Benito Mussolini – Page 2 – Old Magazine Articles

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.

The Anti-Mussolini Resistance (Pathfinder Magazine, 1937)

It is terribly chic these days to insist that the presidency of Donald Trump was Fascist – no one would have found this statement more hilarious than the fellows who are profiled in the attached article. These are the men who were assaulted on the streets and in their offices by Mussolini’s supporters, these are the writers who were censored and blacklisted – these hardy souls were the original Anti-Fa.

Who Was Mussolini? (Pathfinder Magazine, 1937)

A semi-flattering profile of Benito Mussolini that explains his difficult childhood and the periodic beatings he suffered at the hands of his Marxist father. No references are made to his favorite pastimes – beating up editors and closing newspapers:

Significantly, his god is Nietzsche, the German philosopher who wrote: ‘Might makes right.’

You can read about his violent death here…

Fascist Rome fell to the Allies in June of 1944, click here to read about it…

Benito Mussolini And His Followers (American Legion Weekly, 1923)

A 1923 article about the earliest days of Mussolini and the Italian Black Shirts; their discomfort with neighboring Yugoslavia, their love of the Italian poet Gabriele D’Annunzio (1863 – 1938) and their post-war struggle against the Italian Communists:

When the Communists virtually ruled over Italy in 1920 and 1921, they set up a detestable tyranny. Railways could not carry troops. Officers were forbidden wear sidearms, and men with war medals were spat on and beaten.

Mussolini changed all that.

You can read about his violent death here…

Armistice Day Mussolini Style (American Legion Monthly, 1936)

American World War I veteran John Roberts Tunis (1889 – 1975) was charged with the task of writing about the two Armistice Day ceremonies as they were marked in both London and Rome; needless to say they were entirely different in nature and spirit. The attached piece is an excerpt from that article and reported on the manner in which fascist Italy observed the anniversary of November 11, 1918 – the day World War I came to a close; a war in which Italy lost 1,240,000 men. Tunnis was disgusted to observe how the Italians seemed to learn nothing from the war – Mussolini’s Armistice celebration was drenched in fascist pageantry and the attending masses had far greater interest in their current military adventures in Africa than remembering their sons and fathers who had perished just eighteen years earlier.

Musslolini And The Pope: Friction (Newsweek Magazine, 1939)

On June 29, 1931, Pope Pius XI issued an encyclical letter that condemned Italian fascism’s “pagan worship of the State” and “revolution which snatches the young from the Church and from Jesus Christ, and which inculcates in its own young people hatred, violence and irreverence.” The Pope irritated Mussolini to a further degree by labeling the Italian Fascist government as anti-Catholic after Il Duce put the kibosh on numerous Catholic youth organizations throughout the land. A Truce was agreed upon but as Mussolini grew closer to the Nazis later in the decade, and the battle reemerged.