Eminentoes / Mussolinismo

...But there is more to Wagner than stupendous effects...

...This revisionist view of fascism was also found in Eastern Europe, according to Gregor...

...But he is...

...You almost feel sorry for the poor bastard...

...Between 1901 and 1914 he had already published a good deal--a strongly anti-clerical novel with a lecherous cardinal which was translated into several languages...

...A mechanistic view of nature, for Sierra Club types in the front row...

...There is also a philosophy---a grandiose conception of art as the only redeeming feature of an otherwise meaningless universe...

...There will be no celebration of that event as there was of Lenin' s centenary in 1970...

...The only distinction between you and me is that I can articulate them...

...The wheels began to come off the assembly line in vast quantities...

...And, of course, there was Nietzsche, who, said Mussolini, filled him with a "spiritual eroticism" and from whom he took the slogan "live dangerously...

...I must say that I doubt it was...

...Alfred A. Knopf, $20.00...

...looked about the Piaggio plant and saw thousands upon thousands of airplanc nose-wheels stacked up against the factory walls...

...Galkin argued that fascism arose "spontaneously" under crisis conditions, "eroded" the foundations of " b o u r g e o i s democracy," built up and improved the economic infrastructure of Italy, and for a while provided an "increased degree of vertical social mobility...

...Wagner too would have insisted on using a steamboat ten times the actual size, and demanded from his workers and performers the ultimate labor and fortitude--even death--because the cause of art requires moving ships over mountains...

...Political scientists of all shades (except, of course, Marxists, to whom capitalism is the first stage of fascism) have virtually concluded that fascism is undefinable, unlike Communism, socialism, syndicalism, or anarchism...

...Fascism was not a capitalist conspiracy, said Alexander Galkin of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, nor was it a typical expression of bourgeois politics...

...After that, he begins to look a lot more like his own nineteenth-century character: willing to sacrifice mere savages for the sake of a higher culture's high culture...

...30 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JANUARY 1983...

...I have always made allowance for this circumstance, and given orders that former Communists are to be admitted to the party at once...

...It comes from the Latin word, fascio, for "bundle," and has to do with the Roman Empire...

...The superb new biography of Mussolini by Denis Mack Smith* has a story similar to mine...

...The trees here are in misery, the birds are in misery...

...Mussolini was so proud of his German (which conversationally was poor) that he refused to allow an interpreter in the room whenever he met with Adolf Hitler...

...In Burden of Dreams he extols the indians as "people like lions," and deplores the "contami...

...Heidegger and Spengler supported Hitler, and think of how many philosophical pilgrims supported Lenin and Stalin...

...Mack Smith describes him as "an intellectual poseur and cultural exhibitionist" but if not more than that surely he was better than that, at least until he began his march on Rome...

...I had driven one of their scooters around New York for several years as a way of beating urban problems like traffic, finding a taxi during rushhour, and parking...

...He considers ment in order to make a striking grand opera to be the pinnacle of image for the folks at the Paris creation, while the raw, teeming life Theatre...

...Mack S m i t h ' s biography shows that Mussolini wasn'f quite as awful as his peers, but that was only because he was an insecure and an unreliable intellectual...

...To Piaggio came the ukase and with it large supplies of rubber and steel--for the nosewheels...

...He cites a 1972 article by Mihaly Vajda of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences who described Italian fascism as the "only progressive solution" to Italy's economic problems...

...Since there has been no subsequent mention of this, I assume it didn't work out--if indeed it was ever attempted...

...if Wagner had been a film director, he too would have ignored the real, historical Fitzcarraldo---a practical rubber baron who dismantled his steamboat before hauling it, and hadn't a thought in his head of bringing opera to Peru...

...Due to circumstances beyond Mussolini's control, the number of airplanes manufactured never remotely exhausted the pile-up of nose-wheels...

...It must be remembered that Italy entered the twentieth century with a narrow industrial base and lacked basic essentials for economic growth--fossil fuels and iron ore...

...What nosewheels...

...For Mussolini, it was never much of an ideology...

...Knox argues that Mussolini's imperialist aims were "consistent in nature, massive in scope and pursued with tenacity within the limits Italy's military and economic weaknesses imposed...

...In Herman Rauschning, The Voice of Destruction (Putnam, 1940), p. 131...

...There is, above all, genuine revolutionary feeling, which is alive everywhere except where there are Jewish Marxists...

...The great political con game of the 1920s and 1930s, a Stalinist triumph, was the cock-and-bull story that fascism and Communism were morally different...

...One need not be a radical anthropologist to appreciate the man's arrogance--which extends not only to Indianas but to his audience as well...

...This minor economic miracle was quite real, in fact...

...While some of Mussolini's wild and impetuous decisions certainly compassed his own downfall, there appears to have been far more rational calculation in him than Mack Smith allows...

...that Communism was left progressive and fascism right regressive when, in actual fact, Communism, as Don Luigi Sturzo put it in 1926, was leftwing fascism and fascism was rightwing Communism...

...With the war over and people looking for ways of getting around, the Piaggio engineer came up with the idea that if you separated a pair of nose-wheels by a s-mall two-cycle engine, fastened a seat in the middle and another over the engine, you'd have a cheap, small motorcycle which anyone could drive...

...And by 1970, what had been the standard Soviet interpretation of fascism had changed drastically...

...My dreams are the same as yours," he intones...

...The story is typical of Mussolini's Italy~ especially in the later9 years of his 23-year reign...

...The petit bourgeois Social Democrat and the trade-union boss will never make a National Socialist, but the Communist always will...

...Well, after World War II, there was a desperate shortage of transportation in Italy...

...It's hateful...

...nation" of their culture...

...If Herzog shares his American audience's twentieth-century cultural relativism, it is only up to a point...

...The steamboat on the rapids is really the only thrill in .Fitzcarraldo, and if that is an example of Herzog's ability to articulate other people's dreams, then somebody should tell him that his expensive, arduous, dangerous means do not justify the end...

...As a newspaper editor, he doubled the circulation of a weak Socialist daily...

...While Mack Smith finds Mussolini becoming by 1939 "frenzied and irrational" and even more contemptible than ever, another recent study of Mussolini takes an entirely different view of this complex man.l: For MacGregor Knox, Mussolini was far more than a clown, bluffer, or mere journalist...

...Mussolini somehow couldn't bring himself to strive for immortality, of the kind that came naturally to monsters like Hitler and Stalin, neither of whom had to suffer a disgraceful death like Mussolini...

...The result of that bit of ego-display is that he frequently didn't know for sure to what policies Hitler had committed him...

...Adolf Hitler once said: "There is more that binds us to Bolshevism than separates us from it...

...Even the stars up here are a mess...

...This sounds so outrageous that even the most humorless environmentalists snort with laughter...

...Had Mussolini not been trapped by his arrogance and imperial ambitions, and had he stayed out of the war (as Franco did), Mussolini might today enjoy a posthumous reputation as respectable as the one Lenin enjoys among the Left.~ t July 29, 1983 will be the centenary of Mussolini's birth...

...They can't believe Herzog is serious...

...Mussolini, on the other hand, was the twentieth-century intellectual par excellence, undisciplined, unpredictable, autodidactic, always searching for the new and for any idea that would bring him to the top...

...His assumptions not only about nature but about the jungle's human inhabitants seem calculated to rub the average educated American the wrong way...

...Piaggio had popularized the motor-scooter, a low-powered, two-wheeled vehicle which could carry two adults...

...numerous book reviews from Russian novelists to writers like Michels...

...a serious sociological study...

...THE AMERICAN SPEcTATOR JANUARY 1983 29 How he managed to achieve as much as he did, including the reputation for statesmanship of high order, is still a mystery...

...by Arnold Beichman has noted, the economic performance of Italy during the Fascist era was remarkable since it encompassed "a steady rate of industrialization and economic modernization...

...Western liberal gulls should see, thanks to Soviet revisionist theories about fascism, that Mussolini, Hitler, and Stalin were informed by the same Leninist heritage--Lenin's great invention, the totalitarian mass party which, as the prosthetic god of the century, made e v e r y t h i n g permissible including torture and terror, antiSemitism and slave labor...

...In many articles he quoted extensively from the works of Marx and Engels...

...So II Signore the Engineer Arnold Beichman is a political scientist who is currently Visiting Scholar at the Hoover Institution...

...By every index of economic growth, Fascist Italy went through sustained and substantial expansion...

...It certainly has little to do with the doctrine of " f a s c i s m , " a ' w o r d whose origins have no political or social connotation...

...The Vespa...

...properly define without turning it into a synonym for Communism.** In fact, fascism is now regarded by Soviet writers, in a major piece of revisionism, as progressive rather than reactionary, according to A. James Gregor...

...So here you have a doctrine whose legacy is a doctrine nobody can *MacGregor Knox, Mussolini Unleashed, 1939-1941...

...Fichte dreamed of a "Republic of the Germans" in which every man from the age of 20 until death would be a soldier...

...In 1921 he ordered the party intellectuals to produce, as Mack Smith writes, "a satisfactory 'philosophy of fascism,' " which, of course, they never did...

...of the jungle is the pits " I t ' s not Also in Burden of Dreams we are beautiful," he says, glaring at the told that Herzog got the Indians to work for him by promising to win them legal title to their land...

...Nothing but vileness and fornication...

...Perhaps the key to understanding Mussolini is that he was the first twentieth-century intellectual in politics to reach the top and, as much as any human being ever can, to achieve total power over a n a t i o n - s t a t e . Lenin, by contrast, was no intellectual but rather a man dedicated exclusively to the seizure of power...

...There was the cult of "ducismo" (Mussolini liked to be addressed as DUCE, and in the Italian press it was usually all capitals) or "mussolinismo" but these expressions never caught on...

...For example, in 1965 the Soviet theoretician, Boris Lopukhov, repudiated the Stalinist description of fascism--"the terrorist tool of finance-capitalism"--as~ a "caricature" of the actual historical process...

...translations from French and German of articles by Kautsky, Liebknecht, and Kropotkin...

...Though powerfully influenced by ideas, Lenin didn't really care about them apart from their utility in furthering his undisputed power in the revolutionary movement before 1917 and, later, in the revolutionary regime itself...

...QOOIOggIQlI66OIO66QO611~Ot6900mQOL,OaQOO611QQ60g MUSSOLINISMO Some years ago I traveled on a junket to Italy to do a story on the Piaggio plant in Pontedera between Pisa and Florence...

...Benedetto Croce in the early days of Mussolini supported him although he later withdrew that support...

...But in Burden of Dreams Herzog blows it by revealing certain aspects of this philosophy which his American admirers would most vehemently reject...

...As Professor A. James Gregor *Mussolini...

...These views are shared by Herzog, and to some degree by American audiences who look to film directors for spiritual guidance...

...Lenin did not concern himself with music, art, literature, philosophy except insofar as they might interfere with his maintenance and extension of Bolshevik power...

...that Communism had been sent down from heaven to protect us from the fascists, a role which therefore justified Stalinism to Western liberal gulls...

...And since Wagner's greatest accomplishments were not dramatic moments but massive concoctions of scenery and music, he would have overlooked the utter flatness of the characters in Fitzcarraldo, and considered the film justified by the extraordinary sequence showing a passenger steamboat the size of the Staten Island Ferry looming, slithering, and bumping its way down the Ucayali Rapids of Death, while Enrico Caruso's voice soars out through the horn of a windup Victrola...

...Lots of immediate publicity in the press, but nothing was heard of the project again...

...Mussolini went down to impoverished Sicily where he laid the foundation stone of a new town that was to be the first of thousands, each with at least 10,000 inhabitants...

...Cambridge University Press, $29.50...

...The first town, on completion, would be called "Mussolinia...

...Mussolini commanded but things rarely turned out the way he expected...

...Hegel argued in The Philosophy of Right that "one must worship the state as a terrestrial divinity...

...In tribute to its snarling motor, the machine was named "Vespa," which means wasp in Italian...

...At the Piaggio plant, a dignified, elderly aeronautical engineer was introduced to me as the man who had "invented" the Vespa...

...What had inspired the aeronautical engineer...

...But actions speak louder than words when he example...

...The engineer smiled and said that when Italy entered the war in 1940, Mussolini ordered Italian airplane factories to begin producing some astronomical number of aircraft each month...

...But for Herzog it is their lives in primitive hauling equipnot arbitrary at all...

...And yet, despite all the weaknesses, the vanity and pomposity, the small-mindedness and vindictiveness of the Italian dictator, he managed somehow to create a minor economic miracle for Italy, something which Mack Smith glosses over...

...Between 1922 and 1938, Fascist Italy had become "an economically mature society...

...In power, Mussolini sought to demonstrate to the world that his indefinable doctrine was part of a European intellectual tradition--the full implications of which were not made visible until the era of revolutionary tyrannies...

...They don't sing, they just screech in pain...

...Fascism" somehow became an ideology t h a t has yet to be defined in any acceptable fashion...

...Fitzcarraldo's dream of thinks nothing of transporting several bringing opera to the jungle seems hundred tribesmen miles away from arbitrary to Americans: wild and their home villages and supplying crazy, like something Steve Martin them with prostitutes while they risk would cook up...

...a novella...

...a polemical, anti-clerical, booklet about John Huss...