Benito Mussolini: Dictator

June 2003 · Historically Speaking public debate and its effect on public policy: "The just and awful principles ofsociety are rarely brought forward but when they are insulted ordenied, orabusedin practice. Mr. Locke's Essay on Government we owe to Sir RobertFilmer, aswe oweMr. Paine's [Rights ofMan] toMr. Burke's [Reflections]." Erskine's is what I call the one-step backward, twosteps forward theory ofhistory; possibly it applies to historiography as well. AnnabelPatterson isSterlingProfessorof English at Yale University. She is the author ofMarvell: The Writer in Public Life (Longman, 1999). Benito Mussolini: Dictator R. J. B. Bosworth In Britain during the early months of 2003, while the Iraq crisiswas comingto a head, Adolf Hitler was in the news. Politicians found iteasyto draw (usuallyconfused or inapposite) historical parallels between the present and die 1930s and to dispute again the deep meaning ofA.J.P. Taylor 's oldgoak thattheMunich agreementand the policy of the appeasement of Germany which produced itwere "a triumph ofall that was best and most enlightened in British life." Historians, too, were arguing about history. Hitler, it was said, had too high a profile in the training of British school children. To some it seemed that Hitler and the tale ofhis regime and its killing oftheJews had all but taken history over. An Australian-born historian and his American readers should leave the British to sort out theirown educationalpriorities. Yet, the problem ofHitler hangs over us, too. In a profoundlyironical fashion, the ghostofthe German Führer has seized, or been given, world powerin the mind ofhistory, and notjusthistory . Inmuchofourculture,Hiderhasbecome themodelofthebaddictator, dieimage ofevil, the quintessence ofthe "rogue" ruler. But the positioning ofHitler in this role is not good either for our sense ofhistory or of our own society. The adjective which affixes itselfmost readily to the Nazi dictator is "mad." Even Ian Kershaw, in his marvelous , massive, and best-selling biography of the Führer, agrees. But it is a destructive word signifying that the madman is incomprehensible and imponderable, a personwith whom dialogue or diplomacy, any rational dealing, ispointless.Themadmanistheultimate "Other." His evil is beyond our ken; he is not our responsibility. By all accounts, Hitlerwas a verystrange person, and the fanaticism ofhis ideological obsessions to killJews and destroy what he viewed as the evil empire ofJudeo-Bolshevism was profound. Atleast after 1939, Hitler was the sort ofpolitician who unswervingly pursued his ideology even when it undermined his regime's best interests. Butshould we make the leap to assume that other dictators were, or are, mad? I doubt itverymuch. I certainly doubt it as a new biographer of Mussolini. Inmyaccount, Iargue instead that the Duce, in his combination ofstrategy and tactics, his meshing ofrevolutionary leadership and the continuity ofpower, as well as in his copingwith his public and private life, was sweatily human. Benito Mussolini embodied much ofhis country, region, age, gender, and class. He was not an insane Other, but someone we can understand. Reviewinghis lifewe mustacknowledge that there but for the grace ofhumanity gowe. These words should not be confused with revisionism. I am anything but an admirer of Benito Mussolini. Rather, I am appalled by those developments in contemporaryItalian historiography and politics which have allowed some to grow nostalgic about the alleged good order, publicitypizzazz, ormodernizingmarketingofthe Fascistregime. Any assessment ofthe Duce should commence by noting the black record ofFascism. Its premature death toll amounted to at least one million people, the bulkofwhomwere killed in imperial campaigns or wars deliberately entered, although some died as a result of tyrannical and retrograde policies at home. Mussolini and his ruling elite, including the leadership ofthe Royal andItalian (andnotso Fascist) Army, used state terror on Libyan Arabs, Ethiopians, and Slavenemies. Though not the first imperial power to do so, Fascist Italy deployed poison gas to pacifyits empire (while conservative and patriotic Italian historians and publicists spent fifty years afterward denyingthe usage). Itis sadlytypical of much ofthe Italian (and our) reckoningwith the past (and present) that so authoritative and precise a historian ofFascism as Renzo De Felice, author ofa sevenvolume studyof Mussolini, nowhere bothered to count the Ethiopian dead in the war of 1935-36. Nor is diis die end ofdie sins ofMussolini's dictatorship. It banned rival political parties...