Jan 29 2009
Benito Mussolini - the turncoat
Italian dictator Benito Mussolini (1883 - 1945) started out as a socialist and ended up as a dictator and founder of fascism. He was born into a humble, working class family. His father was a blacksmith and his mother a teacher. It’s assumed, that his sympathies for socialism stem from his father’s strong political convictions. Benito worked for a while with him and was reportedly not a very eager student. He was intelligent but displayed a streak of violent behaviour, as proved by the incident when he stabbed the hand of another pupil and threw an inkpot at his teacher. As a consequence, he was evicted from school.
To evade military service, he moved to Switzerland. At the time he had already started to make a name for himself, as an ardent socialist as editor of the party’s newspaper at age 29. After World War I he read the signs of the time and decided that socialism had no future. He did an about turn and embarked on the road to fascism. He ran yet another newpaper and started on a politcal career. Italian socialists called him a traitor when he started to favour the organisation of middle class youth, called for strong control of workers, playing into the hands of entrepreneurs and generally called for a tough centralised government to restore “law and order”
In 1922 he marched into Rome when he became Prime Minister. A dictatorship with absolute powers began, relentlessly prosecuting the working classes, exploiting the country and driving Italy into three wars, the worst being World WarII. He associated with Hitler and supported Franco in the Spanish civil war. He got support from the wealthy who thrived under his rule and even Pope Pius XI, with whom he signed a concordate, called him a saviour.
However, the results of World War II and the American intervention changed his fate. The Italian king ordered his arrest and Mussolini, together with his latest paramour, Clara Petacci, was captured when he tried to flee to Italy. The next day both were executed together with a group of his supporters.
The bodies of Mussolini and Petacci were brought to Milan and hung upside down from the roof of a petrol station. That treatment was intended to show the Italian people that the hated dictator was indeed dead and to mirror his own favored method of execution of enemies.
