In his 1943 essay “Who
are the War Criminals?” George Orwell, a Briton, observed that members of
Parliament clamored to put Benito Mussolini on trial for war crimes. What made this peculiar to Orwell was the
fact that the politicians who clamored the loudest had been, before the war
began, lavish in their praise of Il Duce.
Orwell quotes Winston Churchill, who in 1927 said to
Mussolini: “If I had been an Italian I am sure I should have been
whole-heartedly with you in your triumphant struggle against the bestial
appetites and passions of Leninism... [Italy] has provided the necessary
antidote to the Russian poison.
Hereafter no great nation will be unprovided with an ultimate means of
protection against the cancerous growth of Bolshevism.”
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| Mussolini in Libya |
A second political leader in Great Britain, a man by the
name of Lord Rothermere, also extolled Mussolini's efforts against
international socialism. Rothermere said,
“In his own country [Mussolini] was the antidote to a deadly poison. For the rest of Europe he has been a tonic
which has done to all incalculable good.
I can claim with sincere satisfaction to have been the first man in a
position of public influence to put Mussolini's splendid achievement in its
right light ... He is the greatest figure of our age.”
Other political leaders feted Mussolini as well. Lady Chamberlain, sister-in-law of the Prime
Minister, was credited by some for her outspokenness in support of closer ties
between Great Britain and fascist Italy.
She was joined by Neville and Austen Chamberlain, Lord Halifax, and
other national figures whose names are no longer remembered.
Years before Mussolini allied himself with Adolph Hitler,
he’d displayed to the world what it meant to be a fascist. When he invaded Abyssinia (now Ethiopia), it
was a clandestine act in defiance of the League of Nations. His forces committed war crimes by using
banned chemical weapons, throwing prisoners from aircraft, crushing prisoners
beneath tank treads, and indiscriminately hoarding civilians into concentration
camps.
Mussolini’s concentration camps appeared in places such as
Danane, Nocra and Benghazi. “The
prisoners were generally men suspected of resisting the Italian occupation army
or women and children who lived in villages suspected of sympathizing with the
resistance (source).”
For the most part, it was Arabs who were
placed behind the barbed wire fences, fed starvation rations, and allowed to
die from the infectious diseases that thrive in crowded, unsanitary spaces.
The leaders in Great Britain knew these things but supported
Mussolini all the same. Orwell discerned
that, for the moneyed few, nothing was as terrifying as the specter of
Bolshevism. In the minds of the
oligarchs, if fascists did battle with communism they deserved support. Orwell wrote, “The lords of property had decided
that Fascism was on their side and they were willing to swallow the most
stinking evils so long as their property remained secure. In their clumsy way
they were playing the game of Machiavelli, of ‘political realism’ …”
Orwell believed that “political realism” was both stupid and
immoral. It was stupid because, as
events would soon show, British leaders could not rely on the loyalty or
gratitude of a man like Mussolini. For
all the support they’d given him, Mussolini still chose to side with Hitler in
a war of aggression against Europe.
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| Chamberlain helped empower Mussolini |
Speaking to the immorality of realpolitik, Orwell said, “the
inability of the moneyed class to see anything wrong whatever in concentration
camps, ghettos, massacres and undeclared wars” was a sign that the oligarchs
had succumbed to “moral decadence.” In
this, Orwell’s views align with those of numberless Classical Republicans who
have warned us since time immemorial of the corruption that arises when vast
wealth is concentrated into the hands of the few. A possessor of unearned wealth becomes too
attached to the lifestyle that this affords, but cannot escape the nagging worry
that the same societal quirks that arbitrarily assigned him this wealth could
also take it away.
But for the British oligarchs, the warmth they felt for
Mussolini wasn’t solely because he was enemy of their enemy. The admired Mussolini as a man of
action. In Italy, he had crushed labor
unions and peasant collectives. His invasion
of Abyssinia was an act of empire-building, something that British leaders
could appreciate and something that they could hardly condemn.
Mussolini was one of the early technocratic political
leaders. He had the values of a
businessman. As he once said, “The
working of the State services must be made really efficient, whether it be by
removing the bureaucratic management or by industrialization,” adding that the
privatization of “postal, telephone and railway services” would be instrumental
to achieving this aim. He made the
trains run on time.
From a certain point of view, even the draconian steps of
building concentration camps and singling out broad swaths of the population for internment maybe seen as the bold moves
of a man who is neither afraid of controversy nor hindered by delicately-tuned
scruples.
Even though his political aims benefited the moneyed elite,
Mussolini was popular among ordinary working Italians. He’d earned the reputation of being a
straight-talker. He attributed his own
popularity to “telling upon every occasion and in every place the plain truth,”
adding, “the more this truth is unpalatable the greater the need to speak it
out.” Members of the public yearn to be told unpleasant truths, once they've arrived at the point where they no longer trust the official pronouncements of establishment politicians and suspect that what is being kept from them is an honest discussion of the economic hardship they are already experiencing.
He was a nationalist, and for Italians wracked by poverty,
his message was sorely welcome. “We deny
… internationalism, because it is a luxury which only the upper classes can
afford; the working people are hopelessly bound to their native shores.”
Another key to Mussolini’s popularity was his shrewd insight
into the nature of politics. He was not
interested in developing policy positions or offering government programs. In his own words, “Our program is simple: we
wish to govern Italy. They ask us for programs but there are already too
many. It is not programs that are
wanting for the salvation of Italy but men and will power.” Mussolini did not offer the electorate an
agenda but instead an attitude. He derided
“cowardly politicians.” He opined that
it is, “better to live a day as a lion than 100 years as a sheep.” He praised the Italian people for the simple
reason that they were Italian. He bared
his muscled chest before the people. He
married, and had affairs with, young and beautiful women. He declared, “We do not argue with those who
disagree with us, we destroy them.”
Ordinary Italians wished to live vicariously through him, and resolve
the rage they felt after years of humiliating poverty.
When the Tories were openly embracing Mussolini before the
war, where were the liberals? They spoke
out with moral indignation, and reminded the public of Mussolini’s atrocities. But their critique was half-hearted and received
as an obligatory fault-finding with the views held by the opposing party. The liberal view did not prevail until
Italian bombs starting falling on British ships.
Where did the conventional wisdom stand? To address this point, it bears noting that
Lord Rothermere, who openly consorted with Hitler and Mussolini, controlled the
editorial content of the Daily Mail.
Coverage of the Mussolini’s rise by the British press was
mixed, ranging from a complete lack of recognition to mild disapproval. The Daily Telegraph’s December 30, 1922 yearly review of important world
events did not even mention the Italian fascist coup. The Times
(London) of November 18, 1922 declared Mussolini a “masterful man,” whose,
“programme bears the stamp of his strong character,” reflecting the Conservative
view that Mussolini’s takeover marked the welcome end to Italy’s previous
corrupt liberal government, and was on the whole a positive resolution to Italy’s
dire political situation (source).
Although particularly venomous in his criticism of the
Tories’ embrace of Mussolini, Orwell did not spare the liberals. Just as the conservatives forgave Mussolini
his crimes, many liberals forgave or chose to overlook Stalin’s crimes. The Left, Orwell observed, “have been too
easily satisfied with themselves.” Their
condemnation of the Tories was accurate, but their capacity for self-criticism
was markedly deficient.
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| Mussolini's thugs were known as "blackshirts." |
“The attitude of the Left towards the Russian régime has
been distinctly similar to the attitude of the Tories towards Fascism,” Orwell
wrote. “There has been the same tendency
to excuse almost anything ‘because they're on our side’. It is all very well to
talk about Lady Chamberlain photographed shaking hands with Mussolini; the
photograph of Stalin shaking hands with [Nazi foreign minister] Ribbentrop is
much more recent.” In another essay Orwell
observed that the “liberal intelligentsia is lacking. Bully-worship, under various disguises, has
become a universal religion, and such truisms as that a machine-gun is still a
machine-gun even when a ‘good’ man is squeezing the trigger ... have turned
into heresies which it is actually becoming dangerous to utter.”
He said, “If there is a way out of the moral pigsty we are
living in, the first step towards it is probably to grasp that [political] ‘realism’
does not pay.”
If we follow Mr. Orwell's logic, we may conclude that we never see the lies we believe. So if we are leading blinkered lives, and we are unwitting adherent to a cult of bully-worship, what are the signs? If our political leaders ally with tyrants and admire technocratic efficiency, if they've given up on moral suasion and diplomacy in favor of bombs and guns, these are our warning signs. When these conditions exist, it is likely that our political leaders have become the agents of a small cadre of individuals who possess vast wealth and property, and are pursuing the aims of securing more wealth for these few individuals and defending their position of wealth and privilege against all threats. Bully worship will only thrive when the will of the few is being imposed forcibly on the many. It will wither away when the will of the people is respected.
