Historians From Australia

"Having been banished from his home and friends, Dante created in The Divine Comedy a new life for himself. Denied a voice in Florence, he recreated himself in fiction and gave this poetic "self" a voice that would ring through the ages. What we have in the poem is, in effect, a "virtual Dante." In fact we know far more about this virtual Dante (what literary critics call "Dante-pilgrim") than we know about the real historical person ("Dante-poet"). It is this virtual self who speaks to us across the centuries and is our guide through the landscape of medieval soul-space."

"The regime may have hoped that its land reclamation policies would attract the greatest acclaim but plenty of other public works figured into Fascist policy and propaganda. The national railway system was a cherished part of the project of bonding Italians, all the more because Farinacci had been prominent in pushing railwaymen early into a Fascist union."

"Whereas once the movement had flirted with feminism, now Mussolini required that female organizations focus on charity, ‘to the exclusion of any political action which must be left exclusively to the party."

"Other, mostly richer Italians dealt with the meaning of life under the dictatorship in a more straightforward manner. What might be termed their everyday Mussolinism was, however, scarcely based on a literal application of Fascist totalitarianism. When their actions are reviewed carefully, it becomes plain that they by no means reliably believed, obeyed or fought, despite the regime slogan–credere, obbedire, combattere–insisting that they should."

"To the dismay of some ras, Mussolini suddenly announced that he wished to frame a deal with those socialists who might be willing to treat, especially with their trade unionist wing, end the social war burning through the countryside and, by implication, look to the formation of a grand coalition of new mass parties and organizations in order to overthrow the liberal system, be it embodied in parliament in Rome or in the institutions of civil society."

"In 1919 a nationalist general concluded bitterly that, when confronted by the ‘test of war’, Italy had demonstrated that ‘no one governed it.’"

"If ever a word was in the air, then in Italy around the time of the First World War, it was ‘Fascist.’ Fascista, Fascismo, Fascio: each turned up on numerous occasions and in diverse settings. Doctor deputies, endeavouring to be a pressure group, formed themselves into a Fascio Medico Parlamentare as early as 1906."

"Mussolini exhibited a cynical skill at rewarding his enemies and rebuking his friends."

"In June 1914 the newshound Mussolini was to the fore in playing up the social disturbances known as ‘Red Week’, at the peak of which revolutionaries, stirred up by the socialist conference at Ancona in April, attempted full-scale insurrection. As a historian of Liberal Italy portrayed it evocatively: ‘Local dictators proclaimed republics, the red flag was hoisted above town halls, taxes were abolished and prices reduced by decree, churches were attacked… landlords’ villas sacked, troops disarmed and even a general captured."

"On 4 July [1938] before an audience at the ‘new town’ of Aprilia, [Mussolini] excoriated what he rudely called ‘the great demoplutocracies’; they were, he added flatly, the ‘enemies of Italy’. The new tone of exasperation in his words worried members of the Italian establishment, but Mussolini, taking his temerity one step further, now told Ciano (of all people) that the ‘defeatist’ bourgeoisie needed to be brought into line by a ‘third wave’ of Fascism."

"In this conflict [Red Week], Mussolini for the moment stood on the other side of the barricades; on 10 June, destined to be a redolent date in Fascist history, he urged: ‘We must take up again our anti-militarist propaganda to ensure that bayonets are only raised when we [socialists] want them to be… Our propaganda must break into the barracks, where currently the sons of the people are taught how to kill their own brothers.’"

"[Mussolini’s] most ambitious article for La Lima was a lengthy review of Marx on the twenty-fifth anniversary of his death. Here Mussolini celebrated the father of socialism as an activist, as one who was simultaneously ‘scientific’ and realistic. Marx, he wrote with fervour, had demonstrated conclusively that ‘a class will never give up its privileges unless it is forced to do so.’ He had proven without a doubt that ‘the final struggle will be violence and “catastrophic’” because capitalists would certainly not surrender without a bitter fight."

"Whereas Hitler believed fundamentally and literally in racist science, Mussolini might often sound hard-line, and certainly regularly spoke up for murder. Yet, equally, he remained capable of skepticism, cynicism, intellectual analysis, doubt, contradiction, confusion, sullen bafflement, all positions that the ‘science’ of ‘terrible simplifiers’ condemns and refutes. Whatever else he was, Mussolini was not an ‘other’, unrecognisably distinct from contemporary or even present-day politicians and executives."

"Whatever else he was, Mussolini was no Hitler impelled by a credo to act in one way and one way only."

"Mussolini was, of course, not the only dissident ever to leave a socialist party, especially during the trauma of the First World War. In many countries, the great conflict demanded that a choice be made between the ideals of internationalist socialism and those of the nation."

"As Archduke Franz Ferdinand made his way to Sarjevo, Mussolini remained an extreme socialist, committed to pulling down the Liberal order in the interests of world-spanning revolution. The outbreak of the war did not at first alter that situation. However, by September 1914, the attachment of the editor of Avanti! to the official line of neutralism was crumbling. In October, Mussolini broke from the [Socialist] party, proclaiming that, although still a believing socialist, he was certain that the cause of social overturn could be better hurried by war than by Italy remaining at peace. Mussolini thus joined the ranks of the interventionists, a motley crew in terms of political background, although the great majority nourished a deep belief in their intellectuality and self-importance."

"In 1914, by almost every index, Italy was the least of the great powers. Nor, despite huffing and puffing about imperial conquest and racial prowess, would that ranking be much altered during the Fascist years."

"In 1918 [Mussolini] had coined the slogan: ‘the man who never changes his mind… is a blockhead’… None the less, this early Fascism did often sound radical, even ‘socialist’, in everything except its foreign policy and reading of contemporary history (both in Italy and in Russia). In June of 1919, for example, the fasci maintained that they wanted the voting age lowered to eighteen (Mussolini had frequently talked about youth bringing zest to anything Fascists might do)… Other initial fasci aims were the institution of an eight-hour day, minimum pay, participatory democracy on the factory floor and improved state insurance for workers. Landowners should be obligated to cultivate their land and any fields that were not utilized productively should be handed over to peasant cooperatives, with a preference for those run by returned soldiers… The fasci favoured progressive tax and the punitive review of war contracts and profits, as well as the seizure of the goods held by religious houses."

"A historian tabulated 16 rival groups who, earlier in 1919, had been using the word fascio to describe themselves. Ranging from anarchists to restless bourgeois university students, these ‘fascists’ had nothing in common except their name."

"When the national transport system was tested a few years later by the Second World War, the Fascist railways showed little advance on the Liberal ones and the transport of goods, especially south of Rome, remained a serendipitous affair."

"Fascism, with its habitual use of the language of aggression—not for nothing did Mussolini regularly rejoice in his own savagery, seeing himself as a cat who walked by itself at night ready to scratch, claw and kill—deeply tinctured such thoughts and assumptions. Yet Fascism did not by itself create its bleakly Darwinian view of the functioning of the international system."

"Syndicalist A.O. Olivetti maintained, the Fascist state had invented the economic system surpassing both socialism and liberalism. Its first clause ran: ‘the Italian nation is an organism having a purpose, life and means of action superior to those of any individual or groups who are part of it.’"

"As the elections were being held, he published in Gerarchla a disquisition on Machiavelli. He had, he remarked, just re-read the Florentine writer's corpus, although, he added modestly, he had not fully plumbed the secondary literature in Italy and abroad. Machiavelli's thought was, Mussolini announced, more alive now than ever. His pessimism about human nature was eternal in its acuity. Individuals simply could not be relied on voluntarily to 'obey the law, pay their taxes and serve in war'. No well-ordered society could want the people to be sovereign. Machiavelli’s cynical acumen exposed the fatuity of the dreams of the Enlightenment (and of Mussolini’s own political philosophy before 1914)."

"As I explore Mussolini’s personality, his power, its effects and its limitations, I became convinced that the Duce was not just the first modern dictator but also, far better than Hitler, the personage against whom to measure the very many tyrants who dominated so many countries in Europe between the wars and, in the developing world, then and thereafter. In more complex parallel, Mussolini also bore some comparison with Stalin and his later epigones in Eastern Europe, who, in apparent oxymoron ruled as national communists."

"Bolshevism [Mussolini] knew, was not really a Jewish phenomenon and the manifestations of anti-Semitism in current-day Hungary could not be applauded. Yet, he reckoned, such responses should not astonish. Even in Italy, where ‘anti-Semitism is unknown and we believe will never be known’, Zionism was a troubling development. It was to be hoped that ‘Italian Jews continue to be smart enough not to encourage anti-Semitism in the only country where it had never been.’"

"The fasces pledged national unity above all; each of the sticks represented a sector of society, organically bound into the corporate system. No class, gender, regional or other form of division could weaken a Fascist state, locked together as it was, a proletarian nation, needing to end subjugation by the plutocratic, established, great powers, in a Darwinian struggle of the national fittest; one Italian people, one Fascist state, one Duce at the head."

"Mussolini was a fervent internationalist. Nevertheless, despite his Marxist orthodoxy and despite the fact that the processes of the nationalisation of the masses were feebler in Italy than in the countries to the north, a notion of Italian identity seeped into his words and actions."

"At the next socialist party congress, held in July 1912 at Reggio Emilia, the PSI again split, the most vehement attacks on the three moderates coming from the young ‘maximalist’ or radical, Benito Mussolini, who soon took over the editorship of the party’s paper Avanti! from Claudio Treves, another reformist, and, later, for good measure, fought a duel against him."

"Mussolini was an activist and, in his own mind, a purist one, who deservedly bore the names of Cipriani and the young Costa. In his poetry, he chanted solemn obituaries for fallen comrades, summoning vengeance against their persecutors. He was a Republican; in a paper called IlProletario (The Proletarian), he ridiculed the ways of kings, urging their swift overthrow. Parliament, too, he deemed a farcical organization, which the virtuous must one day destroy. Those moderate socialists who were trying to make it work in the proletarian interest were deluding themselves."

"Which European politician of the first half of the twentieth century could be relied on to read the philosophical and literary works of his co-nationals and send their authors notes of criticism and congratulations? Who, at the time of profound crisis and despite his evident ill health, kept on his desk a copy of the works of Socrates and Plato, annotated in his own hand? Who declared publicly that he loved trees and anxiously quizzed his bureaucracy about storm damage to the environment? Who, in his table talk while he was entrenched in power, was fascinated by the task of tracing his intellectual antecedents?... Who seemed almost always ready to grant an interview and, having done so, was especially pleased by the prospect of talking about contemporary political and philosophical ideas? Who left more than 44 volumes of his collected works? Who claimed with an element of truth that money never dirtied his hands? Who could conduct a conversation in three languages apart from his own?... The somewhat surprising answer to all these questions is Benito Mussolini, Duce of Italian Fascism and dictator of Italy from 1922 (or 1925) to 1945 (or 1943)."

"The Piast realm serves as an example of how the character of the crusade changed in response to shifting military, social, economic, and political circumstances. The taking of the cross by the Piasts and their knighthood was a way of responding equally to both domestic and European strategic developments."

"Polish participation in holy wars and crusades was motivated by the rationale provided by the Piast dynasty which justified it in terms of their dynastic interest. Piast involvement in the crusading movement cannot be explained by the call to crusade made by Pope Urban II in 1095 but rather as an evolutionary fragment of the development of the institution of crusade."

"Christian holy war was a dynamic concept which was adjusted for use in different conditions."

"Through Mirabeau, the National Assembly stated plainly that their right to deliberate unhindered was based on the will of the nation and not hereditary or divine right."

"In theory, there were no legal limits to the monarch’s power over his realm. In practice, however, the king was bound by the laws and customs of the land, and exercising his authority depended on the agreement of France’s elite: the nobility and the clergy."

"In the context of north central Europe, there was no ground-breaking distinction between holy wars and crusades before the 1220s."

"Within a decade of the First Crusade, the anonymous author of the Gesta justified the holy war against the Pomeranians."

"The evolution of Polish involvement in crusading was in step with the process of state formation in Poland and the individual fortunes of the Piasts dynasts pre- and post-civil war of 1142–46, and closely followed the progress of Poland’s incorporation into Latin Christendom."

"New South Wales did not begin as a penal colony; it is better to think of it beginning as a colony of convicts... Why wasn't early New South Wales a penal colony? The short answer is that British officials in 1786 could not conceive of such a beast: a society of wardens and prisoners designed for punishment and control, as the French ran much later on Devil's Island."

"The Enlightenment was not a revolutionary movement; it was not even a political movement. It was a collection of scholars, writers, artists and historians who believed that as reason and education spread, superstition and ignorance would fall away and people would cease to believe in such nonsense as miracles or kings ruling by God’s permission."

"Economic growth in Australia did not require the incorporation of a backward, unproductive rural sector. When farming later developed on the pastoral runs, it was commercial farming. Australia, as its greatest historian Keith Hancock said, was born modern. The United States, by contrast, imitated to an extent the history of Europe. In areas which had been self-sufficient there was more regional variety in speech and habit. There were pockets of settlement which for a long time remained outside the commercial world, even when access to it became possible. Backwoodsmen, hillbillies and country music were the results."

"When the Germans invaded the Roman Empire they did not intend to destroy it. They were coming for plunder, to get the best lands and to settle down and enjoy the good things of life. They were happy to acknowledge the emperor’s rule. But the trouble was that in the 400s so many Germans came, and took so much land, there was nothing left for the emperor to control. In effect the Roman Empire came to an end because there was nothing left to rule."

"The Romans were better than the Greeks at fighting. They were better than the Greeks at law, which they used to run their empire. They were better than the Greeks at engineering, which was useful both for fighting and running an empire. But in everything else they acknowledged that the Greeks were superior and slavishly copied them."

"European civilisation is unique because it is the only civilisation which has imposed itself on the rest of the world. It did this by conquest and settlement; by its economic power; by the power of its ideas; and because it had things that everyone else wanted. Today every country on earth uses the discoveries of science and the technologies that flow from it, and science was a European invention."

"In Australia by 1890, the rate of union membership in the workforce had become the highest in the world. Was this because pay and conditions in Australia were the worst? No; it was because they were the best. Workers who lived in a society that had already yielded so much to them were confident that it could yield much more."

"[O]nly in Australia was the settler population then defined as non-indigenous – there are not non-indigenous Americans or non-indigenous New Zealanders. 'Non-indigenous' implies a people without roots in this place; it elides the fact that settlers have been here for eight generations, that they have formed a distinctive polity and are not indigenous to anywhere else; they regard Australia as their home. On the other side it elides the fact that most Aborigines are descendants of settlers and the original indigenous population. The formulation in fact casts modern Australia as if it were 1788: one group has just stepped off the boat and confronts the traditional owners of the country."

"The committed federalist leaders—Parkes, Deakin, Griffith, Barton, Inglis Clark and others—were pursuing a sacred ideal of nationhood. They can be thought of as both selfish and pure. Selfish, in that the chief force driving them was the new identity and greater stature they would enjoy—either as colonists or natives—from Australia’s nationhood. Pure, in that the benefit they sought did not depend on the particular form federation took. In a sense any federation would do. They knew of course that interests had to be conciliated and other ideals not outraged; they shared some of these themselves. But they were not mere managers or lobbyists; underneath all the negotiation and campaigning there was an emotional drive."

"Australians, like other peoples, tend to think they are highly distinctive, but the characteristics they value may be an extension or an exaggeration of what they brought from the mother country. In some respects they may be more like the peoples of other new lands settled by the British than they are willing to acknowledge. Australian soldiers and Australian nurses of World War I felt themselves to be very different from their English counterparts but the English were inclined to see all the colonials - New Zealanders, Canadians and Australians - as similar and different from themselves."

"Multiculturalists encourage vagueness about 'contributions' to give the impression of equal participation, as in the 'new age' school sports where every player in the team must handle the ball before a goal can be scored. If one were to compose a more precise ethnic history it would read something like this: The English, Irish and Scots were the founding population; they and their children established the Australian nation."

"It is somewhat odd that those who are most opposed to tradition and fixed roles in European society hold up as a model Aboriginal society with its pre-programmed roles sanctioned by an unquestionable tradition."