Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present

by Ruth Ben-Ghiat

On one issue, the strongman has been consistent: his drive to control and exploit everyone and everything for personal gain. The men, women, and children he governs have value in his eyes only insofar as they produce babies, fight his enemies, and adulate him publicly. Each tool of his rule has its place within this scheme. Propaganda lets him monopolize the nation’s attention, and virility comes into play as he poses as the ideal take-charge man. Repression creates confinement spaces full of captive bodies. Corruption lets him claim as his own the fruits of the nation’s labor. The writer Jon Lee Anderson sums up a common authoritarian pathology of possession: “the technologies of paranoia, the stories of slaughter and fear, the vaults, the national economies employed as personal property, the crazy pets, the prostitutes, the golden fixtures”—anything that can chase away their fear of not having enough or losing what they already have. When they finally