[There is growing fascination and nostalgia for dictators, extreme
right-wing government in some countries and “illiberal democracy”
in others. Why is this? What has happened to permit such a distortion
of memory? How do myths replace reality?]
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MUSSOLINI IN MYTH AND MEMORY  
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Paul Corner
December 18, 2022
History News Network [[link removed]]

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_ There is growing fascination and nostalgia for dictators, extreme
right-wing government in some countries and “illiberal democracy”
in others. Why is this? What has happened to permit such a distortion
of memory? How do myths replace reality? _

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In an unexpected explosion of publications, the bookshops of Europe
are suddenly full of titles stressing the dangers of a new Fascism. It
is not the fascism of Putin that causes concern; it is the threat
posed to democratic institutions by what many call “democratic
decline.” Populism, the advent of right-wing—even extreme
right-wing—government in some countries, and the advent of
“illiberal democracy” in others are all factors which have
combined to make many feel they are living on the edge of a precipice.
A further aspect of this crisis of democracy is that of a renewed
fascination with dictators. Opinion polls in Russia put Stalin back
among the leaders most missed, South Korea's Park Chung-hee has a
growing fan club, and even the once-loathed Ceausescu is surrounded by
nostalgia in Romania. This poses an unavoidable question: How can this
be?

The myth of Mussolini, the strutting Italian dictator, is a useful
starting point. In the current turmoil surrounding democratic
institutions, analogies to the 1920s and the 1930s are common.
Inevitably Hitler and Mussolini are in the foreground. But while
Hitler, because of the Holocaust, remains almost the embodiment of
evil, the Italian leader often enjoys very different press. Attitudes
toward him within Italy are frequently ambivalent, if not unashamedly
indulgent. It may be an exaggeration to say that Mussolini is back,
but for many, the memory of the fascist leader is not that of a
violent and cynical dictator, responsible for at least half a million
Italian deaths, but that of the strong leader who—according to the
popular phrase—did “many good things.” The myth of continual
successes—a  myth created by the fascists themselves—has been
turned into a spurious “memory” of the fascist past. Only very
recently, at the time of the commemoration of the centenary of
Mussolini's March on Rome, around 4000 black-shirted admirers of
the _Duce_ merged on the small town of Predappio—his
birthplace—in order to celebrate his memory.

This, and the recent election of a “post-fascist” leader as the
first woman prime minister of Italy, is a reminder of what has been
known for a long time, which is that Italy, unlike Germany, has never
really come to terms with its fascist past. There is even physical
evidence of this. Whereas in Germany Nazi monuments were torn down and
others constructed in order to remind people of Nazi crimes, in Italy
monuments glorifying the _Duce_ are still there for all to see.

Why is this? What has happened to permit such a distortion of memory?
How do myths replace reality? Clearly Mussolini has benefited from
comparison with Hitler. He was, undoubtedly, the “lesser evil” –
a fact that permitted prime minister Silvio Berlusconi to assert,
ridiculously, that “Mussolini never killed anybody,” as if Stalin
strangled people with his bare hands. Here the “lesser evil” has
become no evil at all.

But current indulgence towards the fascist leader has other causes,
some historical, some related to more immediate problems of political
instability and economic insecurity. At the historical level, the way
in which Italy emerged from the Second World War has great importance.
Italians (very understandably) chose to forget Mussolini's alliance
with Hitler and to emphasize instead the role played by the Italian
Resistance movement in the defeat of the Nazi-fascists. It was an
emphasis which suggested that Italians had been victims of Fascism. As
victims, of course, there was no need for Italians to come to terms
with the fascist past.

Even when historians began to question this reading of events—after
all, Mussolini had been extremely popular among many Italians for more
than twenty years—nothing changed. In a remarkable process of
self-forgiveness, Italians remained convinced of their innocence. This
process relied on a common Italian trope which assumes that Italians
are intrinsically “good people.” Thus, the argument went, “if we
were all fascists, and if we are all good people, then it follows that
Fascism could not have been so bad.” Again Italians were off the
hook. If, as victims of Fascism they bore no responsibility, as
supporters of what was now cast as a benign dictatorship, they had
nothing to explain. Germans might have a past that could never pass,
but Italians had a past that presented no problems. The path was wide
open to a distorted memory of dictatorship.

The media have played their part in this distortion. Television, in
particular, has long shown images of the regime drawn from fascist
propaganda. People view the regime through a lens provided by what is,
in effect, the self-representation of Fascism. Predictably, this lens
projects a world of one success after another, of marshlands drained,
trains on time, healthy babies and smiling faces. Mussolini's attempt
to make Italy great again is there for all to see. It all looks very
convincing. The constant violence of the regime, effected in the early
years by what was in fact a private militia, is airbrushed out of the
picture. Corruption, illegality, the assumption of impunity before the
law: these never merit comment. There is rare mention of the tens of
thousands of Africans killed in the colonial massacres of the 1930s.
Between fake news, amnesia and removal, the real picture of Italian
Fascism can never emerge. On the contrary, the picture we form in our
minds is comforting and reassuring.

Not all Italians are flocking to pay homage to the _Duce_ in
Predappio, of course. To suggest as much would be a gross
exaggeration. Even so, the generalized indulgent attitudes towards
Mussolini provide a classic case of historical memory being
transformed into collective myth. And, in times of increased
instability, the myth of the strong leader has evident attractions. As
we have seen, even Stalin has his admirers nowadays. In the Italian
case, the “Mussolini myth” has developed through a partisan
reading of the past, determined by political choices of what was best
said and best left unsaid, by a desire to construct a comforting view
of the past, and by the more fundamental disposition on the part of
many to believe what they want to believe, regardless, or in
ignorance, of the facts. The appeal of the firm hand trumps rational
discourse. In many respects the current myth of Mussolini—the benign
dictator—represents a refusal to confront past errors, a preference
for the head in the sand. It is ironic that this kind of retreat from
politics reproduces the same kind of retreat made by many Italians in
the 1930s. They took refuge in the fascist slogan—“Mussolini is
always right”—and abandoned any kind of genuine political
involvement with, as we now know, disastrous consequences.

_PAUL CORNER is Emeritus Professor of European History at the
University of Siena in Italy. He is the author of many books on
Fascism, including Popular Opinion in Totalitarian Regimes: Fascism,
Nazism, Communism (OUP 2009) and The Fascist Party and Popular
Opinion in Mussolini's Italy (OUP 2012). His most recent
book, Mussolini in Myth and Memory
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The First Totalitarian Dictator (OUP 2022), which will be released in
the United States on December 22, was recently named as one of
the Financial Times best history books of 2022._

* Fascism
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* History
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* Benito Mussolini
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* Italy
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