Benito Mussolini

Find old Mussolini articles here. We have great newspaper articles on Mussolini check them out today!

The Passive Resistance of the Native Population
(Literary Digest, 1938)

Recently former Viceroy Graziani cabled Mussolini that ‘my surveys demonstrate that tranquility is absolute. The native population is with Italy.’ But a writer in the Tribuna of Rome admitted that ‘nobody must delude himself with the idea that the former Shoan-Galla ruling caste have resigned themselves to the loss of their privileges and have welcomed our Italian Empire.’

‘Ethiopia Smolders”
(Literary Digest, 1937)

Italy’s financial and human resources are being heavily drained, not only by a vast [Roman] road-building program in the conquered kingdom, but particularly by the efforts of 200,000 men who compose the fascist expeditionary force to pacify a warlike population of 9,000,000 natives in a territory larger than France and Italy combined.

‘War Fears in Italo-Ethiopia Rift”
(Literary Digest, 1935)

A report on the start of the Italian adventures in Ethiopia:

The dispute arose over alleged trespasses by Ethiopians on Italian possessions in Eritria and Italian Somaliland, in East Africa.

A solemn declaration of Abyssinia’s peaceful intentions toward Italy was read in broken but emphatic Italian to representatives of the foreign press in Rome by the nervous and impassioned Negradsa Yesus, Abyssinian Charge d’ Affaires. In fervent tones he asserted that Abyssinia’s intentions were so peaceful ‘that if Italy remained without a single soldier and without a single gun in her colonies, Abyssinia would not touch a single stone.’


Mussolini explained why he invaded Ethiopia in this article…

The Italian Conquest of Ethiopia
(Literary Digest, 1937)

A column about Mussolini’s Minister of Colonies, Emilio De Bono (1866 – 1944) and his popular book, La Preparazione E Le Prime Operazioni:

Last week, with the appearance of a third printing, following a sold-out second edition (both of which were marked for publication in 1937), Italians at home and abroad noted certain deletions, including the passage which intimated that Mussolini had been on the point of abandoning his campaign in the face of British armed intervention.

The Black-Shirt Revolution
(The Nation, 1922)

A report by Carleton Beals on Italy’s new order:

The strong state has arrived in Italy. It has been on the road ever since the failure of the factory seizures in September, 1920.

The Fascisti
(Current Opinion, 1921)

A tight little essay that clarifies the force behind Italian fascism. This was an editorial penned by Dr. Frank Crane, a pastor who appeared regularly in the pages of CURRENT OPINION.

The Fascisti is a name given to a political party in Italy. Political parties, and indeed almost all organizations, as has often been pointed out, hold together and get their strength by hating something. The Fascisti hate the Bolshevists, Communists and the like.


Click here to read about those who resisted Mussolini.

Fascism At It’s Peak
(Time Magazine, 1923)

A dictatorship can last forever, if properly managed. It is my task to provide a mechanism that will endure and to have the various parts of this mechanism running without friction; then after I am gone it will be able to run itself. A dictatorship must answer the purpose for which it was introduced. Certainly the Fascist regime will last a very long time… Socialism works on the principle that all are equal, but Fascism knows we are far from equal. Take the great masses of human beings. They like rule by the few.

Fascism’s Triumph Explained by Italian-American Journalists
(Literary Digest, 1922)

At the request of The Literary Digest editors, a number of Italian-language journalists working in North America were asked to explain the great success that the Italian Fascists were experiencing in 1922 Italy. This article lists an enormous number of Italian language newspapers that existed in the United States at that time; virtually every medium-sized to large American city had one. We were surprised to find that the most pro-Mussolini Italian-American newspaper operating in the U.S. was located in New York City.


In the late Thirties, early Forties the FBI began to monitor the Italian-Americans who adored Mussolini – Click here to read about it

The Man Behind Mussolini
(Ken Magazine, 1939)

This short, slanderous profile of Italy’s Victor Emmanuel III (1869 – 1947) is accompanied by a caricature of the potentate:

He chose Mussolini in 1922 in preference to dictatorship by Premiere (Luigi) Facta, aided him in attaining supreme power…Hasn’t had any choice about anything since.

WANTED: BAMBINI
(Pathfinder Magazine, 1937)

Since 1922 Italy’s marriage rate has fallen to 7.2 per 1,000 of population, her birth rate to 22.2 per 1,000 and her excess of births over deaths to 8.7 per 1,000. The newspaper IL POPOLO d’ITALIA of Milan has estimated that the steady decline in the birth rate has deprived Il Duce of 15 army divisions.

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