Mussolini and the Jews
From Nicholas Farrell
Sir: Ian Thomson states (Books, 22 October) that ‘these days’ it is ‘fashionable’ to portray Benito Mussolini as a ‘decent fellow’, and cites my biography of Mussolini as his evidence. I am not aware that I am fashionable, but anyway such a view of Mussolini is not mine. My (unfashionable) view is that Mussolini was a genius, which is also how Winston Churchill once described him; not a good man, but not half as bad as portrayed.
The fashionable view of Mussolini, on the other hand, is that he was simply a grotesque buffoon. Naturally, as a fashion victim, Thomson supports it. This is why he states that ‘Italian Fascism relied on bludgeons and intimidation’. Nonsense. Italian Fascism was wanted, not imposed. There was no Fascist Terror à la Danton or Lenin. There was no need. One reason for this is that Fascism tried to address spiritual, not just material, poverty.
On the subject of Mussolini and the Jews, Thomson states, trendily, ‘Mussolini’s gangs helped to deport more than 6,800 Italian Jews to Auschwitz and other Third Reich camps.’ Actually, no Jews were deported from Italy until after the fall of Mussolini in July 1943, by which time Mussolini and his Fascists had saved huge numbers of them from the Nazis and local collaborators in places like France and Croatia. To suggest that Mussolini wanted to exterminate Jews is absurd. Fascism (as distinct from National Socialism) was not intrinsically anti-Semitic. As the Israeli historian Yehoshua Porat wrote in the Israeli daily Yediot Aharonot on 30 November 2003, the Fascist regime ‘with the explicit approval of Mussolini’ saved the lives of ‘thousands of Jews’.
En passant, Thomson also bashes ‘Mussolini’s birthplace of Predappio (where Farrell has chosen to live)’ as apparently ‘awash with Fascist trinkets and other blackshirt memorabilia’. Even if true, this is with the approval of the council, which has been ‘red’ since the war! Lord preserve us from fashionable pundits who choose to see the world in black and white and not in colour.
Nicholas Farrell Forlì (nr Predappio), Italy
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