“That was a much more benign dictatorship ? Mussolini did not murder anyone.
Mussolini sent people on holiday to confine them” – Silvio Berlusconi (Google News has a range of stories about it here)
A Fistful Of Euros
European Opinion
“That was a much more benign dictatorship ? Mussolini did not murder anyone.
Mussolini sent people on holiday to confine them” – Silvio Berlusconi (Google News has a range of stories about it here)
Remind me again,
why was this creep/crook voted into office ?
Apparently because he persuaded Italians he was the little man, like them, against the system, confused, put upon but bearing up succesful and a trier – well that and he owns most of the media…
That beats his previous comment to the German tourisn minister, if I’m not mistaken.
Seems to me some are being a little over hasty in condemning Mussolini. Consider this:
“However it was with the idea of a state planning agency that Holland [at one time Labour MP for the Vauxhall constiuency in London and before that an academic at Sussex University] hoped to show the new possibilities open to a more just economy. He looked to the Italian example of the IRI (the Industrial Reconstruction Institute), set up by Mussolini and used by subsequent Italian governments to develop the economy. This had, of course, already been tried through the IRC (the Industrial Reorganization Corporation) set up as part of the National Plan in 1966, but the IRC had been too small to have much effect on the British economy. A revamped IRC in the form of a National Enterprise Board would, however, have a major effect in stimulating the private sector through an active policy of state intervention and direction.” – from Geoffrey Foote: The Labour Party’s Political Thought: A History; (1997) p. 311. Stuart Holland’s own book, Socialist Challenge (1974), sets out in greater detail policy proposals for a Labour government modelled on the policies of Mussolini’s government in the 1930s.
In Martin Clark: Modern Italy 1871-1995; Longman (2nd ed. 1996), p. 250, where he writes about the policies of Mussolini’s fascist government: “They seemed to offer ‘a third way’, between capitalism and Bolshevism, which looked attractive in the Depression. . .” which has a rather recent resonance. . .
The only thing even more cringeworthy was the site of Boris Johnson, the mop-haired editor of The Spectator, one of the journals who published the interview, trying to defend Berlusconi.
As it is, I think Silvio must have lost the plot at some point in the last few months…
I love Berlusconi. He’s so Italian. It’s really amusing to see the difficulty northern Europeans have in dealing with him.
Get used to it. Italy is very much a part of Europe. Italian thinking would do a world of good in the staid, politically-correct, constrained and constipated environs of the north.
Also be aware that the European media – dominated by left-wingers – have Berlusconi in their crosshairs, and are doing their best to trip him up.
Fight on, Berlusconi!
Bob, I don’t follow you.
David – Whatever can properly be said about the fascistic dimensions of Mussolini’s government and its territorial aggression, some in Britain’s Labour Party in the 1970s evidently regarded the institutions it created for regenerating Italy’s economy in the 1930s as worthy of emulation and proposed adopting the institutions as a model for Britain to follow. The documented evidence in independent academic sources for this is fairly compelling and cannot be readily brushed off however much some would wish to do so.
It tends to get overlooked that Mussolini was a member of the Italian Socialist Party and editor of the party newspaper before he was expelled from the party and went on to found his fascist movement in Italy. It also tends to get overlooked that Mussolini’s fascism was not initially antisemitic in the way the Nazis were from their very foundation and only became so in the later 1930s under Nazi influence.
Socialism and fascism are not as far apart as some would have us to believe. Stalin had no insuperable ideological objections to the Soviet Union signing a Friendship Treaty with Nazi Germany in late September 1939 after Britain and France had declared war on Germany following the invasion of Poland by German forces at the beginning of September. Britain’s ambassador to Germnay in 1936 reported back that the contingent of ex-Communists in a march past in Berlin of the SA [the Nazi Brownshirts] were the best turned out. The traditional linear political spectrum from left to right is hopelessly misleading. I’ve previously noted here that Lloyd George, Britain’s last prime minister from the Liberal Party, is on record as saying after meeting Hitler in 1936: “Fuhrer is the proper name for him. He is a great and wonderful leader.”
Of course, most now will agree that fascism in all its manifestations is to be deplored but the issues in the 1930s were not as transparently clear as they appear by hindsight. Sir Oswald Mosley, who founded the notoriously unsuccessful British Union of Fascists in 1932, had previously been a cabinet minister in Ramsay Macdonald’s Labour government of 1929-31 until Mosley resigned in 1930, ostensibly on the issue that the government was doing too little about rising unemployment.
That’s interesting, but I don’t see how it lets Berlusconi off the hook, or is even relevant.
“why was this creep/crook voted into office ?”
Well you could try looking at his media interests. You could also note that Italy (like Spain – here I go again) is an ageing society, so this kind of ‘naustalgia’ attracts votes.
You could also note that with the ‘structural labour reforms’ the majority of people between 18 and 55 in these countries are working and sleeping too much to watch a lot of TV – hence the decline in advertising payments and an increasing quantity of ads.
So we have the under 16’s (who are implicitly made to feel comfortable in not studying) and the over 55’s, who are either busy having their heads turned by watching young girls playing tennis, or their minds warped by a mixture of reality shows or reality show-like news bulletins, between which it is often hard to distinguish.
Criticising Berlusconi is to miss the point, his comments are for home consumption, and then indirectly for us. This is pretty similar in Spain, and it shouldn’t be overlooked that after his ‘disappointment’ with Tony, Aznar’s new ‘friend’ is Berlusconi. The Spanish media is full of this. And when Aznar sounds off about how the UK – with it’s Gibraltar mafia interests – is responsible for the Prestige, a comment which even merited a front page ‘its a lie’ article from the FT, just remember, facts aren’t important here, it’s the domestic market that matters.
BTW Bob, it’s one think to talk about the inherent similarities between the corporate statism in some versions of socialism and in the fascist movements, it’s quite another to ‘dust down’ the various 1930’s fascist movements. Obviously both Mussolini and Franco were very different from German Nazism. They didn’t have the high profile anti-semitism to anything like the same extent. Indeed, it’s even questionable whether Franco was an explicit ‘racist’ in the conventional sense, since for eg he kept Lola Flores as a kind of resident ‘court gypsy’.
But this doesn’t mean that the regimes weren’t extraordinarily unpleasant. This year, for example, they have begun to speak more openly, and for the first time, about those summarily executed. There are at least 45 mass graves (20 bodies or more) in Catalonia alone. The public administration does nothing to assist in the process of investigation or identification, indeed, where possible, it makes things more difficult: relatives, for eg have to pay for their own DNI tests. Oh yes, Garzon is very busy with the ‘butchers’ of Argentina, but the local variety don’t attract his attention at all. Pure hypocrisy, which is what I’ve had to learn to get used to.
I’m not saying totalitarian regimes are anything but thoroughly nasty and often brutal. What I am saying is that economic policies of Mussolini’s government sufficiently impressed some Labour MPs in Britain in the 1970s for them to press for their application in Britain. That shouldn’t be suprising since Mussolini was a socialist before he went on to found the Fasci di Combattimento in Italy in 1919.
What can also be said on behalf of Berlusconi’s defence of Mussolini is that his regime in Italy through to 1943 does not even rate mention in the league table of mass murdering regimes in RJ Rummell’s classic study on: Death by Government, at: http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/NOTE1.HTM
What we can notice is just how often regimes claiming to be “socialist”, including the Nazis in Germany, do feature in that horrific league table.
Considering how partisan and uniformly left most European media is, Berlusconi’s media empire provides a valid counterpoint to those nurtured by social welfare nanny-states.
Berlusconi’s rather brave attempts to put fascists in a new light is less about exoneration of the past, and more about interpreting standard “accepted” history in a new way.
The amount of vitriol spewed forth against him, – and he is still a survivor. This doesn’t speak so much about him as a leader, but more about the gradual awakening of a public tired of state media’s standard offering of platitudes.
Markku,
>Berlusconi’s rather brave attempts to put
>fascists in a new light is less about
>exoneration of the past, and more about
>interpreting standard “accepted” history in a
>new way.
a) how is that different?
b) brave? You must be kidding…
c) Berlusconi’s rather particular interpretation of Montesquieu’s ideas about balancing power is “frowned upon” for a reaon. And this is a problem that can hardly be located on an economic left-right scale, I’m afraid.
Personally, I fear many Italians trust a tad bit too much in the chaotic self-regulation mechanism that was the mark of Italian post WW2 politics, genre – “If he can deliver some administrational stability, cool. And even if he’s a problem for democracy because he did what he did to become what he became, he won’t be able to do too much damage. C’mon, this is Italy, after all. Relax, have a seat and a Campari.”
“One Mussolini biographer, Richard Bosworth, estimates at least one million people died as a result of his 20-year rule, with ‘atrocious massacres of Libyans, Ethiopians, inhabitants of the ex-Yugoslavia and…thousands of Italian Jews’.
“Mussolini introduced Italy’s first anti-Semitic laws in 1938, opening the way for the eventual deportation of around 7,000 Jews to Nazi concentration camps. Some 5,910 died.”
– from: http://www.reuters.co.uk/newsArticle.jhtml?type=topNews&storyID=3430315
All that from a Reuters assessment would put Mussolini in a relatively minor league of mass-murdering dictators compared with what happened during the regimes of Stalin or Hitler or Chairman Mao but it does not exonerate Mussolini in the way Berlusconi attempted.
The basic problem is that much leftist propaganda effort has been invested in portraying the undeniable evils and atrocities of so-called “rightist” and “fascist” regimes, such as those of Hitler and the Nazis or Mussolini, to distract attention from the equally or worse records of high-profile socialist regimes which had attracted much support from many western intellectuals back in the 1930s and then again after WW2 because of the heroic war-time sacrifices of the Soviet people.
It was to redress that imbalance that George Orwell came to write his classic fable: Animal Farm (1945), before better researched estimates surfaced of the scale of internal Soviet atrocities and repression. It is seldom noted nowadays that the Nazis, in fact, claimed to be “socialist” and were notably successful in bringing down mass unemployment in Germany in the mid 1930s, all presumably because that is inconvient for the propaganda line. Nor is it usually remarked nowadays how much of the official economic policies of the Nazis in the party’s fundamental programme of 1920 also featured in the manifestoes of west European socialist parties after WW2. The casual follower of history of those times is thereby denied an important insight as to why fascist regimes in the 1930s did attract substantial popular support from their citizens at a time of mass unemployment due to the depression.
Tobias: Why should I be joking? Berlusconi adds a worthwhile counterweight to the left-wing bias dominating Europe’s media, academia, and state bureaucracies, who wield the real chokehold on the exercise of democracy and free speech in Europe. Berlusconi’s blustery style seems to have worked very well in Italy, – it remains to be seen if it succeeds in the rest of Europe. Most people seem to be falling for it, having to re-examine certain interpretations of history that have been taken for granted, – as evidenced in this blog.
Bob: You’ve already lost me when you use Reuters “news” service to back up a claim. Reuters’ distortionist policies are evident in almost every “news” dispatch they’ve issued. They have a singular left-wing, anti-American bias, and cannot be trusted.
I also take issue with any historian of body counts. It seems to me estimates suffer from the same effect Bjorn Lomborg, the Danish environmentalist, cited as prevalent in environmental studies: when someone cites one source, estimates are rounded up to reflect new criteria; this source is then used by someone else who rounds up the numbers using another set of criteria.
A good example is the civilian casualty count in Iraq. AP “news” service cited 3000, a little later Reuters mentioned 5000; a columnist I chanced upon had inflated the number to 10,000. Iraqi sources, however, indicated less than 500. It seems to me that the Iraqis would be the ones to trust, given that they had every reason to inflate the numbers.
Markku: so now the fact that you found some blogger tripling the number of Iraqee civil casualties make you question if Italy under Mussolini attacked Abessinia starting a war of conquest?
Nope, that’s not what I said at all. Don’t distort the statement I’ve made: leave that to the professional journalists.
Markkhu: Reuters was quoting a recently published, biog of Mussolini by Richard Bosworth, a British historian, who by reports currently holds a professorship at an Australian university –
Richard Bosworth: Mussolini; Hodder Arnold (2002 P/B) with review quotes at: http://www.arnoldpublishers.com/Mussolini/Reviews.htm
Looks like another book I need to add to the pile.
In an earlier online debate elsewhere on fascism, I looked up the entry in the: Oxford Companion to Politics, to find this:
“Fascist ideology also included a romantic, an antirational allure, an appeal to the emotions, to a quasi-religious longing for a mystic union of peoples and their prophetic leader. In reaction to a utilitarian liberal state, fascism revived aspirations towards a normative or ethical state. According to this view, the community existed not merely as a practical convenience but in order to fulfil the individual’s ethical and moral potential. How people perceived these themes depended on the eye of the beholder. Conservatives viewed fascism as a bulwark against Bolshevism or as a middle way between worn-out liberal capitalism and the communist horror. Radicals viewed fascism as a genuinely revolutionary ideology that would sweep away discredited ideals and institutions and replace them with a new disciplined and cohesive society. . .”
That reminded me both of Tony Blair and all that Communitarian stuff. But then Mussolini evidently also believed he was into the Third Way.
Markku: of course you did not state that exactly. The post is on the fact that the prime minister of a democratic country “forgets” that one of his predecessors started a war of conquest. Unforgivable.
The possibility that he really forgot it can be excluded. That leaves us with only one possible interpretation: In some way starting a war of conquest isn’t that bad in his opinion. What really worries me is the way Berlusconi seems ready to start every debate along his one lines. If people react on his insults of Italian judges or the fact that he described the europarliament as democratic tourists he starts using this reactions in a populist way.
The post is not on a competition of dictators: who of them was responsible for more victims. There is no need to “reexamine certain interpretations of history” concerning the evil deeds of Mussolini.
Remember where the word fascism came from? A glorification of the use of violence.
“a valid counterpoint to those nurtured by social welfare nanny-states”
Uffff, this certainly is true depending on what ‘valid’ means. No one could call Italy a highly modern welfare state. If Big B gets his way, pretty soon the state debts will be so high there’ll be no money left for pensions either.
What I don’t understand is how they can be so much in debt, and spend so little on infrastructure. Even the motorways are appalling.
“Berlusconi’s blustery style seems to have worked very well in Italy”
“Worked” in what sense? In the sense that he’s proved Winston Churchill wrong and that you can, in fact, ‘fool all of the people all of the time’?
Or ‘worked’ in the Menem sense, that it’s a good ‘operation’. Some people get to quietly cream things off, while the whole state heads for bankruptcy. Because, make no mistake about it, that is where you are headed right now.
I don’t really agree with his politics, but thank god for the filmography of Nana Moretti.
Remember Berlusconi just said that the german parlamentarian could play a nazi campguard in a movie he didnt say that he would be one in reality. Thats a big difference.
Eventhough it was an extremly dumb joke.
Silvio: And why did the rude German Socialist parlamentarian get off the hook for his heckling? The media scapegoats Berlusconi, while the left-winger is treated as the injured party.
It’s in cases like this that we can see how one-sided European media is. And that is exactly why we need a counterbalancing media force, – even if it is controlled by one man.