duce was, and is, notoriously well-known...
...6. Martin Gilbert and Richard Gott, The Appeasers (London, 1963), p. 26...
...Their postwar and post-Fascist works, it is true, are far less enthusiastic than those that went before, and it is clear they have paid the price of their enthusiasm...
...The Mao-the-Good-Shepherd delusion is much more interesting and complicated...
...Our own surrogate proletariat of recent memory--the bourgeois student revolutionaries--made the same non-distinctions to much the same purposes, informing us that because our society harbored evidence of racism, there was little to distinguish "Amerika" from Nazi Germany...
...He was convinced that Mussolini was something of a closet moneycrank--a little coy, perhaps, about going public, but a money-crank for all that--and he really believed that the Duce wanted to introduce social credit nostrums into Italy...
...But, as Chief of Staff Lo Jui-ching summed it up before he was broken in the Cultural Revolution, China's military forces add up to nothing more than a "heap of meat" in comparison to those of the USSR...
...V.I...
...Only in retrospect do we acquire a clear perspective on all this...
...Only those mildly enthusiastic, like Shaw or Santayana, managed to disengage before the denouement...
...Above all, he was unclear about how to achieve a stable balance or synthesis of anarchy and authority...
...Iron De Begnac, and Giorgio Pini, two of Mussolini's "official" biographers, have continued to write for the few remaining Fascist nostalgics who remain on the Italian peninsula...
...When a single man, a "revolutionary" and "charismatic" leader, arrogates to himself the right to control our complex, confusing, and difficult lives, there always seem to be some who are prepared to applaud both his advent and his pretensions...
...Shaw's admiration of Mussolini was clearly less exotic than Pound's, but was hardly more substantial...
...If Pound wished to see the moneycrank, and Belloc perceived the serious anti-Semite in Mussolini, Shaw seems to have identified the Duae with the "Bringer of Order," the arch-enemy of anarchy...
...We must simply acknowledge them to be regularly recurring features of our intellectual environment...
...Carter is a more naked power struggle than anything going on in Peking...
...Surely intellectuals can be careerists or conformists, and they can be threatened, coerced, cajoled, and seduced...
...It is not so much that Belloc apparently admired in Mussolini that which most men of good will would count as foolish or barbaric, but that Belloc seems to have taken Mussolini's belated anti-Semitism more seriously that did the Duce himself, whose anti-Semitism was contrived and episodic and, at best, served only tactical purpose...
...They can probably also be suborned--at remarkably little expense...
...They seem to belong to the larger class of "survivors," who recant their enthusiasm after their hero has met unqualified defeat...
...Were such men so clearly gifted, they would hardly have reason to so rigorously control the flow of information, to suppress dissidents so heavyhandedly, and to orchestrate public sentiment so assiduously...
...Then, as now, one finds a streak of power-lust and racism disguised as concern for humanity in the abstract: Victims of alienation--most notably intellectuals--find it intensely satisfying to identify with those awesome movers of men who are able to "guide" so many individuals "for their own good," and find it appalling that we would try to foist our GrecoRoman-Judaeo-Christian ideas of democracy and freedom and dignity on "swarming" Asiatics...
...See Rowse, Appeasement, pp...
...Churchill's ardor abated, of course, with the advent of the Second World War...
...For one thing, intellectual enthusiasts seem to discover virtues in their respective heroes that most of us are unable to detect...
...Books devoted to the "thought" of such men constitute only special instances of adulation produced by the intellectual enthusiasts...
...Or one might call to mind the case of Paolo Monelli, who during Mussolini's tenure, applauded, publicly and with some considerable frequency, the Duce's "vast vision" and "boundless love" for Italy's land and people, only to discover after the war that Mussolini had always been a "petty-bourgeois despot...
...We might even anticipate that the day will come when some of today's enthusiasts will remember the millions who died for the glory of Mao's revolution, just as Jean-Paul Sartre has begun to reflect upon the political prisoners in Castro's "correctional camps...
...In history, after the death of a revolutionary thinker and leader...the oppressing classes lend his name a certain regard, in order to comfort and fool the oppressed masses...
...Albert Marohn could write an entire thesis comparing the thought of Mussolini to that of Friedrich Nietzsche...
...As a consequence, some of us do tend to be understandably skeptical about the profusions, penned by enthusiasts, that pretend to tell us something about the impeccable philosophical, humanistic, military, social, and political accomplishments of men like Mussolini, Hitler, Stalin, Mao, or Castro...
...For the true enthusiasts, of course, not even catastrophic military or pofitical defeat was sufficient to extinguish their intellectual passion...
...And by that time many of the enthusiasts will have begun to pay the price for their cognitive failures: The survivors are condemned The Alternative: An American Spectator August/September 1977 11 to make public display of their derailed judgment...
...and Gilbert and Gott, Appeasers, p. 50...
...The fact that Hitler's eyes were blue says something about the accuracy of Bartlett's reportage...
...for Kissinger, too, he was a Titan of our time...
...It is not so much that Pound was a " t r a i t o r " - - i t was that as an intellectual he was so profoundly confused...
...They pretend to see everything with a special clarity...
...In fact, he alternated these roles like the dynastic cycle of Chinese history itself(unification-decay/rebellion-reunification by a new dynasty...
...When the Fascists reproduced Shaw's letter in Italy, they thoughtfully excised the anachronism...
...We see the proposed images of the world, and the proffered characterizations of the men who dominated it at the time, as irretrievably impaired...
...the victims suffer and sometimes perish...
...Nonetheless, there were enthusiasts to be found who would celebrate his philosophic lucubrations...
...38, 46...
...Invited to visit with Hitler, Lloyd George was struck almost to tears when he saw on Hitler's desk one framed photograph--of David Lloyd George...
...Most men in the West, laymen and intellectuals alike, seem to have accepted this, in principle, as one of the few regularities established by history...
...Hence, there is an almost irresistible tendency to construct a false dichotomy between material progress and socio-political " development...
...It seems fair to say that Shaw's admiration of the Duae was, at least in part, a function of simple ignorance of relevant fact coupled with a singular shortfall in analytic sophistication...
...And many of them were far outside the effective range of the Fascist secret police and were neither compromised nor corrupted...
...It is sobering and informative to read Pini's postRegime biography and compare it with his earlier, "official" version...
...At that moment the Howard Fasts and the Lillian Hellmans remember the millions swallowed up in Stalin's death camps...
...He preferred swimming...
...In the series of exchanges with some of his contemporaries in the late twenties, Friedrich Adler and Gaetano Salvemini among them, Shaw has left us some transparent signs of howling ignorance about Italian affairs...
...For the balance-of-power delusion, see Leibniz--he was glad God put the rough Muscovites between China and Europe, so we could gradually grind them fine...
...Most intellectual enthusiasts do not qualify as true enthusiasts...
...and under Mao they were even falling behind technologically...
...Many of the others, guided by their enthusiasm, marched unflinchingly to the end...
...It is precisely this problem which merits attention from the society that exposed Watergate, and which Professor Edward Luttwak recently raised in Commentary after taking one of those farcically stage-managed tours of China...
...Even Mao rejected this formulation when he told Andr~ Malraux "we're no longer eating bark, but we've only got to one bowl of rice a day...
...8, 22...
...D O g O O O U O O B t O O O # O O O O O O Q O O O O I Q I O O O Q O O O O g O O O O O O D ~ O D D I D D Q O O I O ~ O O p O O O O O I ~ O . . . . . O O O D U ~ 0 Q U O I Q O I O O ~ O S Q ~ O O I Q Q # O O O O ~ O 0 ~ I . . . . QOI4 . . . . . O m J O 4 0 0 . . . . O g O J 4 Q B I O D O 4 O t e W.A...
...I wait in trembling anticipation for the first volume in English devoted to the "philosophy, epistemology, and metalogic" to be found in the stream of consciousness "thought" of Fidel...
...Churchill admired Mussolini the "antiBolshevik...
...Castro and Idi Amin...
...Whether they expected to see him torturing kittens for amusement is not clear, but the fact that he often spoke in the most reasonable tones usually sent them off singing his praises...
...But perhaps all that was the product of opportunism and careerism...
...2. William E. Dodd, Jr...
...In our own time the enthusiasts write books devoted to the "philosophic thought" of Chairman Mao--just as M.M...
...Nor does this kind of confusion seem exclusive to Pound...
...77-78...
...In general, the cognitive content of such expositions is in direct and inverse proportion to the degree of enthusiasm they demonstrate...
...Now it would seem reasonable, even to laymen, to expect that some evidence of Mussolini's disabilities might have made itself available during all those years between 1922 and 1945...
...There is very little evidence that Mussolini ever seriously believed that a "Jewish peril" threatened the world...
...Most men, whatever their station in life, are afflicted with alltoo-human frailties, and it would seem that those frailties become increasingly onerous with the correlative increase in the amount of control they exercise over the lives and the freedoms of others...
...A year later Lloyd George wrote to a friend of"the admiration which I personally feel for [Hitler...
...To my mind, Pound's tragedy was not that he admired the Duce with such unmitigated enthusiasm, but that what he found to admire most in Mussolini was probably not there at all...
...They indicate, in some measure and manner, where virtue and vice are to be found...
...and Martha Dodd (eds...
...It is difficult to gauge what real harm they do, but it seems reasonably clear that at such times they offer laymen little aid, less counsel, and still less responsible judgment...
...There are a great many, however, who will ignore or even countenance in behalf of some ideal the most barbarous conduct of others...
...5. This and preceding quotation from Robert A. Divine, Roosevelt and World War II (Baltimore, 1969), pp...
...Ambassador Dodd's Diary (New York, 1941), p. 212...
...De Begnac's discursive account of his informal conversations with Mussolini, written after the war, adds dimensions to the figure of Mussolini not to be found in De Begnac's three-volume prewar biography...
...Just as Adolf Dresler could generate almost two hundred pages extolling the special virtues of Mussolini's journalistic style and Francesco Sapori could inform us concerning the Duce andArt, we have seen major works on the singular competences of Mao's poetry and Stalin's economic planning...
...We are all painfully familiar with the more contemporary ana%gues of that particular kind of argument...
...This might well be said of Oswald Spengler or Winston Churchill...
...and Drieu La Rochelle took his own life...
...Embarrassingly, Pound seems to have attached himself to Mussolini for all the wrong reasons...
...10 The Alternative: An American Spectator August/September 1977 To disenchant enthusiasts, it thus seems to have required, in many cases, the most abject defeat in war...
...To begin with, it is absurd to praise or blame him for everything that went on in China after he declared the People's Republic in 1949...
...Some of the recent "expert" accounts of "the real China" are reminiscent of what people wrote in the thirties after visiting Manchuria under the Japanese (such an improvement over the Warlords), not to mention the admiring reports about Mussolini, Hitler, and Stalin...
...By "revisionism" he meant a "bloodsucking bureaucrat class" (his words) oppressing the masses--as officially existed during the ascendancies of Liu Shao-chi, Lin Piao, Teng Hsiao-ping, and the "Gang," i.e., for most of the time since the People's Republic was established...
...Rowse, Appeasement, p. 38...
...Whatever the merits of Major CJifford Hugh Douglas' "'social credit" schemes, there is absolutely no evidence that Mussolini ever took any of them seriously, and still less that Pound had anything more than the fuzziest notions about Fascist economics...
...With Mao, said French President Giscard d'Estaing, s'eteint un phare de la pensde mondiale...
...Their hero seems to have made social, political, and economic issues so seamless and tractable, cut so close to the enthusiast's own personal vision, that one can understand, anticipate and, consequently, discount their fascination...
...The moment he died, other politicians and pontiffs of the media broke into an ecumenical chorus of unprecedented praise...
...If nothing else there was the ill-conceived and ill-contrived anti-Semitic legislation of the late thirties with which Mussolini saddled Italy as a consequence of the alliance with Hitler's Germany...
...But whatever contribution such work makes to our knowledge of Mussolini, it is a contribution that is made late and at more than reasonable expense...
...There, of course, the less scholarly and gentle Hua Kuo-feng and the "Gang of Four" (led by Mao's widow, Chiang Ching) were indeed locked in a power struggle...
...Some less prominent intellectuals, like James Strachey Barnes and Drieu La Rochelle, saw Mussolini either as the defender of the "Universal Roman Church" or as the architect of a "revolutionary socialism...
...to accept revisionism is to throw away the bowl of rice...
...Which must needs discourage all of us...
...But intellectual enthusiasm apparently provides poor judgmental insight...
...and the victorious Hua released quite enough details to belie Fairbank's assertion...
...At critical junctures in history, the enthusiasts seem to take up their respective positions...
...Spengler admired Mussolini the "conservative...
...As the "left"-Maoist "Gang" used to complain, when the Sputnik goes up, the Red Flag falls to the ground...
...But with or without ardor, it seems that Churchill never ceased to conceive of Mussolini as the "anti-Bolshevik...
...12) There are very few really wicked people in the world...
...There is, in fact, very little of Mussolini in Pound's effusive Jefferson and/or Mussolini--but a great deal of Ezra Pound, who seems in celebrating Mussolini to have celebrated himself...
...It is a doleful tale fat with unhappy implications...
...Pound was the object of public opprobrium and imprisonment...
...All of which is very sad...
...As for scholars and gentlemen, Professor John King Fairbank, doyen of China-gazers, attacked the press for talk of power struggle among "dedicated revolutionaries": "Unlike us China has no crisis of inflation, unemployment, crime or corruption...Ford vs...
...During the years of Mussolini's successes, Armando Carlini could write a dense monograph devoted to the "philosophy" in the "thought of Mussolini...
...But curiously enough, the Duce's afflictions became apparent to the enthusiasts only after a catastrophically lost war and resounding political defeat...
...3. Geoffrey S. Smith, To Save a Nation (New York, 1973), p. 55ff...
...In one place, Shaw suggested that the murder of the Socialist Giacomo Matteotti took place before the Fascist March on Rome...
...Nor did it disillusion Mario Missiroli, who in 1941 and 1942 could still extol Mussolini's wisdom in embarking on a "war of liberation" against the "plutocratic powers," only to discover, after the war, that Fascism was all corruption and wickedness...
...Gilbert and Gott, Appeasers, pp...
...Reality could not be permitted to intrude upon the ideal of the great socialist experiment...
...For Shaw, the difference between parliamentary democracy and Mussolini's regime turned exclusively on the fact that the "democracies" were hypocritical about their intrinsically non-democratic character, while Mussolini's Fascism was not...
...Ungaretti could have those poems republished as late as 1942, only to discover after the fall of Fascism, that the men of the "left" had always been right and he, Ungaretti, had been egregiously in error about Mussolini...
...Any political leader who constructs a political system that extends a central and unitary party control over economic, social, and religious life just short of that exercised by Stalin's Bolshevism in Russia hardly qualifies as a "conservative"--no matter how loosely the term is construed...
...If we were to attempt to catalogue all those intellectuals, of whatever stature or renown, who at one time or another found Mussolini the object of their enthusiasm, we might well fill a volume as large as the telephone directory of New York City--for in Italy during the Regime, such intellectuals were almost as abundant as garlic cloves...
...So arises the dilemma," goes another version, "who can strike the balance between freedom from starvation for the majority against freedom of thought for the minority...
...he was also (as he put it) "a complete outsider when it comes to economic construction [and understood] nothing about industrial planning"--but that was a lesser failing...
...In 1959, when Vittorio Vettori asked Pound what he then thought of Mussolini, Pound answered, without a moment's hesitation: "A Great Man...
...Was it really necessary for Curzio Malaparte to identify Mussolini as a "hero" larger than life...
...The moribund Malaparte's discovery of Mao Tse-tung is probably an instance of just that kind of transference as is Herbert Matthew's spoiled enthusiasm for Mussolini, and his subsequent discovery of Fidel Castro...
...One might recount how such intellectual luminaries as the poet Giuseppe Ungaretti could pen effusive poetry about the Duce - - a Dune he "drew to his heart...
...The story of how Western intellectuals responded to Benito Mussolini can give little satisfaction to anyone...
...And any political leader who takes satisfaction in recognizing the affinities shared by the system he has created and that put together by Stalin can hardly pass as a convincing "anti-Bolshevik...
...We have few indices that would provide us predictive advantage in attempting to anticipate these shifts among enthusiasts...
...But few of the surviving Mussolini enthusiasts have ever The Alternative: An American Spectator August/September 1977 9 pleaded that their behaviors were the consequence of coercion, conformity, or venality...
...But worse than that, as further evidence of intellectual inconsequentiality, the Shaw of 1927 was prepared to argue, in defense of Mussolini's rule, that all political systems were oligarchical and elitist...
...But even if such were the case, could the dictatorship impose the requirement that such intellectuals be enthusiastic, that they raise incantations to the wisdom, morality, providentiality, and historicity of the Dune...
...It might be better to say that he was cast ashore, for he was never quite at home on land...
...Given such confessions, to what can laymen make confident recourse in their search for defensible judgments about complex contemporary political and social issues...
...They recanted only after a aatastroplaia war andpolitical defeat...
Vol. 10 • August 1977 • No. 10
