Word: duces
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Rome-Berlin-Tokyo Axis, and Munich. Like the first, it packs no great historical surprises, but sketches in a lively picture of intrigue and ethical corrosion along with some gossipy portraits of Fascist bigwigs. As a strutting I-witness of fateful events, Ciano thought that he and the Duce were swashbuckling through history like Renaissance princes, when actually, as the diaries reveal, they were only learning to heel every time the Germans heiled...
...quickly got on Mussolini's black list-he dared to condemn the Fascist murder of Socialist Giacomo Matteotti and to ask the King to dismiss // Duce...
When Mussolini seized power in 1922, Orlando supported him, but broke with Il Duce over the Matteotti murder in 1924. After that he abandoned politics, until in 1935 Mussolini's march into Ethiopia stirred Orlando's nationalism. He reappeared briefly in the political spotlight when he wrote Mussolini a fan letter. Otherwise, as he explained grandly: "The profound oblivion . . . descended on my name [is] the rational necessity of a historical situation imposed by destiny." In 1943, in his eighties, he presented himself to war-battered Sicily as a "heroic symbol" of Italian patriotism...
...with Marxism, later with Fascism, quickly rejected both ("to assert that liberty is dead is the same as saying that life is dead"). When Mussolini came to power, Croce retired to Naples, where he waited out the course of Fascism, constantly badgered Mussolini in his magazine La Critica. Il Duce never dared molest "Don Benedetto" (although mention of his name and works were banned from the press) because, as he once remarked: "There is one man in all Italy whom I fear-Croce, and I fear him because I do not understand...
Inevitably, the gang fell apart. Gino became a pervert and ended his life in jail. Carlo scrambled off to fight in Ethiopia and died for II Duce. Giorgio, the leader, became an antiFascist; it was he who taught Valerio that life meant more than the flashy nihilism of the Blackshirts...