Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present

by Ruth Ben-Ghiat

Strongmen argues that today’s leaders also have deeper roots. They recycle rhetoric and actions that go back to the dawn of authoritarianism in the 1920s and are invested in rehabilitating their autocratic predecessors. Putin has approved the erection of statues of Joseph Stalin in cities like Novosibirsk and Moscow, and Russian scholars who write about the mass graves of Stalin’s victims have been imprisoned.11 Berlusconi spread the lie that Mussolini “never killed anyone.” Bolsonaro makes the false claim that Nazism was a left-wing phenomenon. Austrian chancellor Sebastian Kurz sent fascist-nostalgia signals in 2018 when he called for an “axis of the willing” among Hungary, Italy, and Austria (all fascist or collaborationist states during World War II) to combat illegal migration. To understand today’s authoritarians and their allies, we need a historical perspective.