Happy Birthday, Benito

...He allowed the impression that there he had been the main instrument in saving the peace of Europe...

...in Mussolini's mind crystallized further...

...You're Mussolini!'' -Cole Porter (unexpurgated) .Denito Mussolini was born one hundred years ago, on the twenty-ninth of July in 1883, in the year Karl Marx had died...

...Now Mussolini began to imitate Hitler...

...That reputation was insufficiently warranted...

...What is less well known is how this affected Mussolini...

...The Italians-and many other people-still trusted him...

...but he was not immune to the temptations of grandiloquence...

...Instead of the reputation of a dangerous revolutionary, Mussolini had acquired the reputation of a modern and efficient defender' and proponent of law and order...

...This was his most, fatal step, and the beginning of his ruin...

...The quick and effective interventions of the tightly organized Fascist squads galvanized the national opposition to that kind of anarchy...

...The political manifestations of this rising spirit were around the corner...

...There would be "a Rome-Berlin Axis, around which the destinies of Europe would revolve...

...Unlike Germany, Italy remained a beautiful, poor, and backward country, riven by enormous regional differences, composed-or, rather, uncomposed-of social classes whose standards and ways of life were hopelessly distant from each other, a nation barely held John Lukacs is professor of history at Chestnut Hill College in Philadelphia...

...In many ways Mussolini represented the wave of the present, if not the future...

...They thought that he would restrain, rather than follow, Hitler...

...He thought that the other Mediterranean empires, France and Britain, would not oppose him because they appreciated- his support of Austria against Hitler...

...Yet there remained one crucial difference between Hitler and Mussolini: a difference in their vision, and not merely a difference in their personalities...

...What he did not know was that within two weeks he would earn the contempt of most of the world, including that of the Germans...

...So was Mussolini's father, a simple worker who had taught himself how to read and write: a Socialist...

...His break with Marxism-more precisely, his recognition of the failure of the Marxian view of politics and history -came in 1914...

...Freedom of the press and the freedom of much of political life in Italy ceased to exist...

...His appearance was often ugly, but perhaps less frightening than he might have hoped: at times it approached the ridiculous, and not only in retrospect...

...and he feared the Germans' contempt...

...The previous traces of pensiveness had vanished...

...Greece, without telling Hitler, and postponing their planned meeting until the day of the fait accompli...

...When in the murderous and beautiful spring and early summer of 1940 Hitler's armies conquered Denmark, Norway, Holland, Belgium, often in a matter of days, and when the final defeat of France was but a matter of weeks, Mussolini decided to declare war on Britain and France, on Germany's side...

...The people of Romagna were radicals, and on occasion revolutionaries...

...Mussolini," he wrote, "I shall never forget this...

...In the absence of another great war crisis they would not sustain their,determination and the cost of a great national effort to arm themselves: they would return to their habits of parliamentary confusion, compromise, and lassitude...

...but he was also impatient and violent in his quest for fame...

...and among the Socialist parties of Europe the Italian one was the most radical, at least rhetorically so...

...He was contemptuous of the shallowness of much of political oratory...

...It confirmed his rising contempt and impatience with the theoretical babblings of the Socialist International...

...In sum, Mussolini realized-though he did not use this term-that he was a national socialist not an international one...

...Within its ranks Mussolini rose rapidly, because of his intelligence and writing ability...

...But this divergence would not last...

...This was the beginning of what the thoughtful historian F.W...

...And Mussolini's rise to power was even more startling and quick than Hitler's would be...

...More and more a recluse, he had become monogamous, or at least bigamous: besides his wife, he depended on the warmth and affections of his mistress Clara Petacci, among whose family he had become something of an avuncular figure, the source of ephemeral benefactions and ill-begotten wealth...

...The King made Mussolini prime minister of Italy...

...This progress "was assisted by the demagoguery of the Socialists and Communists whose violent agitation and disruption of life in Italy in 1921 approached the conditions of anarchy that had befallen Russia in 1917, the collapse of law and order before the Bolshevik Revolution...

...Brazil...

...Where was everyday life freer in the Twenties, in Rome, Italy or in Zenith City, USA...

...You're the great Houdini...

...Not an opponent: a friend, to be sure, but a rival nonetheless...

...They murdered the chancellor who was a friend of Mussolini's and whose government had acquired a few Fascist features...

...This corresponded with the emergence of the-in retrospect-unsavory side of his character...

...During the Abyssinian war, in March 1936, Hitler broke the Locarno Treaty, marching into the Rhineland, up to the frontier of France...

...When Mussoiini was still in his cradle, the Italian statesman Crispi wrote: "Italy has been constituted, but the national soul is wanting in energy: what is missing is the man who will inspire it and direct it to the path of those audacious virtues that are the proofs of the greatness of a nation...

...Even the worldwide depression after 1929 affected Italy less than it had other nations in Europe and America...

...All of this was achieved at the cost of dictatorship, and of the elimination of liberal parliamentarism...

...He spoke about this with the Japanese ambassador on his last day in office, July 25, 1943...

...When this Nazi revolt failed, Mussolini sent Italian brigades to the Alpine frontier...

...Deakin called "the brutal friendship...

...Moreover, in the second year of Hitler's Third Reich there was potential trouble between Germany and Italy, Nazism and Fascism...

...Thereafter the entire history of the twentieth century proved that international Socialism and international Communism are chimeras...

...The French were rotten, and the British had become desiccated humani-tarians, unadjusted to and unworthy of the great national movements of the twentieth century...

...the rule of law only on occasion...

...For the first time in history the majority of the working classes in these nations had learned how to read and write and vote...

...and they knew that the only obstacle in the way was Mussolini...

...The women (of many nationalities) who flocked to him, attracted as they were by the smell of virility and power and fame, were admitted to his office in the late afternoons, day after day...

...There are three powers in Rome," Hitler said around that time, "the King, the Pope, and Mussolini...

...that a German worker had much more in common with a French worker than with a German banker or with a German general...

...He built the impressive automobile superhighways (preceding the first American modern turnpike by fifteen years), drained the perennial marshes around Rome, suppressed Mafia rule in Sicily effectively for the first time in perhaps six hundred years...

...What they have seldom considered was the dramatic meaning of those long hours in the hot, dark Roman night...

...Yet the unification of Italy was, in, many ways, deceptive, whereas the unification of Germany was not...

...He had done more than make the Italian railroads run on time...

...After nearly sixty years of conflict and ambiguity he regularized the relationship of the Italian state with the Vatican in the Lateran Treaty of 1929, whose validity remains unbroken even now...

...The significance of this event has not been adequately appreciated by historians, not to speak of other intellectuals and political theorists who have been arriving at their post-Marxist phase in droves fifty, sixty, seventy years after Mussolini...

...It was as if one hundred years later an Italian radical had named his son Fidel, after Castro...

...Mussolini, like Hitler a decade later, realized that in order to reach this kind of power, he had to become more respectable and less revolutionary: that he could and should not risk the hostility of the established powers of Italian society and state...

...The military dictator transcended tfie popular leader...

...Even his alliance with Hitler (it did not become formal until May 1939) did not worry them, nor the fact that when Hitler marched into Austria in 1938, Mussolini remained silent...

...In 1931 Churchill (who respected Mussolini) wrote the preface to a book entitled Dictatorship, surveying the various national leaders emerging across Europe, in which he mused that a new kind of democratic dictatorship may be the solution in many places...

...And so-their previous alliance notwithstanding-Italy did not enter the war as Germany's ally in 1939...

...He had many of the qualities of a realistic statesman who understood history...

...Garibaldi -who, like Marx, died within a year from the day Mussolini was born- had been the first to vest his followers with colored shirts, red in his case...

...When he assumed power in 1922, and for some years thereafter, the world was charmed by his simplicity and determination and intelligence...

...J. wo years later he had a rival...

...He had to conquer Poland, even at the risk of a war with France and Britain, because five years later their armaments would be much stronger...

...He had become a minor member of the Axis...

...Mussolini recognized, as early as 1911, that he was not only a Socialist but an Italian Socialist...

...He saw again what he had recognized a few years before: that the leftist as well as the Liberal opposition to the Fascists was long on rhetoric and short on resoluteness...

...Now he realized that he was an Italian first and a Socialist consequently...

...and before fleeing he put two Venetian scudi on her chest to pay for her funeral...

...In 1934 one Surely Mussolini's Italy seemed to represent an orderly, free, and fairly prosperous alternative to the miserable Communist tyranny in Soviet Russia and perhaps even to Coo-lidge's and Hoover's America...

...and so he was...

...Was there prohibition in Rome...

...Mussolini was the son of an Italian radical: and he remained an Italian radical throughout his life...

...The French and the British protested, but did nothing...

...During the Depression respectable American congressional personalities (Senator Reed of Pennsylvania, for example) said that what America needed was a Mussolini...

...We must keep in mind how bad the record and the reputation of parliamentary government was fifty years ago...

...but this cost, at the time, seemed minimal, and worth taking...

...After the battle of the Marne Mussolini saw that the chance for Italy had come to regain her last Italian-populated territories from the old Austrian empire, Italia irredenta...

...During the first thirty years of his life Benito Mussolini followed in his father's ideological footsteps...

...During Mussolini's youth this became increasingly evident in the creations of modern Italian literature and music...

...That meeting has been often described, and fairly well, by historians...

...instead of a republican revolutionary he became the head of a great nationalist movement...

...Only one of my ancestors interests me: there was a Mussolini in Venice who killed his wife who had betrayed him...

...In June 1934 Hitler came to Venice to meet Mussolini, but the latter was not particularly impressed...

...He named his son Benito, after the Mexican revolutionary Benito Juarez who had the Emperor Maximilian executed in 1867...

...Later Mussolini (and the Japanese) attempted to convince Hitler to make peace with Stalin, and thereby turn the entire German armed might against the Anglo-Americans...

...He was not yet thirty when he became the editor-in-chief of the Italian Socialist newspaper Avanti, an extraordinary achievement in a country where even among radicals the customary respect for age left few important positions open for young people, no matter how talented...

...He would no longer underwrite the independence of Austria...

...In his tumultuous last speedi to them he said that in their hearts they knew that he was right...

...I so hope.'' When Mussolini was seven years old, the nationalist Alfredo Oriani wrote that while the monarchical form of Italian government was still reactionary, the revolutionary Italian spirit had produced two of the greatest men of the century, Napoleon and Garibaldi: the government was still ahead of the nation but the latter would soon surpass the former...

...Between 1919 and 1922 he abandoned his opposition to the Italian monarchy...

...He sat through the meeting for long hours, speaking occasionally...

...rather, the contrary...

...He was, unlike the Marxists, a believer and a propagator of the traditional virtues of the family...

...In the fatal year of 1914, these recognitions...

...Many of the hierarchs of Mussolini's own party wanted to abandon the German alliance now...

...In addition to his materialist and utilitarian view of human nature Marx utterly failed to recognize the main phenomenon of the late modern age: the emergence of the modern nation to which Marx paid no attention at all, having confused and subsumed it within his mental category of the state...

...Save for a few men and women, most of the Socialists allowed themselves to be swept along by that kind of enthusiasm, especially in Germany, the fatherland of Marxism...

...You're the Top...

...At that moment there was an evident divergence between Fascism and Nazism, visible to the world, in spite of the stupid leftist custom to apply the adjective "fascist" indiscriminately to any kind of right-wing regime, including that of Hitler...

...Mussolini wrote this to Hitler a few days before the war...

...His natural ally was Germany, not'France...

...This chronological coincidence is meaningful because Mussolini was a post-Marxist thinker who became a national leader and a European statesman...

...This is how the people of Romagna are, from whom I descend...

...He wanted, and got, the support of the nationalists and the conservatives...

...He, ' also admired Nietzsche...

...there are only national Socialists and national Communists in our world, a lesson that all kinds of people, including President Reagan and his advisers, have yet to learn...

...Something elemental happened across the Alps...

...In 1938 Mussolini returned from the Munich "conference" in triumph...

...He would meet Hitler occasionally: but he knew that he could not influence him...

...It was the rulers of Europe's states that declared war on each other: but the masses of the nations swept into the war with enthusiasm...

...Their leaders therefore reasoned that war had now become impossible: that the ruling classes could no longer lead passive and unwitting millions of people to slaughter...

...In 1925 Matteotti, the moderate and respected leader of the Italian Socialist party, was murdered by Fascists in a cowardly manner...

...Again this filled the Italian people- and many people elsewhere in the world-with hope...

...Even though a former Austrian, Hitler did not allow of the traditional and historical Austrian prejudices against Italy...

...Or Stalin...

...The word "fascio" appeared among Sicilian workers as early as 1892 but it had not crystallized into a political party, let alone a mass movement...

...From 1898 to 1913 strikes, revolutionary agitation, and occasional assassinations were more widespread in Italy than in any other European nation, perhaps excepting Russia...

...The conspiracies for his removal had begun...

...The subsequent public reaction almost brought Mussolini down...

...They-especially the British -condemned his war on Abyssinia as international aggression, which it was, but they did nothing to stop him...

...American influences were in full force...

...more important, he did hot think that time was working for the Western democracies...

...Very late in the night Mussolini dismissed them with a toneless phrase...

...He, whose affectation of the martial virtues and of military appearances preceded that of Hitler and Stalin (the latter two did not appear in military uniform until the war), now hardly interfered with the conduct and tiie direction of military operations...

...When he went to seek work in Switzerland, "I carried my bible in my pocket: Marx...

...He was a radical, on occasion a revolutionary, a Socialist...

...They were only partly right...

...He had a few latent sympathies for Poland (he had had none for Czechoslovakia...

...Mussolini was modest in his personal wants...

...Had he kept out of the war, he may have become the greatest statesman of Europe, with incomparable advantages for Italy...

...These appearances and postures were now characteristic...

...The circles of the King, of his conservative chamberlains, of certain army generals, of the Vatican were considering patriotic treachery: the seeking of a way to save Italy from the further ravages of a disastrous war, to free Italy from her ill-fated alliance with Hitler...

...He had become the Duce...

...Hitler had decided that time' was working against him...

...On one occasion he tried to steal a march on Hitler, by stealth: when in October 1940 he ordered the Italian army to launch a treacherous and wholly unwarranted invasion of...

...They attracted the admiration of many outsiders, including even such genuine pacifists and liberals as Stefan Zweig who remembered it as late as 1941, as an anti-Nazi exile in...

...He would throw them on the floor and possess them without removing his trousers or, presumably, his boots...

...Mussolini saw what this meant...

...There was something engaging in the external appearance of this national leader: a simple man in the uncomfortable clothes of the provincial middle class...

...The development-or, more exactly, the unraveling-of the international Socialist movement in 1914 proved Mussolini right...

...For a moment Mussolini was the most respected statesman in Europe, perhaps in the world...

...They were tired...

...He wore the dark and sometimes ill-fitting clothes of the petty bourgeoisie...

...and the Hitler regime and Nazi philosophy were occasionally attacked in the Italian press...

...This leader, Adolf Hitler, admired Mussdttni...

...As he was shouting his speeches, his sensitive mouth became almost froglike...

...What he did not say was that Mussolini was the weakest of the three...

...A month later the Austrian Nazis rose in a savage attempt to overthrow the government in Vienna...

...The same French army that was overwhelmed by the Germans was able to hold back the Italian army along the Franco-Italian frontier with but a handful of battalions...

...they were afraid to fight...

...But this relative Italian neutrality would not last...

...Meanwhile the Italians had conquered Abyssinia in six months- the last successful colonial conquest by a European nation...

...In October 1914 he wrote his famous editorial article, with the title "Audacia...

...they were acting like old women who will embrace a vague ideal of humanity when they have no how the "brutal friendship" made him seem not only determined but brutal...

...By the time the war was over Mussolini had made up his mind...

...Italy to take her place under the sun...

...Can anyone imagine a pensive Hitler, sitting and listening while his cohorts and newly revealed opponents are drafting a resolution to vote him out of office...

...Someimitationsof Hitlerism: his insistence that the Italian army adopt a version of the Prussian parade-march of the goose step, and his racial legislation, restricting the freedom of and imposing humiliations on the small minority of Italian Jews...

...In one of those brilliantly perceptive remarks that will outlive the hysterical rantings of Hitler and the dull oriental pronouncements of Stalin, Mussolini said in 1931, when the Spanish people voted out the monarchy and proclaimed a parliamentary republic: they were going back to the oil lamps of the last century in this century of electricity...

...Hitler was deeply impressed...

...that the struggle of nations (which Marx had conveniently ignored) was at least as important as the struggle of classes...

...In sum, his rule in Italy was authoritarian, not totalitarian-an important distinction which escaped most people for a long time...

...but the number of political prisoners in Italy was very small, political executions were nonexistent, and many of Mussolini's opponents were treated with circumspection and considerable clemency...

...but he was fatally attracted to military display and the glorious trappings of war...

...Mussolini appreciated this from the beginning of their relationship...

...Contrary to the asseverations of many historians (as in the recent third-rate biography by Denis Mack Smith) his prestige among the Italian people was greater than ever...

...Forty years later Mussolini chose to erase that memory of national humiliation, conquer Abyssinia, and establish thereby an Italian Empire in northeast Africa and, indirectly, in the eastern Mediterranean...

...This showed, among other things, in his personal appearance, in the image which he would present to the world...

...So he launched Italy into the war in June 1940...

...They convinced him to call a meeting of the Fascist Grand Council on the evening of July 24...

...on his large bald head he wore a bombetta, a" big derby, a black pot of a hat, and spats on his large ungainly black shoes...

...Mussolini must have known what was going on: but he, and his secret police, did nothing...

...Will we see the rise of such a man...

...as Hitler was reputed to have said later to one of his intimates, what he planned for Germany was something different: Fascism was "only a half-job...

...By 1926 he transformed his prime ministership into dictatorship...

...So were his other adaptations and one else to embrace...

...This was the time when Mussolini came out to his balcony in a military uniform, booted, spurred, hehneted, with his jaw stuck out and his hand on his left hip...

...The inefficiency, the opportunism, and the cowardice of the anti-Fascist politicians saved him...

...He decided to take advantage of this situation...

...They concentrated on the dramatis per-sonae, from the supremely intelligent Grandi to the stupid Italo-Nazi Farinacci, not on the dramatic enigma of Mussolini himself...

...In this respect he was ahead of Hitler, who was seven years younger than Mussolini, and whose political career began only in 1919, nearly twenty years after that of Mussolini...

...They were wrong...

...Much of this was an open secret...

...Donna Rachele, his long-suffering wife, long on peasant wisdom, had (continued on page 39)g on peasant wisdom, had (continued on page 39...

...The Italians did not have their heart in the war...

...He was partly right...

...J. hat, however, was only one side of his life...

...together by the thin and corroding hoopwork of bureaucrats and politicians, among whose people the rate of illiteracy in 1900 was among the highest in Europe...

...his enormous brown eyes shone out of the sensitive face of an Italian of good peasant stock...

...In reality, they were mistaken...

...but he was also a determined and successful womanizer...

...Archbishop Spel Tman visited the Vatican twice, courteously escorted thither by Italian police through the darkened streets of Rome...

...and that nationality and class not only were components of equal importance in modern consciousness but the first was more profound and more important than the second...

...One of the strangest episodes in the war, indeed, in the history of dictatorship, is that of the Italian political scene during the months before Mussolini's fall...

...Hitler would eventually create the most terrifyingly powerful National Socialist party and movement in the world: but Hitler was not the creator of the idea of Germanic National Socialism, and not even of the small National Socialist party that he joined in 1919 and eventually took over...

...Even though she ended up among the victors, her nationalist aspirations were partially frustrated by Wilson, and her social problems were as grave as ever...

...He gave the impression--an impression not devoid of substance- that his Italy was now a land and a people emerging from under the clouds, a peninsula of sunshine...

...But Mussolini thought that if he were not to participate in the campaign against France, Hitler's domination of Europe would be complete without any of the share falling to Italy...

...Churchill and Roosevelt and the French government actually told him so, suggesting all kinds of promises...

...lines that have been since expunged from all Cole Porter songbooks, including The Complete Cole Porter and The Unpublished Cole Porter...

...Mussolini's first "autobiography" was written with the help of the American ambassador to Italy, and splashed across an issue of the Saturday Evening Post...

...he was poor, bitter, headstrong, and determined...

...When Mussolini was still a callow youth, Gabriele d'Annunzio wrote in a poem: "From your poor land, Italy/will there rise a new hero/of bitter peasant blood?'' Much later, when he was the law-maker and dictator of Italy, biographers traced Mussolini's ancestry to all kinds of noble families in Bologna and Venice...

...To Emil Ludwig he said in 1932: "All this does not interest me in the least...

...But when, six months later, Hitler broke his word and marched into what remained of Czechoslovakia Mussolini decided to imitate him: he, too, chose to conquer a country that had done him no harm, indeed, one that had been something of an Italian satellite in the Balkans: Albania...

...For now there began a reversal in the relationship of these two men, a reversal that was not due merely to the fact that Germany had become immensely more powerful than Italy...

...VV hen Mussolini returned from his soldiering in the war (like Hitler, he was wounded at the front) Italy was in a sorry mess...

...There were a few groups of anti-Fascist exiles...

...Before World War I, for the first time in the history of mankind, there were large Socialist parties in Germany, Sweden, France, and other European nations...

...The French and the English opposed him by words, not deeds...

...Mussolini did not see things this way...

...J. he rest of the story is fairly well known, being part of the history of World War II...

...But by that time he was a broken man, in more than one way...

...The Council voted on the motion: Mussolini must abdicate, go to the King, and ask him to take over the leadership of the nation...

...They were a bunch of old women, he thought, and said...

...Their rhetorical commitments to international pacifism were abstract and ineffectual...

...But after 1926 he began to prefer something else: be began to appear in riding boots, self-designed uniforms, martial berets...

...A leader" took over the German nation, a man with a fanatical vision whom the Germans were willing to follow, no matter where, no matter how far...

...Italy was finally united in 1870, an event that changed the political map of Europe as drastically as did the unification of Germany a few months later...

...and among the three the Pope is the strongest one...

...He was probably right...

...Yet it was then, at the very time of his virtual leadership of Italian Socialists, that Mussolini began to recognize the shortcomings and the outdated materialist categories of Marx...

...But that was all...

...It was then, and then only-in 1919- that Mussolini proclaimed himself a "Fascist" and founded the Fascist party in Milan...

...In 1896 the Italian army, alone among the colonial powers of Europe, had been defeated by a primitive Abyssinian horde...

...After he became prime minister, brutality became the occasional monopoly of the Fascists, protected by Mussolini and condoned by his government...

...Unlike many others of his kind, he was a voracious reader...

...This confirmed a belief in Mussolini's mind that had begun to emerge some years before...

...The British were no longer the descendants of the virile men who had made the Empire...

...after 1900 it was manifested in modern Italian design, architecture, technology...

...He knew that he would be read out of the Italian Socialist party for this...

...The Italian press and Italian cultural life, though constrained within certain political limits, were remarkably vivid and sometimes even free...

...As twenty years before, the sexual metaphor again surfaced in his mind...

...In 1933 he and the Fascist press took satisfaction from the fact that Germany had chosen to follow the Italian model of government...

...This illiteracy was counterbalanced by the quick and acute intelligence of the Italian mind...

...Within three years his small splinter gathering in Milan swelled into a national movement, and in October 1922 the King* and the army leaders of Italy chose to bend before the threatening swelling of that movement, of a "March on Rome" of the Blackshirts...

...He was at the zenith of his power...

...The war with the Greeks led to a further humiliation of the Italian army, something that Hitler had fairly predicted...

...indeed, that the time had come for of Cole Porter's clever doublets in "You're the Top" included these lines: "You're the Top...

...Unlike Hitler, Mussolini was the creator and founder of Fascism...

...From 1940 to 1943 he aged ten years, if not more...

...These dual elements were there in his character from the beginning of his conscious life, throughout which alternately one or the other side came to prevail...

...It was then that the bankruptcy-the practical, and not only the moral, bankruptcy- of Marxism became evident: evident, that is, to those who did not see only what they wanted to see...

...The rule of order returned to Italy...

...With a few singular exceptions, their army and navy and air force went from defeat to defeat...

...On July 10, 1943 American and British, forces invaded Sicily...

...He was right...

...Well," he said, "you have provoked the crisis of the regime...

...borrowed from Danton), calling for the preparation of Italy's entry into the war...