Word: mussolini
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Litanies of Response. As an orator, Mussolini was incomparable (until Hitler began his blacker magic). He developed an incantatory style capable of evoking litanies of response from his audience...
...What a Character." Few recall that Mussolini once fancied himself as "the Lenin of Italy" and that Lenin himself (though Hibbert does not record the fact) returned the compliment by calling him the most hopeful prospect for Bolshevism among Europe's Socialists. In those days before World War I, Mussolini was a wide-eyed, impoverished zealot living in Milan. He edited a paper called La Lotta di Classe (The Class War), had written an anticlerical novelette, The Cardinal's Mistress, and was dedicated to revolution -particularly the violent revolution of the Communist creed. "Who has steel has bread...
...after World War I (in which, according to Hibbert, Mussolini was a good soldier), Mussolini broke with Bolshevism because of its call for international solidarity of the workers against mere national governments. He sent squads of his blackshirted thugs against the Communists then forming Soviets in towns all over northern Italy. He believed that the factories should be taken over, all right-but that he should take them in the name of Italy. To little King Victor Emmanuel III, he seemed to promise order in a chaos of revolutionaries; the midget monarch asked him to take charge...
...result was the famous "March on Rome." In reality, Mussolini arrived by train a day ahead, resplendent in black shirt, spats and a bowler. Then he called in his blackshirted squadristi, who arrived by suburban train and were permitted to parade. Mussolini posted himself at their head for the benefit of photographers recording the event for history. "What a character," said Donna Rachele Mussolini, his faithful, dowdy wife, when told of these heroic events...
When the sands were running out, he answered his own question as to what Fascism was all about: "One could call it irrationalism." But the irrational leads to boredom when it does not also lead to crime. All the frenetic posturing of Fascism led to Mussolini's last desperate apathy-almost torpor-and his meat-shop death. Mussolini's articulate explorations of his own dilemma give an awful fascination to Hibbert's history. In the end, it makes it possible to pity the Fascist dictator in a way that no one has ever pitied Hitler...