Twentieth-Century Caesar by Jules Archer

Author:Jules Archer
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Waterside Productions, Inc
Published: 2017-01-23T16:00:00+00:00

9

Imitator in Berlin

The announcement of a Tenth Anniversary Celebration of Fascism in 1932 came as something of a shock to the rest of the world. Had Benito Mussolini already ruled Italy for a decade? The March on Rome seemed only yesterday. An overseas tribute came from the former American Ambassador to Italy, Richard Washburn Child, who declared emphatically, “The Duce is now the greatest figure of his sphere and time.”

Millions of Italians, however, were beginning to have grave doubts. The Fascist government, unable to meet the cost of its public works program, had simply slashed wages. Men now earned less than ten cents an hour, making them the lowest paid workers in Europe. The Fascist National Academy published a scientific paper revealing that Italians weren’t getting enough to eat. Mussolini assured the Chamber of Deputies with a shrug, “Fortunately the Italian people are not yet accustomed to eating several times a day. Since they have a modest standard of living, they don’t feel want and suffering very much.”

Workers in the cities were too carefully policed by the Cheka (now legalized as the OVRA with over 100,000 secret and uniformed operatives) to protest. But peasants in the South of Italy staged violent demonstrations against heavy taxes. Shouting “Death to the famine-makers,” they fought local police, sacked mayors’ offices, ripped down pictures of Mussolini, burned him in effigy, smashed Dopolavoro buildings and chased tax collectors into the hills.

The deeply religious peasants had been inspired to revolt by a papal encyclical published from Paris, where it had been smuggled to escape censorship. The Pope told the world that Fascism and Catholicism were not and could never be the same thing. He denounced the Fascists for “indecencies, destruction, confiscation and vandalism.” Behind this indignation lay the OVRA’s grim record of twelve thousand secret arrests in five years. One foreign journalist whom Mussolini respected ventured to reproach him one day for such harshness.

“Who in my whole life has shown me tenderness?” he quavered in self-pity. “Nobody! I was brought up in a poor, horribly poor home, and my life has always been poor and bitter. Where could I have learned tenderness? At school? In church? In the world? No … nowhere! Then why do people wonder that I am reserved, solitary, harsh and stern?”

He grew more and more autocratic each year, hardening personal whims into laws. Shaking hands was forbidden; only the Fascist salute could be used for greeting. The press must not use the plural term “supreme hierarchies” because “the party has only one hierarchy—Il Duce!” All sketches of women drawn by artists and cartoonists must show them not slim but plump, to reflect Mussolini’s private preferences.

The royal family of Italy, nervously aware that it was within the dictator’s power to end the monarchy and send them into exile if the impulse seized him, were careful to ingratiate themselves by providing him with the use of their castles and hunting lodges for vacation retreats. Mussolini soon fell into the habit of snapping his fingers for anything he wanted or needed.

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