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Showing posts with label Italy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Italy. Show all posts
February 18, 2023
June 04, 2022
India: On Hindutva’s Italian connection | Ramachandra Guha
Indisputable link
Hindutva’s Italian connection
by Ramachandra Guha
"Last month, a teacher of political science in Uttar Pradesh’s Sharda University posed this examination question to his students: ‘Do you find any similarities between Fascism/ Nazism and Hindu right-wing (Hindutva)? Elaborate with the argument.’ The teacher was suspended by the university authorities, on the grounds that the very posing of the question was “totally averse” to the “great national identity” of our country and “may have the potential for fomenting social discord”. (see https://thewire.in/ education/sharda-university-professor-hindutva-nazism)
This column seeks to answer the question the teacher in Sharda University was forbidden from asking his students. I use, as my main sources, the writings of the Italian historian, Marzia Casolari, in particular an essay she published in the Economic and Political Weekly in 2000 titled “Hindutva’s Foreign Tie-up in the 1930s” (see https://www.epw. in/journal/2000/04/special-articles/ hindutvas-foreign-tie-1930s.html), and a book she published twenty years later, titled In the Shadow of the Swastika: The Relationships Between Indian Radical Nationalism, Italian Fascism and Nazism (available at https://www.amazon.in/ Shadow-Swastika-RelationshipsNationalism-Routledge-ebook/dp/ B08DPXXLF6)."
[ . . . ]
https://www.telegraphindia.com/opinion/indisputable-link-hindutvas-italian-connection/cid/1868274
December 22, 2016
Book Review: Vollmer on Hofmann, 'The Fascist Effect: Japan and Italy, 1915-1952'
H-Net
Reto Hofmann.
The Fascist Effect: Japan and Italy, 1915-1952.
Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2015. 224 pp.
$35.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-8014-5341-0.
Reviewed by Klaus Vollmer (Ludwig Maximilian University)
Published on H-Nationalism (December, 2016)
Commissioned by Cristian Cercel
Published on H-Nationalism (December, 2016)
Commissioned by Cristian Cercel
Reto Hofmann has written an illuminating volume which
is an original contribution not only to the study of the reception of
Italian fascism in a non-Western context, but also to global
intellectual history and the history of Japanese thought and culture in
the prewar era. "Fascism needs to be examined through its relations" (p.
2), Hofmann claims in his introduction. While in previous research this
has most often meant looking at fascism's relation to other ideologies (e.g., Marxism, liberalism, etc.), Hofmann intends to examine the relationship between fascisms in different national contexts,
taking Italy and Japan as examples. This approach is significant
because it "expose(s) a fundamental contradiction at the heart of this
ideology" (p. 2), namely the contradiction between particularism
(fascism as an ideology in a specific country, i.e., Italy) and
a universalist claim, as fascism aimed to overcome the crisis brought
about by capitalist modernity and which had global effects in the first
decades of the twentiethth century. Hofmann's study convincingly
demonstrates that the discourse on fascism in Japan "simultaneously
emanated from Italy and emerged domestically" (p. 3) and that Japanese
intellectuals, politicians, and right-wing activists were very much
aware of the problems that emerged from the contradiction mentioned
above. How to strictly insist on the cultural uniqueness of Japan while
at the same time acknowledging the power of fascist ideology to address
and possibly solve the problems of modernity and capitalism that had
affected Japanese society was an issue occupying the minds of many
intellectuals of almost all political orientations. In fact, Hofmann's
detailed narrative drawing on a wide variety of sources--books, academic
and popular journals, newspapers, and visual materials--reminds us to
what extent fascism was at the center of debate in the 1920s and 1930s.
In reevaluating fascism as a global ideology
discussed in Japan during these decades, it is thus more adequate to
conceive fascism as a process rather than a clear-cut model with fixed
elements. In this way it becomes possible to view the assertions of
Japanese uniqueness and its vocabulary ("national polity," kokutai; "imperial way," ôdô)
and even the nominal rejection of (Italian) fascism as "part of the
fascist logic itself, its drive to generate a politics of cultural
authenticity" (p. 3). So when, for example, Japanese intellectuals
questioned the need for a leader like Mussolini or Hitler because
according to their view the emperor system provided the basis for
politics more adequately in Japan, this should not be taken as a
rejection of fascism in general: "they regarded fascism as open-ended,
as a new politics of the right that began with Mussolini but that would
find different, and possibly more sophisticated, expressions in Japan"
(p. 3).
The slim but densely written volume contains five
chapters. After the introduction in which the author explains his
approach and assumptions, some of which were summarized above, the first
chapter introduces the reader to Shimoi Harukichi (1883-1954), today a
little-known Japanese poet and writer. As a long-term resident of Italy,
where he moved in 1915, he later became an admirer of Italian
fascism and an acquaintance of Mussolini. In 1917 he toured the front
and even took part in the occupation of Fiume in 1919, where he worked
as liaison for Gabriele D'Annunzio. In Hofmann's narrative, which
revisits Shimoi’s later activities frequently in other chapters, he acts
as the "mediator of fascism" to Japan. On many occasions, Shimoi
subsequently served as tour guide and interpreter in both countries.
Chapters 2 and 3 ("The Mussolini Boom, 1928-1931" and "The Clash of
Fascisms, 1931-1937"), covering the first decade of the turbulent Shôwa
(1926-89) era, outline in detail the intellectual debates centering on
the interpretation of Italian fascism and the possibilities of adapting
fascism to Japanese society. Chapter 4 ("Imperial Convergence: The
Italo-Ethopian War and Japanese World-Order-Thinking, 1935-1936"), which
is a revised version of an article published by Hofmann recently in the
Journal of Contemporary History, presents a close reading of
the complexities involved in the Italo-Ethopian war, which highlighted
the expansionist ambitions of Italian fascism. In Japan, not only the
camp of right-wing Pan-Asianists but also the general public condemned
the brutal military attack on Ethopia that smacked of old-fashioned
European colonialism and imperialism and temporarily even disrupted
diplomatic relations between the countries. On the other hand, this was a
moment when the debate on fascism became linked more closely to broader
questions of international relations. For some right-wing intellectuals
and bureaucrats, Mussolini's war in Africa dealt a welcome blow to the
world order of international liberalism dominated by Anglo-American
rule and foreshadowed the fascist Axis and its policies that formed
later in the 1930s. This is the topic of chapter 5 ("Fascism in World
History, 1937-1943"), which discusses the Japanese discourse on the
alliance with fascist Italy and Nazi Germany, again employing a wide
variety of sources ranging from philosophical debate to propaganda
materials which introduced Italian culture and history to broader
Japanese audiences. The short epilogue ("Fascism after the New World
Order, 1943-1952") traces the fate of the concept during the occupation
era and argues "that the long-standing Japanese association with fascism
became an inconvenient truth for the Allies after the war, when
Americans decided to rehabilitate Japan as their best friend in Asia in
the fight against communism" (p. 7). While the concept of fascism as a
solution to the problems of global capitalist modernity had carried a
sense of open-endedness and the potential to adapt to specific cultural
and historical contexts from the late 1920s to the wartime era, it was
now largely relegated to the politics of interwar Italy. In regard to
Japan the term "ultranationalism" gained universal acceptance although
Marxist and left-wing circles continued to discuss prewar and wartime
Japan as "emperor system fascism."
Hofmann has drawn on a large number of primary
sources from Italian and Japanese archives and secondary sources in
English. Given his multilingual background and his linguistic
competence, it is surprising and at times even disturbing, however, that
Hofmann hardly mentions any German-language scholarship, naturally
abundant when it comes to studies on Axis politics, but also on Japanese
relations to Nazi Germany and fascist Italy or, to give one
more specific example, on Japanese debates regarding the issue of Grossraumpolitik and
the thought of Carl Schmitt that Hofmann discusses in chapter 5 (pp.
133-134). From the perspective of this reviewer, who specializes in
Japanese history, it would have been mandatory to refer to, for example,
the seminal work of Urs Matthias Zachmann on the discourse on
international law and its reappropriation and application in interwar
and early postwar Japan or the volume on Karl Haushofer and the
reception of his ideas of geopolitics in Japan by Christian Spang.[1]
Both monographs were published in 2013 (the bibliography mentions an
English-language paper by Spang published in 2006). It is unfortunate
that the author has not consulted or even mentioned these and other
recent scholarly works in German extensively treating issues
that Hofmann elaborates on in his volume. Besides Max Weber's venerable Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft
(1922) and Wolfgang Schieder's recent book on German visitors to
Mussolini, the bibliography contains only two, rather dated, works in
German, by Bernd Martin and Theo Sommer.[2] These shortcomings
notwithstanding, this book is a timely contribution to the ongoing
reevaluation and contextualization of fascist discourse in the first
half of the twentieth century and also a welcome addition to the study
of the Axis from the point of view of global history.
Notes
[1]. Urs Matthias Zachmann, Völkerrechtsdenken und Außenpolitik in Japan, 1919-1960 (Baden-Baden: Nomos, 2013); Christian W. Spang, Karl Haushofer und Japan. Die Rezeption seiner geopolitischen Theorien in Deutschland und Japan (Munich: Iudicium, 2013).
[2]. Wolfgang Schieder, Mythos Mussolini. Deutsche in Audienz beim Duce (Munich: Oldenbourg Wissenschaftsberlag, 2013); Bernd Martin, Deutschland und Japan im Zweiten Weltkrieg. Vom Angriff auf Pearl Harbor bis zur deutschen Kapitulation (Göttingen: Musterschmidt, 1969); Theo Sommer, Deutschland
und Japan zwischen den Mächten, 1935-1940. Vom Antikominternpakt zum
Dreimächtepakt. Eine Studie zur diplomatischen Vorgeschichte des Zweiten
Weltkriegs (Tübingen: Mohr, 1962).
January 11, 2015
India: HIndutva Connections With Italian Fascists (A.G; Noorani in Frontline, 23 Jan 2015)
Excerpts from the article “Hindutva’s foreign tie-up in the 1930s: Archival evidence” written by Marzia Casolari in Economic & Political Weekly, January 22, 2000:
The first Hindu nationalist who came in contact with the fascist regime and its dictator was B.S. Moonje, a politician strictly related to the RSS. In fact, Moonje had been Hedgewar’s mentor, the two men were related by an intimate friendship.
Moonje’s declared intention to strengthen the RSS and to extend it as a nationwide organisation is well known. Between February and March 1931, on his return from the round table conference, Moonje made a tour of Europe, which included a long stop-over in Italy. There he visited some important military schools and educational institutions. The highlight of the visit was the meeting with Mussolini. An interesting account of the trip and the meeting is given in Moonje’s diary, and takes 13 pages (Nehru Memorial Museum and Library (NMML), Moonje papers, microfilm, rn 1).
The Indian leader was in Rome during March 15 to 24, 1931. On March 19, in Rome, he visited, among others, the Military College, the Central Military School of Physical Education, the Fascist Academy of Physical Education, and, most important, the Balilla and Avanguardisti organisations. These two organisations, which he describes in more than two pages of his diary, were the keystone of the fascist system of indoctrination—rather than education—of the youths. Their structure is strikingly similar to that of the RSS. They recruited boys from the age of six, up to 18: the youths had to attend weekly meetings, where they practised physical exercises, received paramilitary training and performed drills and parades.
According to the literature promoted by the RSS and other Hindu fundamentalist organisations and parties, the structure of the RSS was the result of Hedgewar’s vision and work. However Moonje played a crucial role in moulding the RSS along Italian (fascist) lines. The deep impression left on Moonje by the vision of the fascist organisation is confirmed by his diary:
“The Balilla institutions and the conception of the whole organisation have appealed to me most, though there is still not discipline and organisation of high order. The whole idea is conceived by Mussolini for the military regeneration of Italy. Italians, by nature, appear ease-loving and non-martial like the Indians generally. They have cultivated, like Indians, the work of peace and neglected the cultivation of the art of war. Mussolini saw the essential weakness of his country and conceived the idea of the Balilla organisation.... Nothing better could have been conceived for the military organisation of Italy.... The idea of fascism vividly brings out the conception of unity amongst people.... India and particularly Hindu India need some such institution for the military regeneration of the Hindus: so that the artificial distinction so much emphasised by the British of martial and non-martial classes amongst the Hindus may disappear. Our institution of Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh of Nagpur under Dr Hedgewar is of this kind, though quite independently conceived. I will spend the rest of my life in developing and extending this Institution of Dr Hedgewar all throughout the Maharashtra and other provinces.”
He continues describing drills and uniforms:
“I was charmed to see boys and girls well dressed in their naval and military uniforms undergoing simple exercises of physical training and forms of drill.”
Definitely more meaningful is the report of the meeting with Mussolini. On the same day, March 19, 1931, at 3 p.m., in Palazzo Venezia, the headquarters of the fascist government, he met the Italian dictator. The meeting is recorded in the diary on March 20, and it is worth reproducing the complete report.
“...As soon as I was announced at the door, he got up and walked up to receive me.
I shook hands with him saying that I am Dr Moonje. He knew everything about me and appeared to be closely following the events of the Indian struggle for freedom.
He seemed to have great respect for Gandhi. He sat down in front of me on another chair in front of his table and was conversing with me for quite half an hour. He asked me about Gandhi and his movement and pointedly asked me a question ‘If the Round Table Conference will bring about peace between India and England’. I said that if the British would honestly desire to give us equal status with other dominions of the Empire, we shall have no objection to remain peacefully and loyally within the Empire; otherwise the struggle will be renewed and continued. Britain will gain and be able to maintain her premier position amongst the European Nation (sic) if India is friendly and peaceful towards her and India cannot be so unless she is given Dominion Status on equal terms with other Dominions. Signor Mussolini appeared impressed by this remark of mine. Then he asked me if I have visited the University. I said I am interested in the military training of boys and have been visiting the Military Schools of England, France and Germany. I have now come to Italy for the same purpose and I am very grateful to say that the Foreign Office and the War Office have made good arrangements for my visiting these schools. I just saw this morning and afternoon the Balilla and the Fascist Organisations and I was much impressed. Italy needs them for her development and prosperity. I do not see anything objectionable, though I have been frequently reading in the newspapers not very friendly criticisms about them and about your Excellency also.
Signor Mussolini: What is your opinion about them?
Dr Moonje: Your Excellency, I am much impressed. Every aspiring and growing nation needs such organisations. India needs them most for her military regeneration.
During the British domination of the last 150 years Indians have been waved away from the military profession but India now desires to prepare herself for undertaking the responsibility for her own defence and I am working for it. I have already started an organisation of my own, conceived independently with similar objectives. I shall have no hesitation to raise my voice from the public platform both in India and England when occasion may arise in praise of your Balilla and Fascist organisations. I wish them good luck and every success.
Signor Mussolini—who appeared very pleased—said: Thanks but yours is an uphill task. However I wish you every success in return.
Saying this he got up and I also got up to take his leave. ”
The description of the Italian journey includes information regarding fascism, its history, the fascist “revolution”, etc., and continues for two more pages. One can wonder at the association between B.S. Moonje and the RSS, but if we think that Moonje had been Hedgewar’s mentor, the association will be much clearer. The intimate friendship between Moonje and Hedgewar and the former’s declared intention to strengthen the RSS and to extend it as a nationwide organisation prove a strict connection between Moonje and the RSS. Moreover, it makes sense to think that the entire circle of militant Hinduism must have been influenced by Moonje’s Italian experience.
A.G. Noorani
source: http://www.frontline.in/cover-story/moonje-mussolini/article6756630.ece
July 17, 2013
Review: Arthurs on Hametz, 'In the Name of Italy: Nation, Family, and Patriotism in a Fascist Court'
Maura Hametz. In the Name of Italy: Nation, Family, and Patriotism in a Fascist Court. New York: Fordham University Press, 2012. x + 278 pp. $45.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-8232-4339-6.
Reviewed by Joshua Arthurs (West Virginia University)
Published on H-Italy (July, 2013)
Commissioned by Matt Vester
What’s in a Name? Nationalism, Gender, and the Law in Fascist Trieste
In January 1932, the widow Luigia Barbarovich Paulovich of Trieste won an unusual legal victory. For the past eighteen months, she had officially been known as Luigia Paoli, a name imposed on her by Fascist legislation aimed at “Italianizing” the inhabitants of the northeastern borderlands. Despite the regime’s aggressive efforts to nationalize this population acquired after World War I, the widow Paulovich prevailed in her efforts to retain her husband’s seemingly “foreign” or “Slavic” surname--a seemingly uncharacteristic instance of “administrative tolerance” and legalism by an authoritarian dictatorship (p. 2). The Paulovich case was never publicized at the time, and has remained obscure for decades. Maura Hametz’s new book, In the Name of Italy, brings the story to light, and uses it as a vehicle for exploring key themes in the historiography of modern Italy and Fascism. These include, but are not limited to: legal culture, bureaucracy, and the state; national, ethnic, and regional identities; center-periphery relations; and religion, gender, and the family. This is an ambitious agenda, and Hametz effectively situates the Paulovich case within these larger dimensions of Italian history.
As Hametz convincingly demonstrates, Paulovich’s petition was motivated not by opposition to Fascism or the surname legislation per se, but rather by a loyal citizen’s insistence on the correct application of the law. Indeed, she won precisely because, as an elderly matriarch, she conformed to the regime’s vision of Italianness (italianità) and womanhood. The surname legislation claimed not to forcibly impose new names but instead to “restore” historic Italian names that had been “deformed” by centuries of foreign rule. However, for many Adriatic Italians, belonging to the nation was understood in terms of their identification with a distinct regional culture, not with a homogenized identity dictated from Rome. Paulovich could therefore argue that her name was a distinctive marker of Dalmatian italianità, and thus of her family’s “exquisitely patriotic Italian traditions and sentiments” (p. 99). This claim was strengthened by invoking traditionalist conceptions of gender and family. After all, Paulovich was the widow’s married name; she merely wished to honor and preserve the memory of her late husband. She had produced sons who had campaigned against Habsburg rule and fought for Italy during the Great War. In sum, as Hametz argues, Paulovich “asserted her patriotism and sought recognition of italianità on her own terms, not on the terms dictated by the regime” (p. 142).
Another important element of Paulovich’s argument was pitting the central authorities in Rome against local Triestine officials, who were cast as fanatical incompetents. Such jurisdictional conflicts point to the difficulties inherent in implementing the Fascist “revolution” from above to below, and from the center to the periphery. Despite the insistence on uniformity and discipline, laws were often applied irregularly, subject to loopholes, and filtered through local priorities and concerns. Added to this was the resilience of liberal legal culture among many lawyers and functionaries. The commitment to judicial independence and civil liberties was often in tension with the ideological exigencies of the Fascist state, again undercutting the “totalitarian” aspirations of the regime and revealing the limits of its reach.
This book has much to recommend it; however, I have two main criticisms. First, while Hametz repeatedly stresses that Paulovich’s petition was not an act of resistance or defiance, she sometimes cites it as evidence that “much work remained for the regime to effect the widow’s ‘political and moral education’ and to ensure that Italians had sufficiently imbibed fascist national spirit” (p. 50). This argument seems to stand in tension with the interpretation discussed above, namely, that the widow’s appeal was if anything an act of faith in the state and Italian justice. Should we really view this (seemingly anomalous) case as “test[ing] the bounds of fascist success in molding new citizens and inculcating italianità in the borderland” (p. 50)? Or, in a seemingly paradoxical way, could it not also be seen as an instance of the system working?
My second concern is more methodological. In the introduction, Hametz positions her study as a microhistory along the lines of Carlo Ginzburg’s The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller (first published in Italian in 1976; English edition published in 1980); she also invokes German Alltagsgeschichte (everyday history), with its emphasis on individual agency and experience. However, most of In the Name of Italy is devoted to the larger political, institutional, and social forces that shaped the case. Paulovich appears infrequently, mainly to illustrate a more general point. Hametz similarly goes on long tangents into well-trodden historiographical territory. The chapter on womanhood, for example, is mainly about biological essentialism, demography, and the body, though their relevance to the case is not always clear. Rarely do we get glimpses of the everyday; nor do we get much of a sense of Paulovich as a real person or historical agent. Hametz herself states that she does not see the “widow as an individual” but as “‘the woman in question’ in a legal proceeding” (p. 10). Clearly, the obscurity of the case means a relative paucity of sources; however, too often the book relies on a “top-down” and macrohistorical approach that the author had wanted to transcend. A more fully realized microhistory could have revealed fascinating new perspectives on daily life under Fascism on the Adriatic periphery.
Nevertheless, this book is much more convincing as a work of legal and bureaucratic history, and as such is a welcome contribution to the study of the mechanisms of the Fascist state, Italian nationalism, and especially Italian legal culture since unification.
If there is additional discussion of this review, you may access it through the list discussion logs at: http://h-net.msu.edu/cgi-bin/logbrowse.pl.
Citation: Joshua Arthurs. Review of Hametz, Maura, In the Name of Italy: Nation, Family, and Patriotism in a Fascist Court. H-Italy, H-Net Reviews. July, 2013.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=37084
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
Reviewed by Joshua Arthurs (West Virginia University)
Published on H-Italy (July, 2013)
Commissioned by Matt Vester
What’s in a Name? Nationalism, Gender, and the Law in Fascist Trieste
In January 1932, the widow Luigia Barbarovich Paulovich of Trieste won an unusual legal victory. For the past eighteen months, she had officially been known as Luigia Paoli, a name imposed on her by Fascist legislation aimed at “Italianizing” the inhabitants of the northeastern borderlands. Despite the regime’s aggressive efforts to nationalize this population acquired after World War I, the widow Paulovich prevailed in her efforts to retain her husband’s seemingly “foreign” or “Slavic” surname--a seemingly uncharacteristic instance of “administrative tolerance” and legalism by an authoritarian dictatorship (p. 2). The Paulovich case was never publicized at the time, and has remained obscure for decades. Maura Hametz’s new book, In the Name of Italy, brings the story to light, and uses it as a vehicle for exploring key themes in the historiography of modern Italy and Fascism. These include, but are not limited to: legal culture, bureaucracy, and the state; national, ethnic, and regional identities; center-periphery relations; and religion, gender, and the family. This is an ambitious agenda, and Hametz effectively situates the Paulovich case within these larger dimensions of Italian history.
As Hametz convincingly demonstrates, Paulovich’s petition was motivated not by opposition to Fascism or the surname legislation per se, but rather by a loyal citizen’s insistence on the correct application of the law. Indeed, she won precisely because, as an elderly matriarch, she conformed to the regime’s vision of Italianness (italianità) and womanhood. The surname legislation claimed not to forcibly impose new names but instead to “restore” historic Italian names that had been “deformed” by centuries of foreign rule. However, for many Adriatic Italians, belonging to the nation was understood in terms of their identification with a distinct regional culture, not with a homogenized identity dictated from Rome. Paulovich could therefore argue that her name was a distinctive marker of Dalmatian italianità, and thus of her family’s “exquisitely patriotic Italian traditions and sentiments” (p. 99). This claim was strengthened by invoking traditionalist conceptions of gender and family. After all, Paulovich was the widow’s married name; she merely wished to honor and preserve the memory of her late husband. She had produced sons who had campaigned against Habsburg rule and fought for Italy during the Great War. In sum, as Hametz argues, Paulovich “asserted her patriotism and sought recognition of italianità on her own terms, not on the terms dictated by the regime” (p. 142).
Another important element of Paulovich’s argument was pitting the central authorities in Rome against local Triestine officials, who were cast as fanatical incompetents. Such jurisdictional conflicts point to the difficulties inherent in implementing the Fascist “revolution” from above to below, and from the center to the periphery. Despite the insistence on uniformity and discipline, laws were often applied irregularly, subject to loopholes, and filtered through local priorities and concerns. Added to this was the resilience of liberal legal culture among many lawyers and functionaries. The commitment to judicial independence and civil liberties was often in tension with the ideological exigencies of the Fascist state, again undercutting the “totalitarian” aspirations of the regime and revealing the limits of its reach.
This book has much to recommend it; however, I have two main criticisms. First, while Hametz repeatedly stresses that Paulovich’s petition was not an act of resistance or defiance, she sometimes cites it as evidence that “much work remained for the regime to effect the widow’s ‘political and moral education’ and to ensure that Italians had sufficiently imbibed fascist national spirit” (p. 50). This argument seems to stand in tension with the interpretation discussed above, namely, that the widow’s appeal was if anything an act of faith in the state and Italian justice. Should we really view this (seemingly anomalous) case as “test[ing] the bounds of fascist success in molding new citizens and inculcating italianità in the borderland” (p. 50)? Or, in a seemingly paradoxical way, could it not also be seen as an instance of the system working?
My second concern is more methodological. In the introduction, Hametz positions her study as a microhistory along the lines of Carlo Ginzburg’s The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller (first published in Italian in 1976; English edition published in 1980); she also invokes German Alltagsgeschichte (everyday history), with its emphasis on individual agency and experience. However, most of In the Name of Italy is devoted to the larger political, institutional, and social forces that shaped the case. Paulovich appears infrequently, mainly to illustrate a more general point. Hametz similarly goes on long tangents into well-trodden historiographical territory. The chapter on womanhood, for example, is mainly about biological essentialism, demography, and the body, though their relevance to the case is not always clear. Rarely do we get glimpses of the everyday; nor do we get much of a sense of Paulovich as a real person or historical agent. Hametz herself states that she does not see the “widow as an individual” but as “‘the woman in question’ in a legal proceeding” (p. 10). Clearly, the obscurity of the case means a relative paucity of sources; however, too often the book relies on a “top-down” and macrohistorical approach that the author had wanted to transcend. A more fully realized microhistory could have revealed fascinating new perspectives on daily life under Fascism on the Adriatic periphery.
Nevertheless, this book is much more convincing as a work of legal and bureaucratic history, and as such is a welcome contribution to the study of the mechanisms of the Fascist state, Italian nationalism, and especially Italian legal culture since unification.
If there is additional discussion of this review, you may access it through the list discussion logs at: http://h-net.msu.edu/cgi-bin/logbrowse.pl.
Citation: Joshua Arthurs. Review of Hametz, Maura, In the Name of Italy: Nation, Family, and Patriotism in a Fascist Court. H-Italy, H-Net Reviews. July, 2013.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=37084
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
February 19, 2013
Italy: Kisses for the Duce (Richard J. Evans)
London Review of Books
Vol. 35 No. 3 · 7 February 2013
pages 6-8 | 3838 words
Kisses for the Duce
by Richard J. Evans
Fascist Voices: An Intimate History of Mussolini’s Italy by Christopher Duggan
Bodley Head, 501 pp, £25.00, November 2012, ISBN 978 1 84792 103 1
The Fascist Party and Popular Opinion in Mussolini’s Italy by Paul Corner
Oxford, 320 pp, £65.00, July 2012, ISBN 978 0 19 873069 9
Shortly after he was forced out of office in November 2011, Italy’s longest serving postwar prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi, told the press he was spending his time reading the last letters written by Mussolini to his mistress Clara Petacci. ‘I have to say,’ he confessed, ‘that I see myself in many aspects of those letters.’ In the Duce’s view, according to Berlusconi, Italy was ungovernable. ‘What sort of democracy is this?’ Mussolini had wondered. When a journalist suggested that it might not be entirely accurate to describe Mussolini’s Italy as a democracy, the former prime minister replied: ‘Well, it was a democracy in a minor way.’
The right-wing parties which have dominated Italian politics since the end of the Cold War have consistently rejected the legacy of anti-Fascism represented by the Christian Democrats and the Communists, the two parties that dominated Italian politics from the late 1940s until the early 1990s. Exploiting Italians’ deep frustration at the chaotic instability and corruption of the postwar political system, the New Right has based its appeal on its claim to represent law and order, on the idea of Italy for the Italians, on respect for the Catholic Church and its values and, not least, on financial rectitude and political stability. Neo-fascist and self-styled ‘post-fascist’ political groupings have played a full part in the manoeuvrings and mergers that have characterised Italian politics over the past two decades, moderating their policies and rhetoric where necessary in order to obtain a share in power.
In this situation, serious public criticism of Mussolini has become increasingly rare. His rule, which lasted from 1922 until 1943, is widely portrayed as having been relatively benign. ‘Mussolini,’ Berlusconi told the Spectator in September 2003, ‘never killed anyone.’ If he sent his opponents into internal exile it was to holiday resorts. Politicians like Gianfranco Fini, who began his career in the neo-fascist Italian Social Movement (MSI), had no difficulty in attaining high political office under Berlusconi (he was foreign minister for several years). In 1992, Fini declared that Fascism had been ‘part of the history of Italy and the expression of permanent values’. Alessandra Mussolini, the dictator’s granddaughter, after playing a prominent but repeatedly disruptive role in post-fascist politics, became a member of the Italian legislature as part of Berlusconi’s right-wing alliance. In 2008, Gianni Alemanno, the former secretary of the youth wing of the MSI, was elected mayor of Rome on the promise of expelling illegal immigrants from the city. His victory speech was greeted with arms raised in the Fascist salute and chants of ‘Duce! Duce!’ from the crowd.
In Mussolini’s home town of Predappio, souvenir shops line the main street. They still sell online what the town council has banned them from selling in their shops: black shirts, Fascist banners, statues of the Duce, books and DVDs celebrating his life, and, more disturbing still, manganelli, clubs inscribed with such slogans as molti nemici, molto onore (‘many enemies, much honour’). Every year, on the anniversaries of Mussolini’s birth and death as well as the 1922 March on Rome, thousands of sympathisers, many dressed in black shirts and wearing Fascist badges, march from the town centre to the mausoleum where his body is interred, chanting Fascist songs and slogans. Dozens, sometimes hundreds of people come to the mausoleum every day and leave comments in the visitors’ book placed in front of the tomb. What they have to say is overwhelmingly positive, their words almost always addressed directly to the Duce himself: ‘Only under your wise guidance did Italy become a “nation”, a nation that was feared, respected, fruitful and envied.’ ‘If you were here, we would not be in this mess.’ Many of the messages are quite personal, even intimate, and religious phrases and sentiments are common: ‘If you could see how low our poor Italy has sunk,’ one visitor wrote in 2007, ‘return, reincarnated in one of us! Now and forever.’
It’s impossible to imagine Germans openly expressing similar sentiments about Hitler, former Nazis and neo-Nazis joining a present-day German government, German politicians claiming Hitler never killed anyone, someone with the name Hitler being elected to parliament, a former German head of government ‘seeing himself’ in Hitler’s letters to Eva Braun, German crowds chanting Nazi slogans, or German souvenir shops selling Nazi memorabilia. While Italians are widely dissatisfied with their political system and even more with the state of their economy, there has seldom been a political system that has enjoyed such widespread support as the system brought into being in 1949 by the Basic Law for the Federal Republic of Germany: it has delivered stability and prosperity, and nurtured in the Germans a palpable smugness that is sometimes hard to bear, however justified it may be.
In Italy a general amnesty for political and military prisoners was issued in June 1946; there was no consistent policy for prosecuting Italian citizens for war crimes and Fascist bureaucrats and administrators stayed in office. The judge appointed in 1957 as president of the Constitutional Court had also been president of the tribunal set up in 1938 to adjudicate on issues stemming from the Fascist racial laws. In 1960, 60 of the country’s 64 regional prefects and all 135 of its police chiefs had begun their careers under Mussolini. Senior figures in the regime went unpunished: there was no general reckoning with Fascism’s crimes either at home or abroad. In Germany, as we know, only a handful of former Nazis escaped denazification, and war crimes trials continued for several years, giving shocking publicity to the misdeeds of the Third Reich and its servants.
In Germany, there is a gulf between past and present that Germans can’t conceive of bridging, perhaps as a result of the reorientation of German public memory since the end of the Cold War, reflecting the widespread tendency, especially in the US, to place what at that point came to be called the Holocaust at the centre of any retrospective assessment of the Third Reich. Even Italian neo-fascists have felt obliged to distance themselves from Mussolini’s introduction of racial and anti-semitic laws in the late 1930s. Yet the fact that for most of his time in office, Mussolini didn’t persecute the country’s Jews, who were sent to Auschwitz only after the Germans occupied Italy following the Duce’s fall, has preserved the memory of his regime from the fate of its German counterpart.
While a considerable body of research now exists documenting the nature and extent of ordinary Germans’ support for Hitler during the Third Reich, there is nothing comparable on Fascist Italy. In his magnificent new book, a pathbreaking study that everyone interested in Fascism, or in Italy past and present, should read, Christopher Duggan fills the gap by examining a wide range of diaries, including Petacci’s, and the numerous letters sent to Mussolini by private citizens during the two decades of his rule, which often express the same intimate feelings towards the Duce and his regime as the messages left in recent times on his grave. This enables Duggan to deliver not merely a detailed account of popular attitudes towards the regime, but, far more, a general history of Fascism that for the first time treats it, not as a tyranny that allowed ordinary Italians no possibility of expressing themselves freely, nor as the brutal dictatorship of a capitalist class that reduced the great majority of the country’s citizens to the status of victims, but as a regime rooted strongly in popular aspirations and desires. Yet this material, by its nature, quite possibly exaggerates the degree of popular success enjoyed by Mussolini. In The Fascist Party and Popular Opinion in Mussolini’s Italy, Paul Corner paints a very different picture, arguing that corruption and mismanagement had made the Fascist Party deeply unpopular by 1939. And other sources used by Duggan himself reveal a more complex situation than the letters and diaries he quotes seem to suggest.
True, Mussolini secured the support of the Catholic Church and the gratitude of the faithful. His concordat with the papacy in 1929, ending the mutual hostility of church and state that had begun with unification in the 19th century, and putting in place arrangements that have endured to the present day, marked the symbiosis between the two that made Catholicism one of the regime’s most important props. Mussolini’s anti-semitic laws too were backed by leading Catholic periodicals, and praised by the rector of the Catholic University of Milan, Father Agostino Gemelli, as part of the ‘terrible sentence that the Deicide people has brought upon itself and for which it goes wandering the world, unable to find the peace of a fatherland, while the consequences of that horrendous crime pursue it everywhere and at all times’. Nor would conversion release the Jews from this sentence: thanks to their race they would never be assimilated into what Gemelli called Italy’s new Fascist unity ‘of descent, of religion, of tongue, of customs, of hopes, of ideals’.
When Mussolini spoke in public, as he often did, he was the object of adulation; he told Petacci of ‘fanatical scenes, delirious, mad’; of crowds ‘weeping, kneeling, shrieking, arms stretched out’. The enthusiasm expressed in the letters ordinary people sent him convinced him that this wasn’t stage-managed (though Corner presents compelling evidence that a great deal of it was).
To a degree, Duggan undermines his own argument by documenting the extraordinary degree of surveillance imposed on real or potential dissenters. Known critics of Fascism were targeted; Benedetto Croce’s house was broken into by armed blackshirts in November 1926 and its contents trashed before the eyes of his terrified family. The police guard permanently stationed outside his house thereafter was less to ensure his safety than to note down the names of his visitors – now rapidly dwindling in number. Soon friends were obliged to meet him ‘in deserted streets and in solitary corridors’. Even greater isolation was the lot of those exiled to remote parts of southern Italy; 13,000 of them in all, including not only political opponents and critics but troublemakers of all kinds, as well as homosexuals and petty criminals. The villages where they were sent, a long way from their families and jobs, were godforsaken places, as even their inhabitants admitted: Christ Stopped at Eboli, the classic account of exile by Carlo Levi, takes its title from a local saying. Absorbed in the daily struggle for existence in a harsh and unforgiving environment, the peasants had little time for intellectuals, politicians or even the Italian state, whatever its political complexion; for them, Rome, as Levi noted, was ‘the capital of the Signori, the centre of a foreign and malicious state’.
The political police or ‘PolPol’, formed in 1926, had a budget of 50 million lire, half the amount assigned to the police force as a whole, and liaised with local police through what Duggan calls ‘another vast tentacular organisaton’, OVRA (Organisation for Vigilance and Repression of Anti-Fascism, also short for piovra or ‘octopus’), whose job it was to open and copy the correspondence of dissidents. A Special Confidential Service tapped the phones not only of opponents of the regime but also of leading figures in the Fascist movement, against the day when Mussolini might need to use their tawdry secrets in order to blackmail them. By 1938, the service was employing 462 stenographers just to transcribe the conversations it overheard. OVRA – according to Mussolini, ‘the strongest organisation in the world’ – employed a large number of spies, often under the threat of exposing their own personal vices. Some of them were former socialists or communists persuaded to work for the regime by payments that rescued them from the financial ruin into which so many had fallen.
The result of all this was a pervasive atmosphere of suspicion and distrust; even the schoolchildren whose diaries Duggan quotes were wary of expressing criticism of the regime. A law of November 1926 banned statements that were ‘seditious or damaging to the prestige of the authorities’ as well as the display of ‘symbols of social subversion’, though (as wasn’t the case in Germany) the political jokes that proliferate under any dictatorship seem mostly to have gone unpunished. But arrest and imprisonment were far from being the only sanctions in the economic depression of the late 1920s and 1930s; dismissal from a job, however badly paid, could spell ruin, and was frequently resorted to. As in Germany, many people sent denunciations to the police when they witnessed imprudent remarks or behaviour, though Duggan says, rather charitably, that this was mainly because they were worried that if they didn’t report them ‘they might themselves risk an accusation of complicity.’
Despite the regime’s strong links with the Catholic Church, sexual libertinism seems to have been as prominent a feature of political life then as it has been more recently. When Berlusconi said that he could see himself in the letters exchanged between Mussolini and his mistress, he may well have been referring to their often highly sexual content. The Duce’s ill-concealed sexual voracity, like Berlusconi’s, projected an image of virility that many Italians found deeply impressive. Like Berlusconi, Mussolini spent huge amounts of time on his sex life, his official image as a faithful family man paralleling an unofficial one as a man of uncontrollable priapic urges.
Women, he liked to boast, threw themselves at him, and he didn’t even pretend to fend them off. There can have been little doubt what was being offered in some of the 1500 pieces of correspondence from private citizens that reached his office every day: ‘So many kisses and caresses I would give my dear Benito,’ one woman wrote: ‘I would embrace him so he could not escape!’ Most of these women, he told Petacci, he made love to once, and never saw again. He simply used them, he told her, ‘for my carnal satisfaction’, and to reassure her, he phoned or wrote to her a dozen or more times a day after their relationship began in 1936.
The lusts of the regime’s satraps were also a matter of public knowledge. During the disastrous military campaign in Greece in the winter of 1940-41, Mussolini’s son-in-law Galeazzo Ciano installed himself and his entourage in a large hotel in Bari, where twenty or more girls were brought in by government officials every week for orgies in which the participants divided into teams and squirted water from soda-siphons at one another’s genitals while hacking at their clothes with scissors. Just to make sure everyone knew what was going on, the windows were left wide open. All this was a world away from the priggishness of Hitler, who concealed his own utterly conventional sexual relationship with Eva Braun from the public until they finally married on the eve of their mutual suicide at the end of the war. When he found out that Goebbels was conducting a passionate affair with the Czech actress Lida Baarova, Hitler gave him a furious dressing-down and forced him to break it off.
Mussolini’s standing with the Italian public wasn’t damaged by any of this. People might grumble about one thing or another, but as in Nazi Germany, the Leader bridged social, cultural, generational and regional differences to help bind the nation together. ‘If only the Führer knew,’ was a phrase frequently heard from citizens of the Third Reich outraged at yet another peccadillo of a corrupt Gauleiter or party boss, and it was much the same in Fascist Italy: ‘If only the Duce knew.’ Mussolini seemed to be a sacrosanct figure, however much his subordinates were reviled.
He reached the height of his popularity with the invasion of Ethiopia in October 1935, as the regime pursued wild fantasies of imperial wealth and expressed its determination to exact revenge for liberal Italy’s defeat at the hands of Menelik forty years before. Determined to avoid a repeat of the disastrous ground war of 1896, Mussolini ordered poison gas to be sprayed indiscriminately from the air on military and civilian targets alike. This too was widely supported. Any means were justified to punish the ‘inhuman, vile … bestial Abyssinian people’, a group of students told him: ‘Chemical weapons are expensive, it is true, but the Italian people are ready to make the financial sacrifices required to save their sons.’ Critics in Geneva were told the chemicals only knocked people out briefly, while photographs of mustard-gas victims were said to show victims of leprosy.
Duggan cites one or two diarists who expressed doubts about the conduct of Italian troops during the war – for example, when the party secretary, Achille Starace, used Ethiopian prisoners for target practice, shooting them first in the testicles and then in the chest – but the overwhelming majority of comments were ecstatic. As numerous testimonies quoted by Duggan demonstrate, Mussolini became at this point the embodiment of Italian national pride and national achievement. ‘It is right that we look for a place in the sun,’ one diarist wrote: ‘Today Italy is a nation, a people, conscious of its worth, that knows what it wants and how to get it. The Italy of 15 years ago is finished, dead.’
The war in Ethiopia kindled in the regime a new optimism that Italians could be remoulded into aggressive, well-disciplined and fanatical members of a new master race. Among other things, this meant getting rid of ‘bourgeois’ customs such as the handshake (declared to be ‘soft’ and ‘Anglo-Saxon’ and to be replaced with the Fascist salute) and the formal mode of address, Lei (branded as a ‘foreign import’ with connotations of ‘servility’). Coffee-drinking was condemned as decadent (even more of a lost cause than the other proposed reforms). Mussolini announced his intention of making Italians ‘less nice’ and more ‘odious, tough and implacable: in other words, masters’. In April 1937, he made it illegal for white Italians to have sexual relations with blacks, a measure prompted by the mass sexual exploitation of Ethiopian women by Italian troops following the invasion. As the 26-year-old Fascist journalist Indro Montanelli, who had enrolled as a volunteer for the 1935 campaign, wrote: ‘We will never be dominators without a strong sense of our predestined superiority. There is no fraternising with negroes … No indulgences, no love affairs … The white must command.’ This did not stop him spending 500 lire on purchasing a 12-year-old wife from her Ethiopian father, though he was prudent enough to leave her behind when he returned home.
The conquest of Ethiopia combined with Mussolini’s large-scale intervention in the Spanish Civil War imposed unsustainable financial burdens on the state, making it impossible to invest seriously in military equipment or the expansion of the armed forces. Mussolini thought he was militarily invincible, and no one dared tell him otherwise. In his conversations with Petacci he poured scorn on other Europeans: the English were ‘a disgusting people … They think only with their arses.’ ‘People who carry an umbrella,’ he added, ‘can never … understand the moral significance of war.’ The Spanish were ‘lazy, lethargic’, and the French a ‘hotchpotch of races and scum, a haven for cowards’, a ‘spineless and gutless people’, corrupted by ‘alcohol and syphilis’. Only the Italians and Germans were able to ‘love that supreme, inexorable violence which is the chief motor force of world history’.
In 1939 it finally dawned on him that the Italian armed forces, poorly trained, and with obsolete equipment and severe shortages of arms and ammunition, were woefully unprepared for a European war. When it broke out he had no alternative but to adopt a stance of ‘non-belligerence’, to the relief of most Italians. As German victories multiplied, however, Mussolini grew increasingly irritated at his countrymen’s evident distaste for war: ‘I have to say they nauseate me. They are cowards and weaklings … It’s disappointing and soul-destroying to see that I’ve failed to change these people into a people with steel and courage!’ The popular reaction to Italy’s declaration of war on France and Britain on 10 June 1940 was mixed. The doubters were right to worry.
If the Italian attack on France was a fiasco, the invasion of Greece was a catastrophe. Instead of the anticipated lightning victory, the poorly prepared Italian forces were humiliated by superior Greek troops, while the British quickly routed the Italians in Libya and Ethiopia. Hitler had to step in to rescue the situation, and the ease with which the Germans drove the British out of Greece, combined with Rommel’s stunning victories in North Africa, only rubbed salt into the wounds of Italian pride. The letters and diaries quoted by Duggan now mixed patriotic and Fascist commitment with increasing doubt and scepticism. When Mussolini visited wounded soldiers in hospital he was greeted with cries of ‘assassin!’ (a second visit produced better publicity – the injured had been replaced in their beds by policemen). People refused to buy the 50 cent stamp with the picture of Hitler and Mussolini, complaining that ‘they’re even forcing us to lick his backside.’
Duggan reports ‘explosions of collective joy’ when Mussolini was overthrown by the Fascist Grand Council following the Allied invasion in 1943. The Fascist movement disappeared from view. As Corner shows, the everyday experience of Fascist rule had alienated most people long before the regime melted away in 1943. Fascism had never succeeded in breaking free from its roots in local and regional politics, and had become the vehicle of the personal and financial ambitions of local power-brokers. Just as 19th-century nationalism had tried to ‘make Italians’, so 20th-century dictatorship had tried to ‘make Fascists’; both, in the end, failed. Italians greeted the surrender in September 1943 with huge relief, only to be rudely disabused when the Germans occupied the country and arrested most Italian troops, sending them to Germany as forced labourers in the factories and fields. Just as it had begun in civil violence, so the regime ended. The former Duce was rescued from captivity by the Germans and installed in the puppet regime of Salò in the north, at the same time as a resistance movement emerged, meeting with brutal reprisals from Mussolini’s remaining followers, backed by the Germans. More than fifty thousand people were killed, including Mussolini and Petacci, shot by partisans while trying to flee. Their bodies were strung upside down from the gantry of a petrol station in the suburbs of Milan after being reviled, spat and urinated on by rejoicing crowds, a large number of whom had most probably been cheering the Duce to the rafters only a few years before.
Vol. 35 No. 3 · 7 February 2013
pages 6-8 | 3838 words
Kisses for the Duce
by Richard J. Evans
Fascist Voices: An Intimate History of Mussolini’s Italy by Christopher Duggan
Bodley Head, 501 pp, £25.00, November 2012, ISBN 978 1 84792 103 1
The Fascist Party and Popular Opinion in Mussolini’s Italy by Paul Corner
Oxford, 320 pp, £65.00, July 2012, ISBN 978 0 19 873069 9
Shortly after he was forced out of office in November 2011, Italy’s longest serving postwar prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi, told the press he was spending his time reading the last letters written by Mussolini to his mistress Clara Petacci. ‘I have to say,’ he confessed, ‘that I see myself in many aspects of those letters.’ In the Duce’s view, according to Berlusconi, Italy was ungovernable. ‘What sort of democracy is this?’ Mussolini had wondered. When a journalist suggested that it might not be entirely accurate to describe Mussolini’s Italy as a democracy, the former prime minister replied: ‘Well, it was a democracy in a minor way.’
The right-wing parties which have dominated Italian politics since the end of the Cold War have consistently rejected the legacy of anti-Fascism represented by the Christian Democrats and the Communists, the two parties that dominated Italian politics from the late 1940s until the early 1990s. Exploiting Italians’ deep frustration at the chaotic instability and corruption of the postwar political system, the New Right has based its appeal on its claim to represent law and order, on the idea of Italy for the Italians, on respect for the Catholic Church and its values and, not least, on financial rectitude and political stability. Neo-fascist and self-styled ‘post-fascist’ political groupings have played a full part in the manoeuvrings and mergers that have characterised Italian politics over the past two decades, moderating their policies and rhetoric where necessary in order to obtain a share in power.
In this situation, serious public criticism of Mussolini has become increasingly rare. His rule, which lasted from 1922 until 1943, is widely portrayed as having been relatively benign. ‘Mussolini,’ Berlusconi told the Spectator in September 2003, ‘never killed anyone.’ If he sent his opponents into internal exile it was to holiday resorts. Politicians like Gianfranco Fini, who began his career in the neo-fascist Italian Social Movement (MSI), had no difficulty in attaining high political office under Berlusconi (he was foreign minister for several years). In 1992, Fini declared that Fascism had been ‘part of the history of Italy and the expression of permanent values’. Alessandra Mussolini, the dictator’s granddaughter, after playing a prominent but repeatedly disruptive role in post-fascist politics, became a member of the Italian legislature as part of Berlusconi’s right-wing alliance. In 2008, Gianni Alemanno, the former secretary of the youth wing of the MSI, was elected mayor of Rome on the promise of expelling illegal immigrants from the city. His victory speech was greeted with arms raised in the Fascist salute and chants of ‘Duce! Duce!’ from the crowd.
In Mussolini’s home town of Predappio, souvenir shops line the main street. They still sell online what the town council has banned them from selling in their shops: black shirts, Fascist banners, statues of the Duce, books and DVDs celebrating his life, and, more disturbing still, manganelli, clubs inscribed with such slogans as molti nemici, molto onore (‘many enemies, much honour’). Every year, on the anniversaries of Mussolini’s birth and death as well as the 1922 March on Rome, thousands of sympathisers, many dressed in black shirts and wearing Fascist badges, march from the town centre to the mausoleum where his body is interred, chanting Fascist songs and slogans. Dozens, sometimes hundreds of people come to the mausoleum every day and leave comments in the visitors’ book placed in front of the tomb. What they have to say is overwhelmingly positive, their words almost always addressed directly to the Duce himself: ‘Only under your wise guidance did Italy become a “nation”, a nation that was feared, respected, fruitful and envied.’ ‘If you were here, we would not be in this mess.’ Many of the messages are quite personal, even intimate, and religious phrases and sentiments are common: ‘If you could see how low our poor Italy has sunk,’ one visitor wrote in 2007, ‘return, reincarnated in one of us! Now and forever.’
It’s impossible to imagine Germans openly expressing similar sentiments about Hitler, former Nazis and neo-Nazis joining a present-day German government, German politicians claiming Hitler never killed anyone, someone with the name Hitler being elected to parliament, a former German head of government ‘seeing himself’ in Hitler’s letters to Eva Braun, German crowds chanting Nazi slogans, or German souvenir shops selling Nazi memorabilia. While Italians are widely dissatisfied with their political system and even more with the state of their economy, there has seldom been a political system that has enjoyed such widespread support as the system brought into being in 1949 by the Basic Law for the Federal Republic of Germany: it has delivered stability and prosperity, and nurtured in the Germans a palpable smugness that is sometimes hard to bear, however justified it may be.
In Italy a general amnesty for political and military prisoners was issued in June 1946; there was no consistent policy for prosecuting Italian citizens for war crimes and Fascist bureaucrats and administrators stayed in office. The judge appointed in 1957 as president of the Constitutional Court had also been president of the tribunal set up in 1938 to adjudicate on issues stemming from the Fascist racial laws. In 1960, 60 of the country’s 64 regional prefects and all 135 of its police chiefs had begun their careers under Mussolini. Senior figures in the regime went unpunished: there was no general reckoning with Fascism’s crimes either at home or abroad. In Germany, as we know, only a handful of former Nazis escaped denazification, and war crimes trials continued for several years, giving shocking publicity to the misdeeds of the Third Reich and its servants.
In Germany, there is a gulf between past and present that Germans can’t conceive of bridging, perhaps as a result of the reorientation of German public memory since the end of the Cold War, reflecting the widespread tendency, especially in the US, to place what at that point came to be called the Holocaust at the centre of any retrospective assessment of the Third Reich. Even Italian neo-fascists have felt obliged to distance themselves from Mussolini’s introduction of racial and anti-semitic laws in the late 1930s. Yet the fact that for most of his time in office, Mussolini didn’t persecute the country’s Jews, who were sent to Auschwitz only after the Germans occupied Italy following the Duce’s fall, has preserved the memory of his regime from the fate of its German counterpart.
While a considerable body of research now exists documenting the nature and extent of ordinary Germans’ support for Hitler during the Third Reich, there is nothing comparable on Fascist Italy. In his magnificent new book, a pathbreaking study that everyone interested in Fascism, or in Italy past and present, should read, Christopher Duggan fills the gap by examining a wide range of diaries, including Petacci’s, and the numerous letters sent to Mussolini by private citizens during the two decades of his rule, which often express the same intimate feelings towards the Duce and his regime as the messages left in recent times on his grave. This enables Duggan to deliver not merely a detailed account of popular attitudes towards the regime, but, far more, a general history of Fascism that for the first time treats it, not as a tyranny that allowed ordinary Italians no possibility of expressing themselves freely, nor as the brutal dictatorship of a capitalist class that reduced the great majority of the country’s citizens to the status of victims, but as a regime rooted strongly in popular aspirations and desires. Yet this material, by its nature, quite possibly exaggerates the degree of popular success enjoyed by Mussolini. In The Fascist Party and Popular Opinion in Mussolini’s Italy, Paul Corner paints a very different picture, arguing that corruption and mismanagement had made the Fascist Party deeply unpopular by 1939. And other sources used by Duggan himself reveal a more complex situation than the letters and diaries he quotes seem to suggest.
True, Mussolini secured the support of the Catholic Church and the gratitude of the faithful. His concordat with the papacy in 1929, ending the mutual hostility of church and state that had begun with unification in the 19th century, and putting in place arrangements that have endured to the present day, marked the symbiosis between the two that made Catholicism one of the regime’s most important props. Mussolini’s anti-semitic laws too were backed by leading Catholic periodicals, and praised by the rector of the Catholic University of Milan, Father Agostino Gemelli, as part of the ‘terrible sentence that the Deicide people has brought upon itself and for which it goes wandering the world, unable to find the peace of a fatherland, while the consequences of that horrendous crime pursue it everywhere and at all times’. Nor would conversion release the Jews from this sentence: thanks to their race they would never be assimilated into what Gemelli called Italy’s new Fascist unity ‘of descent, of religion, of tongue, of customs, of hopes, of ideals’.
When Mussolini spoke in public, as he often did, he was the object of adulation; he told Petacci of ‘fanatical scenes, delirious, mad’; of crowds ‘weeping, kneeling, shrieking, arms stretched out’. The enthusiasm expressed in the letters ordinary people sent him convinced him that this wasn’t stage-managed (though Corner presents compelling evidence that a great deal of it was).
To a degree, Duggan undermines his own argument by documenting the extraordinary degree of surveillance imposed on real or potential dissenters. Known critics of Fascism were targeted; Benedetto Croce’s house was broken into by armed blackshirts in November 1926 and its contents trashed before the eyes of his terrified family. The police guard permanently stationed outside his house thereafter was less to ensure his safety than to note down the names of his visitors – now rapidly dwindling in number. Soon friends were obliged to meet him ‘in deserted streets and in solitary corridors’. Even greater isolation was the lot of those exiled to remote parts of southern Italy; 13,000 of them in all, including not only political opponents and critics but troublemakers of all kinds, as well as homosexuals and petty criminals. The villages where they were sent, a long way from their families and jobs, were godforsaken places, as even their inhabitants admitted: Christ Stopped at Eboli, the classic account of exile by Carlo Levi, takes its title from a local saying. Absorbed in the daily struggle for existence in a harsh and unforgiving environment, the peasants had little time for intellectuals, politicians or even the Italian state, whatever its political complexion; for them, Rome, as Levi noted, was ‘the capital of the Signori, the centre of a foreign and malicious state’.
The political police or ‘PolPol’, formed in 1926, had a budget of 50 million lire, half the amount assigned to the police force as a whole, and liaised with local police through what Duggan calls ‘another vast tentacular organisaton’, OVRA (Organisation for Vigilance and Repression of Anti-Fascism, also short for piovra or ‘octopus’), whose job it was to open and copy the correspondence of dissidents. A Special Confidential Service tapped the phones not only of opponents of the regime but also of leading figures in the Fascist movement, against the day when Mussolini might need to use their tawdry secrets in order to blackmail them. By 1938, the service was employing 462 stenographers just to transcribe the conversations it overheard. OVRA – according to Mussolini, ‘the strongest organisation in the world’ – employed a large number of spies, often under the threat of exposing their own personal vices. Some of them were former socialists or communists persuaded to work for the regime by payments that rescued them from the financial ruin into which so many had fallen.
The result of all this was a pervasive atmosphere of suspicion and distrust; even the schoolchildren whose diaries Duggan quotes were wary of expressing criticism of the regime. A law of November 1926 banned statements that were ‘seditious or damaging to the prestige of the authorities’ as well as the display of ‘symbols of social subversion’, though (as wasn’t the case in Germany) the political jokes that proliferate under any dictatorship seem mostly to have gone unpunished. But arrest and imprisonment were far from being the only sanctions in the economic depression of the late 1920s and 1930s; dismissal from a job, however badly paid, could spell ruin, and was frequently resorted to. As in Germany, many people sent denunciations to the police when they witnessed imprudent remarks or behaviour, though Duggan says, rather charitably, that this was mainly because they were worried that if they didn’t report them ‘they might themselves risk an accusation of complicity.’
Despite the regime’s strong links with the Catholic Church, sexual libertinism seems to have been as prominent a feature of political life then as it has been more recently. When Berlusconi said that he could see himself in the letters exchanged between Mussolini and his mistress, he may well have been referring to their often highly sexual content. The Duce’s ill-concealed sexual voracity, like Berlusconi’s, projected an image of virility that many Italians found deeply impressive. Like Berlusconi, Mussolini spent huge amounts of time on his sex life, his official image as a faithful family man paralleling an unofficial one as a man of uncontrollable priapic urges.
Women, he liked to boast, threw themselves at him, and he didn’t even pretend to fend them off. There can have been little doubt what was being offered in some of the 1500 pieces of correspondence from private citizens that reached his office every day: ‘So many kisses and caresses I would give my dear Benito,’ one woman wrote: ‘I would embrace him so he could not escape!’ Most of these women, he told Petacci, he made love to once, and never saw again. He simply used them, he told her, ‘for my carnal satisfaction’, and to reassure her, he phoned or wrote to her a dozen or more times a day after their relationship began in 1936.
The lusts of the regime’s satraps were also a matter of public knowledge. During the disastrous military campaign in Greece in the winter of 1940-41, Mussolini’s son-in-law Galeazzo Ciano installed himself and his entourage in a large hotel in Bari, where twenty or more girls were brought in by government officials every week for orgies in which the participants divided into teams and squirted water from soda-siphons at one another’s genitals while hacking at their clothes with scissors. Just to make sure everyone knew what was going on, the windows were left wide open. All this was a world away from the priggishness of Hitler, who concealed his own utterly conventional sexual relationship with Eva Braun from the public until they finally married on the eve of their mutual suicide at the end of the war. When he found out that Goebbels was conducting a passionate affair with the Czech actress Lida Baarova, Hitler gave him a furious dressing-down and forced him to break it off.
Mussolini’s standing with the Italian public wasn’t damaged by any of this. People might grumble about one thing or another, but as in Nazi Germany, the Leader bridged social, cultural, generational and regional differences to help bind the nation together. ‘If only the Führer knew,’ was a phrase frequently heard from citizens of the Third Reich outraged at yet another peccadillo of a corrupt Gauleiter or party boss, and it was much the same in Fascist Italy: ‘If only the Duce knew.’ Mussolini seemed to be a sacrosanct figure, however much his subordinates were reviled.
He reached the height of his popularity with the invasion of Ethiopia in October 1935, as the regime pursued wild fantasies of imperial wealth and expressed its determination to exact revenge for liberal Italy’s defeat at the hands of Menelik forty years before. Determined to avoid a repeat of the disastrous ground war of 1896, Mussolini ordered poison gas to be sprayed indiscriminately from the air on military and civilian targets alike. This too was widely supported. Any means were justified to punish the ‘inhuman, vile … bestial Abyssinian people’, a group of students told him: ‘Chemical weapons are expensive, it is true, but the Italian people are ready to make the financial sacrifices required to save their sons.’ Critics in Geneva were told the chemicals only knocked people out briefly, while photographs of mustard-gas victims were said to show victims of leprosy.
Duggan cites one or two diarists who expressed doubts about the conduct of Italian troops during the war – for example, when the party secretary, Achille Starace, used Ethiopian prisoners for target practice, shooting them first in the testicles and then in the chest – but the overwhelming majority of comments were ecstatic. As numerous testimonies quoted by Duggan demonstrate, Mussolini became at this point the embodiment of Italian national pride and national achievement. ‘It is right that we look for a place in the sun,’ one diarist wrote: ‘Today Italy is a nation, a people, conscious of its worth, that knows what it wants and how to get it. The Italy of 15 years ago is finished, dead.’
The war in Ethiopia kindled in the regime a new optimism that Italians could be remoulded into aggressive, well-disciplined and fanatical members of a new master race. Among other things, this meant getting rid of ‘bourgeois’ customs such as the handshake (declared to be ‘soft’ and ‘Anglo-Saxon’ and to be replaced with the Fascist salute) and the formal mode of address, Lei (branded as a ‘foreign import’ with connotations of ‘servility’). Coffee-drinking was condemned as decadent (even more of a lost cause than the other proposed reforms). Mussolini announced his intention of making Italians ‘less nice’ and more ‘odious, tough and implacable: in other words, masters’. In April 1937, he made it illegal for white Italians to have sexual relations with blacks, a measure prompted by the mass sexual exploitation of Ethiopian women by Italian troops following the invasion. As the 26-year-old Fascist journalist Indro Montanelli, who had enrolled as a volunteer for the 1935 campaign, wrote: ‘We will never be dominators without a strong sense of our predestined superiority. There is no fraternising with negroes … No indulgences, no love affairs … The white must command.’ This did not stop him spending 500 lire on purchasing a 12-year-old wife from her Ethiopian father, though he was prudent enough to leave her behind when he returned home.
The conquest of Ethiopia combined with Mussolini’s large-scale intervention in the Spanish Civil War imposed unsustainable financial burdens on the state, making it impossible to invest seriously in military equipment or the expansion of the armed forces. Mussolini thought he was militarily invincible, and no one dared tell him otherwise. In his conversations with Petacci he poured scorn on other Europeans: the English were ‘a disgusting people … They think only with their arses.’ ‘People who carry an umbrella,’ he added, ‘can never … understand the moral significance of war.’ The Spanish were ‘lazy, lethargic’, and the French a ‘hotchpotch of races and scum, a haven for cowards’, a ‘spineless and gutless people’, corrupted by ‘alcohol and syphilis’. Only the Italians and Germans were able to ‘love that supreme, inexorable violence which is the chief motor force of world history’.
In 1939 it finally dawned on him that the Italian armed forces, poorly trained, and with obsolete equipment and severe shortages of arms and ammunition, were woefully unprepared for a European war. When it broke out he had no alternative but to adopt a stance of ‘non-belligerence’, to the relief of most Italians. As German victories multiplied, however, Mussolini grew increasingly irritated at his countrymen’s evident distaste for war: ‘I have to say they nauseate me. They are cowards and weaklings … It’s disappointing and soul-destroying to see that I’ve failed to change these people into a people with steel and courage!’ The popular reaction to Italy’s declaration of war on France and Britain on 10 June 1940 was mixed. The doubters were right to worry.
If the Italian attack on France was a fiasco, the invasion of Greece was a catastrophe. Instead of the anticipated lightning victory, the poorly prepared Italian forces were humiliated by superior Greek troops, while the British quickly routed the Italians in Libya and Ethiopia. Hitler had to step in to rescue the situation, and the ease with which the Germans drove the British out of Greece, combined with Rommel’s stunning victories in North Africa, only rubbed salt into the wounds of Italian pride. The letters and diaries quoted by Duggan now mixed patriotic and Fascist commitment with increasing doubt and scepticism. When Mussolini visited wounded soldiers in hospital he was greeted with cries of ‘assassin!’ (a second visit produced better publicity – the injured had been replaced in their beds by policemen). People refused to buy the 50 cent stamp with the picture of Hitler and Mussolini, complaining that ‘they’re even forcing us to lick his backside.’
Duggan reports ‘explosions of collective joy’ when Mussolini was overthrown by the Fascist Grand Council following the Allied invasion in 1943. The Fascist movement disappeared from view. As Corner shows, the everyday experience of Fascist rule had alienated most people long before the regime melted away in 1943. Fascism had never succeeded in breaking free from its roots in local and regional politics, and had become the vehicle of the personal and financial ambitions of local power-brokers. Just as 19th-century nationalism had tried to ‘make Italians’, so 20th-century dictatorship had tried to ‘make Fascists’; both, in the end, failed. Italians greeted the surrender in September 1943 with huge relief, only to be rudely disabused when the Germans occupied the country and arrested most Italian troops, sending them to Germany as forced labourers in the factories and fields. Just as it had begun in civil violence, so the regime ended. The former Duce was rescued from captivity by the Germans and installed in the puppet regime of Salò in the north, at the same time as a resistance movement emerged, meeting with brutal reprisals from Mussolini’s remaining followers, backed by the Germans. More than fifty thousand people were killed, including Mussolini and Petacci, shot by partisans while trying to flee. Their bodies were strung upside down from the gantry of a petrol station in the suburbs of Milan after being reviled, spat and urinated on by rejoicing crowds, a large number of whom had most probably been cheering the Duce to the rafters only a few years before.
January 24, 2013
A hidden property empire grown with Mussolini’s millions
With money from the dictator for papal recognition of the Italian fascist regime in 1929, the Vatican used tax havens to create a £500m international portfolio
http://www.thehindu.com/opinion/op-ed/a-hidden-property-empire-grown-with-mussolinis-millions/article4337210.ece
http://www.thehindu.com/opinion/op-ed/a-hidden-property-empire-grown-with-mussolinis-millions/article4337210.ece
August 24, 2012
Blurb of Marzia Casolari's book 'In the Shade of the Swastika'
In the Shade of the Swastika
The Ambiguous Relationship between Indian Nationalism and Fascism
20,00 €
Autrice: Marzia Casolari
This book examines the connections between the fascist regime and Indian radical nationalism. These contacts developed within the frame of the Italian foreign policy, which was essentially anti-British and became more anti-British approaching the Abyssinian war and the second World War.
The most remarkable contacts were established with the Bengali political milieu. Consuls and intellectuals played an important role in developing such contacts. Tagore’s visits to Italy in the 1920s and the much more relevant liaison with Subhas Chandra Bose and the INA “adventure” were the results of these contacts.
While representatives and emissaries of the fascist regime worked actively to create a consensus among Bengali political circles, fascist Italy obtained a remarkable popularity among Marathi radical nationalism (from which evolved modern hindutva firces) without doing the same efforts made in Bengal. Marathi nationalists examined the fascist political literature and analyzed fascism as both an ideology and a political system. The scope of this book is not to prove that hindutva forces are fascist, but that they borrowed many elements and features from fascism as an ideology and a political practice.
“
Autrice
Marzia Casolari is Lecturer of Asian History at the University of Perugia. She carries out research on India, South and South East Asia. She wrote several papers of the relationships between Indian nationalism and fascism, Hindu political radicalism, Islam in India. Since 2010 Marzia Casolari is chairman of Asia Maior, an association of Italian scholars working and writing on Asia.
Da inserire:
Collana: I Libri di Emil
ISBN: 978-88-96026-96-0
Pagine: 220
Brossura con bandelle
Formato: 15,5x23,5 cm
Data di pubblicazione: novembre 2011
Editore: Emil
Tutti i libri dell' autore: Marzia Casolari
I libri di Emil. Via Benedetto Marcello 7, 40141 Bologna, Italy
Tel/Fax +39.051474494 - info@ilibridiemil.it
February 21, 2012
Express solidarity with anti-fascist trade union leader Matteo Parlati in Italy
Labour Notes South Asia - Year 12
o o o
Italy: Stop victimization of anti-fascist trade union leader Matteo Parlati
Matteo Parlati stood up to the fascists. Now, he needs us to stand up for him.
Matteo Parlati is a shop steward who works for Ferrari Auto in Italy.
He's an activist in FIOM-CGIL, Italy's largest metal workers union..
In October 2011, when local neo-fascists decided to celebrate Mussolini's infamous March on Rome, Matteo and his colleagues staged a counter-demonstration which was attacked by police.
He was then charged with resisting the police and bearing 'moral responsibility' for the clash.
(Photos and videos confirm that Matteo was the victim, not the criminal.)
The local judge and prefect are simply trying legalize Fascist organizations and to suppress the anti-Fascists. All the shop stewards at Ferrari Auto's FIOM-CGIL union have called for a global campaign of solidarity with Matteo Parlati demanding that the charges against him be dropped.
What Matteo did was resist fascism -- this is a basic responsibility of all trade unionists and is not a crime.
All labour movement and progressive activists from South Asia are invited to show their solidarity with the Italian comrade
Please take a moment and send off your message of protest today !
Go here to sign and send off your message: http://www.labourstart.org/cgi-bin/solidarityforever/show_campaign.cgi?c=1271&src=lsmm
in solidarity
Harsh Kapoor/LNSA
________________________________
Labour Notes South Asia (LNSA): An informal archive and mailing list for trade
unionists and labour activists based in or working on South asia.
LNSA Mailing List:
Labour Notes South Asia
To subscribe send a blank message to:
o o o
Italy: Stop victimization of anti-fascist trade union leader Matteo Parlati
Matteo Parlati stood up to the fascists. Now, he needs us to stand up for him.
Matteo Parlati is a shop steward who works for Ferrari Auto in Italy.
He's an activist in FIOM-CGIL, Italy's largest metal workers union..
In October 2011, when local neo-fascists decided to celebrate Mussolini's infamous March on Rome, Matteo and his colleagues staged a counter-demonstration which was attacked by police.
He was then charged with resisting the police and bearing 'moral responsibility' for the clash.
(Photos and videos confirm that Matteo was the victim, not the criminal.)
The local judge and prefect are simply trying legalize Fascist organizations and to suppress the anti-Fascists. All the shop stewards at Ferrari Auto's FIOM-CGIL union have called for a global campaign of solidarity with Matteo Parlati demanding that the charges against him be dropped.
What Matteo did was resist fascism -- this is a basic responsibility of all trade unionists and is not a crime.
All labour movement and progressive activists from South Asia are invited to show their solidarity with the Italian comrade
Please take a moment and send off your message of protest today !
Go here to sign and send off your message: http://www.labourstart.org/cgi-bin/solidarityforever/show_campaign.cgi?c=1271&src=lsmm
in solidarity
Harsh Kapoor/LNSA
________________________________
Labour Notes South Asia (LNSA): An informal archive and mailing list for trade
unionists and labour activists based in or working on South asia.
LNSA Mailing List:
Labour Notes South Asia
To subscribe send a blank message to:
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