Word: mussolini
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...dispels what one Congressman calls a "reservoir of bitterness" against the Speaker. Some of that is normal in the election season, but it seemed to go beyond all bounds last week when Georgia's Newt Gingrich stormed through Florida calling Wright a "genuinely corrupt man" and comparing him to Mussolini. Even given Gingrich's right-wing fervor, that is startling stuff...
...Mussolini once remarked, "It is not impossible to govern the Italians, it is merely useless." It is not impossible to lead Americans as a nation. It is just that the Founding Fathers did not think it was a particularly good idea. Says Historian James MacGregor Burns: "Leadership itself is one of the most mentioned and least understood processes in the American system. What we have in this country is an antileadership system bequeathed to us by the Founding Fathers because they feared overly strong Government. It is quite ironic that we end this bicentennial year with a dramatic example...
...attributable to his perfect -- i.e., all-American but ambiguous -- Hollywood face. Fine, grant the premise. But if you do, you are confirming that what we are dealing with is not a political but a cultural, perhaps an anthropological phenomenon. Those who think Olliemania signifies a nation rising to Mussolini (or Nathan Hale) are apt to see their paranoia (or exaltation) disappointed...
Italians, with memories of Mussolini still fresh in their minds, went even further than the Germans in reining in the executive branch. While this has guarded against a new outbreak of tyranny, the inability of any one of Italy's parties to win a majority in parliament has led to frequent political turnover: Italy has had 46 governments since...
...Hook brings them onstage as object lessons. Lincoln Steffens had famously seen the future in the U.S.S.R. and proclaimed that it worked. It was less well known, notes the author, that Steffens "had previously seen it in Italy . . . where he thought it had also worked. His praise for Mussolini was as glowing as for Lenin." Bertolt Brecht told Hook that the status of defendants in the Soviet dock was irrelevant: "The more innocent they are, the more they deserve to be shot." Hook dryly comments, "I never saw him again...