Word: mussolini
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...last he was a European. As an Austrian during the Habsburg decline, he was an M.P. in the Austrian Parliament, an editor, a labor organizer. As an Italian, he was one of the founders of Italy's dominant Christian Democratic Party, and an enemy of Fascism. In 1926 Mussolini clapped him into Rome's infamous Queen of Heaven prison on the banks of the Tiber, where he languished for a year and a half until the Holy See was able to negotiate his release...
Life of a Balloon. More afraid of his friends than of his enemies, Mussolini began to do his utmost to appease the friends. As Biographer Monelli sees it. he was terrified into terrorizing Italy. In 1925, "the Fascist regime became a regime of force," all opposition was suppressed, total censorship clamped on the newspapers. His followers made sure that the Duce's balloon of a phony identity was not punctured by public scorn. They kept him surrounded by "policemen in various disguises" playing the equally phony role of "fanatical admirers." These cops, known as "the Presidential Division," became...
Historians who believe that great decisions are the result of historical necessity rather than of the acts of individuals will find in Monelli's account of Mussolini's life a stiff argument to the contrary. Personal vanity, swollen to monstrous proportions, made Italy Germany's ally in World War II. Mussolini detested Hitler, but, as he said frankly: "It's too late to drop him. I don't want them to say abroad that Italy's cowardly." Of all Mussolini's millions of spouted words, none has a greater ring of sincerity than...
Claretta Petacci was the exception to the general rule. Mussolini made love to her in his usual perfunctory way ("He doesn't even take his boots off," she once complained), but he showed his affection by installing her in his private apartments a few steps away from his office, where she would "lie for hours on end, waiting for a visit from her master, reading and daydreaming." From childhood on (she was 29 years his junior), Claretta had slept with Mussolini's photograph under her pillow; to be his mistress had been her sole ambition...
Author Monelli's book is never better than in the account of the last days of Mussolini and his doxie. Utterly defeated, universally despised, the sick and whipped dictator began mouthing extracts from a Life of Jesus and discovering "surprising analogies between his own fate and that of Christ." Too vain to surrender to the British, too indecisive to accept German protection, Mussolini blundered into the waiting hands of his bitterest enemies, the Italian partisans. By the time they dragged him, in pouring rain, to the wall against which he and Claretta were to be shot, he was much...