The ‘persona’ of Benito Mussolini remains compelling to this day. Not the man as such, nor his ideas. But the personality he craftily constructed: that which led Winston Churchill to hail him as “the Roman Genius”, “the greatest law-giver among living men”. He wasn’t alone to be infatuated. A host of other politicians, intellectuals, ‘captains of industry’ – the pope himself – awed by this persona, considered Mussolini to be “a man sent from God”, a model to emulate, the man of the future. After bluffing his path to power in 1922, he worked his way to obtaining widespread consensus among the Italian populace; even, nowadays, the myth persists in Italy that ‘trains ran on time during the good old days of the Duce’ and that only another Duce will be able to cure Italy from its troubles. After the infamous marcia su Roma, when Mussolini was made prime minister by Victor Emanuel III, the Leftists decried the violence of the black shirts. They accused the king of weakness, the police of collusion, the liberal administration of inertia. However, the Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci berated his colleagues for blaming the establishment – that certainly played its part in Mussolini’s...
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