Glyn Ford on lessons from 20C Fascism
Duce: The Contradictions of Power by Peter J. Williamson published by Hurst
In the wake of the victory of Georgia Meloni’s Fratelli d’Italia, Mussolini is back. In northern Italy, at least, posters, calendars and key-rings venerating Il Duce now litter the racks and shelves of Italy’s kiosks and coffee shops. Scarcely surprising with Meloni’s party in the direct line of descent from his Partito Nazionale Fascista (PNF) and with ancestor worship a hallmark of the far right and far east.
As Williamson tells us in his very readable book, Mussolini’s regime between 1922 and 1943 was a brutal and barbarous one. Violence for the sake of power was its very essence. You won the fight, not the argument. The squadristi gangs reign of terror on the left were the organised version of the mob violence that scarred England’s “left behind” communities in August. Mentality was more important than dogma. Violence was a permanent feature of people’s lives in the embattled working class fastnesses of Milan and Turin. Class was to surrender to nation.
Mass arrests saw the incarceration of communist and socialist militants; held in what were little short of concentration camps. Of the 40,000 held, few were murdered, but many died in consequence of the appalling insanitary conditions and daily patina of violence. Mussolini was directly responsible for the infamous assassination of the socialist Giacomo Matteotti in 1924 and culpable in the death of Antonio Gramsci in 1937. Yet for all that, in reality, he was a “pound shop” Hitler; bad rather than evil, with punishment for the few, threat to the many. There was no genocide and no gas. The deportation of Italy’s Jews came only when he was demoted from Hitler’s junior partner to retainer after he was ousted by the Fascist Grand Council in July 1943 and recycled to power by German forces in the rump Salò Republic.
For Duce his ascent was with the connivance of Italy’s conservatives in a dress rehearsal of Hitler’s accession. The traditional right were alarmed by the growth of Italy’s socialist and communist left and the threat of working class power. In 1914 their opposition delayed Rome’s passage to war and when the Italian Army was humiliated in catastrophic defeat at Caporetto in November 1917 with over a quarter of a million captured, the establishment scapegoated “socialist shirkers” rather than the blundering military leadership. Mussolini had broken with his comrades in the Italian Socialist Party with his enthusiasm for war as the motor of modernisation and renewal. Neither really worked, while industrial output finally surpassed agriculture in 1933 the economy didn’t really grow, it became unequal. Veterans and their officers flocked to join the party and the violence.
The infamous March on Rome in October 1922 was more performance than putsch, but the conservatives were all too eager to believe. In making him a minority Prime Minister they opened the doors to dictatorship, Mussolini and the PNF ungratefully walked through. The hide-bound state bureaucracy remained, but freshly dressed in black. In power the economic cake was increasingly cut to favour the middle classes. Corporatism was the shell for corruption, patronage and clientelism. For the rest bread might be in short supply, but circuses in the form of cinema, football and festivals were aplenty. The party became a cesspit as the “fascists of the first hour” battled the carpetbaggers, opportunists and the rural establishment with the membership alternately surged and purged as mass party competed with vanguard party.
Mussolini’s mistake – like Blair’s – was war, but here he was instigator rather than dupe. Italy’s intervention in the Spanish Civil War saw 50,000 troops dispatched. Their first encounter with the International Brigades saw them defeated at Guadalajara, but in the end their weight helped deliver Franco’s victory. Few of his other colonial wars served Italy well, save for modernising defence production. While Italy’s adventures in North Africa were little short of a fiasco with Germany needing to step in. The price for Berlin saw 230,000 Italian troops immured on the Eastern Front. Military adventurism sucked the country dry. Like bankruptcy, the end was slow then it was quick. Initially there had been little armed resistance. After the Italian armistice/surrender in September 1943 Italy suddenly had three wars: a civil war between partisans and fascists; a patriotic war to liberate Italy from the Germans; a class war between workers and peasants and their collaborationist employers. While the first two were won, the last was lost with the intervention of the Allies. Three days after liberation Mussolini was caught attempting to escape to Switzerland “en route” to exile in Franco’s Spain, and was promptly executed with the body ending up hanging from a lamp post in Milan. For those left wanting more, I recommend Antonio Scurati’s lightly fictionalised M: Son of the Century.
Williamson and Duce don’t explicitly spell out today’s lesson. Nevertheless, it’s clear those threatening or tempted to break the cordon sanitaire around Le Pen’s Rassemblement National or Germany’s Alternative für Deutschland have yet to learn their history.
My father was in the 8th Army which liberated Italy and he always loved talking about how lovely the country and people were; he helped find an elderly Calabrian woman’s son in the North.