Benito Mussolini

"There seems to be no question that [Mussolini] is really interested in what we are doing and I am much interested and deeply impressed by what he has accomplished and by his evidenced honest purpose of restoring Italy."

"I don't mind telling you in confidence that I am keeping in fairly close touch with that admirable Italian gentleman."

"The meeting between Chesterton and Il Duce occurred in 1929, ten years before the war, at a time when, whatever his other faults, Mussolini had reintroduced a mark spirit of optimism and freshness to an Italy that had formerly been pessimistic and stagnant. Throughout the 1920s, Chesterton thought he saw in the Italian leader qualities that might have offset certain evils in Britain. It is important to keep in mind that whatever the misreadings of fascism, Chesterton always had some quite specific British problem in view when he praises Mussolini."

"For Chesterton… British public rhetoric was more than a mere style: "The motive is the desire to disguise a thing even when expressing it." To his mind, the dictator's words, even if his actions were as bad or worse than those of the parliamentarians, were morally and stylistically superior. At least they said openly what was being done openly. The British rhetoric, for Chesterton, was one with the decayed British liberalism that allowed exploitation of workers by plutocrats who were never rebuked by government or the courts. If nothing else, Mussolini's language was a bracing alternative. Gazing back across the horrors of World War II, it is hard for us to imagine how good men like Chesterton, whatever their objections to British liberalism, could admire Mussolini, though several prominent intellectuals and politicians did. Many of us have family members or friends who fought or died to stop the fascist darkness, and we find it difficult to sympathize with Chesterton's desire to be fair to Mussolini. Mussolini's thuggish violence, of course, Chesterton and others rejected. But their admiration was an index of the scale of reform they thought needed."

"Some of the things Mussolini has done, and some that he is threatening to do go further in the direction of Socialism than the English Labour Party could yet venture if they were in power."

"[Mussolini was] farther to the Left in his political opinions than any of his socialist rivals."

"Roosevelt had no illusions about revolution. Mussolini and Stalin seemed to him ‘not mere distant relatives’ but ‘blood brothers.’"

"Mussolini told the young man of his admiration for Communism—‘Fascism is the same thing’ [as Communism]."

"So fell, ignominiously, the modern Roman Caesar, a bellicose-sounding man of the twentieth century who had known how to profit from its confusions and despair, but who underneath the gaudy facade was made largely of sawdust. As a person he was not unintelligent. He had read widely in history and thought he understood its lessons. But as a dictator he had made the fatal mistake of seeking to make a martial, imperial Great Power of a country which lacked the industrial resources to become one and whose people, unlike the Germans, were too civilized, too sophisticated, too down to earth to be attracted by such false ambitions. The Italian people, at heart, had never, like the Germans, embraced fascism. They had merely suffered it, knowing that it was a passing phase, and Mussolini toward the end seems to have realized this. But like all dictators he was carried away by power, which, as it inevitably must, corrupted him, corroding his mind and poisoning his judgment. This led him to his second fatal mistake of tying his fortunes and those of Italy to the Third Reich. When the bell began to toll for Hitler's Germany it began to toll for Mussolini's Italy, and as the summer of 1943 came the Italian leader heard it. But there was nothing he could do to escape his fate. By then he was a prisoner of Hitler."

"Not a gun was fired- not even by the Fascist militia- to save him. Not a voice was raised in his defense. No one seemed to mind the humiliating nature of his departure- being hauled away from the King's presence to jail in an ambulance. On the contrary, there was general rejoicing at his fall. Fascism collapsed as easily as its founder."

"Living in New York, she (Angelica Balabanoff) discovered support for Mussolini in some Italian-American and conservative circles before the United States entered World War II, and so she edited and wrote a small periodical, Il Traditore, which between January, 1942, and May, 1943, contained a series of articles describing Mussolini's early years, his persecution of socialists, and the fascist record of assassinations and brutality in Italy.""

"[Mussolini] brought a radical Marxist strand to the Avanti! newspaper, soon doubling its circulation. With a growing audience, Mussolini redoubled the urgency of his utopian propaganda; ‘private property is theft’ and should be abolished as Italy moved through the phase of collectivism forwards to the ultimate goal of communism."

"The Mussolini that now emerges is more intelligent, less tinsel and stage property than some had supposed, more than the mere gangster and bluffer that others have seen, on the whole a more sinister phenomenon for the student’s science of politics. Here is a real intellectual who has run the gamut of radical revolutionary ideas—anti-patriotism, anti-religion (not merely anti-clericalism), anarchism, bolshevistic communism in the Leninist sense, all genuinely and vehemently advocated—and has come out the simon-pure imperialistic despot, who uses throne and altar, brutal violence and fraud, to buttress his autocratic regime."

"Lenin was the contemporary politician whom [Mussolini] most admired and he studied the Russian revolution closely to see what lessons it offered. Lenin seemed to him ‘the very negation of socialism’ because he had not created a dictatorship of the proletariat or of the socialist party, but only of a few intellectuals who had found the secret of winning power. Mussolini was, in truth, envious."

"Mussolini had once belonged to the Bolshevik wing of the Italian Socialist party and still in 1924 confessed admiration for Lenin, while Trotsky was quoted as saying that Mussolini was his best pupil."

"[In 1938] Mussolini anti-clericalism was thus reassuring itself. Sometimes he now acknowledged that he was an outright disbeliever... [that] the papacy was a malignant tumor in the body of Italy and must 'be rooted out once and for all,’ because there was no room in Rome for both the Pope and himself."

"Mussolini had been envious of the bolsheviks and for a while fancied himself as the Lenin of Italy."

"After his defeat in the 1919 election, Mussolini saw no future in trying to out-socialist the socialists. Without a distinct policy, without friends and backing, he was in serious danger of ending up as a confused and egocentric demagogue with a talent for histrionics."

"[Mussolin is] a man no less extraordinary than Lenin. He, too, is a political genius, of a greater reach than all the statesmen of the day, with the only exception of Lenin. . . not a socialist from the bourgeoisie; he never believed in parliamentary socialism."

"From 1912 to 1914, Mussolini was the Che Guevara of his day, a living saint of leftism. Handsome, courageous, charismatic, an erudite Marxist, a riveting speaker and writer, a dedicated class warrior to the core, he was the peerless duce of the Italian Left."

"Like all self-respecting revolutionaries, Mussolini considered himself a Marxist. He regarded Marx as the ‘greatest theoretician of socialism’ and Marxism as the ‘scientific doctrine of class revolution.’"

"In the tragic days of Mussolini, the trains in Italy ran on time as never before and I am told in their way, their horrible way, that the Nazi concentration-camp system in Germany was a model of horrible efficiency. The really basic thing in government is policy. Bad administration, to be sure, can destroy good policy, but good administration can never save bad policy."

"By then the Duce... was a sick man, living on a diet of milk and rice, whose political strength at home was growing more feeble by the day. In late 1942, he had tried to talk Hitler into making peace with the Russians. It was their only chance to avoid disaster, he argued. The Fuehrer, of course, would have none of it. About all Mussolini was good for now, it seemed, was strutting about in one of his snappy getups. But then, at least he still looked like he amounted to something."

"in 1926 I was asked to go to Italy to report on the Fascist State of Benito Mussolini, now four years in power, a scandal to the democracies at which he openly jeered, but an even greater one to the Socialists and Communists who once had thought him on the way to being the strongest radical leader in Europe…Altogether it was an illuminating half-hour, and when Mussolini accompanied me to the door and kissed my hand in the gallant Italian fashion I understood for the first time an unexpected phase of the man which makes him such a power in Italy. He might be and was, I believed-a fearful despot, but he had a dimple."

"Fascism never possessed the ruthless drive, let alone the material strength, of National Socialism. Morally it was just as corrupting – or perhaps more so from its very dishonesty. Everything about Fascism was a fraud. The social peril from which it saved Italy was a fraud; the revolution by which it seized power was a fraud; the ability and policy of Mussolini were fraudulent. Fascist rule was corrupt, incompetent, empty; Mussolini himself a vain, blundering boaster without either ideas or aims."

"Der Sinn für den Staat ist tief im Bewusstsein der Italiener verankert, die das Gefühl haben, dass nur der Staat die unersetzliche Garantie ihrer Einheit und ihrer Unabhängigkeit ist: dass nur der Staat die Kontinuität ihrer Abstammung und ihrer Geschichte in der Zukunft darstellt!"

"Wir sind nicht, wir wollen nicht Mumien sein, die unbeweglich ihr Antlitz nach der gleichen Richtung kehren, wir wollen uns nicht in die engen Fesseln einer Frömmelei einfangen lassen, die mechanisch Formeln murmelt, ähnlich denen der Gebete religiöser Bekenntnisse; Menschen wollen wir sein, und zwar lebendige Menschen, die wir unseren Beitrag, sei er auch bescheiden, der schöpferischen Geschichte darbieten."

"Unser Kampf ist undankbar, aber er ist schön, denn er verpflichtet uns, daß wir uns nur auf unsere Kräfte verlassen."