{"id":29912,"date":"2013-12-11T04:33:50","date_gmt":"2013-12-11T04:33:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/zenpundit.com\/?p=29912"},"modified":"2013-12-11T04:35:01","modified_gmt":"2013-12-11T04:35:01","slug":"review-mussolinis-italy-life-under-the-fascist-dictatorship-1915-1945-by-r-j-b-bosworth","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/?p=29912","title":{"rendered":"Review: Mussolini’s Italy: Life under the Fascist Dictatorship 1915-1945 by R.J.B. Bosworth"},"content":{"rendered":"

[by Mark Safranski<\/strong>, a.k.a “zen<\/strong>“]<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Mussolini’s Italy: Life Under the Fascist Dictatorship, 1915-1945<\/a><\/strong>\u00a0by R.J.B. Bosworth<\/a>\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

This book was Fascist Italy not of the newsreels of frenzied Roman crowds cheering bombastic speeches by Mussolini but how fascism’s imperial grandiosity were an ill-fitting facade for an Italy that underneath remained substantially an impoverished, traditionalist, parochial society of peasant squabbles and regional jealousies. Bosworth, one of the world’s top experts on the period takes a granular look at Italy under Fascism and the reader comes away amazed at how Mussolini fooled the great powers into taking his regime seriously for as long as they did.<\/p>\n

At 692 pages, including 88 pages of endnotes, Mussolini’s Italy lays out in exhaustive detail how ordinary Italians carried on as best they could under the dictatorship, with the traditional reliance on corruption and the influence of kin and “men of respect” to undermine and ameliorate “totalitarian” rule. Repeatedly the regime sanctions dissidents (usually politically naive -or simply drunken – tradesmen or villagers) to “confino”, internal exile to faraway unpleasant regions only to have the intervention of some Fascist bigwig result in a swift amnesty.The brutality of the regime’s informal sanctions – the beatings, castor oil, kidnappings and murders – carried out by roving Fascist squadrists or at the orders of a local Fascist Ras<\/em> (boss) like Cremona’s thuggish Roberto Farinacci<\/a><\/strong>, were by contrast, real enough.<\/p>\n

Outside of the violent hooliganism of blackshirt squadrism there at times seems little to have held Fascism together as a political movement without Mussolini’s tin cult of personality, there was seldom agreement among fascists about such fundamental political issues as the role of the state vs. the party, capitalism vs. autarky, the sanctity of private property, the need for unions, whether Fascism should be antisemitic or the role of the Catholic Church in Italian life? An incoherence that left Mussolini, who was never much of a stickler for consistency, as supreme arbiter. A role he kept secure by arbitrarily moving his preening, intriguing, womanizing and feuding cabal of uniformed henchmen and party apparatchiks from job to job all the way into his bitter gotterdammerung of the Salo Republic, where Mussolini was reduced to being the puppet gauleiter of Lombardy and eventually patheitic victim of popular revenge.<\/p>\n

Bosworth does a scholarly take-down of the original Fascist regime, demonstrating the deep propensity for cultural continuity in any society in the long term, even in one under the heavy hand of self-proclaimed revolutionaries and Roman tyrants.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

[by Mark Safranski, a.k.a “zen“] Mussolini’s Italy: Life Under the Fascist Dictatorship, 1915-1945\u00a0by R.J.B. Bosworth\u00a0 This book was Fascist Italy not of the newsreels of frenzied Roman crowds cheering bombastic speeches by Mussolini but how fascism’s imperial grandiosity were an ill-fitting facade for an Italy that underneath remained substantially an impoverished, traditionalist, parochial society of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[216,420,133,233,132,483,721,187,153],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-29912","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-academia","category-authors","category-book","category-dictator","category-dystopia","category-extremists","category-italy","category-politics","category-wwii"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29912","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=29912"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29912\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":30022,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29912\/revisions\/30022"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=29912"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=29912"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=29912"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}