The march of Mussolini into Italy's mainstream

[Ellipse]

The Independent
Peter Popham
Friday, 20 March 2009

After carrying the dictator's torch for 60 years, the far-right National Alliance is to merge with Silvio Berlusconi's party. So is this the end of fascism in Italy? Quite the reverse. Peter Popham reports

The flames are going out all over Italy. Tomorrow, the flame which for more than 60 years has been the symbol of neo-Fascist continuity with Mussolini, will disappear from mainstream politics. The National Alliance, the last important home of that inheritance, is "fusing" with Silvio Berlusconi's People of Freedom party to give the governing bloc a single identity and a single unchallenged leader.

The change has been a long time coming – 15 years and more. Mr Berlusconi broke the great taboo of Italian post-war politics after he won his first general election victory in 1994 and incorporating four members of the National Alliance into his coalition.

Embracing the Fascists and neo-Fascists was taboo for good reason. For one thing, their return after they had led the nation to ruin in the war was banned by the new Constitution, whose Article 139 states, "the re-organisation, under whatever form, of the dissolved Fascist party, is forbidden."

That veto had been honoured in the breach rather than the observance since 1946, when Giorgio Almirante, the leader of the Italian Social Movement, picked up the baton of Mussolini where he had left it at his death and led the new party into parliament. But the neo-Fascists remained in parliamentary limbo, far from power. Berlusconi blew that inhibition away.

Under the wily leadership of Gianfranco Fini the "post-Fascists" have been gaining ground since. Tall, bespectacled, buttoned up, the opposite of Berlusconi in every way, the Alliance's leader impressed the Eurocrats with his democratic credentials when he was brought in to lend a hand at drafting the EU's new Constitution.

He leaned over backwards to break his party's connection to anti-Semitism, paying repeated official visits to Israel where he was photographed in a skull cap at the Wailing Wall. On one visit, in 2003, he went so far as to condemn Mussolini and the race laws passed in 1938 which barred Jews from school and resulted in thousands being deported to the death camps.

"I've certainly changed my ideas about Mussolini," he said at the time. "And to condemn [the race laws] means to take responsibility for them." Statesmanlike: the word stuck to him like lint. Party hardliners such as Alessandra Mussolini, the glamorous granddaughter of Il Duce, were furious and split away to form fascist micro-parties of their own. But Mr Fini's strategy prevailed. Under Mr Berlusconi's patronage, he became foreign minister then deputy prime minister and now speaker of the lower house, a more prestigious job than its British equivalent. As Berlusconi's unquestioned number two in the new "fused" party, he is also his heir-apparent.

The puri e duri, the hardcore fascist elements, have been gritting their teeth and screaming defiance. One group wanted to stage a ceremony to mark the extinguishing of the flame at the "Altar of the Nation", the wedding cake-like symbol of Italy that towers over Piazza Venezia in Rome. The city's mayor, ironically himself a lifelong "post-Fascist", banned it.

But the puri e duri will not give up. "The National Alliance dies, the Right lives!" declares a flyer scattered about by one of the hard-right parties, whose symbol sports an oversized flame.

"Today, with the betrayal of our ideas, of our story and our identity," roars one of their leaders, Teodoro Buontempo, the national president of The Right party, "we have the duty to make clearer than ever that our party was born to assure the continuity of our ideals ... [Join us] to scream your indignation against a ruling class of trimmers and nobodies."

Black Bands, an investigative book into the hard right by Paolo Berizzi published in Italy this week, claims "at least 150,000 young Italians under 30 live within the cults of Fascism and neo-Fascism. And not all but many in the myth of Hitler." Five tiny registered parties account for 1.8 per cent of the national vote, between 450,000 and 480,000 voters. These are significant numbers, yet even combined they are not nearly enough to reach the 4 per cent threshold to break into parliament.

By this reading, the Fascist element in Italy is no more significant than the BNP in Britain: an embarrassing irritant that can make noise and win insignificant victories, but nothing more.

Despite the claims of the loony right to the contrary, the going out of the Fascist flame does not mean Fascist ideas have disappeared from the Italian political scene. Quite the reverse. Fifteen years after Mr Berlusconi brought the neo-Fascists in from the cold, their impact on politics has never been more striking, never more disturbing.

According to Christopher Duggan, the British author of Force of Destiny, an acclaimed history of modern Italy, the fusion of the two parties does not mark the disappearance of Fascist ideas and practices but rather their triumphant insinuation. "This is an alarming situation in many, many ways," he says.

"The fusion of the parties signifies the absorption of the ideas of the post-Fascists into Berlusconi's party ... the tendency to see no moral and ultimately no political distinction between those who supported the Fascist regime and those who supported the Resistance. So the fact that Fascism was belligerent, racist and illiberal gets forgotten; there is a quiet chorus of public opinion saying that Fascism was not so bad."

One example of the way things are changing is the treatment of the veterans of the Republic of Salo, the puppet Fascist state ruled by Mussolini on the shores of Lake Garda in the last phase of the war. Under the thumb of Hitler and responsible for dispatching Jews to the death camps, Salo was seen by Italians after the war as the darkest chapter in the nation's modern history.

But steadily and quietly it has been rehabilitated in the Italian memory. The latest step, before parliament, is the creation of a new military order, the Cavaliere di Tricolore, which can be awarded to people who fought for at least six months during the war – either with the Partisans against the "Nazi-Fascists", with the forces of the Republic of Salo on behalf of the Nazis and against the Partisans, or with the forces in the south under General Badoglio.

In this way, says Duggan, the idea of moral interchangeability is smuggled into the national discourse, treating the soldiers fighting for the puppet Nazi statelet "on an equal footing morally and politically with the Partisans".

Duggan contrasts the post-war process in Italy with that in Germany, where the Nuremberg trials and the purge of public life supervised by the Allies produced a new political landscape. Nothing of the sort happened in Italy.

"There was never a clear public watershed between the experience of Fascism and what happened afterwards. It's partly the fault of the Allies, who after the war were much more concerned with preventing the Communists from coming to power.

"As a result very senior figures in the army, the police and the judiciary remained unpurged. Take the figure of Gaetano Azzariti, one of the first presidents, post-war, of Italy's Constitutional Court, yet under Mussolini he had been the president of the court which had the job of enforcing the the race laws. The failure of the Allies to put pressure on Italy also reflects a perception that still exists: that the Fascist revival is not to be taken seriously because Italy is 'lightweight'. Whereas if the same thing happened in Germany or Austria, you'd get really worried."

The widespread defiance of the anti-Fascist Constitution can be seen in the profusion of parties deriving inspiration from Mussolini; in the thousands who pour into Predapio, Mussolini's birthplace, to celebrate his march on Rome on 20 October every year; in shops and on market stalls doing a lively trade in busts of Il Duce and other Fascist mementoes of every sort.

Far more alarming, Duggan says, is what is happening out of the spotlight to the national temper, where the steady erosion and discrediting of state institutions is playing into the hands of a dictatorial elite, just as it did in the 1920s.

"What is so disturbing is not just the systematic rehabilitation of Fascism but the erosion of every aspect of the state, for example justice, with the result that people have the urge to throw themselves into the arms of the one man who they believe can sort things out.

"You create very personalised relations with the leader, so that in Mussolini's case, he received 2,000 letters a day from people pleading with him to help. If the state doesn't work, you trust in one man to pick up the phone and sort things out. This is how liberalism disappeared in the 1920s, with the steady discrediting of parliament so that in the end there was no need for Mussolini to abolish it, he merely ignored it. Something very similar is happening in Italy today."

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/the-march-of-mussolini-into-italys-mainstream-1649561.html

 

[Sindy-S.R]

One example of the way things are changing is the treatment of the veterans of the Republic of Salo, the puppet Fascist state ruled by Mussolini on the shores of Lake Garda in the last phase of the war. Under the thumb of Hitler and responsible for dispatching Jews to the death camps, Salo was seen by Italians after the war as the darkest chapter in the nation's modern history.

But steadily and quietly it has been rehabilitated in the Italian memory. The latest step, before parliament, is the creation of a new military order, the Cavaliere di Tricolore, which can be awarded to people who fought for at least six months during the war – either with the Partisans against the "Nazi-Fascists", with the forces of the Republic of Salo on behalf of the Nazis and against the Partisans, or with the forces in the south under General Badoglio.

In this way, says Duggan, the idea of moral interchangeability is smuggled into the national discourse, treating the soldiers fighting for the puppet Nazi statelet "on an equal footing morally and politically with the Partisans".

Duggan contrasts the post-war process in Italy with that in Germany, where the Nuremberg trials and the purge of public life supervised by the Allies produced a new political landscape. Nothing of the sort happened in Italy.

"There was never a clear public watershed between the experience of Fascism and what happened afterwards. It's partly the fault of the Allies, who after the war were much more concerned with preventing the Communists from coming to power.

Very interesting article.

For me, history is very complex, including so many details and interactions with the people involved, which makes it very difficult to define a single version of past events.

I would like to complement this article with this other historical information (in English, I couldn't find this book):

Margherita Sarfatti. The woman who invented Mussolini
by Roberto Festorazzi (Author)

Roberto Festorazzi's work is based on a dual, very important and unpublished archive documentation found by the author. The first fundamental document is an autobiographical, retrospective and self-critical memoir, which Margherita Sarfatti wrote, in English, in 1943-44, entitled "My Fault", which many biographers and historians had unsuccessfully pursued in recent decades. Written with polemical intentions towards fascism and its Leader by the woman who with the very successful Dux had created the myth of the good Dictator, the memoir, by will of the author herself, was never published. My Fault is a decisive document because it gives us the exact human and psychological figure of Mussolini, removed from the pedestal of mythology and the absolute demonizations that were made of him after 1945, and because it reveals aspects and episodes of his life that were completely unpublished until now, such as, to give just a few examples, that of the syphilis contracted by Mussolini in his youth, or the early and temporary consumption of cocaine. The second important documentary source is the "German" dossier of Baron Werner von der Schulenburg, read and studied, in an absolute preview, by the author with the permission of his heirs. And by examining those papers Roberto Festorazzi found evidence of the role played by Margherita Sarfatti, in the second half of 1933, behind the scenes of the international scene, to favor Hitler's succession to the Berlin chancellery.

Mussolini’s Jewess
Michael McDonald
Margherita Grassini Sarfatti claimed she was to blame for fascism.
It’s not so; not that she didn’t try.

July 29 each year marks one of the principal anniversaries of fascism: Benito Mussolini’s birth on that date in 1883. To celebrate the occasion, thousands of his contemporary supporters assemble in Predappio (the village in which he was born) to pay tribute to the man who coined the term fascismo, launched the Fascist political movement in 1919, and ruled Italy as dictator from 1925 to 1943.
(...)
The annual Predappio spectacle is surely distasteful. Nevertheless, it would be wrong to indulge the commonplace view that Mussolini is best laughed at and forgotten. He continues to be an important historical figure, if only because he created the new type of modern barbarism that we know as fascism. “Fascism”, as the political scientist Robert Paxton points out, “was the major political innovation of the 20th century, and the source of much of its pain.”
(...)

If Sarfatti is known at all today—aside from having been portrayed by Susan Sarandon in the 1999 Tim Robbins film Cradle Will Rock—it is as one of Mussolini’s lovers. That alone simply makes her but one of hundreds, but Sarfatti is strikingly different from the others. She stayed by his side much longer than most, she was highly intelligent, and she also happened to have been Jewish. Sullivan rightly contends that there was much more to Sarfatti than boudoir intrigue. Indeed, in the second and third decades of the 20th century, there were arguably few men or women who played a more pivotal role in the Italian cultural scene, or in Mussolini’s life, than Sarfatti.

But Sullivan goes much further, referring to Mussolini as Sarfatti’s “pupil and dependent.” Where other scholars have seen her memoirs as a mélange of malicious gossip, Sullivan contends that they explore “the creation of a Frankenstein’s monster.” Sullivan’s publishers, in turn, call My Fault not only “the most revealing portrait of the Duce” but also “a major contribution to the history of the origins and evolution of the Fascist regime.” Sarfatti certainly merits a place in the history of Italian fascism, but she was not nearly the pivotal ideological figure depicted by Sullivan, who apparently plies his line not for the sake of novelty, but because he actually believes it.

Who was Margherita Sarfatti? My Fault’s introduction provides a lucid overview of her life. She was born in Venice in 1880, the fourth and last child of Amedeo Grassini and Emma Levi. The Sarfattis were wealthy (among other things, her father established the city’s water taxi system of vaporetti to capitalize on the tourist trade), and his daughter grew up in highly privileged circumstances.

Her parents were Orthodox Jews, but Sarfatti received an outstanding secular education. Well read, fluent in several languages, including English, she became active in Socialist and feminist causes while still in her teens—hence her sobriquet in Venice as la vergine rossa, “the red virgin.” Around the turn of the past century, she married a much older Socialist lawyer and moved to Milan to become the art critic for the Socialist Party newspaper Avanti!. It was there she first met Benito Mussolini, the paper’s new editor, in 1912.

Sarfatti and Mussolini were inseparable for the next two decades, both in and out of the bedroom. Mussolini went so far as to refer to Sarfatti as his mascotte. She paid for his clothes, his car, his apartment, and much more. She joined with him as he broke with the Socialists over Italy’s participation in the World War. When Mussolini founded his own newspaper, Il Popolo d’Italia, to advocate intervention, she went with him. When at the end of the war he organized his followers in the Piazza San Sepolcro in Milan (where the first Fasci italiani di combatimento, or combat bands, were formed), she was there, too.

Sarfatti was by Mussolini’s side as well in the months preceding the March on Rome in 1922. It was in her villa in Soldo, a few kilometers from Lake Como, that the plans for the march were hatched, and she was physically “at Mussolini’s elbow” when Mussolini was offered the premiership in 1922. By the time he took office, she had also launched the political journal Gerarchia, a principal source of Fascist orthodoxy, which she managed for several years.

Sarfatti stuck by Mussolini during the crisis occasioned by the 1924 kidnapping and murder of the Socialist politician Giacomo Matteotti by Fascist thugs, an episode that aroused fierce opposition to fascism and eventually led Mussolini to crush the antifascist resistance and assume dictatorial powers. She then began to write the first authorized biography of Mussolini, which initially appeared in English in 1925. It appeared in Italy the following year with the title Dux. It ran through 17 editions between 1926 and 1938 and was translated into 18 languages. Her book, which was introduced into Italian schools, sought to create the legend of a new Caesar, a modern man of destiny for Italy. Because the biography sold well, Sarfatti was commissioned to write a series of articles in English for the Hearst newspaper syndicate, which helped to bolster Mussolini’s image in America.

The 1920s were the high point of Sarfatti’s life. Beginning in 1922, Sarfatti was the most powerful woman in the regime. She moved from Milan to Rome in 1926, where she set up a salon to win support for the regime from artists and intellectuals, whom she wooed with patronage. During this period Sarfatti was also one of Mussolini’s ghostwriters. That Mussolini was so effusively praised in the foreign press in the 1920s was in great part due to Sarfatti’s efforts. Mussolini phoned her several times a day to ask for information and advice; Sarfatti probably saw more of him than his wife Donna Rachele, who stayed in Milan.

A woman of enormous energy and talent, Sarfatti became a great art collector during her time in Rome. There she also promoted the Novecento italiano, a movement of avant-garde artists that attempted—in the name of “a modern restoration”—to relink 20th century Italian art to classical and Renaissance traditions. Sarfatti proclaimed that, “an orderly society produced an ordered art.” She was able to make it appear that Mussolini had bestowed his seal of approval on the movement by inducing him to give a speech at the inaugural exhibition of Novecento art in 1923, which he would later disavow.
(...)

The portrait Sarfatti paints of the Duce confirms what we already knew: At the start of his political career Mussolini was a rather louche and provincial figure. He was the first low-class adventurer to scale the summit of power in a major European country. His boorishness was apparent, as was his lack of style. Fortunately for Mussolini though, with her help, Sarfatti writes, “He learned to choose the right shape of his shirt collars and learned the proper way to knot his tie.” In this and other personal respects, Sarfatti admittedly provided important cosmetic assistance to Mussolini at the start of his career, when, to quote Bosworth once more, “he drifted up-market in his patterns of behavior.” In Sullivan’s words, “She had turned an ignorant boorish paisano, unable to use a knife and fork properly and who wiped his mouth with his sleeve, into the semblance of a mannerly gentleman she later introduced into good society.”

Even after he assumed power, Sarfatti tells us, Mussolini’s sexual habits remained disordered and bohemian, and he may for a time have had a cocaine habit. She says he was also a distant father to his children. Her observations that Mussolini’s isolation from others and his egoism deepened as the years passed jibes with what other contemporary accounts have described. From the 1930s on, Sarfatti asserts, Mussolini increasingly rejected human sympathies. He “had no friends. He tolerated only those who acted like lowly servants.”
(...)

Sarfatti’s memoirs are regrettably silent on many major issues, such as anti-Semitism. Mussolini had Jewish backers among the industrialists and big landowners who helped finance him at the start of his career. Indeed, about 200 Jews took part in the March on Rome. But the Fascist movement became increasingly anti-Semitic, to the point that Sarfatti’s sister and her husband died on the way to Auschwitz. Other relatives also died in the extermination camps. Sarfatti sheds no light on how Mussolini—who had for years mocked Hitler for his anti-Semitism and denied the existence of a Jewish problem in Italy—came to impose anti-Jewish legislation in 1938.

Similarly, Sarfatti casts a passing eye on the ruthlessness of Italian colonial conquest but does not adequately address it. Reading Sarfatti, one would never know that Italy’s war against Ethiopia led to the deaths of some 500,000 Ethiopians—or that Mussolini, unlike Hitler, used poison gas. (Perhaps Sarfatti avoids this subject because she herself held racist views about white superiority.)

Sarfatti was an important figure, in that she helped create Mussolini’s image and enhance the projection of his charisma. That is not a negligible achievement inasmuch as Italian fascism, as Christopher Duggan convincingly argues in his 2013 book Fascist Voices, ultimately rested on the Duce’s mystical union with the dreams and “historical destiny” of his people. But it is an achievement that lies exclusively in the realm of public relations and the emotional manipulation of mass society through ritual, rhetoric, and unrelenting propaganda. The book does not show that Sarfatti had a profound effect on Mussolini’s intellectual development (for example, how he came to proclaim that fascism would be a regime in which “all would be for the state, nothing outside the state and no one against the state”), or that she influenced his daily tactical political maneuverings once in power.

Nevertheless, Sullivan asserts that “Sarfatti was instrumental in persuading Mussolini . . . to take the route that led him to power in 1922”, and that she nudged Mussolini “from the revolutionary left to the nationalist right” and thereby helped “conceptualize Fascism.” Remarkably, he even contends that “Sarfatti, more than Mussolini, formulated the ideological and philosophical basis for Fascism in the 1913–19 periods.” But nothing in Sarfatti’s memoirs comes remotely close to supporting such claims. Sullivan himself recognizes that “throughout her memoir, she . . . avoids mention of her role in crafting Fascism.” His rather unconvincing explanation for this is that Sarfatti was following Albert Speer’s Nuremberg strategy: “That is, to present a contrite, humble apology for serving an evil regime but to avoid admitting guilt for any offense.” A simpler and much more plausible explanation for this glaring lacuna is that she had no role (and understood that she had no role) in crafting Italian fascism.

Sullivan has yet to make his case for Sarfatti’s overarching intellectual significance in Mussolini’s life. But there is still hope for him. He notes that Mussolini wrote Sarfatti hundreds of letters, “reportedly 1,272.” These letters, written over the course of two decades, “have passed into the possession of Sarfatti’s heirs. They have refused permission to anyone to study them.” If and when the letters become available, Sullivan will surely try to turn them to his advantage.

Mussolini was contemptuous of the Italians, whom he once derided as “a gesticulating, chatterbox, superficial, carnivalesque people.” Unfortunately, the Italians by and large did not reciprocate. On the contrary, they mostly welcomed him. Sarfatti correctly observes that Mussolini “was absolutely prescient about feelings that would soon move the masses.” In the aftermath of World War I, many Italians were looking for a leader who would end the confusion and uncertainty that prevailed. And they saw Mussolini as that leader.