Word: blackshirted
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Vasco Pratolini's jigsaw picture of violence, perversion and young love is colored by a tired tenderness for people too much at the mercy of their own appetites and apathies to fight or even to visualize the blackshirt terror closing in. Some readers will not have the patience to keep track of the dozens of lightly sketched characters; others will gag on the implication that communism was the only answer to Mussolini. But A Tale of Poor Lovers is no U.S.-brand party-line novel. It is wise, involved and European-a swarming microcosm of social and psychological complexities...
...Fascism: free thought was abolished, the individual became subordinated to the state, the human bill of rights was suppressed and the secret police became the main arm of government. Soon little boys, well-shod and sporting Balilla-like uniforms, were marching in the wake of Salazar's blackshirt-type Legido (Legion), which gave the stiff-arm salute and chanted: "Who leads? SALAZAR...
...Rome, as May Day began, five armed raiders slipped into the radio station at suburban Monte Mario, overpowered attendants, seized the master transmitter. Into the microphone they shouted the Blackshirt war cry, "Duce, a noi!"-"Duce, to us!" They played a recording of the Blackshirt war song, Giovinezza. They declaimed: "Italians! Remember Mussolini made our country great and powerful! We have not been freed but occupied. Slaves, arise and liberate yourselves...
...body snatchers signed themselves "Democratic Fascist Party," a blackshirt lunatic fringe. But when rumor spread that the Democratic Fascists would ecstatically hoist Mussolini's remains on the Piazza Venezia's cenotaph, in view of Fascism's most glorious balcony, the police put on extra guards to repel a repulsive resurrection...
Through a month of bickering testimony the stocky, jut-jawed Blackshirt, who was Mussolini's Chief of Staff and Chief of SIM (secret service), had denied all charges against him. No! no! he cried, he had not ordered the murder of Carlo and Nello Roselli, famed anti-Fascist refugees in France. That crime had been done while he was busy in Spain's civil war, in which he led the Italian flight from Guadalajara. But the prosecution brushed aside his protests, demanded his imprisonment for life. While the judges deliberated, Roatta's weak heart fluttered...