Dark Valley on Mussolini

 Referring to his own Stormtroopers, Hitler remarked: "The brown shirt would probably not have existed without the black shirt. The march on Rome, in 1922, was one of the turning-points of history."4 Few at the time could see this. The New York Times commented patron-isingly that the Fascists had achieved a "revolution of the peculiar and rela-tively harmless Italian type. "Is Mussolini formed a coalition government, preserved an impression of continuity and never became a totalitarian ruler to compare with Hitler or Stalin. He donned a frock coat and a butterfly collar when visiting the King and had himself schooled in bour-geois etiquette (though he never became a Beau Brummell and could still sometimes be seen eating his food with a knife). He tried to project an image of dignity and respectability, controlling his own press, bribing or intimidating foreign correspondents—subjecting them, as he cynically put it, to "the olive or the club."i6 Privileged journalists were allowed to interview him, first in the Chigi Palace and later in the gold-coloured Palazzo Venezia. This was a great fortress in the centre of Rome, built by medieval popes with stones taken from the Colosseum and now staffed by Fascist lackeys in silver-laced uniforms. Here, in the grand echoing Hall of the Mappa Mundi, home of the first terrestrial globe, Mussolini was to establish his office. It had three huge windows, painted columns, gilded torches (fitted with electric lights) in the corners, a decorated ceiling featuring the Lion of St. Mark and the she-wolf of Rome, and mosaic tiles on the floor depicting nude women and children bearing fruit. The hall was so large that Mussolini communicated with entering flunkeys by hand signals and it was empty apart from Mus-solini's massive rosewood desk, itself unadorned except by a bronze lion. Approaching the dictator was an ordeal, for he seldom greeted guests at
the door and later decreed that his ministers should run the last 20 yards into his presence. Enthroned on high, Mussolini exuded animal magne-tism. But he could be modest, courteous, charming and sardonic. Many visitors were impressed, not least Winston Churchill, who was suspected of wishing to become an English Mussolini. Churchill did not altogether discourage this notion before 1935, saying that in Italy he would be a Fas-cist and stressing the need for leaders who "feel themselves to be uplifted above the general mass." There were no giant peaks on the "democratic plateau," there was no "venerated 'El Capitan' or 11 Duce,' casting its majestic shadow in the evening light."'7 Witnesses less susceptible to the allurements of power were inclined to dismiss Mussolini as a comic-opera Caesar, "a Napoleon turned pugilist."" One woman journalist (whom he tried to seduce) was put off by Mus-solini's "absurd attitudinising"—the scowling forehead, the rolling eyes, the pouting mouth, the snapping jaw, the shaven head thrown back, the huge chin thrust out.'9 Mussolini's compulsive exhibitionism was part of his cult of machismo. Whenever possible he bared his chest for the benefit of the cameras and he made much of his furious bouts of exercise—riding, fencing, swimming, bicycling, boxing, playing tennis, doing gymnastics. More private manifestations of virility were visited on the many females who succumbed to his crude advances. Indifferent to the looks of his con-quests (though he liked them to smell strongly of scent or sweat—he him-self seldom washed, preferring to dab his body with eau-de-Cologne), Mussolini thrust himself forward with sadistic vigour, dragging them to the floor while removing neither his trousers nor his shoes. Apparently "his brutality and savage curses in moments of climax were followed by words of tenderness, however brief and however commonplace, when he was satisfied." And at least one woman was favoured, after he had lifted himself from her person, with an air on his violin.2° Equally theatrical were Mussolini's public performances, his harangues to crowds from his balcony, which he called his "stage." He spoke in short, strident sentences, making chopping gestures with his right hand. Often he paused and posed for dramatic effect—head up, torso erect, arms akimbo—looking like nothing so much as a music hall villain. Yet Mussolini was no more the comic figure he seems in flickering news-reels than he was the old-fashioned accommodationist visualised by other politicians at home and abroad. He was a peculiarly twentieth-century species of political gangster. Fascism was not just the negation of democ-racy, it was government by terror. Mussolini certainly snuffed out parlia-mentary power. But he also encouraged acts of violence against his opponents, of which the murder of the Socialist deputy Giacomo Matteotti in 1924 is the best-known example. Mussolini relished thuggery as a form of manliness and declared that his regime "could not be prosecuted except at the bar of history."2' This conveniently remote tribunal enabled him to rule by means of crime. He employed ruffians such as Roberto Farinacci, the viciously anti-Semitic boss of Cremona who was sometimes known as "Mussolini's left hand." He suppressed civil liberties, expro-priated property, imposed censorship, tapped telephones, destroyed inde-pendent trade unions, imprisoned people without trial. He appointed himself "head" of government and built up a mystique of the Duce, the infallible, omnipotent Leader, who was capable of performing miracles. (It was said that he stopped Mount Etna's lava from destroying a village.) Nothing less than playing the role of quasi-divine dictator could satisfy Mussolini's extravagant longings. As he said soon after coming to power, "I am possessed by a frenzied ambition which torments and devours me from within like a physical illness. It is, through my own will-power, to carve a mark on the age—like a lion with his claws, like this." Then with outspread fingers he made a savage, slashing motion. It was a symbolic gesture hardly impaired by the fact that he bit his fin-ger nails "not merely to the quick but almost to the moons." Whether they regarded him as saviour, buffoon or barbarian, contemporaries were bound to acknowledge that Mussolini had made his mark. Out of the blazing passions of war and the blighted hopes of peace he had distilled a new political force. It drew strength both from national exaltation and from national humiliation; for despite victory won at such terrible cost Italy remained, as Mussolini insisted, in comparison to more exalted pow-ers a "proletarian nation."24 It also drew strength from fears of Bolshevism, which was widely seen not as an alternative form of tyranny but as the stark antithesis of Fascism. Communists themselves identified Fascism as the final crisis of capitalism, in which the workers were terrorised into submission. Capitalists, or some of them, believed that the political dynamism and discipline of Fascism complemented their own economic efforts, especially after the Crash. "In 1929 the pillars of the temple that seemed to defy the centuries crumbled in a vast uproar," Mussolini declared. "The crisis through which we are passing is not a crisis in the sys-tem; it is a crisis of the system. "25 During this crisis the global battle-lines between Left and Right hardened, leaving little room for compromise. Many non-Fascists admired Mussolini for having created a state which seemed strong enough to withstand the economic holocaust. Many others feared that Mussolini's Roman Empire would plunge Europe into a new dark age. After the Great War T S. Eliot had described the Waste Land as "a heap of broken images." With equal pessimism the Auden generation witnessed the consecration of the new icons of Fascism—black shirts, loud-speakers, rubber truncheons, barbed wire, jackboots.
A DRESS rehearsal for the world crisis of 1929 seemed to be taking place in the Germany of 1923. The lost war and the cruel peace had reduced the new Weimar Republic to a condition bordering on anarchy. Short-lived governments were challenged by separatist organisations and putsches from the Left and Right. There was a rash of political assassinations. Riots and strikes proliferated. Poverty and hunger stalked the land. France's intransigent President Poincare demanded prompt payment of repara-tions, fixed at the enormous sum of 132 billion gold marks; and when the Germans defaulted in January 1923 French troops marched into the Rhineland, proposing to dig out the Ruhr's coal, as Lloyd George said, with bayonets. More insidious still, inflation was destroying the value of money like some financial cancer. In this poisoned atmosphere extremist political groups flourished, among them the small but well-disciplined National Socialist party in Bavaria. Its spell-binding leader Adolf Hitler intuitively grasped the fact that the social chaos caused by the mark's precipitous fall was the humus of Nazism.