Italy stays divided over Mussolini 100 years on

Press, 7 January 1983, Page 14

Italy stays divided over Mussolini 100 years on

NZPA-Reuter Rome Italy marks the centenary of the birth of Benito Mussolini this year, sharply divided over the dictator’s role in history and the lessons to be learned from fascism.

Television programmes, records of his bombastic speeches and even badges saying in English “I Love M” will commemorate the birth of the blacksmith’s son on July 29, 1883, at Predappio, south of Forli.

A series already screened on the State-run television, entitled “All the Duce’s Men,” demonstrated how the fascist era from 1922 to 1943 still stirs long memories and short tempers. Left-wing historians criticised the series as glorifying Mussolini and glossing over negative aspects like his racism. They warned that the neo-Fascist Italian Social Movement would try to capitalise on the centenary celebrations.

Veterans of the partisan struggle against fascism entered the fray and petitioned President Sandro Pertini, a leading partisan in the anti-fascist struggle, to have the television series withdrawn.

The partisans’ association A.N.P.I. said that the fortieth anniversary this year of the collapse of the Fascist Government in Rome was a worthier occasion for public nostalgia. An opinion research institute, Doxa, says that the Italian public consistently names Mussolini as one of the most fascinating figures of recent history. The La Dina publishing company confirmed this by selling the entire 2000-copy edition of the memoirs of the late Fascist party secretary,

Carlo Scorza. The memoirs had covers of gold and silver costing ?2200 and $llOO.

Another forerunner of the centenary year, a pictorial exhibition in Milan of life in the. 19305, drew millions of visitors during 1982 but had to add a section on antisemitism after Jewish communities complained of distortion. “The . tone of this sudden revival and revaluation of the Duce and his regime makes me realise this country never learns anything,” said Indro Montanelli, the publisher of the national daily newspaper, “11 Giornale.”

“To remedy one excess it can find no solution except committing another.” Historians are still divided over the sincerity of Mussolini’s socialism before World War I, his role in the 1924 murder of the Socialist Party leader, Giacomo Matteotti, and the links between Fascism and Italian industry.

One biographer of Mussolini, Giorgio Bocca, urged that the public debate should reflect at least one verifiable fact of the 19-year fascist era — it was a mass movement that won almost unanimous approval in a 1929 nation-, wide plebiscite, held a consensus of the Italian people for several years, and even attracted members of the ‘Communist Party. "Until now we have pretended our fathers and grandfathers had nothing to do with fascism, that the 40 million Italian Fascists and their sympathisers came from outside and mysteriously disappeared in 1943.” Bocca wrote in the weekly. “L’Espresso.” “Fascism has to be treated as an episode in our family history.”

Bocca said that it was understandable but pointless to fear that the Mussolini centenary would unleash dormant forces of Fascism.

“Either the nostalgia stems from a deep-seated desire for strong regimes, which could not be halted by an ostrich-like posture, or, which I believe, the roots of democracy are now deeply enough embedded to resist this crisis,” he said.

Left-wing academics and .journalists describe a biographer, Renzo de Felice, as the spiritual mentor of Mussolini's rehabilitation, accusing him of a portrayal which too closely resembles the once-official Fascist version. De Felice, however, ascribes the explosion of interest in Mussolini to the conscious attempt since 1945 to maintain silence about the

life and times of a man who epitomised Italy's erratic course before that date. At the same time he said that the level of nostalgia was generally “very low, and often squalid," and described some of the pictures on show at the 1930 s exhibition as “unfit to be hung in a dog kennel.” Traditional historians say that Mussolini was torn by dilemma from the moment of his birth in cramping poverty to an atheist, anarchic father and God-fearing mother in the old forge at Dovia, a hamlet of Predappio.

The Communist mayor who now holds office in Mussolini’s native community, Mr Mauro Strocchi, says that there will be no officially backed carnivals to

mark the centenary. “But if the neo-Fascists want to come and they behave. there will be no trouble,” he said. In an interview just published. Vittorio Mussolini, the eldest of the dictator’s five children, describes his father as having had a strong sense of humour and having been an expert mimic, who had often reduced the family to tears of laughter. Vittorio said in the January edition of “Storia” (History) magazine that descriptions of his father as “a misery” were completely wrong. It was the latest interview by a member of the Mussolini family to emphasise the human characteristics of the Fascist leader, who was shot dead, then hanged from a lamp-post, in Milan in 1945.