Reflections of a stormy petrel

The past does not die very fast. For decades now, the heirs and sympathizers of Benito Mussolini have been trying to popularize a version of their Leader that cleared him of all the issues that have made Fascism, not only discredited, but odious. This Mussolini of the Mussolinis was not particularly racist; he did not really hate Jews, was nervous about Hitler's influence, and did not relish violence for its own sake. This is not overwhelmingly important; the majority of Italians loathe the memory of Mussolini and regard Fascism as a blight. But there has long been a significant and slowly increasing minority that was willing, either to accept this nonsense at face value, or at least to allow itself to believe that there were areas of doubt and debate about the real moral legacy of the Leader.

What is disgusting about this is that, all the time, a set of documents existed that would have blown all this disingenuous and oily propaganda sky-high: the papers and diaries of Claretta Petacci, Mussolini's main lover (but never the only one - apart from his wife, Mussolini was always predatory and bragged of conquests even in the Italian royal family). And yet, until the last few months, these papers have been inaccessible to anyone, because of a grotesquely long lawsuit between the Petacci heirs and the State national archives (which held them). This lawsuit has only ended recently, due, it would seem, to the desire of the one surviving nephew of Petacci to see his aunt properly treated by historians.

Why on Earth he should imagine that these writings will burnish Petacci's image is a mystery of the human soul. The confidences that Petacci registers on a diary apparently started purely for the purpose - her diaries proper begin in 1937, when her position as favourite sex object is assured - paint an image so repulsive that it reflects very badly on her, given her continued willingness to give herself to him more or less in public. (Their affair was notorious all over Italy.) The gross and lustful compliments he pays to her are bad enough, but Mussolini was already known to be sex-mad, and even his defenders do not try to pretend otherwise. But the vicious racism, the way he relished the idea of violence against minorities ("I have thrown 70,000 Arabs into camps, why shouldn't I throw 50,000 Jews?" - this while he was selling his image in the Middle East as a champion of Islam), the crudity of his mind, the pleasure he took in Hitler's flattery at the time of Munich, his vicious and even rather petulant rage at the Pope's defence of Jews, Africans and mixed marriages, all go to prove that everything that we most despise about Fascism had its fountainhead in its leader and founder. And incidentally, this woman, who was the comfort and support of his life for its worst and most debased decade, from the wars in Lybia and Ethiopia to his final reincarnation as a German glove puppet, and who seems to have recorded every most despicable utterance of her lover out of admiration, gives us, for the first time, a good reason for the Partisans to have executed her alongside him that day in 1945. The enraged civilians who desecrated her body alongside his in Milan understood it instinctively, even without need for written evidence. If the person who gives moral aid and sexual comfort to a criminal, year after year, in the full knowledge of his crimes, can be seen as an accomplice, then she was his accomplice; in a sense, his closest.

I recently read an article on the historical German right which felt so convincing to me that I archived it.( Read more... )