How bad was Mussolini?

Forza Italia senator Paolo Guzzanti condemns Fascism — and defends Silvio Berlusconi's assessment of Mussolini For much of the past month Italy has been lashed by a political, journalistic and emotional late summer storm of such intensity that it has verged on the paranormal. The storm was caused by the now notorious interview that Silvio Berlusconi gave The Spectator last month. There are even some who speculate whether this week's blackout was engineered by Berlusconi in an attempt to divert attention from his political embarrassment.

In his interview, the Prime Minister told your editor, Boris Johnson, and your Italy correspondent, Nicholas Farrell, that Italian judges are 'mad' and 'anthropologically different' from the rest of mankind and that Mussolini was a 'benign' dictator who 'did not murder anyone' but 'sent people [his opponents] on holiday to confine them', on islands such as Ponza.

All hell broke loose. The remark about the judges was bad enough. The judges went on strike in protest, which some saw as proving the charge of madness. But it was the remark about Mussolini that caused the greatest anger. Ferocious articles were written; ferocious insults exchanged. There were debates in parliament and demands for resignations subito. Berlusconi had to apologise to leaders of the Jewish community.

The fury was not confined to Italy. In America, the Anti-Defamation League had just named Berlusconi its Statesman of the Year for his robust support of Israel. Three Nobel laureates felt conscience-bound to write to the New York Times demanding that the ADL withdraw the award. The ADL did not bow to the letter-writers. The award, presented last week in New York, stands. As far as the most powerful Jewish group in America is concerned, Berlusconi is still Statesman of the Year.

Others are less open-minded than the ADL. The subject of Mussolini still touches a raw nerve not just in Italy but the world over. No Italian, least of all an Italian prime minister, is allowed to question the official history of the Fascist period — history largely written by the Left.

History, after all, is written by the victors, and if such a thing as a victor existed in Italy in 1945, it was the Left The official history obliges Italians to regard German National Socialism and Italian Fascism as one and the same, so that all crimes corn mitted by the Nazis were also committed by the Fascists, especially the biggest crime of all — the Holocaust.

This is quite simply false. It is true that of all the crimes committed by the Fascists the passing of the race laws in 1938 was the filthiest. But Mussolini and his regime had absolutely no intention of exterminating Jews. No Jews were deported to the Nazi death camps from Italy until after the fall of Mussolini in July 1943. The Jews deported thereafter — some 8,000 out of a total of 50,000 — were arrested on the orders of the Germans, not the Italians. In the Italian-occupied south-east of France, meanwhile, the Italians saved thousands of Jews from arrest and deportation by the all-too-willing French.

Nor was the military alliance between Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy the inevitable consequence of Mussolini's political creed. Only last week an extraordinary document, discovered in the Vatican archives, came to light. It reveals that in April 1938, one month after the Anschluss, which gave Germany a border with Italy, Mussolini urged the Pope to excommunicate Hitler. This suggests that Mussolini's main motive in fighting on Germany's side was fear of Hitler rather than greed for territory.

In the two decades that Mussolini was in power before the second world war, his regime condemned 42 people to death, of whom fewer than half were executed, and murdered perhaps half a dozen. So in fact what Berlusconi said about Mussolini being a benign dictator is more or less correct, at least when compared with other dictators of the time.

Berlusconi is not an apologist for Mussolini, any more than I am, and without a shadow of doubt he is anti-fascist, just as I am. He simply told the truth about Mussolini. But in Italy that is strictly forbid den hence the howls of protest. For the truth contradicts the version of events still fed to the Italian people — a version that remains trapped in the ideological, quasireligious straitjacket imposed at the end of the second world war. In Italy, historical truth — which elsewhere in the West is subject to continuous renewal and revision — remains embalmed like Lenin in his mausoleum. To preserve it requires that we say, we write and we teach that Fascism and Mussolini were uniquely bloody and murderous. The far worse crimes of Stalin, meanwhile, are played down.

Italian students are never told, therefore, that during the 1930s several hundred Italian Communists were killed without trial but that these executions took place in Moscow not Rome — that those responsible were Stalin's Communists, not Mussolini's Fascists. Nor are they told that those executions took place with the agreement of Palm iero Togliatti, the leader of the Italian Communist party, who, in his other job as the Comintern's number two, had happily organised the liquidation of anarchists, Trotskyites and anti-Fascists in Spain during the civil war. Nor are they told that immediately afterwards Togliatti was responsible for the elimination of the Polish Communist party leadership as the prelude to the invasion of Poland by Hitler and Stalin in 1939.

Fascism died in Italy in 1945, but Communism in Italy has never died, in spite of the collapse of the Soviet Union. In the Italian parliament today there are two Communist parties and one postCommunist party — the Democratici di sinistra — which is the main opposition party.

What is often forgotten is that, unlike Hitler, Mussolini was the leader of the revolutionary Left and that Fascism was socialist and Jacobin in origin. Lenin considered Mussolini the only genuine revolutionary in Italy. The Fascist party — like the Communist party — was born in Italy out of the numerous schisms within the Socialist party and the impotence of the democratic system.

To describe Mussolini as right-wing, therefore, is grossly to oversimplify politics and history. Mussolini remained to the end a violent and wholehearted enemy of the bourgeoisie, capitalism, the free market and all those values that allowed the birth of democracy in Britain, America and, with one or two hiccups, in France.

In speaking as he did to The Spectator, Berlusconi was following his instinct for saying what most Italians believe. In common with the vast majority of Italians, I have no sympathy for Fascism, no sympathy whatsoever, but, again like the vast majority, I am fed up with the lies told about the Fascist period.

Berlusconi is indeed outspoken and politically incorrect; that is why he is so popular. Once again, he has given his friends and allies — and not just his enemies — the shivers. It is not the first time. And it will not be the last.

Paolo Guzzanti is a Forza Italia senator and vice -direttore of Il Giornale.