On Mussolini and the bystanders – Lucy Hughes-Hallett in TLS:

‘In 1931 the exiled anti-fascist Lauro De Bosis flew, in a flimsy wooden aeroplane, from Marseille to Rome. Arriving in the skies over the Italian capital, he dropped leaflets, then turned back. The round trip was inordinately long for such an aircraft. De Bosis did not expect to complete it. He had left behind, ready for publication, a text called The Story of My Death. On the return journey his plane – out of fuel – crashed into the sea. One of his leaflets contained a warning to those less principled Italians who were, gladly or with glum pragmatism, getting by in fascist Italy: “Accept nothing from fascism. All that it can give you is the price of your prostitution”.’

(…)

‘Throughout those years the great majority of Italians, like a sex worker who consoles herself for her commodification by telling herself that she has no choice, accepted what De Bosis called the price of their prostitution. In some cases that price was simply the negative one of not being repeatedly and brutally beaten up, as those who resisted the regime were. In others it might be advantages like a lucrative job, immunity from prosecution or access to some power. Or it might be – and in the beginning this was, for millions, an irresistibly tempting offer – the feeling of stability that a strong government seemed to provide, the relief of not living (as many Italians in the early 1920s felt that they were) in a country on the verge of a civil war and/or a Bolshevik revolution.
One of those who gladly accepted that “price” was John Foot’s Italian great-grandmother, Aurelia. He opens his book by recounting a family story. The Foot family would gather every summer at his grandmother’s house in Cornwall. They were a left-leaning clan. John’s great-uncle was the Labour leader Michael Foot. His father was the Socialist Workers Party-supporting journalist Paul Foot. Table talk was politically engaged and argumentative. Every now and then someone would use the word “fascist” in its loose, non-specifically pejorative sense. Paul Foot later told his son that each time they did so, great-grandmother Aurelia, who had been living in Bologna in the 1920s, would interject. “Ah, the fascism! It was wonderful!”’

(…)
‘The book is chronologically organized, year by year – an almanac of totalitarian violence. Within that simple frame Foot presents not a continuous, unifying narrative, but a mosaic. He is showing us an entire society, and a society is made up of myriads of individuals: so his book is made up of scores of unconnected stories, brought together not by causation but by coincidence, and brusquely told. In that year this happened, and this, and this. Less skilfully done, his approach could be jumpy or confusing, but Foot uses the strategy ably, its piecemeal nature mirroring the impression of a country where the enforced togetherness of corporatism was replacing the human-kindness of community.
The tesserae – the fragments that make up the whole – are diverse. This is a book swarming with people, each one of whose stories adds another touch to the big picture. Here, the account of a communist-on-fascist murder followed by brutal reprisals by the squadristi, the Blackshirts who believed not in taking a life for a life, but in taking dozens of lives for one. There, the brief biography of a Jewish official, proudly serving the fascist state before being deprived of his job, his rights and his life. There, a many-voiced rendering of the trial of 132 people held responsible for the “barbaric and vulgar violence” that exploded in Empoli in March 1921, when the townspeople believed they were fighting for their lives against the squadristi. “The spectacle of those huge cages full of prisoners is truly extraordinary” wrote an eyewitness.’ (…)
‘Foot is not offering a justification of what came next, but he is showing how violent and alarming were the actions to which the rise of fascism was the reaction. Landowners and industrialists looked at what was happening in Russia and were afraid. To protect themselves and their property, they hired people from the loosely defined movement that Foot describes as “a mixture of organised crime and paramilitary vigilantism”, and Mussolini called the “trenchocracy” – the returned soldiers, the Blackshirts. Liberal politicians up to and including the grand old man, the five times prime minister Giovanni Giolitti, saw the fascists as tools they could use against socialist insurrection. Giolitti invited Mussolini to join his coalition, his “big list”. Fascists had come in from the cold, into the centre of power. Far from bolstering the liberal establishment, they turned on it. So two Red Years were followed by twenty Black ones.
It is not hard to find evidence of fascism’s brutality. Foot gives us a partly quoted, partly paraphrased version of Italo Balbo’s account of the night he and his followers set fire to the Palazzo delle Cooperative in Ravenna. Addressing parliament afterwards, the socialist Claudio Treves called the historic building, and the hundred-odd co-operatives for which it was the headquarters, “a miracle of faith and work, an institution of which the proletariat was proud and which was admired and studied from abroad”. Balbo, one of the most brutal of fascist leaders, had no compunction about destroying it and no hesitation in boasting about doing so: “The whole city was lit up … There are no half-measures in civil warfare, unfortunately … I announced [to the chief of police] that I would burn down and destroy the houses of all socialists in Ravenna”. Fascist violence was real and bloody, but it was also performative. The more it was seen to be done, the more effective it was.’

(…)
‘A chapter on the persecution of Italy’s Jews, which resoundingly contradicts the widespread assumption that fascism only became antisemitic after the Pact of Steel with Nazi Germany. And then the war (summarily dispatched) and the downfall.’ (…)
‘Francesco Filippi is not telling stories, he is marshalling arguments. Mussolini Also Did a Lot of Good is his riposte to those modern Italians who would still agree with Foot’s great-grandmother. He is intent on debunking “historical fake news”, and exposing what his Italian subtitle calls “le idioze” still in circulation about fascism.
His short book is exasperated in tone and punchy in manner. Each segment responds to one of the myths about fascism (those punctual trains among them). Mussolini introduced old-age pensions, they say. No, says Filippi, that was Francesco Crispi, back in 1895. The fascist regime merely took over the existing institutions for the administration of public welfare and used them as a form of social control. Mussolini challenged the mafia and introduced a rule of law, they say. No, says Filippi, he was a swindler and an embezzler who repeatedly broke the law (including the law against murder). Italians were better off financially under fascism, they say. No, says Filippi.’ (…)
‘Foot wants to remind his readers what fascism was like and to alert them to the possibility of similar regimes arising now, in Italy or elsewhere. He quotes a novel written in the 1930s by the exiled anti-fascist Ignazio Silone. A young workman is being beaten up because he failed to salute the flag. Police arrive, congratulate the attackers on “their patriotic action”, then arrest the man. Silone writes: “A big crowd had gathered but kept completely silent”.’

Read the article here.
The longing for the clarity and also the brutality of fascism have not disappeared of course. And I know that violence is extremely contagious, but I’m not sure that performative quality of violence will as attractive nowadays as it was hundred years ago.

Not that mankind has been morally uplifted, but 75 years of peace in Western Europe spread the joy of the non-violent society, which basically means that violence has been outsourced to the periphery, Afghanistan et cetera.

One might say: Yugoslavia.

Yes, but if totalitarianism returns it will be more subtle, the performative, brazen violence will be replaced with efficient and human and animal friendly violence.
What will be the same is this: all it can give you is the price of your prostitution.