Hitler-Mussolini comparison

I read an early 1939 magazine article comparing the attributes of Hitler and Mussolini. The author felt Hitler was an overrated upstart who was going nowhere, while Mussolini was one of the great statesmen of the era. Mussolini won in the libido department, while Hitler never learned to drive a car. One memorable quote: "Mussolini makes history; Hitler makes geography" So, what if Hitler throws a tantrum in 1939, swallows his tongue and drops dead, and Mussolini fulfills the author's prophecy?
 
Mussolini would need more then Hitler dropping dead to be a great statesman. You would have to give him a sense of proportion and the realization of Italy's true limitations to do that.
 
Maybe Mussolini would end up having a "career" like Franco did in Spain -- Being rather passive "dictator"...?


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Well, you have to understand that Mussolini was the darling of the Democratic Right everywhere at the time. People really bought his story. To give you a small idea, Cole Porter wrote a smashing tune, still popular, called "You Are the Top." In its, unaltered, pre-WWII lyrics, one line went something like, "You are the top, you are Mussolini!" And I believe Churchill also called him a great statesman at the time.

So a lot depends on what he would do. Without Hitler (assuming as you that Hitler keeled over in 39) egging him on, it's possible that his saner cronies could've kept his megalomania in check and so that Abyssinia would be his last moronic foreign adventure. Indeed, until Hitler came to the scene, Mussolini was very much a cautious politician in terms of foreign policy. He talked big, but he was too afraid to do anything spectacular. It was only with Hitler's example that he began outgrowing his breeches; without Hitler at all, it's possible that there would have been no Abyssinia and thus no real break with the Western powers.

Thus, without Hitler, there's a real possiblity that Mussolini could have gone down as a lovable, bombastic, but a great of a guy dictator immediately after death. Then, like Franco, people would eventually look closer and find him to be a boor and a buffoon who ran one of the more spectacularly incompetent kleptocracies to have emerged in the 20th century Western Europe.

But not a monster and blood brother to Hitler as he is known now.
 
WI Mussolini dies in, let's say, '34 or '35? And better people do what he set to more earnestly and cautiously and achieve some success? Would he be made into some kind of an idol as the "Good" dictator? After all, some of his ideas turned out to be good (i.e New Deal-type program in Italy) and his propaganda was pretty believable too.
 

englander1

Banned
Mussolini wanted to pretend Italy was great rather than make it great.
He turned a blind eye to the failures within his system that was his problem.
Italian colonialism in Africa did show the World White Imperialism at its most brutal and powerful peak.
Mussolini could have been kept on side by both Britain and France had they allowed the occupation of Ethiopia no questions asked after all both Britain and France had huge African Empires.
 
Mussolini wanted to pretend Italy was great rather than make it great.
He turned a blind eye to the failures within his system that was his problem.
Italian colonialism in Africa did show the World White Imperialism at its most brutal and powerful peak.
Mussolini could have been kept on side by both Britain and France had they allowed the occupation of Ethiopia no questions asked after all both Britain and France had huge African Empires.

In order of sentence: Kind of true. Not true. Maybe true. Definetely not true.
 
Why not? Do you mean Mussolini would have abandoned them, or they would have abandoned him?

Mussolini would dump them. He wanted to restore Italy to the glory if the Roman Empire. But often he would sacrifice what could be done for what he wanted to be done. For example, in those military parades people like him enjoy, the Italians would tow Brass, Midieval cannons, because they lacked the real thing.
 
Actually, things might be far more problematic for Mussolini than the scenarios already described would suggest. Unlike most conservative autocracies, the Fascist revolution was conceived by its intellectual supporters and by the Italian populace (though in a more subconscious sense) as an epic project to create a new world order, a system of belief where the complexities and hypocrisies of the modern world would be simplified and erased, and a new national community would be formed. Unfortunately, as events in Germany, the Soviet Union, China, Cambodia, Japan, and so many other nations have proved, forging national myths is not a task that can be directed on high. By the middle of the 1930s, even before Hitler’s influence came to dominate the political landscape, Fascist Italy was beset by any number of familiar problems, namely national apathy among the general populace, a party apparatus that was congealing into a bureaucratic gerontocracy, an exhausted autocrat in command with no successor, diminishing returns on industrial and imperial megaprojects, and a growing alienation by the intellectual supporters of the regime, many of whom moved into the anti-Fascist resistance during the war. While I’m not saying that Italy would collapse by 1945 even without a Second World War, I would say that the system was not suited for the rigors of ordinary governance (Say what you will about the communists, but at least they knew how to run a bureaucracy). I’d recommend Simon Louvish’s The Resurrections for a worm’s eye view of the death of Mussolini in 1968, and the utter free-for-all that emerges in his death.

In this case, I doubt history would judge Mussolini kindly. Still, his final image may be that of a sick old man, out of touch with the world he once commanded, rather than the clownish image we have today. I can’t really imagine the world at large viewing him with any malice, unless some new regime came to power that made anti-fascism a fundamental part of its claim to legitimacy.
 

englander1

Banned
Actually, things might be far more problematic for Mussolini than the scenarios already described would suggest. Unlike most conservative autocracies, the Fascist revolution was conceived by its intellectual supporters and by the Italian populace (though in a more subconscious sense) as an epic project to create a new world order, a system of belief where the complexities and hypocrisies of the modern world would be simplified and erased, and a new national community would be formed. Unfortunately, as events in Germany, the Soviet Union, China, Cambodia, Japan, and so many other nations have proved, forging national myths is not a task that can be directed on high. By the middle of the 1930s, even before Hitler’s influence came to dominate the political landscape, Fascist Italy was beset by any number of familiar problems, namely national apathy among the general populace, a party apparatus that was congealing into a bureaucratic gerontocracy, an exhausted autocrat in command with no successor, diminishing returns on industrial and imperial megaprojects, and a growing alienation by the intellectual supporters of the regime, many of whom moved into the anti-Fascist resistance during the war. While I’m not saying that Italy would collapse by 1945 even without a Second World War, I would say that the system was not suited for the rigors of ordinary governance (Say what you will about the communists, but at least they knew how to run a bureaucracy). I’d recommend Simon Louvish’s The Resurrections for a worm’s eye view of the death of Mussolini in 1968, and the utter free-for-all that emerges in his death.

In this case, I doubt history would judge Mussolini kindly. Still, his final image may be that of a sick old man, out of touch with the world he once commanded, rather than the clownish image we have today. I can’t really imagine the world at large viewing him with any malice, unless some new regime came to power that made anti-fascism a fundamental part of its claim to legitimacy.

Mussolini did try to re-new the Fascist revolution in the late 1930's but didn’t do what needed to be done.
He should have moved to a much more anti-clerical, anti-monarcal pro-working class direction which was better seen in the Republic of Salo.
 
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