Word: mussolini
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Long before Italians ever heard the name of Benito Mussolini, they had begun to know Benedetto Croce. He was the wealthy aristocrat with the bristly hair who was to become not only Italy's most noted 20th Century philosopher, but a senator and a cabinet minister as well...
...first months of Fascism, he was slow to realize what Mussolini stood for. But when dictatorship established itself, he turned his back on Rome. In Naples, he edited a scholarly anti-Fascist magazine called La Critica, defied the government with his book History as the Story of Liberty. Once a band of young Black Shirts threatened to storm his home, fled when confronted by Signora Croce. Beyond that, the Fascists never dared to molest the Croces. "There is one man in all Italy whom I fear," Mussolini once remarked-"Croce. And I fear him because I do not understand...
...Sigh of Relief. Other Italians understood him better. After the fall of Mussolini, they called Croce back into public life once more in Marshal Badoglio's cabinet. But his appearance was a brief one. With a sigh of relief he left public office for good, and went back home to a library that reached ladder-high ("How can a man live without books?"), and to a special Italian Institute of Historical Studies which he had long wanted to found...
Time to Change. Independent Douglas was-dogmatic about another party too: his proposed alliance of farmers, workers and consumers should have no truck with the Communists. In 1935, he and his wife went abroad, stood in the Palazzo Venezia the day Mussolini sent Italy into the Ethiopian war. Douglas, who had become a Quaker in 1920, turned away from pacifism then & there. He heard and approved Franklin Roosevelt's warnings against dictators. And he discovered that Roosevelt had cribbed a lot of the Socialists' ideas. He decided there was indeed a logical place in American life...
...Togliatti, son of a poor Genoese bookkeeper, who fled from Fascism in 1926; between foreign assignments for the Comintern (which included organizing the Garibaldi Brigade in the Spanish Civil War), he studied revolutionary strategy and wrote polemics in Moscow. He thrice escaped death (he was condemned to death by Mussolini, stabbed in Spain, shot at in 1948 in Rome). Shortly after U.S. troops invaded Southern Italy he flew to Naples, became leader of Italy's 2,283,000 Communists...