Word: mussolini
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...Dead men tell no tales," Benito Mussolini once reminded Count Galeazzo Ciano, little realizing that the son-in-law he ordered shot in January 1944 would prove a talkative exception. As Italy's Foreign Minister from 1936 to 1943, Ciano jotted day-to-day entries in a red diary. The first volume, covering 1939-43, appeared in 1945. The latest covers 1937-38, the years of the German annexation of Austria, the forging of the Rome-Berlin-Tokyo Axis, and Munich. Like the first, it packs no great historical surprises, but sketches in a lively picture of intrigue...
...Goose Is Roman." The Fascist leaders were painfully anxious not to lose face with the Germans. "Pay attention to uniforms," Ciano cued himself for a visit to Germany. "We must be more Prussian than the Prussians." Mussolini repeatedly lectured Ciano on "the necessity for redeeming Italy's reputation as a faithless nation. Bismark used to say that you can't have a policy with Italy when she is faithless both as friend and foe." Yet no one took a more contemptuous view of the Italian people than Mussolini himself. One incident or another kept him boiling. "The Duce...
...turn the army, at least, into a Prussian facsimile, Mussolini introduced the "passo Romano," a copy of the goose-step. When old soldiers and short-legged King Victor Emmanuel complained, the Duce's comment was: "People say the goose-step is Prussian. Nonsense. The goose is a Roman animal. ... It is not my fault if the King is half-size. Naturally he won't be able to do the parade step without making himself ridiculous. He will hate it for the same reason that he has always hated horses-he has to use a ladder to climb...
...Silent Partners. In one mood, Mussolini would defend all his sedulous aping of the Nazis on the ground that "Italy will never be sufficiently Prussianized." In another, he would harbor black, if fanciful, designs against his ally: "I shall combine the whole world into a coalition against Germanism. And we shall crush Germany for at least two centuries." What irked the Italians most was that they were treated as silent partners of the Axis, and only called in when matters reached the sign-on-the-dotted-line stage. After the Austrian Anschluss, "the Duce was in a mood of irritation...
...became a scraggly village below a vineyard-covered slope with a few resistant ruins poking out of the soil. Antiquarians knew for centuries that fascinating things must lie under the vine roots, but there was little digging. The vineyard owners would not sell their land, until at last, under Mussolini, who would have appreciated the Roman Baiae, the vineyards were expropriated and turned over to the diggers...