Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- List of maps
- Introduction
- 1 “There has been much bluff”
- 2 Bellicose nonbelligerent
- 3 “The most impatient of all Italians”
- 4 June–September 1940: Duce strategy in the shadow of Sea Lion
- 5 The attack on Greece
- 6 To the Berghof: Italy's end as a great power
- Conclusion: The meaning of Fascist Italy's last war
- Appendix 1 The diaries of Count Galeazzo Ciano
- Appendix 2 Military expenditure: Italy and the powers compared
- Abbreviations
- Notes
- A note on sources
- Frequently cited works
- Index
1 - “There has been much bluff”
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 15 December 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- List of maps
- Introduction
- 1 “There has been much bluff”
- 2 Bellicose nonbelligerent
- 3 “The most impatient of all Italians”
- 4 June–September 1940: Duce strategy in the shadow of Sea Lion
- 5 The attack on Greece
- 6 To the Berghof: Italy's end as a great power
- Conclusion: The meaning of Fascist Italy's last war
- Appendix 1 The diaries of Count Galeazzo Ciano
- Appendix 2 Military expenditure: Italy and the powers compared
- Abbreviations
- Notes
- A note on sources
- Frequently cited works
- Index
Summary
“…tutt'i profeti armati vinsono e li disarmati ruinorono.”
MachiavelliDuce politics. It is a commonplace among educated Italians that “Mussolini was indeed a dictator, but no bloody-handed murderer [sanguinario] like Hitler.” Scholarly sources tell us that he was a “realist,” unlike Hitler, who “was gripped by a delusion which he made from the purely personal into a collective organic delusion shared by thousands of his fellow-countrymen.” Finally, “far from possessing the gifts of intelligence and character of a truly great and creative statesman,” Mussolini had a hidden weakness in dealing with individuals, and was incapable of choosing or retaining competent subordinates.
Mussolini was certainly no sanguinario on Hitler's scale. He did not have millions of people murdered in the service of a racialist pseudoscience. Italian political prisoners generally ended up in desolate corners of the South and the Islands rather than in concentration camps of the German type. The regime's systematic persecution of the Jews did not end in their extermination until Italy's collapse in 1943 brought German occupation. But Mussolini was hardly squeamish, nor was his brutality free of racialist motivation even before the adoption of an anti-Jewish policy. The imposition of what the regime pleased to call a “Roman peace” upon the Arabs of Libya required mass shootings, large-scale population transfers, and concentration camps. In Ethiopia, Italian forces employed mustard gas systematically in accordance with Mussolini's own directives, issued eight months before the campaign opened. The telegrams with which he bombarded his viceroy, Marshal Rodolfo Graziani, vividly render the Duce's conception of what he called a “radical house-cleaning” of the newly conquered Impero:
H[is] E[xcellency] GRAZIANI– ADDIS ABABA 6496 – 5 JUNE 1936 – ALL REBELS MADE PRISONER ARE TO BE SHOT
MUSSOLINI- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Mussolini Unleashed, 1939–1941Politics and Strategy in Fascist Italy's Last War, pp. 3 - 43Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1982
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