Word: mussolini
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...found myself staring at a different calendar entirely, labeled Il Duce. “This has to be a joke,” I thought to myself. But as I wearily flipped through it, I saw pictures that portrayed a strong Italian leader. The Benito Mussolini of this calendar was no buffoon...
...Someone should tell him this is not okay.” It’s embarrassing; it should be tucked behind dozens of Roman Holiday calendars. Let’s sell the tourists black-and-white photos of Audrey Hepburn and Gregory Peck eating gelato, not images of Mussolini inspiring false and dangerous notions of Italian greatness through racism...
...work, I mentioned the calendar to one of my colleagues. She wasn’t the least bit surprised, mentioning that some of her friends thought Mussolini wasn’t half bad (she, of course, completely disagreed with them). She reminded me of something Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi said in 2003. In an interview with English magazine The Spectator, he was quoted as calling Il Duce a “benign” dictator, saying “Mussolini never killed anyone” and “Mussolini just sent people on holiday to confine them...
...flying shithouse." The plant took a while to get going. There was a shortage of local labor, which meant that workers had to be imported from Appalachia (Ypsilanti, a local town, became known as "Ypsitucky"). Mosquitoes plagued the site until Henry Ford imported a bug-eating fish that Mussolini had found useful in draining the Pontine marshes in Italy. By 1944, Willow Run was turning out a B-24 every hour (it later got the time down to 55 minutes), and all told, it produced 9,000 of them...
Does this make Italy an authoritarian state? Of course not. We are too anarchic to allow anyone to tell us what do for long (they all failed, from Caesar Augustus to Benito Mussolini). Berlusconi has won three elections, lost two, and democracy is alive and (almost) well. Italy is like a postmodern signoria - think the Sforza in Milan, the Medici in Florence - led by a benevolent elder well-liked by his subjects...