I am in the middle of the aftermath of a migraine, which has lasted for more than a week. It has left me with very bad eyesight, and the actions of reading and writing have become very tedious indeed.
Nevertheless, I am – since yesterday – reading again. I figure that one has to train the brain in order to keep it supple, so IF I stop reading, it might actually have a negative effect on my ability to understand things…. or something. However it might really work, I am grabbing any excuse to break my self-inflicted – but nevertheless coerced – deprivation of books with both hands. So yesterday I picked up what I was reading a week ago when the migraine struck.
The book I am currently reading is: Mussolini, The Rise and Fall of Il Duce by Christopher Hibbert. And I must say that after reading several books about a guy like Adolf Hitler, a book on Ol’Benny is a real treat. Say what you want about Ben, but he had a much more interesting life than Adolf. Not in the last place because Mussolini was an intellectual, politically active and a great person to have around. That is, if one believes his contemporaries and fellow statesmen, who all – without exception - called him a “Great Man”.
This is quite a contrast to Hitler, who generally is described as a loud-mouth know-it-all who was lazy, not very smart, certainly no intellectual high-flyer, and who was only drawn into the political arena after all else had failed. Including a career as a painter. To think, if he had only endured life as an underpaid artist, he would at least have enjoyed post-mortem glory.
I will not give too many spoilers on this book. It’s enough to promote the book as a great way to jog one’s historical mind. But the one thing I must convey here is the very negative view Mussolini had on Hitler. For one: Mussolini warned Europe against Hitler because he foresaw that the Versailles Treaty would force Germany’s hand into a new war – about which Ben was right, as was well proven by history. He also regarded National Socialism as a weak and watered down version of the real Italian Fascism, tailor-made for those wild Nordic barbarians, who were still roaming the earth in bearskins when the Italians had already founded the Roman Empire. Mussolini had the same loathing for the National Socialist racial theory, which, according to Mussolini, would “position the people from Letand as the most advanced on the planet…”
It suffices to say that Mussolini did not have much more than utter contempt for Hitler. Only later were both driven into each other’s arms. Does this sound interesting enough? For me, the view Mussolini held on Hitler and his National Socialism was not new, but in my edcation it had at least been grossly under-lit. I suspect that this is the case for most of us. And that constitutes a very good reason to read this biography.
