Looks as though Berlusconi has outed himself as a moral relativist; he’s told two interviewers that Mussolini wasn’t such a bad chap after all. Berlusconi is “quoted”:http://www.repubblica.it/2003/i/sezioni/politica/berlugiudici/spectator/spectator.html as replying to a question comparing Mussolini and Saddam by saying:
bq. Mussolini never killed anyone. Mussolini sent people on holiday in internal exile [a fare vacanza al confino].
He’s now backtracking, saying that he never intended to signal a ‘re-evaluation’ of Mussolini, and was merely defending Italian national pride and honour.
bq. I wasn’t re-evaluating Mussolini; I was acting as a patriot. As an Italian, I wasn’t accepting a comparison between Mussolini and Saddam.
Berlusconi is crying unfair. He claims that it was an informal interview and that the journalists had promised that he could vet the interview before publication. Maybe so; but equally likely, he thought he was talking to ideological friends, and could get away with a certain amount of indiscretion. The two interviewers work for the _Spectator_, a Conservative rag in Britain; one of them, “Boris Johnson”:http://politics.guardian.co.uk/person/0,9290,-2735,00.html, is a Eurosceptic Tory MP (and occasional amiable buffoon on the BBC’s _Have I Got News for You_).
Whatever. Berlusconi’s now on record as defending Mussolini and downplaying his reprehensible behavior as a Fascist dictator. As the “Guardian”:http://www.guardian.co.uk/worldlatest/story/0,1280,-3135052,00.html reminds us, Mussolini not only had various opponents bumped off; he also oversaw the introduction of racial laws, forced labour and internment camps for Jews. Which, to put it mildly, don’t count as ‘holidays’ in my books.
I’ll be interested to see whether the various people who denounce ‘Old Europe’ as a snakepit of jackboot-fancying anti-Semites have anything to say about this. Various figures on the right jumped to Berlusconi’s defence a couple of months ago, over the various corruption allegations he’s dealing with, and his previous Nazi-related gaffe in the European Parliament. “Michael Ledeen”:http://www.nationalreview.com/ledeen/ledeen070203.asp, for example, described Berlusconi as a ‘passionate freedom fighter,’ cheering him for having
bq. the courage to speak the truth when the rest of the Eurocrats were cowering behind the conventional wisdom.
William Sjostrom, among many others, “concurred”:http://www.atlanticblog.com/archives/000932.html#000932, dismissing criticisms of Berlusconi as the carping of ‘crybaby leftists.’
How will Berlusconi’s erstwhile defenders react to his latest statement? If Chirac or Schroeder had said anything like what Berlusconi said, I imagine that these commentators would be all over it, trumpeting it as further evidence of anti-Semitism and nostalgia for Fascism in Europe. Will they apply the same standard when the apologist for Fascism is a Bush ally, and strong supporter of the Iraq invasion? I very much hope so.
Update: translation retweaked, thanks to Andrew Chen.
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nameless 09.12.03 at 1:26 am
Mussolin invaded Ethiopia and dropped poison gas on their villages. The comparison to Saddam is apt. I don’t suspect the Ethiopians who were slaughtered thought they were being sent on holiday.
Oh yea, Mussolini also made common cause with Adolph Hitler and helped unleash WWII. What a poor, misunderstood man.
Mac Thomason 09.12.03 at 2:09 am
Great, now “Mussolini: Not as bad as Hitler!” is being replaced by “Mussolini: Not as bad as Saddam!”
I don’t think 4000 of Mussolini’s subjects ever died in a heat wave, though.
eric 09.12.03 at 2:56 am
Geez. The more I see what Europeans really think, the more it scares me.
nick sweeney 09.12.03 at 3:15 am
I recommend Tobias Jones’s The Dark Heart of Italy: not just because he’s a mate from college, but because it’s a really great book on the state of modern Italian politics and culture.
Bob 09.12.03 at 3:23 am
“‘Tony told me that he was completely serene about criticisms over his relationship with me,’ says Silvio Berlusconi . .” – from The Guardian on 19 March 2002 at: http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,669873,00.html
In Martin Clark’s book: Modern Italy 1871-1995; Longman (2nd ed. 1996), p. 250, where he writes about the policies of Mussolini’s fascist government: “They seemed to offer ‘a third way’, between capitalism and Bolshevism, which looked attractive in the Depression. . .”
Greg 09.12.03 at 5:23 am
I’ve often wondered whether Berlusconi, who has long harboured NeoFascists in his cabinet, was a CryptoFascist himself, or simply a greedy man, as a Serbian friend of mine scornfully called Milosevic.
I’m not sure that this proves the case either way.
For what it’s worth, Eric, you can rest assured that the vast majority of Europeans think this way.
I have yet to meet a German who would defend Hitler in attempting to be patriotic; rather most hate his memory and all it stands for.
I’m pretty sure that Mussolini apologists are in almost equally short supply in Italy.
scott h. 09.12.03 at 7:30 am
First the Hitler wines, now this. Good grief.
John 09.12.03 at 8:06 am
How can we old Mussolini responsible for using poison gas in Ethiopia when “Greatest Man of the 20th Century, or what not” Winston Churchill did exactly the same thing – in Iraq, I belive – in 1921 as Colonial Secretary?
If there’s stuff we don’t like about Mussolini (obviously there is, much of it valid – the guy was a horrendous figure, and one would be hard pressed to make the case that he was at all better than Saddam), it’s hardly his use of poison gas in an African country.
Just to note a bit further, I don’t think Mussolini was particularly anti-Semitic in himself. He did introduce racial laws, but largely due to German pressure. There were Jews in the Italian Fascist Party, for instance. So Mussolini was more of a monstrously amoral opportunist than anything else.
chris 09.12.03 at 8:38 am
It would be nice to think that Mussolini apologists are indeed in short supply in Italy. But reading books like Tim Parks’s _An Italian Education_, suggests that casual expressions of nostaligia for the fascist period are rather common.
Angelo 09.12.03 at 9:05 am
As an Italian I am ashamed of Berlusconi.
Most of the people I know would not agree with his judgement about Mussolini.
khr 09.12.03 at 10:23 am
“How can we hold Mussolini responsible for using poison gas in Ethiopia when … Winston Churchill did exactly the same thing”
Since when is “Others do it, too” an excuse for a crime ?
This only means that Churchill was not the saint that WWII legends makes him. It does not mean that Mussolini is a good guy.
Greetings
Karl Heinz
Hamburg, Germany
Dave 09.12.03 at 10:38 am
I’d just like to say that Hitler was, of course, Austrian. Not that it really alters Greg’s point.
Chris Young 09.12.03 at 12:34 pm
John, I don’t think you’re actually trying to say you approve of using gas in Africa, but will you please stop it!
Don’t blame Mussolini because Churchill used gas in Iraq. Don’t blame al Qaeda for the WTC attack because of American backing for the atrocities in Chile. Don’t blame Hitler because Stalin liquidated the Kulaks?
Can we all have a five minute moratorium on moral mind games.
Andrew Chen 09.12.03 at 1:47 pm
Your translation is still off.
“Al confine” means “to the border”,
i.e. exile. It has nothing to do
with being confined; quite the opposite.
Still an outrageous lie, of course.
Henry 09.12.03 at 2:51 pm
Andrew
Thanks for the correction – duly noted. I’d originally translated it as ‘holiday in internal exile,’ and then found that a little wordy, and hadn’t been sure it was 100% accurate – the English speaking press were translating it differently, and I don’t have my dictionary with me in Toronto. Hence the change – but also hence my leaving the original Italian phrase in, precisely in case my translation was still not entirely accurate.
Harry Tuttle 09.12.03 at 3:35 pm
I’d just like to say that Hitler was, of course, Austrian.
Ah, Austria… the country whose primary purpose seems to be attempting to convince the world that Hitler was really German and Beethoven was really Austrian.
tsquared 09.12.03 at 3:35 pm
“This only means that Churchill was not the saint that WWII legends makes him”
Churchill once remarked that history would be kind to him; he knew that because he wrote the history books!
clew 09.12.03 at 5:13 pm
“If it wasn’t true, it should have been, and more and better besides”!
ChrisB 09.12.03 at 7:44 pm
Of course it was also Berlusconi who said in the lead up to war in Iraq that we SHOULD fight a war for Western values against Islam. Then again that view sadly seems to be as widely held in some circles as his views on Musollini are not.
Dugger 09.12.03 at 10:27 pm
A stupid comment from an Italian, BUT how bad was Mussolini? Well, it does depend on who you are comparing him with. If it is against say the Generalisimo or Bela Kun of Hungary, he’s about average, but if it is against totalitarian dictators – he’s not so bad. As a mass murderer he’s not fit to wear ol’ Pol Pot’s jock strap. I’d also say he’s not quite up there with Fidel, who is a mass murderer and been in power much longer. Yet Fidel is loved by Hollywood and a lot of the left wing establishment in this country. Berlusconi must be just a tad smarter than those Bozos , right?
John 09.13.03 at 12:37 am
I’m not excusing Mussolini’s use of poison gas. I’m saying that we’re extremely selective about whose use of poison gas horrifies us. I mean, be honest, the fact that Mussolini used poison gas is not why people think he’s awful. If it were, people would also think Churchill is awful. And FDR, for agreeing to the fire bombing of Dresden, which was surely at least as bad as any poison gassing.
If all Mussolini had done was gassed some Africans, I don’t think he would have gone down in history as an awful dictator. It’s all the other stuff that makes people dislike Mussolini. And he’s certainly worthy of very strong dislike. And the fact that he gassed a bunch of Ethiopians certainly is another reason to dislike him. But it, in itself, has nothing to do with why he’s a famous “evil dictator”.
nameless 09.13.03 at 3:14 am
“But it, in itself, has nothing to do with why he’s a famous “evil dictator.'”
He’s a famous evil dictator because he was best pals with the most famous evil dictator in history, Adolph Hitler. I’m not sure what relevance Mussolini’s claim to fame has to Berlusconi’s apology.
“I mean, be honest, the fact that Mussolini used poison gas is not why people think he’s awful.”
It’s one of the reasons I think he’s awful. He invaded another country without cause and deliberately murdered civilians (which is the reason poison gas is vile: it is mainly a weapon for the mass murder of civilians. It may not be particularly efficient, but is also not particularly discriminant).
“If it were, people would also think Churchill is awful. And FDR, for agreeing to the fire bombing of Dresden, which was surely at least as bad as any poison gassing.”
Many people do think that Churchill’s use of poison gas and the fire bombing of Dresden were awful. They also balance those atrocities with the good things accomplished by Churchill and Roosevelt (such as defeating Nazi Germany). Mussolini’s only redeeming quality, apparently, was making the trains run on time.
Edward Hugh 09.13.03 at 4:32 pm
“I don’t have my dictionary with me in Toronto”
Old mindset Henry. you don’t need to buy the whole transhumanist bit to remember there is the internet……….
On the more substantive point, I find it incredible how many people are trying to make up excuses for Mussolini. He was bad, but he wasn’t that bad etc. Incredible.
I mean these days it’s a regular insult to call someone a fascist who isn’t. Aznar seems to do this almost every single day. Well I don’t think there’s any doubt Mussolini was, he even said he was. And there is also that other little detail: he was Hitler’s closest ally.
“Most of the people I know would not agree with his judgement about Mussolini”.
This is a kind of social networks point, they wouldn’t because like you they’d be reasonable. I don’t know anyone in Barcelona who votes PP, but they still form the government. (read Granovetter).
However I do feel that criticising Berlusconi is to miss the point, his comments are for home consumption, and then indirectly for us. He’s happy if we take him seriously, that’s good for him back home (Italy we will remember is a rapidly ageing society, and this is going to have its inevitable political dimension). This is pretty similar in Spain, and it shouldn’t be overlooked that after his ‘disappointment’ with Tony, Aznar’s new ‘friend’ is Berlusconi. The Spanish media is full of this. And when Aznar sounds off about how, for example, the UK – with it’s Gibraltar mafia interests – is responsible for the Prestige disaster, a comment which even merited a front page ‘its a lie’ article from the FT, just remember, facts aren’t important here, it’s the domestic market that matters.
And all this naustalgia for fascism gets pretty scary when you look at the numbers of people who will be either ‘lame, blind or mute’ or suffering some modern equivalent like Altzheimer or Senile Dementia, and will be ‘non-productive’ from the point of view of a state which may neither be willing nor able to support them.
Remember: Hiter’s first victims were not Jewish.
Edward Hugh 09.13.03 at 4:37 pm
BTW Henry: I also have an old minset sometimes, so I checked the Cambridge Italian Dictionary and they give the alternative reading: Mandare al confine – Send into exile.
So congratulations, your intuition was good. Still exile could be internal, external……or something like Dante’s Inferno. We can leave the reader to decide.
jw mason 09.15.03 at 4:59 pm
My favorite bit on this was the explanation from an Italian government spokesperson that Berlusconi’s comments were “a witticism bordering on the paradoxical.”
There’s one for Scott McClellan to keep in mind…
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