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84 of 94 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Still a swine after all these years, June 5, 2002
This review is from: Mussolini (Hardcover)
Twenty years ago Denis Mack Smith published what was at the time the definitive biography of Mussolini. Concise and economical, it was also utterly devastating and mordantly hilarious. But between then and now the conservative Italian historian Renzo De Felice finished his mammoth biography that weighed in at perhaps twenty times the length of Mack Smith. At the same time De Felice's book was noticeably more sympathetic to the man (and to the Italian ruling class that let him get away with so much) and helped encourage what to outsiders appears the bizarre atmosphere of "anti-anti-Fascism" that typifies Berlusconi Italy. Partially as a response to this diplomatic historian R.J.B. Bosworth has produced a new biography, which seeks incorporate twenty new years of scholarship. It counters De Felice's lenient version and offers a more complex response to Mussolini than Mack Smith's olympian scorn. Is it better than Mack Smith? Not necessarily. But it is a useful book worth reading. One should compare it to Paul Preston's book on Franco, Herbert Bix's work on Hirohito and Ian Kershaw's two volume biography on Hitler. Bosworth's book is shorter than all three (and the body is only a hundred pages longer than Mack Smith's). His portrait of Mussolini as a bullying demagogue, manipulative thug, shallow ideologue, brutal colonialist and incompetent general does not differ too much from Mack Smith's version. As a result it is not as revelatory as Bix's was on Hirohito's complicity or Preston's was on Franco's willingness to support the Axis. Bosworth is not as thorough as Kershaw. Whereas Kershaw's book is definitive on such matters as rumours about Hitler's "Jewishness" or his relationship with his niece, or about the Reichstag Fire or the attempt on Hitler's life, Bosworth's account of such matters at the murder of Mateleotti or the decision to enter the second world war seem comparatively cursory. What Bosworth seeks to do in this account is to bring in many of the ideas that Kershaw and other historians of Nazism, most noticeably the late great Martin Broszat, have brought to their study of the Third Reich, and apply them to Italy. As such Bosworth emphasizes questions such as was Mussolini a "weak" dictator? how much influence did he personally have in relation to other segments of the regime? what degree of continuity was there with the pre-Mussolini "Liberal Italy"? how coherent was Mussolini's ideology and how determined was he on his objectives? The results are useful, and we get to learn more about relationships within the party and its regional bases. We learn, for instance, that other fascists came up with the distinctive anthem, uniform, slogan, name, and nasty habit of forcing castor oil down their enemies' throats. Bosworth points out that Mussolini's colonial atrocities in Ethiopia and Libya (where in Cyraneica he killed half the population) as well as his opportunistic entry into the second world war was all too much in keeping with "Liberal" traditions. In discussing ideology Mack Smith famously emphasized Mussolini's breathtaking cynicism, combined with a strong dose of culpable stupidity and shallowness. Bosworth, by contrast, tends to provide more nuance on the shallowness side of the ledger (he is particularly useful on the twists and turns of Mussolini's racialism). On the other hand in discussions on foreign policy Bosworth tends to forget the fact that in Italian politics just because something is very badly planned, that is NOT evidence of a lack of premeditation. MacGregor Knox's Hitler's Italian Allies should be read in contrast. More evidence could have been provided about public opinion on vital points in 1922, 1924, 1940, and 1943-45. In contrast to Kershaw, Bosworth's volume is not as definitive as a history of Italy. Bosworth's eye for detail is not as consistently damning as Mack Smith, but we do learn some interesting new things. Bosworth provides more detail about Mussolini's ill health, his many affairs, as well as the oddly complicated fate of his corpse. We also learn more about Mussolini's children, who were a shallow and unappealing lot. We learn that Claretta Petacci, Mussolini's last mistress, had a tendency to whinge and to lie all day in bed eating chocolate. We learn that Mussolini's wife hated her son in law Count Ciano for, among other reasons, playing golf. We learn that Mussolini was by far the most prolific of leading fascists at producing children, the average being otherwise only 1.9 children. Fascism claimed to be a modernizing dictatorship, yet in 1931 a smaller proportion of university students were from the working class than in 1911, Mussolini did a poorer job in confronting illiteracy than, say, Stalin, while the growth rate was lower than that in Baldwin's England, and half that of Social Democratic Sweden. If Fascism is defined as the symbiosis of vicious cruelty and modernizing change, Franco was far more of a fascist than Mussolini. Like Mack Smith, Bosworth has no patience for those who try to argue that Mussolini after 1914 had any real radical principles, and he quotes an article Mussolini wrote in 1918 saying that the ideal dictator should be Woodrow Wilson. We learn about gullible pro-Fascist supporters, including the ordinarily very sensible Clementine Churchill, while we hear Pius XI speak approvingly in 1932 of a "Catholic totalitarianism" and babbling to Mussolini that same year that all of the Church's troubles were the fault of the Jews. In the end Bosworth concludes "His propagandists declared that he was always right. However, in the most profound matters which touch on the human condition, he was, with little exception, wrong."
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11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
a leader who did much harm, December 11, 2005
This review is from: Mussolini (Hardcover)
Unlike most biographies, Bosworth's book actually starts from late in Mussolin's life, specifically his last 2 years alive 1944-45 and later resumes with Mussolini's birth and childhood and moves on to his adulthood as a teacher and writer and traces his political beginnings which were actually as a socialist. Later on it describes how Mussolini turned to fascism, gained power, and the prewar years and World War II. I was a little surprised at how much damage Mussolini did to Libya and Ethiopia as well as the magnitude of the killings of the local populations in those areas carried out by the Italians. The book includes a section of photographs as well as maps, footnotes, and bibliography. The last chapter even gives an account of the travels of Mussolini's corpse after he was executed and put on diplay in Milan. As much as this was a biography of Mussolini, it also seemed to be an analysis of fascism as a whole and how much harm that ideology and Mussolini were for Italy and the Italian people, as well as the above mentioned areas of Africa, and Europe. All in all, it was an interesting read, however, one can only pity the Italian people for having to put up with such poor, damaging, and detrimental leadership for such a long time, during an especially critical part of their history. I believe the fact that Mussolini is mentioned in the same breath with such a harmful leader as Hitler is indeed fitting and appropriate.
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5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
the duce was almost always wrong, September 7, 2006
Richard Bosworth is an academic specialized in modern Italian history, who improbably teaches at the University of Western Australia. After reading his spin-off of this book, I decided to read this book.
Bosworth doesn't disappoint with this exceptionally well-written biography of one of the more unpleasant individuals to rule Italy. Anyone who was expelled from school for knifing a fellow student, who accepted foreign money for influencing his country's politics towards bringing it into a disastrous war, who didn't shy from using violence and murder to advance his political ends, who openly and flagrantly dishonored his marital vows, who used racial and religious animosities for political ends, and under whose command poison gas was used against Ethiopians cannot be a statesman, and ought have no place in politics. In this book the strong impression arises that Bosworth went out of his way to be fair to the "duce" but that there just was little that was flattering to be said for him. However, when Bosworth describes Preston's biography of Franco as "authoritative," and compares him to the other unelected European leaders of his time, I am not persuaded that Bosworth was as meticulously fair-minded.
Bosworth describes himself as a proud product of 1789, and writes that he is quite open to hearing criticisms that his politics color his historiography. I do believe this to be the case: Bosworth is quite willing to describe the pathology of the duce, but doesn't ponder why Italians were willing to tolerate such a loathsome individual as their leader. A possible explanation, whose omission is easily explained by Bosworth's unabashed identification with the fateful year of 1789, is that Italy was not so much a single country, as several countries which had uneasily been united during the Risorgimento. Milan and Turin were completely different from Sicily and Calabria, and the former Papal States between them were yet different again. Perhaps the Italians of his day were initially willing to let a demagogue and thug bind together "the Italies," to use Bosworth's words, because their country was far too heterogeneous to withstand the centrifugal forces democracy can unleash. I believe an approach more along the ideas of Edmund Burke would have far preferable to trying to force 1789 onto a rather fractured country. Better eight solid and slows steps forward than twelve rapid steps forwards and sixteen tortured steps backwards.
Bosworth writes that any historian of Italy must take pains to ensure that he doesn't absorb preconceived notions about Italy, and it is clear that Bosworth does his utmost to avoid this trap. I suspect that it is precisely in this endeavor, that Bosworth comes to the conclusion that if Italy had only been more like other liberal European countries, none of this would have happened. In my opinion, Italy was Italy, because it was different, and it would have been preferable not to try to overcome, but rather to make use of, Italy's differences.
I would strongly recommend this impressively-written and quite sobering look at Mussolini to anyone who can distinguish between Bosworth's laudable historiography and his less authoritative political views.
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