the duce was almost always wrong | Mussolini

Interesting theory but still hard to vindicate Mussolini | Mussolini | R. J. B. Bosworth

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	• Mussolini R. J. B. Bosworth A Hodder Arnold Publication, 2003 - 624 pages average customer review:based on 8 reviews view larger image
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Thorough, Complete, and Valuable.

It seems like I have been studying World War II all my life, but a glaring deficiency in my education is my lack of knowledge concerning the intricacies of Fascist Italy. This caused me to pick up a used copy of this book the other day and I wasn't disappointed. I will say though that I thought the font on the paperback edition was too small, and I share this here just in case anyone else is really annoyed by small print. Bosworth's accounting of Il Duce was complete and fascinating. His narration skills are strong although his contempt for Mussolini definitely comes across in these pages which is really the only criticism that I have. Clocking in at around 430 pages, this text packs a serious punch and provides a brimming overview of the man and his times. The panorama he gives on Italy and the Italian people also made it well worth the money. Mussolini was more than a brutal clown, and Bosworth's study of him allows us to realize this.

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the duce was almost always wrong

Richard Bosworth is an academic specialized in modern Italian history, who improbably teaches at the University of Western Australia. After reading his spin-off of this book, I decided to read this book.

Bosworth doesn't disappoint with this exceptionally well-written biography of one of the more unpleasant individuals to rule Italy. Anyone who was expelled from school for knifing a fellow student, who accepted foreign money for influencing his country's politics towards bringing it into a disastrous war, who didn't shy from using violence and murder to advance his political ends, who openly and flagrantly dishonored his marital vows, who used racial and religious animosities for political ends, and under whose command poison gas was used against Ethiopians cannot be a statesman, and ought have no place in politics. In this book the strong impression arises that Bosworth went out of his way to be fair to the "duce" but that there just was little that was flattering to be said for him. However, when Bosworth describes Preston's biography of Franco as "authoritative," and compares him to the other unelected European leaders of his time, I am not persuaded that Bosworth was as meticulously fair-minded.

Bosworth describes himself as a proud product of 1789, and writes that he is quite open to hearing criticisms that his politics color his historiography. I do believe this to be the case: Bosworth is quite willing to describe the pathology of the duce, but doesn't ponder why Italians were willing to tolerate such a loathsome individual as their leader. A possible explanation, whose omission is easily explained by Bosworth's unabashed identification with the fateful year of 1789, is that Italy was not so much a single country, as several countries which had uneasily been united during the Risorgimento. Milan and Turin were completely different from Sicily and Calabria, and the former Papal States between them were yet different again. Perhaps the Italians of his day were initially willing to let a demagogue and thug bind together "the Italies," to use Bosworth's words, because their country was far too heterogeneous to withstand the centrifugal forces democracy can unleash. I believe an approach more along the ideas of Edmund Burke would have far preferable to trying to force 1789 onto a rather fractured country. Better eight solid and slows steps forward than twelve rapid steps forwards and sixteen tortured steps backwards.

Bosworth writes that any historian of Italy must take pains to ensure that he doesn't absorb preconceived notions about Italy, and it is clear that Bosworth does his utmost to avoid this trap. I suspect that it is precisely in this endeavor, that Bosworth comes to the conclusion that if Italy had only been more like other liberal European countries, none of this would have happened. In my opinion, Italy was Italy, because it was different, and it would have been preferable not to try to overcome, but rather to make use of, Italy's differences.

I would strongly recommend this impressively-written and quite sobering look at Mussolini to anyone who can distinguish between Bosworth's laudable historiography and his less authoritative political views.

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Interesting theory but still hard to vindicate Mussolini

RJ Bosworth makes an interesting attempt at writing a positive biography of Mussolini. This book does a decent job of summarizing parts of the Duce's life but does jump around quite a bit. Many of the things that make this book useful are in relation to how it reacts to other biographies and accounts of Mussolini. Bosworth glazes over many of the foreign policy decisions which are where so many other biographies are highly critical of Mussolini. It is noteworthy to try and write a biography that puts Mussolini in a different light and when combined with Dennis Mack Smith's biography of Mussolini (which is pretty negative) the reader can get a great sense of Mussolini himself. Bosworth is one of the premiere Italian historians and his work is always insightful and well done. The only compliant I have with this book is the jumping around and skipping over areas. The Brenner Pass meeting is not covered in this book and that is one of the pivotal moments in Mussolini's life and Italian history. I still would recommend this book through as long as it is being read with other sources to get a more complete picture.

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a leader who did much harm

Unlike most biographies, Bosworth's book actually starts from late in Mussolin's life, specifically his last 2 years alive 1944-45 and later resumes with Mussolini's birth and childhood and moves on to his adulthood as a teacher and writer and traces his political beginnings which were actually as a socialist. Later on it describes how Mussolini turned to fascism, gained power, and the prewar years and World War II. I was a little surprised at how much damage Mussolini did to Libya and Ethiopia as well as the magnitude of the killings of the local populations in those areas carried out by the Italians. The book includes a section of photographs as well as maps, footnotes, and bibliography. The last chapter even gives an account of the travels of Mussolini's corpse after he was executed and put on diplay in Milan. As much as this was a biography of Mussolini, it also seemed to be an analysis of fascism as a whole and how much harm that ideology and Mussolini were for Italy and the Italian people, as well as the above mentioned areas of Africa, and Europe. All in all, it was an interesting read, however, one can only pity the Italian people for having to put up with such poor, damaging, and detrimental leadership for such a long time, during an especially critical part of their history. I believe the fact that Mussolini is mentioned in the same breath with such a harmful leader as Hitler is indeed fitting and appropriate.

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In 1945, disguised in German greatcoat and helmet, Mussolini attempted to escape from the advancing Allied armies. Unfortunately for him, the convoy of which he was part was stopped by partisans and his features, made so familiar by Fascist propaganda, gave him away. Within 24 hours he was executed by his captors, joining those he sent early to their graves as an outcome of his tyranny, at least one million people.
He was one of the tyrant-killers who so scarred interwar Europe, but we cannot properly understand him or his regime by any simple equation with Hitler or Stalin. Like them, his life began modestly in the provinces; unlike them, he maintained a traditonal male family life, including both wife and mistresses, and sought in his way to be an intellectual. He was cruel (though not the cruellist); his racism existed, but never without the consistency and vigor that would have made him a good recruit for the SS. He sought an empire; but, in the most part, his was of the old-fashioned, costly, nineteenth century variety, not a racial or ideological imperium. And, self-evidently Italian society was not German or Russian: the particular patterns of that society shaped his dictatorship.
Bosworth's Mussolini allows us to come closer than ever before to an appreciation of the life and actions of the man and of the political world and society within which he operated. With extraordinary skill and vividness, drawing on a huge range of sources, this biography paints a picture of brutality and failure, yet one tempered with an understanding of Mussolini as a human being, not so different from many of his contemporaries.

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