Watched ‘M’ the other night – a brilliant piece of TV film about the rise of Mussolini, and the emergence of modern fascism. So good I got hold of Antonio Scurati’s book, “M: Son of the Century” on which it is based. Also a good read, although literary in form rather than documentary.
We forget, and of course cannot feel, the appalling degradation that the First World War brought to those countries that ‘lost’ … except that Italy’s loss was not military defeat, because of course they were among the Allies, but the betrayal of promises made in the Treaty of London. It was a very complicated situation – after all Italy decided not to fight with the German/Austrian alliance of which they were a part because Italy saw an opportunity to regain territories it had lost in previous wars! And by the end of the 1st World War Europe as a whole was burning with the passionate possibility of a widespread socialist revolution stimulated by the the Bolshevik revolution.
Scurati and the film emphasise the depths of despair that the Italian survivors of that war had fallen into. All the promises of victory wiped away and to make the humiliation of the conscripts worse the promises of a fulsome welcome on their return from the battlefields were replacd with ostracism.
Mussolini had been a Marxist until he rejected the threat of the seizure of power by the socialist Movement following the Bolshevik successes. He (supposedly) never rejected the working class foundations but sought an active overthrow of all party political government. An ‘anti-party’
Thus fascism in Italy arises from the depression of defeat and national humiliation in spite of sharing the victory in a turbulent war..
None of this directly explains the rise of fascism today (for that is what is happening) although many of the markers are there. A particular idea early in the book catches eye: the fear that many of us feel as the madness of our increasingly psychotic democracies stretches its tentacles and encircles us. Some say, there is little you can do but look at the things you can control – and these aren’t many – but a least you might hang on to your sanity and avoid the dark wind of except that fear blows away confidence in the future.
This is all very well, and is a comforting idea – whatever it is that you can do will at least maintain your soul. But isn’t this exactly what Martin Niemöller was writing about … “First they came for …”?
Scurati writes about the fear that stalked Italian cities as division and often brutal strife caused people to lock their doors and shutter their windows and the political mobs paraded and or rampaged in the the streets:
“Faced with that future, they walled themselves up in the prison of the present.”