PUTIN AND THE GHOST OF MUSSOLINI

Men's courses will foreshadow certain ends, to which, if persevered in, they must lead. But if the courses be departed from, the ends will change. -- Scrooge

Just because you don't take an interest in politics doesn't mean politics won't take an interest in you. – Pericles

The most curious thing about world news is how easy it is to ignore. Under ordinary circumstances it is perfectly possible for an American to pretend as if most of the rest of the planet doesn't exist -- or exists in a fictional sort of way, like the happenings of Middle Earth. We share only two borders, and one of those is with Canada, a nation which (Quebec notwithstanding) is so much like our own that going there hardly even seems like leaving the country. Between us and almost everyone else, there are huge oceans or vast distances, or both. We are vaguely aware that what happens in Europe, or Asia, can effect us financially, but we don't really understand how, and even if we did understand, we probably wouldn't care. Broadly speaking, our focus is us.

The war in Europe, between Russia and Ukraine, is not something which occupies the hourly thoughts of the ordinary Yank. Most Americans are probably only vaguely aware of it, even though it periodically dominates the headlines. Nevertheless, it is getting increasingly hard to ignore. In 1914, a general war broke out in Europe which eventually dragged in the United States and cost us 100,000 dead. In 1939, another war broke out, and the U.S. was once again sucked into the maelstrom: this time the price was much higher, 300,000 dead in Europe alone. In 1947, the Cold War began, and dragged on until 1991: total deaths were fewer, but the stakes were higher: global annihilation. When it ended, America, with the greatest sigh of relief, let go of the idea of ever having to put a fighting army in Europe again. Our once-mighty military forces there dwindled to a kind of token, meant more for the psychological comfort of Europeans than practical use. Some openly questioned the need for any American military in presence there at all. And yet, just two years after an anti-NATO Trump presidency, here we are once again, being dragged toward a European war. It seems that America is once again learning that it cannot extricate itself from its place on the world stage: that in the age of a global economy, in which no nation is actually self-sufficient, what effects one large area of the earth must naturally effect others.

The Russian invasion of Ukraine has set in motion a whole chain of events which have, in turn, brought the world to the edge of total catastrophe. There is no way to gloss this over or to sugar-coat it. As Orwell said in 1940, "We are in the soup, full fathom five." Anyone who says differently is lying to you. Both your retirement fund and your life are at risk. On the other hand, neither panic nor anxiety is productive, and both can generally be kept at bay by possessing a clear understanding of what the hell is going on. Possession of this is best obtained by an understanding not of Vladimir Putin, but Benito Mussolini.

Mussolini is in my estimation the historical figure most analagous to Putin. In certain very distinct ways their careers, outlooks and ambitions follow the same general courses, and since courses foreshadow ends, it may be that in the grisly fate of Mussolini we see the most likely end to the life of Putin.

Mussolini is today regarded as something of a joke: even the Italians refer to him as the "Sawdust Caesar." It is easy to forget that until 1939, Mussolini was regarded as one of the great figures of modern history. Following a brief, tumultuous career as a politician after service in WWI, he rose to power in 1922 at the head of his self-created Fascist Party. Shrewdly cutting deals with the Italian Crown and the Vatican, he secured himself near-absolute power, and then embarked on a quest to restore Italy's former Roman Imperial glory. First, in 1930, came the "pacification" of Libya, which Italy had conquered 20 years before. This was carried out ruthlessly and with great cruelty. Then, in 1936, Italy conquered East Africa, a huge area which today comprises all of Somalia, Ethiopia, and Eritrea, as well as other territories. This conquest was even more savage than the Libyan "pacification," with Italian forces employing poison gas against a native population which had no defense against it. Mussolini's desire for empire was not merely an expression of hunger for dominion: he needed a foreign war to distract Italians from the effects of the Great Depression, and also to give him an excuse to further radicalize his domestic social agenda and increase his own personal power.

In 1936, the Spanish Civil War broke out, and Mussolini threw the full weight of his military behind Fransisco Franco, head of the quasi-fascist Falangist Party fighting in rebellion against the elected government. The Italians were by far the greatest contributor of men and equipment to the nationalist cause, and Mussolini could be counted as a fellow victor when Franco emerged victorious from the war in 1939.

In '39, Mussolini invaded and swiftly conquered the small nation of Albania, which put him in a position to attack Greece and strengthened his hold on the Adriatic. At this point he had been in power for 18 years, won a series of conflicts, expanded Italian power, reach and prestiege, and yet was still seen -- accurately -- as eager to prevent a second world war. Had he retired or died then, he would have been regarded quite differently by history, and certainly seen as a success, if a badly bloodstained one. But here Mussolini, unlike Franco, made a fatal error. Having spent his career slaughtering African tribesmen and the second or third-rate armies of European nations, he decided, in 1940, to enter the Second World War on Hitler's side. This event cost him first his empire and then his life.

For much of his career, Mussolini's strengths largely rested upon his sense of practicality. He understood the limitations of Italian military power, the Italian economy, and the Italian people themselves, and only operated within the boundaries of the possible, never pushing his machine past its design limits. Even as a bully-politician in the 20s, he was careful in his estimations of what the Italian public would and would not tolerate. But in 1940, vicariously drunk on Hitler's successes and previous instances of Allied cowardice, he decided a general war could be fought, and won, without much in the way of cost. He was wrong. The French easily repulsed his attacks into their southeast border. The British swiftly conquered the whole of Italian East Africa, and his army in Libya was so badly mauled he had to plead with Hitler for military assistance to prevent losing North Africa as well. In late 1940, conscious of his damaged prestiege, he launched an invasion of Greece which failed so miserably he actually lost part of Albania too, again requiring Hitler's intervention to save him. In 1941, determined to be a part of the war in Russia, he sent a large army there, only to see it almost annihilated in the Stalingrad campaign. And by 1943, Hitler's star now waning itself, North Africa fell to the Allies, collapsing all of his African ambitions and destroying any lingering confidence the Italian people may have possessed in him. The Allied invasion of Sicily toppled his government, and only Hitler -- once again! -- was able to save him, sending commandos to rescue him from imprisonment, and then placing him ahead of a puppet government in northern Italy. The last two years of Mussolini's life were joyless farce: a mere figurehead without any real power, without any popular support, he "governed" over the north of Italy while the Germans ruled the country, and the Allies gobbled not only the last of his Balkan conquests but gradually worked their way up the Italian peninsula. In the spring of 1945, when the Axis finally collapsed, he was captured by anti-fascist partisans while trying to flee northward, possibly to Switzerland. These partisans were part of a huge guerilla movement which had opposed both the Germans and the Fascists: they hated Mussolini and were gleeful to have captured him. This article from Ranker picks up the narrative:

"After the partisans seized Mussolini and [his mistress Claretta] Petacci, they hid them in a remote northern Italian farmhouse for a night. From there, they took them to a village near Lake Como where the two were placed in front of a stone wall and executed. Afterwards, the bodies of Mussolini, Petacci, and 14 others were driven to a central square in Milan where vast crowds awaited their chance to channel their rage...The bodies were stoned, beaten, hit with vegetables, used for target practice, and eventually strung up at a gas station on one side of the square. By the end of the day – when it could finally be taken to the morgue – Mussolini's body was unrecognizable."

Such was the end of a man who, at his height, controlled nearly a million square miles of territory in Europe and Africa, and who, but for a single terrible decision, might have died in bed in the 1970s like Franco did. But the difference between rule or ruin is often a single bad decision, and the more powerful the man, the more terrible the consequences when a gamble craps out. Which brings us back to Vladimir Putin.

Putin, like Mussolini, enjoyed a highly improbable rise to power. In a brief span of time, Putin went from being an obscure KGB officer to the presidency of Russia. Once there, he gradually but systematically eroded, weakened, ameliorated and finally destroyed all barriers to his personal power, using intimidation and violence against his political opposition. He then embarked on a string of foreign adventures in places like Chechnya, Georgia and Syria, all of which were ultimately successful despite embarrassing setbacks and failures along the way. In doing so, he raised the prestige of the Russian army, which became regarded as "the second best in the world" behind the United States. Wary of fatiguing his people with conflict, he only engaged in small wars, and brokered economic deals that temporarily fattened the Russian economy, giving his autocratic, corrupt rule a modicum of popularity. Like Mussolini, he tapped, or tried to tap, into nationalistic fervor to motivate the populace, and to keep them distracted from their increasing lack of freedoms. In 2014, he took a huge but calculated risk, and seized almost without bloodshed a huge swath of Ukrainian territory, a "land grab" of the Hitler-Mussolini style. He then legitimized the theft by organizing elections which voted the stolen territories into Russia. This near-bloodless conquest carried his domestic popularity to its highest levels, and he endured the Western sanctions which followed without weakening his grip on power.

Like Mussolini in 1939-1940, Putin was now at a crossroads in his career. His capture of the Crimea from Ukraine was a fait accompli, and his army was still respected and feared in Europe. He also had economic cards to play with his near-monopoly on natural gas, upon which Europe was and is largely dependent. He was in effective control of Belarus, which was basically a Russian vassal-state. A wise course would have been to sit back, make consoling diplomatic noises, and let the West gradually acclimate itself to his Ukraine adventure. Instead, he came to the conclusion that between Donald Trump's avowed desire to divorce America from NATO (and Europe), and Ukraine's seeming inability to defend itself, he could conquer Ukraine in a Blitzkrieg attack, install a puppet government, and then once again sit back and ride out the sanctions. Like Mussolini (and Hitler), he let himself be seduced by a vision of his place in history and by an over-identification of his own imperial ambitions with the good of his people. And ike both Mussolini and Hitler, he failed to grasp that democratic nations, while generally cowardly and short-sighted when initially confronted with military aggression, are capable of tremendous unity and ferocity once they realize there is no choice but battle. The Ukraine of 2014 was like the France of 1939; the Ukraine of 2022 was like the Britain of 1940: full of defiance and determination to win at all costs.

There is no need to go into the military situation in Ukraine in detail, except to say that seven months into the war, Putin is roughly where Mussolini was in 1941-1942: a dictator who has discovered his army is inadequate to fighting the war which he started; whose domestic popularity has cratered in tandem with his international standing; whose economy is crumbling; whose authoritarianism is growing in proportion to public hostility to the war; whose young men are fleeing military service by the tens of thousands; who is beset by powerful enemies and has no clear (or even blurry) pathway to peace without humiliating himself and surrendering all hopes of empire. The critical difference is, of course, the existence of nuclear weapons. Mussolini had none. When his armies were beaten, his fleets sunk, his air force shot out of the sky, he had no recourses, no way to save himself. Putin, on the other hand, still has a radioactive ace up his sleeve. And history shows us that tyrants, especially those whose egos have swollen to the point where they see themselves as the living embodiment of their own nations, will happily see those nations burn rather than admit defeat. The very act of placing nation above self is antithetical to the mentality of a dictator, and even if it were not, no dictator can step down and expect anything but a hangman's noose. The crimes they commit to obtain and maintain power mark them for death should they surrender it.

In my novella "Deus Ex," I explored the psychology of a defeated dictator who, having lost a bloody global war he himself initiated, flees his capital in a hypersonic jet, leaving behind a ticking nuclear bomb for both his enemies and his former supporters, many of whom are still completely loyal to him. Magnus, my fictional tyrant, does not even trouble to justify this horrific act: in his mind it is the logical outcome of any scenario in which he is not the winner. I do not, at this point, believe Putin will employ even a tactical nuclear weapon in Ukraine: he is not yet far gone enough in the head to believe this will prolong his life or grip on power, which are in fact bound up. My fear is that when and if he comes to believe he cannot salvage the situation through conventional warfare or diplomacy, he may turn to this method in the same way a child kicks over a gameboard when he realizes the game is lost. It is not a last attempt to win: it is an assurance that everyone else loses.

Someday, if we all live to see a someday, historians may look back on the present era and take note of the selfishness, narcissism and egotism which have marked politics in both East and West in recent years: the insistence that the power and privilege of an individual, or a small coterie of individuals, outweigh the rights and even the lives of the masses they supposedly lead. Until then we are stuck with men like Putin. And the ghost of Mussolini.

Deus Ex