11 quotes
Mussolini exhibited a cynical skill at rewarding his enemies and rebuking his friends.
Mussolini’s Italy: Life Under the Fascist Dictatorship, 1915-1945 (2005)
Whatever else he was, Mussolini was no Hitler impelled by a credo to act in one way and one way only.
Mussolini (2002)
In 1919 a nationalist general concluded bitterly that, when confronted by the ‘test of war’, Italy had demonstrated that ‘no one governed it.’
Mussolini’s Italy: Life Under the Fascist Dictatorship, 1915-1945 (2005)
In 1914, by almost every index, Italy was the least of the great powers. Nor, despite huffing and puffing about imperial conquest and racial prowess, would that ranking be much altered during the Fascist years.
Mussolini’s Italy: Life Under the Fascist Dictatorship, 1915-1945 (2005)
Whereas once the movement had flirted with feminism, now Mussolini required that female organizations focus on charity, ‘to the exclusion of any political action which must be left exclusively to the party.
Mussolini’s Italy: Life Under the Fascist Dictatorship, 1915-1945 (2005)
Mussolini was, of course, not the only dissident ever to leave a socialist party, especially during the trauma of the First World War. In many countries, the great conflict demanded that a choice be made between the ideals of internationalist socialism and those of the nation.
Mussolini (2002)
A historian tabulated 16 rival groups who, earlier in 1919, had been using the word fascio to describe themselves. Ranging from anarchists to restless bourgeois university students, these ‘fascists’ had nothing in common except their name.
Mussolini (2002)
When the national transport system was tested a few years later by the Second World War, the Fascist railways showed little advance on the Liberal ones and the transport of goods, especially south of Rome, remained a serendipitous affair.
Mussolini’s Italy: Life Under the Fascist Dictatorship, 1915-1945 (2005)
Syndicalist A.O. Olivetti maintained, the Fascist state had invented the economic system surpassing both socialism and liberalism. Its first clause ran: ‘the Italian nation is an organism having a purpose, life and means of action superior to those of any individual or groups who are part of it.’
Mussolini’s Italy: Life Under the Fascist Dictatorship, 1915-1945 (2005)
If ever a word was in the air, then in Italy around the time of the First World War, it was ‘Fascist.’ Fascista, Fascismo, Fascio: each turned up on numerous occasions and in diverse settings. Doctor deputies, endeavouring to be a pressure group, formed themselves into a Fascio Medico Parlamentare as early as 1906.
Mussolini’s Italy: Life Under the Fascist Dictatorship, 1915-1945 (2005)
Fascism, with its habitual use of the language of aggression—not for nothing did Mussolini regularly rejoice in his own savagery, seeing himself as a cat who walked by itself at night ready to scratch, claw and kill—deeply tinctured such thoughts and assumptions. Yet Fascism did not by itself create its bleakly Darwinian view of the functioning of the international system.
Mussolini’s Italy: Life Under the Fascist Dictatorship, 1915-1945 (2005)