AS I PLEASE XXIV: THINGS WE LEARNED FROM BENITO EDITION

I am currently reading Duce!, a breathless, beautifully-written biography of Benito Mussolini, written by Robert Collier in 1971. I have been curious about Mussolini more and more in recent years, especially since Putin's invasion of Ukraine, because it is in Mussolini rather than Hitler or Stalin that I see a historical figure analagous to Russia's present-day dictator. Reading the book has my mind going in a parallel direction: parallel in the sense that Mussolini's rise -- and his catastrophic fall -- were both the results of the human inability to heed historical warnings, both individually and on a mass scale. I believe as a Generation Xer I am among the last group of Americans to have been formally taught Civics, the subject being hateful to both the Left and the Right for the same reason: the fundamental lessons of Civics are to teach students the "slippery slope" theory as it applies to human freedoms, and more broadly, how to think critically in the face of one's own prejudices and predelictions. Both skills are critical to the survival of democracy, and therefore, neither idea is popular among the would-be autocrats who have hijacked our political system at both eneds. Reading about Mussolini, however, led me to a whole series of observations about history and current events which I will now set before you.

* There is widespread belief that authoritarian governments are more efficient than democracies because they do not engage in tedious wrangling over policy, but make decisive decisions and then act upon them. People admire dictators as much for their supposed ability to "get things done" as for their cruelty or ambition. (Mussolini was admired for his literal and figurative ability to "make the trains run on time.") Authoritarian worship, then, is often born not in a vicarious lust for power but rather out of sheer impatience for the fumbling and stumbling way of democracy. History has shown us, however, that authoritarian systems rapidly become so corrupt that they find it almost impossible to do anything effectively. Corruption stems largely from the fact that a free press is by far the most effective tool in exposing corruption in both business and government, and of course a free press is the first thing to go under a dictatorship. In the vacuum, corruption flourishes, leading in turn to the very inefficiency that investing a man or a small group with ultimate power was supposed to eliminate.

* Perhaps not coincidentally, the Italian director and provocoteur Passolini explored the "anarchy of power" in his unwatchably disgusting movie Salò, or 120 Days of Sodom; Salò happened to be the capital of Mussolini's short-lived Italian Social Republic, the Nazi puppet state in northern Italy the last two years of the war. The film deals with corruption, not in the monetary but rather in the moral sense, and it is fair to say that Mussolini's empire, whether headquartered in Rome or Salò, was morally corrupt almost from the start if not before its actual inception. The tactics Mussolini used to gain power, which included murder of political opposition, tainted the legitimacy of his rule, and his actual policies were divergent enough from their socialist origins to alienate much of the populace he governed. His penchant for warmongering did the rest. Napoleon once remarked that the moral is to the physical in war as three is to one, and it remains a fact, however uncomfortable to dictators, that people do not like to fight, and most especially do not like to die, for morally bankrupt causes. A dictator must convince his people that his cause is just, or at least that there is some identifiable merit in it, and after about 1937 Mussolini seems to have been unable to do this. The Italian people fight well when they believe in their cause, but when they do not, to paraphrase Suvorov, they stick their bayonets in the ground and go home. Several million Italian soldiers did this in World War Two and it is very difficult to fault them for it.

* Militarism is the worship of the military for its own sake, rather for any benefit it produces society, and its central tenant is that bombs solve political problems. This is at the core of all fascist movements: a veneration of all things military and a belief that violence is always the answer. In fact, history manifestly shows that bombs actually tend to create more problems than they solve, and that those who view politics as merely a continuation of war are generally doomed to failure. The genius of a man like Franco was that he knew how to play the role of a fascist dictator without losing his good sense: his understanding of the limits of Spanish military power kept him out of WW2 and allowed him to rule for generations and die in bed. Mussolini probably knew Italian limits at the start; he was actually quite an able politician, and after taking power, was trying to moderate and rule by coalition; he was forced into autocracy by extremists in his own party. Once he accepted this autocracy, however, he fell headlong into it and all the false logic that came with it, and his petty jealousy of Hitler led him to try and imitate his former pupil by playing Caesar to Hitler's Charlemagne. The result was total destruction of the Italian Empire, the extermination of fascism in Italy, and the death of Mussolini himself.

* Realpolitik, the practice of conducting foreign policy without regard to morality but only benefit, is a darling of right wing political thought; but is self-defeating for the same reason that selfishness is ironically self-defeating: it produces the thing it seeks to avoid. It may be expedient, for example, to ignore a friend's cries for help so as to avoid risk or inconvenience to oneself, but the bill for such selfishness will eventually come due -- often with interest. There is an intangible moral factor in politics of all kinds, and those eager to dismiss morality as a basis for behavior usually do so under the guise that they are "realists." This is the same mentality that justifies what we call brutal honesty, which more than half the time is simply an excuse for sadism under the guise of directness. Realpolitik is ultimately an attempt to dress up and justify amoral decision-makiny. Mussolini threw many a laurel and cosmetic over his imperial ambitions, but these dressings failed to conceal the stench of his amorality, his lack of scruple. For a dictator to remain popular, he must find a way to justify his dictatorship to the individual. Mussolini's brand of realism failed, except to the extent it thoroughly produced its own destruction.

* One of the results of tyranny and dictatorship is the movement toward group fantasy, a stylized denial of reality, among the ruling clique. For a good many years Mussolini seems to have had a reasonably firm grasp on both Italian and world politics -- he initially courted members of the internal opposition he felt were useful for his government, and correctly deduced the League of Nations would not stop his military ambitions in Africa. As Europe came closer to war, Mussolini -- not Churchill -- was actually at the forefront of the peace movement, being the first to stand up to Hitler, and later, even after his ill-fated alliance with same, a vocal proponent of talks and negotiations between the powers rather than violence. Hitler's success in the field, however, jealousy-blinded Mussolini to the inadequacy of his own military, goading him into the world war; much later, after defeats had stripped him of most of his empire and all of his prestige, he spent more and more of his time retreating into the petty squalor of internal fascist party politics, arguing with his disgruntled, fractious fascist prelates over this or that doctrine, this or that platform, this or that method of recovering the party's soul, when in fact it was obvious to anyone with sense that fascism was doomed -- actually dead and rotting, though admittedly still clinging to the levers of power like a corpse in mid-rigor. This collapse into denial is a marked feature of all tyrannies looking into the abyss, but it does not take an existential crisis to produce psychosis: success can also produce it. The point is that dictators like Mussolini inevitably become isolated from reality, either due to the scheming machinations of servile and ambitious underlings, or because they lose the ability to distinguish between power and omnipotence.

* Collier makes a fascinating observation about Mussolini, to wit, that like many revolutionaries, even those who went on to commit bestial atrocities on a massive scale, Mussolini's initial objectives as a political figure were at least partially understandable. A child of abject poverty, he knew poverty intimately and detested a system which ignored its cruelties and indignities; he opposed imperial adventures abroad when the great mass of the people at home were hungry and hopeless; and he wanted to effect changes which would grant the ordinary Italian dignity and a share in his own destiny as well as sufficient bread and vino to live, as opposed to merely subsist. He did not begin his journey fighting for the church, the aristocracy, the wealthy, or big business; quite the contrary, he openly hated these instutitions and classes and longed to see them in the dirt. And yet one of his girlfriends made the observation that "to her it seemed that his hatred of oppression not from love of the people but from his own sense of indignity and frustration, his passion to assert his ego." In this he shared much with men like Stalin and Hitler, whose sense of grievance, and whose desire for vengeance against the world, outweighed any benign motives they might have once succored for their people early in their politico-revolutionary life. This serves as a keen reminder that "even the devil can quote scripture to his purpose;" that just because a man has or seems to have the right enemies, the right goals, it is his motives and his means by which ye shall know them.

So much for old Benito, who has long since been consigned to the ash-heap of history. The fact that his memory resides there is not the important issue, but rather the fact that he needed to be sent there in the first place. For Mussolini, like Stalin and Hitler alongside him and like so many subsequent dictators and would-be dictators since, could have been avoided. His methodology was from almost the start a red flag fluttering and snapping in the breeze, plain for any to see and remark upon; and his fate could have been foretold by anyone with sufficient understanding of the inherent weaknesses of dictatorship. It remains for us to remember the lessons taught to us by his rise and fall, and by the existence of all the others who would follow in his footsteps and utilize his same means.