Mussolini is Always Right: A Selection from Taras Grescoe’s Possess the Air (2020)
“State propaganda presented Mussolini as omniscient, invulnerable, omnipresent. His image was everywhere visible on postcards, in newspapers, on posters. He could be seen posing with his pet lion, wearing shorts and boxing gloves, playing the violin, swimming, driving a sports car, fencing, or working a scythe, shirtless, in a wheat field surrounded by happy peasants. With thirty million pictures in 2,500 different poses in circulation, he was believed to be the most photographed man in history. Like the Caesars, who had given their names to the months of July and August, Mussolini even changed the calendar. Henceforth, years would be indicated by Roman numerals, starting with Anno I in 1922, numbered not from Christ’s birth but the year of the March on Rome. A new slogan, devised by a journalist, began to appear on walls: Mussolini ha sempre ragione.
‘Mussolini is always right’ was the official message, but Fascism’s main policies came from the gerarchi, the officials who occupied the upper ranks of the party. Alfredo Rocco, a former Marxist and Nationalist, transformed d’Annunzio’s constitution for Fiume into the basis for the Fascist corporative state. Workers and factory owners were made to sit together in ‘corporations’ devoted to furthering the fortunes of the Fascist state; the head of the new Ministry of Corporations, naturally, would be Mussolini himself. Totalitarismo, first used as an expression of scorn by the Liberal deputy Amendola, was adapted by Rocco and the education minister Giovanni Gentile into a vision of total subordination to the state, in which individuals existed only to serve a nation united under Fascism . . . .
Since the March on Rome, foreign correspondents, Liberals, and people of conscience had been sounding the alarm about the violence and repression that was the essence of Italian Fascism. Yet it was only after over a decade of dictatorship that some of them were being heeded. The blank cheque handed to the regime, which had been credited with bringing American-style progress to the perennially undisciplined Italians, was about to be cancelled.
Mussolini, it turned out, wasn’t the regular guy—the ‘right dictator’—that Will Rogers had praised in his syndicated column. One of the first signs that public opinion was turning came in a 1931 speech delivered by General Smedley Butler of the Marine Corps at a private luncheon in Philadelphia. Butler told the story of a friend who was invited to accompany Mussolini on a driving tour of the Italian countryside. Travelling at 110 kilometres an hour, Il Duce’s car struck a child, ‘grinding it to death under the wheels.’ Butler’s friend reported that Mussolini ordered his driver to keep going, shouting, ‘What is one life in the affairs of a State?’
Mussolini’s travel companion, who was later revealed to be newspaper publisher Cornelius Vanderbilt IV, corroborated the story, adding that when he’d turned to ‘see a shapeless little form lying on the road behind us,’ he was told: ‘Never look back, my friend. Always forward.’”—Taras Grescoe, Possess the Air: Love, Heroism, and the Battle for the Soul of Mussolini’s Rome (2020)
