Communists caught him, executed him, and hung his body in the Piazzale Loreto so regular folks could spit and piss on him.

about this?

of an anniversary.

this ain't fascinating to you:

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c7/Mussolini_e_Petacci_a_Piazzale_Loreto%2C_1945.jpg

no?

don't care.

The plainer thing that really hits me is that we see our present social and political stability as so permanent, but this was really recent.

Why assume everyone is up on everything?
Everyone is NOT up on everything.
When not up on something...ask.
*shrugs*

"Get ready....for your blessing....."
"Bury me by my Grand-Grand and when you can come follow me"

why not do some research yourself?

you even admitted to having the time.

The question I posed was a straight up question and he gave a perfect straight up answer with enough substance to allow me to move forward with some frame of reference. Almost like when you pick up a new book, and you check the back cover or inside flap for quick synopsis...


"Get ready....for your blessing....."
"Bury me by my Grand-Grand and when you can come follow me"

i guess this is the intersection at which we both spend our downtime.

i think it's lazy; you think it's efficient.

we can all win.

right?

Ease.


"Get ready....for your blessing....."
"Bury me by my Grand-Grand and when you can come follow me"

i love you, fluid.

was wondering the same myself. In not a bad way, just curiuos.

i didn't mean to imply you was wiling out over there. not like that, at least.

Offhand, I'd say a good 85% of my posts over about 20 years here have received crickets. Mussolini wasn't even the most important fascist to die in this week in 1945 (Hitler was up in a couple days) so this is undercard shit, at best.

But I can tell you why I care about it.

The first reason is historical. Americans like to flatter themselves that our liberal, democratic order prevailed over fascism in WWII. Obscuring the sacrifices and success of communists during this period is intentional, as it is meant to additionally obscure a lesson that (to me at least) is revealed in the story of Mussolini's death: that the desire for political power is both libidinal and more common than we imagine. People intuit that the state is nothing but a relationship, and that makes us ultimately responsible for our own freedom. Fascism rises when capital and nationalism collaborate to steal political power from the people.

Our good, liberal democracy is not fascism in shape or size, but it does commit the same theft by slowly narrowing the scope of legitimate political involvement. Over the past few decades we've seen a large scale decline in avenues for regular people to collectively realize political power. Union membership and action have declined. Wealthy people use philanthropy as a shield against having to participate in the successful administration of the state on the same grounds as the rest of us. What you have left is a vote, which we rhetorically privilege as an act of free expression and then deflate as a strategic expression of surrender to one view of the state-as-relationship or another.

That's not some grand evil. Voting is an act, and one that reinforces our collective obligation to each other. But I think that even though we've tried our asses off to describe our current, minimal political participation as calm and even and rational, we're still Milanese working people, waiting for a body to spit and piss on. And that's where socialism as an ideology has something to offer that liberalism doesn't: actual, chaotic political power given to real people and rather than a thin sliver of DC people.

And to be clear, I grew up in the DC area (MoCo) and live in the district now after leaving for fifteen years. Both my parents worked for the federal government when I was growing up, and my father continued to do so until the Bush administration. They're good people who want the best for Americans, but not if it comes at a loss of control for our educated liberal betters. That's the one thing that they'll never cough up.

"Get ready....for your blessing....."
"Bury me by my Grand-Grand and when you can come follow me"

The USSR threw wave after wave after wave of bodies at the Nazi's. 20 million Russians died to win that WWII. It does not happen without them. Communism is the great enemy of Facism (Nazism being the more commonly known/used term in the US), not Liberalism. The US was on the winning side of that war, but the US did not WIN that war.

>The USSR threw wave after wave after wave of bodies at the
>Nazi's. 20 million Russians died to win that WWII. It does not
>happen without them.

If an American general recognized the urgent threat of Nazism and committed literal millions of soldiers to stamp it out no matter the cost and American lives were the ones who stood up and agreed to this exchange, we would throw our country a weekly holiday to celebrate it. Georgy Zhukov does it and he's a clunky butcher who blithely commends enormous human suffering. And the Soviet soldiers weren't brave young men (and women, because it doesn't dissolve the immense human rights issues of the USSR to point out that they were better at gender equality in some areas than we are) but brainwashed commies who threw themselves into the woodchipper simply because the state asked.

>Communism is the great enemy of Facism
>(Nazism being the more commonly known/used term in the US),
>not Liberalism. The US was on the winning side of that war,
>but the US did not WIN that war.

Yep. It doesn't require a blind assent to the USSR, especially the USSR under Stalin, to point out that they understood the threat of fascism before the liberal nations of Europe and especially before the United States did.

This is my HS history class talking, so bear with me lol.

The Soviets were pretty much allies of Germany at the start of the war (maybe frenemies). It wasn't until the Nazis decided to try to conquer the USSR (Operation Barbarossa) that the Soviets started fighting them.

It wasn't the threat of fascism that sparked the Soviets to action. It was existential threat of an invading nation. And it happened much later than the Europeans.

USSR didn't care about fascism until it threatened them


>
>Yep. It doesn't require a blind assent to the USSR, especially
>the USSR under Stalin, to point out that they understood the
>threat of fascism before the liberal nations of Europe and
>especially before the United States did.

We joined the war in Europe similarly late and with similar self-interest, but didn't accomplish or lose as much. So why is our heroic intervention in WWII an acceptable source of national mythology and not theirs? I'm actually teaching a very remedial class in 20th century history right now and one of the points that I'm trying to drive home is that trying to find moments where you say "the USSR was acting based on national self-preservation in this case" and "the USSR was acting based on ideology in this case" sort of misses the point when you remember they were figuring out on the fly what it meant to have a modern, bounded nation state based on a fundamentally internationalist ideology.

Past that, I think you're mischaracterizing the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. It reads like two major powers who were aware that their objectives for Eastern Europe were going to collide, violently, sooner rather than later and wanted to put it off for as long as possible. It was a disastrous concession to the Nazis, but it wasn't friendship.

It's also worth arguing that maybe you should widen your scope as long as we're arguing about whether there is a natural, active opposition between fascism and communism. World War II wasn't the only grounds for the Soviet Union to act on anti-fascism as a goal - and it wasn't the only time that it did. The USSR sent thousands of people to fight for the Spanish republic in the Spanish Civil War,just as the Nazis sent their support for the Nationalists. We can see that as a proxy war with self-preservation at stake or we can see that as an ideological conflict, but I think the correct answer is that both sides understood it as both of those things. If you want another example, very early in the existence of the Soviet Union, Lenin offered vocal support and advice for the Bavarian Soviet Republic in 1919, before the Bavarian communists were smashed to pieces by the proto-fascist Freikorps - many of which would become literal Nazis as soon as it was available as a political option.

So, I agree that I'm romanticizing their involvement, but don't view that as a misunderstanding of the events in play. Look at photos from the Battle of Berlin. Their involvement *was* romantic - at least as much as war can possibly be - and as one last point I think it's also worth taking a different, bottom-up perspective that includes the huge number of communist partisans that were independent of the USSR who took up arms against fascists in the 30's and 40's. Stalin vs. Hitler isn't the only way to look at this, and there are millions of dead communists who entered this struggle independent of that top-down conflict.

I'm not going to pretend I'm informed on this topic outside of what a wrestling coach taught me in HS. But what I'm gathering from what you wrote is that the world and the history of it is complicated.
It is damn near impossible to say "this happened solely because that"

I don't really disagree with you by much. It just seems like a matter of framing to me.

>It is damn near impossible to say "this happened solely
>because that"

History is story-telling. We're working with the same set of facts, and even though I disagree with how you've strung those together, I don't think you've said anything factually incorrect, much less dishonest. So even if the project of saying that "this thing led to that thing" is really complicated, the process of moving toward a clearer understanding seems really important. Especially when we're run by an honest-to-god fascist with no desire to play by the rules of historical story-telling.

To me, the way it should work is you analyze some uncontested facts and tell your story. I get viciously angry and tell you that you're wrong, based on the same uncontested facts and/or additional ones, from reframing the scope of the story we're telling by geography or year or perspective. And then some third sucker comes in and explains that we're BOTH incredibly misguided, offering another new story. And then you and I both turn on that dumb-dumb, in spite of mostly disagreeing before their presence.

Storytelling and arguing. I've got a class full of incredibly dedicated women right now that I'm trying to teach 20th century history (this isn't my typical area of interest and my background in it is VERY limited) and this is the chaotic, messy process that I'm trying to teach them.

They'll teach you good lessons toin apply all other areas of life tho

And education on the subject(s) here is obviously pro-American, looking at situations where the US backed dictatorships and/or fascism over the course of the last 75 years or so - while framing our foreign policy, incessantly, as "promoting democracy" or some similar refrain - through red, white, and blue-tinted glasses.

The US and USSR's involvement in WWII and the subsequent Cold War are not anywhere near the black and white conflict it's viewed as from our slanted perspective.

And that shouldn't be taken as a full-throated defense of the USSR/Russia, either. It's not. Just echoing your point, in that Capitalism vs. Communism isn't anywhere near black and white. Communism isn't the devil it's made out to be here.

>the US backed dictatorships and/or fascism over the course of the last >75 years or so - while framing our foreign policy, incessantly,
>as "promoting democracy" or some similar refrain - through
>red, white, and blue-tinted glasses.

Yep. And particularly during the Cold War you have a bunch of very broad, sweeping narratives that collide with each other in really messy, interesting ways. Socialism vs. Capitalism is just a story of competing ideologies until you have specific nations who embody those ideologies trying to figure out what that means on the fly - and often through the lens of a much more discrete story of US vs. USSR. But that latter narrative sometimes consumes the first, say when Stalin and Tito - both dedicated to communist ideology - fell out with each other. Or when the USSR put down independent labor movements in Poland.

Or when other countries, particularly outside the North American/European framework, started to see themselves as the embodiment of socialist values. China (mostly) giving the USSR the cold shoulder and the first world proletariat with some skepticism and tiny, insignificant Cuba sending thousands of soldiers abroad to help African revolutions with no clear, national benefit reframes the socialism vs. capitalism narrative as something independent of the traditional Cold War powers. But instead you get DIFFERENT overlapping narratives like Colonialism vs. Nationalism or De-Colonization vs. NeoColonialism.

And that invites a whole separate band of messiness into the analysis.

I'm OCD and like everything in a neat little package so these unending ideological overlaps, inconsistencies, and contradictions frustrate me to no end.

But I suppose that's exactly why I've always simultaneously been so interested in continuing to dig deeper and learn more about them as the years have gone on, in an effort to try and make sense of them.


>>the US backed dictatorships and/or fascism over the course
>of the last >75 years or so - while framing our foreign
>policy, incessantly,
>>as "promoting democracy" or some similar refrain - through
>>red, white, and blue-tinted glasses.
>
>Yep. And particularly during the Cold War you have a bunch of
>very broad, sweeping narratives that collide with each other
>in really messy, interesting ways. Socialism vs. Capitalism is
>just a story of competing ideologies until you have specific
>nations who embody those ideologies trying to figure out what
>that means on the fly - and often through the lens of a much
>more discrete story of US vs. USSR. But that latter narrative
>sometimes consumes the first, say when Stalin and Tito - both
>dedicated to communist ideology - fell out with each other. Or
>when the USSR put down independent labor movements in Poland.
>
>
>Or when other countries, particularly outside the North
>American/European framework, started to see themselves as the
>embodiment of socialist values. China (mostly) giving the USSR
>the cold shoulder and the first world proletariat with some
>skepticism and tiny, insignificant Cuba sending thousands of
>soldiers abroad to help African revolutions with no clear,
>national benefit reframes the socialism vs. capitalism
>narrative as something independent of the traditional Cold War
>powers. But instead you get DIFFERENT overlapping narratives
>like Colonialism vs. Nationalism or De-Colonization vs.
>NeoColonialism.
>
>And that invites a whole separate band of messiness into the
>analysis.

LOL yep yep yep re: Colonialism et al. It took me a long time to understand how Colonialism was different from so many other historical philosophies and ideologies. And I'm still working it out.

Cabaret Voltaire: 'Do The Mussolini (Headkick)'
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QzsPw0jNCjk

AND an entire band:
Mussolini Headkick - Your God is Dead
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oto_W6SkST8

https://www.parcast.com/dictators

BTW, the Ivan the Terrible episodes is the scariest thing I have ever heard in my entire life.


**********
"Everyone has a plan until you punch them in the face. Then they don't have a plan anymore." (c) Mike Tyson

"what's a leader if he isn't reluctant"

Thanks for the link. I'm going to check it out.

I'm having a hard time fitting podcasts back into my life since I no longer have to commute. I'm clearly missing some good content, though.

So this is gonna make me have to figure out that problem.

>
>https://www.parcast.com/dictators
>
>BTW, the Ivan the Terrible episodes is the scariest thing I
>have ever heard in my entire life.
>

I kind of want to dig deeper into Russian history. The Romanov's, Rasputin, Ivan the terrible, WWII... shit is all next levels of wild.

I read this book called called "Russka" when I was a junior in high school by this incredibly bizarre writer named Edward Rutherfurd. His whole schtick is 700+ page novels set in a particular city that trace a series of families in that city over, like, 5,000 years of storyline. So, Russka is set in this small town in Russia and the story starts in nigh-prehistoric times with the rivalries and inter-marriages and stuff of around a half-dozen different families. The families names change with different linguistic shifts that Mr. Rutherfurd has painstakingly written into his storylines, but continue to basically sound the same through the entire multi-millenia narrative. The stories with the families are interwoven with different big, real-life historical events, so every chapter is like it's own "Titanic" or something.

Rutherfurd wrote a few of these. The first one was called "Sarum" after Salisbury in England and I think it clocked a full one thousand pages. Russka was better, though. The sections on Ivan the Terrible are pretty wild, if I recall. There's also a few on Ireland.

I have no idea if he's still writing, and I'm afraid to revisit the books because I'm afraid they won't hold up. His whole move is really sort of ridiculous though if he's still alive and working he should team up with 23andMe for some horrifyingly addictive synthesis that they could just stream directly into white boomer History Channel dads' brains. Folks who are into genealogy would be tickled with these dumb books. But in addition to it being possible that they were actually good (gotta be okay to hold a HS kid's attention, right?) they were incredibly instrumental in encouraging me to study history, and specifically religious history. That may not have paid off in any sort of career success or even a stable position that I can rely on from semester to semester, but it's the life I chose and I really like teaching so it kind of feels like I owe him something.

Uh, in any case. If you like big, sweeping historical fiction and want to learn more about Russia with a kind of impressive (if a big on-the-nose) attention to historical detail, then I can assure you that there is a book that combines those two things and it... definitely exists.

I like it cuz I have some background on Mussolini (and now Stalin) but this pod is diving deeper into some things I wasn't really aware of re: both of them, as well.

We like to think we are all modern and evolved but I am pretty sure that a solid 30% (or whatever Trump's base is) would go for it.


**********
"Everyone has a plan until you punch them in the face. Then they don't have a plan anymore." (c) Mike Tyson

"what's a leader if he isn't reluctant"

>We like to think we are all modern and evolved but I am
>pretty sure that a solid 30% (or whatever Trump's base is)
>would go for it.

I agree that's the reason we think we're past all of this, though I think that the way we've papered over our (apparent) political bloodlust is by alienating ourselves from political participation.

At least in the liberal, democratic west, we think we're past the point in history where we string dictators upside down so that people can mutilate their bodies. But we're not past dictators and we're not past the daily, horrifying indignities that they force on regular people who just want to live their lives freely.

So what have we achieved except for making it clear to people who want to exert power over our lives that they won't suffer any consequences for it?

A private equity banker from wall street can make a budgetary decision that indirectly (or directly) leads to the death of 1000 of people on the otherwise of the globe (or city) and there are so many intermediaries between that decision making and death that no one is ever held responsible.

Who has been held accountable for the lead in the water in Flint?

Shit has changed in my lifetime because at least with the S&L scandals of the 80s people actually went to jail. It was unthinkable to send people to jail in 2008 though trillions of dollars were wiped away.


**********
"Everyone has a plan until you punch them in the face. Then they don't have a plan anymore." (c) Mike Tyson

"what's a leader if he isn't reluctant"

>Shit has changed in my lifetime because at least with the S&L
>scandals of the 80s people actually went to jail. It was
>unthinkable to send people to jail in 2008 though trillions of
>dollars were wiped away.

Any time you hear about an "old" scandal like that one, it sounds like... quaint now. Like men flipping out because a woman showed a bare shoulder in a movie. And as you point out, there were actual consequences.

https://www.besoccer.com/new/follow-your-leader-celtic-respond-to-fascism-with-image-of-mussolini-s-hanging-732936

Pretty awesome soccer hooliganism.

Basically the hanging minus the communists getting it done.

It's fascinating to me that there are soccer clubs that also have, at least to their supporters, political identities. Apparently St. Pauli in Germany is historically associated with anti-fascism?

Could you imagine what it would be like if American sports franchises also came freighted with political identities? Two areas where we don't really practice any sort of restraint coming together in a frightful/hilarious mix.

Tampa Bay Rays are Maoist. In this scenario.

to gusanos there is not a socialist bone in their bodies

Whereas... the Packers essentially being owned by their fans is a perfect framework for them having super left ultra fans. That and their identity revolving around the town's industry.

But yeah, unfortunately there are a lot of football clubs that use Nazi and fascist symbolism.

>Whereas... the Packers essentially being owned by their fans
>is a perfect framework for them having super left ultra fans.
>That and their identity revolving around the town's industry.

Between community ownership of the Packers and pretty strong union support, Wisconsin does seem like a place ripe for radicalization. You could probably run Trotsky himself there, particularly if he was willing to take a soft-on-drunk-driving position. Shit's like the state sport there.

>But yeah, unfortunately there are a lot of football clubs that
>use Nazi and fascist symbolism.

I have a friend who studies sociology of sports, and I'd love to see him deal with fascism and American football.

Instead he just, like, knows things about cricket. Which is not useful to me at all.

we scoff and laugh when North Korea forces compliance in showing deference to Kim Jong Un at one of his parades but think nothing of people at an amateur sporting event literally losing their shit when someone in attendance refuses to stand for the national anthem (I used to have a lefty friend who would drive blue collar white guys nuts at our friend's Golden Gloves fights)

>I have a friend who studies sociology of sports, and I'd love
>to see him deal with fascism and American football.
>
>Instead he just, like, knows things about cricket. Which is
>not useful to me at all.

I have no idea, but I would really like to see a good movie about this so I hope somebody chimes in. Wikipedia says that "Last Days of Mussolini" had Rod Steiger playing Mussolini and Henry Fonda was in it too. They're both pretty good.

Playing Mussolini would seem like a kind of low-upside choice for an actor. His persona was so, like, self-consciously absurd that it seems really easy for somebody to look ridiculous playing him.