Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present

by Ruth Ben-Ghiat

As leaders stabilize their rule, they use propaganda to legitimate their authority. Discrediting the press is a kind of insurance policy. When journalists turn up evidence of the government’s violence or corruption, the public will already be accustomed to seeing them as partisan. Even those who demonstrate their loyalty can never be certain of their standing with the leader. Any critique, no matter how veiled, can lead to arrest, meetings with security forces or censors, or public denunciations by the leader and his allies on television, radio, or Twitter. This encourages self-censorship, which makes the construction of an alternate reality easier.

some of the most successful propaganda builds its falsehoods around a grain of truth.

The perennial strongman message that foreigners are breaching the border to engage in criminal acts is one example. A fabric of lies is woven around the fact that large numbers of foreigners do indeed cross the border, omitting vital information such as when they arrived and with what motives. Information manipulation on this subject often includes attempts to link immigration to elevated crime rates and terrorism.

Propaganda may seem to be all about noise, but silence and absence are equally important to its operation. Strongmen disappear people, and they also disappear knowledge that conflicts with their ideologies and goals.

In strongman states, where speaking out can bring professional ruin or physical harm to you and your family, self-censorship can be a survival strategy.

The same mechanisms that make propaganda effective can lessen its impact.

Propaganda needs propagandists, and the regime coopted the poor and talented by putting them on state payrolls. Academics, most of them state employees, could be pressured through bureaucratic measures.

Many learned too late the rule about cooperating with authoritarian regimes: as with the related world of organized crime, the moment you agree to do one thing, the trap is set for you to do another.

The Nazis took over, purged, or shuttered many of them (5,000 newspapers became 2,000 by 1938), firing and imprisoning thousands of journalists in 1933 alone, including for racial reasons. A law that year made editors and publishers liable for journalists’ transgressions so that the media would police its own.24

Hitler’s voice, so laden with emotion that it stilled thought, was his chief propaganda weapon. Those who heard him speak, like the Italian writer Italo Calvino and the American journalist Janet Flannery, remarked on how his speeches built from relative calm to a state of “fanatic-hysterical energy.” As he spoke, he became “like a man hypnotized, repeating himself into a frenzy.” Like all strongmen, Hitler had worked hard on his charisma.

Who would the strongman past and present be without those crowds that form the raw material of his propaganda? His secret is that he needs them far more than they need him.

philosopher Hannah Arendt’s 1951 observation: The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist.32

The philosopher Theodor Adorno’s assertion that television could continue fascist tyranny by fostering “intellectual passivity, and gullibility” was good news to postwar autocrats, who knew that discouraging critical thinking was key to maintaining themselves in power.

The destruction of press freedom was a top junta priority. The Catholic Church Vicariate of Solidarity’s radio and press survived as sources of alternate information, as did the Christian Democrat–linked Radio Cooperativa. But eleven daily newspapers shrunk to four, and 50 percent of Chilean journalists lost their jobs in the months after the coup, with many killed or imprisoned and dozens more prosecuted in the 1980s.

University of Tripoli students who protested the regime starred in some of the first televised hangings in Libya on April 7, 1976. The popularity of the broadcast prompted Gaddafi to dedicate that date every year to student executions, and classes were interrupted to force students to watch.

Making misogynist and racist comments to shift media attention away from their corruption and incompetence is a common tactic.

Today’s strongmen are well aware that every minute the public and the press spend on the outrage du jour is time they’re not mobilizing for political action or investigating abuses of power.46

Rather than ban all opposition media, new authoritarians deny licenses to media outlets, bribe, sue, or threaten their owners, call for advertising boycotts to cause financial ruin, and stage hostile takeovers.

What today’s strongmen give up in old-style top-down synchronization, they gain in amplification and penetration. This includes messages intended to raise hatred for the press. The Committee to Protect Journalists found “an unprecedented level of hostility towards media personnel” around the world in 2018, with record-breaking numbers of journalists killed, jailed, and held hostage.48

Whether directed at Russians or foreigners, Putin’s propaganda does not just seek to create alternate truths; it also seeks to create confusion through disinformation and undermine the ability to distinguish truth from fiction.

As of April 2017, cartoons or other satires of Putin can be labeled “extremist material.” In 2019, a broader measure made those who “disrespect” the state and its symbols, “society,” or government authorities on the Internet liable for fifteen days in jail. “Soon we’ll be telling jokes about authorities in whispers in the kitchen,” wrote a Moscow lawyer on Facebook, describing a situation familiar to those who lived under Communist or other authoritarian regimes.53

A landmark 2019 study found that heavy viewing of Mediaset’s entertainment channels translated into a decline in civic engagement and a preference for simplistic populist rhetoric. This translated into an almost 10 percent bump at the polls for Berlusconi and his party over five elections from 1994 to 2008.54

Media companies have strong incentives to sacrifice a few individuals rather than lose access or enter into expensive legal proceedings.57

“DON’T BELIEVE THE CRAP YOU SEE from these people, the fake news. . . . Just remember: what you’re seeing and what you’re reading is not what’s happening.” So declared Trump to a group of American veterans in 2018, continuing a century of strongman attempts to discredit and deny unflattering realities.

Trump does not lie about one or two things. Rather, facts on any subject that conflict with his goals of power and profit are degraded through rumor and innuendo or simply altered or denied. The number of documented falsehoods he uttered as president increased from 5.9 a day in 2017 to an average of 22 a day in 2019, for a total of 16,241 in his first three years in office. This constitutes a disinformation barrage without precedent in America.

Trump’s tweets feature simple vocabulary and misspelled words, offering a curated sense of authenticity.

THE STRONGMAN WOULD BE NOTHING without bodies to control. He needs crowds to acclaim his projects of national greatness on camera, taxpayers to fund his follies and his private bank accounts, soldiers to fight his wars, and mothers to birth all of the above.

Presented by their personality cults as the ideal blend of everyman and superman, authoritarians make ordinary men feel better about their own transgressions.

Gaining favor after periods of economic and political gain for women, the strongman seeks to reverse shifts in social norms that threaten patriarchy and the satisfaction of “natural” male desires.

For a century, women have been the strongman’s adversaries, along with prosecutors, journalists, and the political opposition. His machismo is not just empty posturing, but a strategy of political legitimation and an important component of authoritarian rule.

Strongman rulers also display their virility to and for each other. Public events, like meetings and summits, where millions will be watching, are ideal occasions. Machismo figures heavily in their mediatized brand of politics.

The leader sets the tone as his government propagates models of masculinity that suit his demographic and ideological goals. In most states, these compete with visions of gender roles advanced by advertising or American or other foreign cinema and television.

Many men who support these leaders’ agendas of female subordination realize, too late, that the ultimate aim is to humiliate them as well.10

IF STRONGMEN ARE such misogynist monsters, why do some women love them? Some appreciate the social welfare benefits they offer and feel elevated by inclusion in the national community.

Twenty-first-century leaders boost their popularity with female voters by appointing women to positions of authority.

The modern strongman can tolerate women in power as long as they work for him.12

Observers over a century have seen both masculine and feminine sides in strongman rulers. For every behavior that conforms to codes of machismo, there’s another that hardly fits classical notions of the virile man who blends courage with self-control. Between their victim personas, vanity, endless demands for attention, and impulsivity, these men are high-maintenance (a term usually reserved for demanding women).

The independence women gained during World War I fueled a desire to restore male authority.

The prominence of female enablers in Gaddafi’s system offers another example of the strongman’s paradoxical view of gender emancipation. Women advance in their careers by making it easier for the leader and his inner circle to harm other women.

Reducing people to mere instruments of his desires for money, sex, and more is part of the strongman way of life and rule.

Participation in the system made them wealthy, but also, paradoxically, more vulnerable.

OFTEN DEFINED AS THE ABUSE OF public power for private gain, corruption involves practices that encompass bribery, conflict of interest, plunder of state resources, the use of tax and licensing regulations to extort or force bankruptcy, illegal raids on businesses, and profiting from privatization or nationalization.

Strongmen use corruption in tandem with other tools. Purges of the judiciary result in a justice system that exonerates crooks or doesn’t prosecute them at all. Journalists and activists who might expose thievery are imprisoned or smeared through propaganda. Virility makes taking what you want and getting away with it the measure of manhood.

The core of the contract between the ruler and his enablers is the offer of power and economic gain in exchange for supporting his violent actions and his suppression of civil rights.6

Rulers who come into office with a criminal record, like Mussolini and Hitler, or under investigation, as was the case with Putin, Trump, and Berlusconi, have a head start. They know that making the government a refuge for criminals who don’t have to learn to be lawless hastens the “contagion effect.” So does granting amnesties and pardons, which indebt individuals to the leader and make blackmailers, war criminals, and murderers available for service.8

Corrupting others works for the ruler only if he remains so powerful that the coercive tactics he uses on underlings cannot be used on him. To protect himself he relies on a “divide and rule” strategy that involves frequent upheavals of his cabinet to keep elites in competition with one another and loyal only to him.

Strongmen are family men, in their own fashion. To block criticism and engage in corrupt practices while minimizing the chance of exposure, they establish inner sanctums composed of family members and trusted cronies.

Retaining sole control of patronage and punishment systems, personalist military rulers are less likely to be overthrown than those who share power with their juntas.25

He did have plenty of oil, which prolongs authoritarians’ time in power and gives them little incentive to democratize. Scholars call this the “resource curse”;

Kompromat, the Russian word for gaining cooperation through the threat of loss (from exposure of real or fabricated wrongdoing) rather than the promise of material gain, now rules.40