Word: mussolini
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...steamed across the Bay of Naples, and, like precision swimmers, 85 submarines dived beneath the water, resurfacing eight minutes later in perfect formation to fire an eleven-gun tribute to their Nazi guest. It was a dazzling display from a master of spectacle, but like most other things Benito Mussolini did, this muscle flexing was little more than an act: two years later, after a few disastrous encounters with Britain's Royal Navy, his impressive-looking fleet cowered in port, all but useless to the Germans...
...Hitler has gone down in history as the personification of evil, Mussolini has won his own immortality as the archetypal thug. But the founder of Fascism was a complex thug who could never make up his mind whether he wanted to be a fearsome breaker of the peace, like his neighbor to the north, or a geopolitical showman, the P.T. Barnum of international politics. Judging from Denis Mack Smith's study, by far the more solid and persuasive of these two new biographies, the Duce (chief) was a bit of both...
Born in 1883 in the Romagna, a region south of Venice, Mussolini was a hereditary rebel; both his father and his grandfather had been imprisoned for their political beliefs. Papa Alessandro, a blacksmith with intellectual aspirations, was one of the earliest proclaimed socialists in Italy. Young Benito was a loner with what would now be called sociopathic tendencies, a street fighter who looked on violence as the natural way to get what he wanted. Yet he was unquestionably intelligent. He read extensively in German, French and English and even wrote a novella in the style of Edgar Allan...
...zeal for scribbling led to journalism; he became a major socialist writer and editor, with a talent for extremist invective. "The national flag is for us a rag to plant on a dunghill," he wrote in the years before World War I when he was a strong internationalist. But Mussolini could believe almost anything passionately, and not long after a dispute led him to split with the Socialists, he established a new party, the Fascists, molding it along the lines of his own erratic and opportunistic temperament. As he described it, the party was "super-relativist," with only one guiding...
...publishing business, it is always Springtime for Hitler. As Mussolini shows, the Fhürer is ubiquitous, a major character or a necessary evil hovering off-page. Few authors should understand this better than Michael Korda. When he is not exploiting national anxieties with such books as Success! or Power! or Male Chauvinism! or winning readers with anecdotes about his triumphant Hungarian relatives (Charmed Lives), he is editor in chief at Simon & Schuster...