A Powerful and Much Admired Fascist Dictator

(More thoughts and ideas from Jonah Goldberg's Liberal Fascism.)

The Italian Fascist movement was founded in 1919. Jews were actually overrepresented in that movement until they were kicked out in 1938. The father of fascism was Benito Mussolini. Mussolini, at first, had many admirers around the world: Churchill, Einstein, Freud, Will Rogers, the American Legion, Toscanini, Columbia University, and Lowell Thomas are mentioned by Goldberg. But Mussolini's fascism had its critics: Ernest Hemingway and Henry Miller were two.

Mussolini's father, a blacksmith, was an "ardent socialist with an anarchist bent." Benito, at age ten, "led a demonstration against his school for serving bad food." At the age of eighteen he began his career as a "left-wing journalist." His father hated the Catholic Church. Benito did his father proud, when he referred to Jesus as an "ignorant Jew," and he tried to purge Christians from the ranks of Italian Socialism. He "demanded that party members renounce religious marriage, baptism, and all other Christian rituals."

Boasting "169 mistresses over the course of his career, Mussolini was also, by contempory standards, something of a rapist." Goldberg believes that Mussolini, being a sex symbol, "paved the way for the sexual deification of Che Guevara." He also "cultivated an impression of being married to all Italian women." When Italy faced sanctions for its invasion of Ethiopia, Mussolini asked Italians to donate their gold to the state. Millions sent in their wedding rings; 250,000 women in Rome alone!

Mussolini and Lenin were mutual admirers. At one point Mussolini considered "moving to the leftist haven of Vermont, (which fills much the same function today)." He was "astoundingly well read and fluent in socialist theory." He carried a Karl Marx medallion in his pocket.