Il Douche: Trump still feels like a joke to some, but so did Mussolini
by Mic Wright (@brokenbottleboy)
Donald Trump is far from the first seemingly cartoonish figure to turn a what at first looked like a laughable position into a platform with destructive power.
History offers us one particularly apposite demagogue whose evil acts occurred behind a screen of ridicule — the Italian dictator Benito Mussolini.
Even long after he took power in Italy — and was waging aggressive war as part of the Axis powers — Mussolini was almost a figure of fun.
The Beano recast Il Duce as “Musso the Wop,” a big bumbling fool, portrayed variously demanding wine, being chased by a horse and being sent insomnia cures by readers (rat poison, a hammer, and a sock to “stuff in his big mouth.”)
It’s easy to get swept away by the buffoonish caricatures but, like Donald Trump — whose bullying tendencies began during his time at military school — described by another alumnus as “a little Lord of the Flies” — Mussolini was prone to fights and intimidation from a young age.
At 10, the future dictator was expelled from his boarding school for stabbing a classmate. He did the same at his next school, before learning to duel with a sword and leading gangs who stole from local farms.
The penchant for fighting continued in adult life. Mussolini ended up with over 100 scars and wounds from previous fights, according to a report in the New York Times, published in 1922, after a duel with a rival newspaper editor.
Unlike the ultra-moneyed Donald J Trump, Benito Amilcare Andrea Mussolini came from a lower-middle class family. His father was a socialist blacksmith, his mother a devout schoolteacher. The similarities are there though: Like Trump, Mussolini was boastful, brash and fostered a rabid cult of personality. Similarly, Il Duce was extremely vain.
Another parallel between Trump and Mussolini is the distance between claims about achievements and the reality.
As with Trump, Mussolini was far from stupid, despite his populist posturing. He held power from 1922 to 1943 and managed to remake Italy’s economic, legal and cultural institutions in his own image. But, unlike Hitler, he did not gain the loyalty of the armed forces, nor did he manage to destroy the power and influence of the royal family, a fact that ultimately led to his undoing.
The image presented by Mussolini to the Italian public and the world at large was that of a sportsman, intellectual and gifted musician.
E E Cummings wrote about his experience in newly Facist Italy for Vanity Fair in 1926:
A revolution or something, had just happened. We sought refuge in a stationery shop. Before our eyes reposed a series of coloured postcards celebrating the recent cataclysm. The first card at which we glanced depicted Mussolini, in the role of Christ, raising Italia, in the role of Lazarus, from the dead. Shocked to our aesthetic foundations, we left hurriedly both the shop and Italia.
His explanation of Italy’s acceptance of Il Duce could well be recast as a description of Donald Trump’s rhetoric about “making America great again,”:
If Italia swallowed the dictatorship pill, Mussolini positively guaranteed that she would rise from the dead and be alive even as she was alive in the days of the Caesars. In other words, she would be alive at the expense of everybody else and would rule the modern world very much as Rome ruled the ancient world.
Donald Trump recently promised to introduce something “worse than waterboarding” if he were to win the presidency. Mussolini went far beyond torture. He suppressed the media — deriding them in ways that will seem familiar to any Trump watcher — and masterminded brutal crackdowns, executions and ultimately the use of poison gas on multiple occasions.
His regime used mustard gas and phosgene, and during its five-year campaign to subdue rebellions in its Africa colony of Ethiopia, Italian forces killed thousands of civilians, estimated to have been around 7% of the country’s population.
Trump’s opportunist and cynical embrace of racist rhetoric does not go as far as Il Duce’s yet, but you could argue that it is simply a lack of opportunity.
Unlike Hitler — who, early in their relationship, hugely admired Mussolini — the Italian was not a true believer in the oppression and ultimate extermination of the Jews.
For most of the 1930s, Mussolini rejected the concept of ‘racial’ superiority. Asked about the German diktat that its citizens must carry passports bearing ‘Aryan’ or ‘Jew,’ in 1934, the dictator openly mocked the concept of the ‘German race’:
By which race? Does there exist a German race? Has it ever existed? Will it ever exist? Reality, myth or hoax of the theorists? Ah well, we respond, a Germanic race does not exist. Various movements. Curiosity. Stupor. We repeat. Does not exist. We don’t say so. Scientists say so. Hitler says so.
In an earlier interview with German-Swiss journalist Emil Ludwig, who was Jewish, he went even further: “Race! It is a feeling, not a reality: ninety-five percent, at least, is a feeling.”
His position began to change in 1938 with the introduction of the ‘Manifesto of Race’. It was drawn from the Nuremberg Laws, legislation imposed by the Nazis to strip Jews of rights and property.
Italy’s anti-Jewish laws stripped Italian Jews of their citizenship, government jobs and professional standing. Marriage between Jews and non-Jews was forbidden. Land ownership was restricted and Jews were banned from serving in the armed forces, employing non-Jewish servants or having the dubious honour of belonging to the Facist party.
Despite the imposition of the Manifesto, persecution of the Jewish population was largely unpopular among the Italian people. Mussolini and Italian military commanders blocked German attempts to deport Italian Jews to concentration camps, but fanatical members of the party and those seeking to suck up to the Germans did seize and deliver Jews to the SS.
In 1943, Mussolini told Italian journalist Bruno Spampanato that the Manifesto and the results of it “could have been avoided” and explicitly attacked the virulent anti-Semitic philosophy pursued by the Nazis: “I am far from accepting [Albert] Rosenberg’s myth.”
Rosenberg was the Nazi ideologue who shaped the ‘Master Race’ mindset.
Unlike Trump, who has aimed to paint Muslims as an extreme threat to the United States, Mussolini cosied up to Islam, as a means of strengthening his power base in the Middle East. In 1937, he accepted the ‘Sword of Islam’ from the Muslims of Libya and had himself declared ‘Protector of Islam’ in propaganda.
However, like Trump, Mussolini picked up the trappings of religion when they suited him. Starting as largely irreligious — a product of his father’s socialist views and his own hatred of his religious boarding school rather than a kicking out at his mother’s devout Catholicism — he later turned to the Catholic Church to help him consolidate his position.
As I’ve already indicated, Mussolini had an ego that could have gone blow for blow with Trump’s. His love of Nietzsche led him to excitement over the concept of man and superman. It’s not hard to guess which one Mussolini saw himself as:
“The supreme egoist who defied both God and the masses, who despised egalitarianism and democracy, who believed in the weakest going to the wall and pushing them if they did not go fast enough.”
He lashed out frequently at the Catholic Church in his years as newspaper editor, deriding it for “its authoritarianism and refusal to allow freedom of thought.” There’s a gigantic irony there, of course, coming from the pen of a man who later mastered in both traits.
But, just as Trump has found increasingly found religion as his political ambitions have grown, Mussolini worked to consolidate his power by at least publicly sucking up to the Church.
He began in 1924 by ensuring that three of his children took communion. The following year he took part in a new, religious marriage ceremony with his wife, Rachele, who he had married 10 years previously in a purely civil service.
As well as public relations efforts — looking a little more Catholic for the people — Mussolini acted to shore up the political position with the Church, signing the Lateran Pact, which put Vatican City entirely in the control of the Pope and under church law.
The dictator also used his power to make Catholicism the state religion and mandated that it be taught in schools, as well as banning contraception and the Masons — not usually two things you see together.
The official Catholic Church newspaper crowed: “Italy has been given back to God and God to Italy.”
Mussolini’s control over the state remained significant until the King finally made his move, following repeated military disasters and growing dissent among the people and the party. But his time in power was far from the fanatically ordered success suggested by the old saying “…at least he made the trains run on time.”
Heavily pushed by the official propaganda organs of the Facist state, the trains myth was dismissed by many contemporary observers. The American journalist George Seldes injected some reality in a dispatch published in 1936:
…the majority of the big expresses, those carrying eye-witnessing tourists, are usually put through on time, but on the smaller lines rail and road-bed conditions frequently cause delays.
His contemporary, the British journalist Elizabeth Wiskermann, also noted: “I travelled in a number that were late.”
Trump’s equivalent of the punctual trains is his apparent business genius. He brushes off bankruptcy as a tactical move and skips lightly over a significant number of failed or stalled property projects. This is the man who talked of taking a “small loan of a million dollars” from his father, a man so malevolent he starred in a number of Woody Guthrie’s protest songs.
During the Second World War, long after he had used poison gas in waging wars of conquest, the general ineptitude of his forces kept Mussolini in the punchlines.
One joke, which appears in Rudolph Herzog’s ‘Heil Hitler! The Pig is Dead!’ — a study of Nazi humour — sums up the German attitude well:
German army HQ is told Mussolini has entered the war: “We’ll have to put up 10 divisions to counter him,” says one general.
“Oh no,” says the other, “You don’t understand — he’s on our side.”
“In that case,” says the first general, “we’ll need 20 divisions…”
President Trump would have something at his disposal that Mussolini did not — armed forces able to execute his plans. He would also face more concerted opposition and a political system he could not simply dismantle, but his success would still be disastrous.
E E Cumming’s conclusion on Mussolini for Vanity Fair could, once again, be lightly rewritten to cover Trump:
Mussolini has invented nothing. He has simply, as a means of purging his compatriots of their unworthiness, borrowed from America her most unworthy credo (the utterly transparent and lifeless lie: Time is money) and the results of this borrowing are already apparent…
Later, or sooner, everybody in the “land of beauty, of sunlight and song” will be minding everybody else’s business as thoroughly as everybody does in the dear old USA.
This article originally appeared on The Malcontent. Visit for more coverage of culture, media and politics as well as new original fiction.
