“He raised the Italian people from the Bolshevism into
which they might have sunk in 1919 to a position in Europe such as Italy had
never held before”, Winston Churchill.
Whether the author consciously set out to write a book
that challenges a very dangerous trend in a number of poorly written books is
open to debate. These books have sought to impose a revisionist historiography
that attempts to rehabilitates Benito Mussolini and mystify the rise of Italian
fascism.
For Sassoon, the study of Italian fascism is not merely
an exercise in historical research but has lessons for today’s political
situation. To combat the growth of right-wing and fascistic forces in Italy
today the past must be studied objectively and truthfully.
Modern Italian Politics
Perhaps the most marked development in politics during
the Berlusconi years was the attempt to rehabilitate Mussolini and his fascist
party. Italy’s former prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi, on numerous occasions,
praised the fascist “Duce” Benito Mussolini.
According to him, Mussolini had “done a great deal of good”.
Berlusconi went on to downplay Italy’s collaboration with
the holocaust saying it was “not comparable to that of Germany”. He also
repeated the tired lie that Mussolini was pressured by Hitler.
One of the more grotesque by-products of the whitewashing
of the Italian fascist leader by Berlusconi came about when iPhone issued an
app of Mussolini’s speeches. Apple was roundly condemned by a large number of
Jewish groups who correctly stated that Mussolini was directly responsible for
sending thousands of Jews to the death during the Holocaust. The app was subsequently
pulled by Apple.
Revisionism
This political whitewashing of Mussolini and the fascists
is mirrored in publishing circles by a growing number of poorly written books.
At the moment, it is hard to gauge whether this revisionist whitewash is a
minority, or has started to gain a foothold in academic circles. So many of these books have appeared that one
writer sees it as “a noir publishing niche”.
It would take a historian a rather long time to sift
through over 100 current biographies of Mussolini to tell whether this very
nasty revisionist trend has done any damage in academia.
According to the historian R J B Bosworth, “It is true
that much revisionism of the Berlusconi years is hard to take seriously. The
slew of biographies and memoirs devoted to praising 'good Fascists' mostly fall
well below acceptable academic standard. in devoting himself without reserve to
the idea in which he believed'. But the quality of the research base of such
works, and the decisions about which facts to include and which to exclude are
too blatantly slanted to make much impact on scholarship.[1]
While that may be the case for academic books there is a
definite trend in non-academic publications for rebranding fascism in order to
fit into today’s politics. As one reviewer put it these books are not so much
an attempt “at revisionism, but at restoration.”
One such book is by Nicholas Farrell[2] who has sought to
overturn decades of historiography to claim that Mussolini was not really all
that bad and that he took a wrong direction because of his alliance with
Hitler. According to Farrell, Mussolini had "charisma" and was a
"phenomenal" personality. Farrell tends to mirror Berlusconi
thoughts.
It is not that difficult to challenge these falsehoods. A
more objective and truthful examination of the facts would also lead us to a
different picture. Mussolini’s prime goal was to create a new. “Roman Empire”
around the Mediterranean Sea.
In order to achieve this goal, the Italian fascists
invaded and occupied North Africa and areas of Yugoslavia. In order to justify
the slaughter of Jews, Africans and Slavs the fascists classified them as
“subhuman”. This discrimination was done in the defense of a “pure Italian
race”. According to historian Carlo Moos, Italian racial laws were very similar
to the Nazi’s and belonged to “a long-existing, general-fascist racial concept”
[3]
Another book Liberal Fascism [4] is “less a work of
neutral scholarship or unbiased journalism than thinly veiled historical
revisionism”. Jonah Goldberg’s argument is simplistic, to say the least, it is
the idea that fascism came from liberalism. A position not dissimilar to some
of the “pseudo-left” writers from the Frankfurt school who put forward the
perspective that fascism can be traced back to the enlightenment. However, it
must be said that it is hard to take this writer seriously when he describes
former presidents of the United States as fascists.
The rise of fascism
Given a limited space, Sassoon does a very competent job
in explaining the rise of Italian fascism. While not a Marxist he does favor a
left-wing slant to his history. The rise of fascism in Italy was a
spur-of-the-moment development with significant sections of the population
taking part. Its leaders predominantly
came from the rank and file fascist organization.
Despite taking a plebian character it was controlled and
financed by big business. Its social composition was made up largely of the
petty bourgeoisie, lumpen elements of the working class and in its latter
stages, it began to draw in larger sections of the working class.
Sassoon has done some good research into the social
makeup of the fascists in 1921 24-per cent rural workers; 15.5-per cent
industrial workers; 14-per cent white-collar workers; 13-per cent students;
11.9-per cent small farmers; and 9- percent shopkeepers. “The proportion of
students was, "a much higher proportion than any other group in the
population".
Mussolini’s Rise to Power
The notion fostered by far too many right wing history
books is that Benito Mussolini came to power in Italy at the end of 1922 by
carrying out a heroic march on Rome. The truth revealed by Sassoon is a little
less glamorous.
The majority arrived in special trains. The few that did
march were hardly a fascist vanguard they were as one writer put it a
“raggle-taggle bunch with hardly a modern weapon among them, and who could have
been easily stopped by the army.”
Benito Mussolini and his fascists did not crush all
before him rather he was invited by the aristocracy and sections of big
business to form a coalition government. Once fully in power, the fascists
carried out a murderous crackdown against its opponents in the working class.
The Italian bourgeoisie had always fancied itself as a
great power but economically this was not the case. The crisis of capitalist
rule that brought the Italian fascists into government was the product was
Italy's entry, in 1915, into the First World War on the side of Britain and
France.
The pressure of the war merely escalated Italy’s economic
and political crisis. This led to the famous post-war "Red Years" of
1919 to 1920. During these years, a revolutionary overthrow of capitalism was
clearly on the cards. Sassoon’s account is very puzzlingly light on these
years. Why?
To solve this crisis, the Italian bourgeoisie turned to
the fascists, as the Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky explains “At the moment
that the "normal" police and military resources of the bourgeois
dictatorship, together with their parliamentary screens, no longer suffice to
hold society in a state of equilibrium -- the turn of the fascist regime
arrives. Through the fascist agency, capitalism sets in motion the masses of
the crazed petty bourgeoisie and the bands of declassed and demoralized
lumpenproletariat -- all the countless human beings whom finance capital itself
has brought to desperation and frenzy”.[5]
There are two major weaknesses of the book the first
being Sassoon’s complacent attitude towards the Italian Communist party’s role
in the rise of fascism. Despite its being only two years old when Mussolini was
given power it played a crucial role in allowing the fascists to consolidate
its rule again as Trotsky said “One must admit, however, that the German
Communist Party has also learned little from the Italian experience. The
Italian Communist Party came into being almost simultaneously with fascism. But
the same conditions of revolutionary ebb tide, which carried the fascists to
power, served to deter the development of the Communist Party. It did not give
itself an accounting as to the full sweep of the fascist danger; it lulled
itself with revolutionary illusions; it was irreconcilably antagonistic to the
policy of the united front; in short, it was stricken with all the infantile
diseases. .[6]
The second major political weakness of the book is its
glaring underestimation of the revolutionary nature of the working class. The
Italian bourgeoisie saw very clearly the dangers of socialist revolution and
turned to fascism to solve its predicament. In doing it had the collaboration
of both social democracy and Stalinism.
Despite these weaknesses, I would recommend this book to
anyone who is beginning a study of this important international event. I would
also urge students and anyone interested in history to fascism to consult Leon
Trotsky’s writing on the rise of fascism in Germany and Italy.
[1] R. J. B. Bosworth -
Benito Mussolini: Bad Guy on the International Block- Contemporary
European History, Vol. 18, No. 1 (Feb., 2009), pp. 123-134
[2] Farrell Nicholas Mussolini: A New Life Weidenfeld,
2015
[3] Moos, Carlo: Late Italian Fascism and the Jews,
2008).
[4] Jonah
Goldberg- Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the Left from Mussolini to the
Politics of Meaning- Penguin- 2009
[5] Leon Trotsky - What Next? vital Question for the
German Proletariat, 1932
[6]Leon Trotsky - Fascism- What It Is and How to Fight It
