Behind the Bastards - Part Two: The Man Who Invented Fascism

Episode Date: January 23, 2020

Robert is joined again by Shereen Lani Younes to continue discussing the creator of Fascism, Gabriele D’Annunzio. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. We're back! This is again behind the bastards of the podcast where we talk about terrible people, and we're talking about Gabriel Denenzio, the inventor of fascism, and the inventor of claiming you had two ribs removed to suck your own dick. Now, Shereen, how are you feeling about this guy as we barrel into part do? You know, he's fascinating. He's fascinating, yeah.

I'm intrigued. I mean, I was learned every second of the last episode got more absurd as we continued, and it ended with me learning what he looked like. So now that I have an image in my head, it might be easier for me to imagine how he's going about his life. Yeah, he has so many claims to fame. He really does. This is crazy because you would think, I don't know, he wouldn't quit.

He wouldn't quit, and I can't wait to learn how he literally invented fascism, which is crazy. Yeah, he's got a lot of gas left in the tank, this guy. But he's already did so much bullshit. He already did so much bullshit. He's lived a full life of bullshit, and it's not even at the halfway point, really. His productivity is notable. I'll give him that. He's astonishing.

Yeah, astonishing. For a little guy. I do want to say, as interesting as I find this guy, his biography, Gabriel Denoncio, a poet, seducer, and the preacher of war by Lucy Hughes Hallett, I really recommend. It's one of the best biographies I've ever read. Wow. Like, very compulsively readable. Hughes Hallett is a fantastic writer and a very critical eye in a really interesting way.

Like, I really appreciate her perspective on this guy, so I very much recommend that book. I mean, all the quotes you've read from it are amazing. Yeah. Yeah. Gabriel Denoncio loved planes. Loved planes. Big plane fan. He'd been an enthusiastic fan of the new technology since its inception.

In 1909, he'd made headlines at a famous air show in Brescia for writing with an American aviator named Glenn Curtis over an adoring crowd of thousands. The seat he sat on during the flight was later auctioned off to his legions of adoring fans. Prior to World War I, Gabriel had repeatedly pressed the Italian government to start an air force. When the war started, Gabriel's enormous fame and belligerent speeches managed to secure him a lofty position in the Italian military. The government expected him to write a song of war, some brilliant poem that would light a fire in the hearts of the Italian soldiery and help to get the nations fully behind a war most of them still did not want. He was officially attached to the Third Army, a staff to the Duke of Iosta. But he was given unlimited freedom to basically do whatever he wanted.

He could go to any part of the front he desired, partake in any maneuvers or actions he wanted to partake in. His job was generally to inspire the military in whatever way seemed interesting to him. So, that's the job this guy gets at the start of World War I. Gabriel's first trip up to the front was delayed by the difficulty he had designing and hiring someone to sew his custom uniforms. He eventually solved that problem while thousands of his countrymen dashed themselves to bloody chunks in Austrian machine gun nests. He spent so much time waiting at a fancy hotel to get all of that sorted out that yet again he went broke. His manager suggested he go to Third Army headquarters and start working. He'd get free food and laundry and be paid.

But once he arrived in Venice, the closest city to the front, he yet again set him up in the fanciest possible hotel. As much of an incorrigible dandy as he was, Denunzio's writing during this period shows he was eager to actually take part in war. On his way to the front, he wrote in his notebook, Surprisingly, this was not just Bluster. Two days after reaching Venice, he was on a naval destroyer doing night maneuvers heading towards the Austrian coast. Now, like two weeks before he did this, one of those destroyers had been sunk by a mine and dozens of guys had died. So this was a very dangerous thing to do. His trip wound up not having any combat in it, but he later spent time up at the front lines,

where he was under machine gun fire and artillery shelling regularly. He made friends and he saw them die horribly. And none of this dimmed Denunzio's ardor for war. Lucy Hughes Hallett writes, Their deaths were marvelous to him. When they were killed, as one after another they were, he took them into the pantheon. He was elaborating in his writing and speeches, making them the martyrs and cult heroes of his new mythology of war. Wow.

Yeah. He's a guy. I mean, like he's, he's doing exactly what he wants, which is like infuriating, you know? He does, that's his whole life. Yeah. Yeah. Now, Gabriel is enticing as he found the front lines. He had no desire to actually take part in trench combat because it led to all,

everyone dying basically anonymously in huge groups. And if there's one thing he could not stand, it was being part of a large anonymous group of men. He had, yeah. So he decided that the sky was more like the theater of war he wanted to get involved in. It had not, no, this choice like had nothing to do with cowardice, but it was intimately tied to his narcissism. He was absolutely willing to die and flying in any, any length of time was very dangerous at this period of time. What he couldn't abide was dying anonymously and pilots were at the time seen as the knights of the sky. So if he died, you know, in a plane that was a romantic enough death for him to be willing to like take the risk.

Wow. Very calculated. Yeah. He never learned to fly, but he figured he was more than capable of being a bombardier, basically dropping bombs by hand on targets like while the guy in front flew. And now up at the front, he befriended a pilot, a guy named Miraglia, who told him that a bombing raid had been planned for the city of Trieste, Austria's chief port. The city had a large Italian population and was seen by people like Gabrielle as rightfully Italy's property. And Denunzio here was struck by a brilliant idea.

Not only would he bomb the city, he'd also devise a way to airdrop propaganda onto Trieste to try and incite the Italian citizens to rise up against their government. This was not an easy mission. No Italian pilot had ever flown this far in a single trip and there would be numerous machine guns protecting the port itself from aerial attack. It was an insanely dangerous gambit, seen as suicidal by many. And Miraglia and Denunzio would be undertaking this mission alone. Obviously the attack had little military value, but the propaganda value of dropping bombs on the Austrian emplacements and propaganda for the Italian citizens was, in Gabrielle's eyes, huge. For days he agonized over how to drop the leaflets, which he wrote himself. He eventually went with tiny sandbags that would help the leaflets fall on target rather than getting blown to and fro.

The message itself was titled, To the Italians of Trieste, and promised an imminent liberation. Each copy was handwritten by him, a sign of how much the project mattered in Gabrielle's eyes. Once it became clear that what they planned to do, of course the admiral in charge of Italy's air force tried to put a stop to it. So did the government. Known with any measure of power, wanted Gabrielle Denunzio, Italy's most famous living poet and writer, to die flying over Austria. Morale was bad enough after the glorious war against Austria had turned almost instantly into a blood-soaked stalemate. Instead they wanted him to sit in his hotel room and write the damn poem they'd been counting on him to write to help motivate the war effort. But now, up at the front, Gabrielle Denunzio found himself unable to write.

I have a horror of sedentary work, of the pin, of the ink, of paper, of all those things now become so futile, a feverish desire for action takes me. Denunzio protested against being grounded, and a battle ensued behind the scenes of the military brass. Eventually Denunzio went to the prime minister and tried flattery, and here's how Lucy Hughes Hallett describes it in one of the most deliciously caddy sections of her book. You, whose own spirit is so hardworking and so generous, must understand me. He stressed his physical competence. He was not a man of letters as of the old type and skull cap and slippers. He was an adventurer. My whole life has been a risky game.

He boasted of his past daring. I have exposed myself to danger a thousand times against the fences and hedges of the Roman campania. He adored fox hunting. In France he had often been out on the Atlantic in chancy weather, as the fishermen of the land as could tell you. He had ventured repeatedly in the enemy territory on the western front. He visited the front twice, staying on the safer side of the French lines. Most importantly, I am an aviator. I have flown many times at high altitude.

This wasn't strictly true either. And he wasn't only brave. He had knowledge and skills which could be useful. He knew Istria. He knew Trieste. He had an observant spirit. Having presented his credentials, he made his request in the most insistent terms. I pray I beg repeal this odious veto.

He hinted that if he were not allowed to risk his life in his own way, he would deliberately endanger it by going straight to the front. To bar one with my past, my future from living the heroic life would be to cripple me, to mutilate me, to reduce me to nothing. And the prime minister was apparently impressed by his ardor and permission was granted for the raid. So he gets his way as he always does his entire life. Every time. Every single time.

I love her way of writing that though. I love that she's just like, I imagined it in my head in like, in parentheses being like all this like side note, like, not true. The whole biography is written with the air of like, yeah, she's just utterly unimpressed by a lot of this guy's life. I love that. I love that a lot. But also fascinated by him and compelled to chronicle it.

It's an interesting book. Yeah. I mean, I will say like in my brain, when you were talking about him dropping propaganda from a plane, I was thinking like he might as well be dropping poetry books. Like, isn't that one of the same? Isn't that kind of what they wanted him to do regardless? Like, isn't like, it's.

They wanted him to inspire the people of Italy. Because like most Italians weren't really on board with the war. Like he was able to get a lot of them in the cities on board. But like most people in Italy were like, why are we, why would we get involved in this stupid thing? It would be like sends our sums off to die for this. So that's what the government wanted was him to convince them of that. And instead he really wants to go be in danger.

Yeah. Yeah. I don't know. He just likes being a contrarian probably. That's part of it. Yeah. So Gabriel and his pilot set off on August 7th. And what followed was an outrageously dangerous adventure.

They were shot at several times and at least one bullet struck the plane. Just flying 150 kilometers in that period of time was very risky. And it's really impossible to overstate just how fucking dangerous this was. At one point a bomb got stuck on the plane and Denunzio had to dislodge it. An act that could have easily led to the bomb exploding and killing he and his pilot. I'm emphasizing the danger here because I want to make it clear that with his actions, Gabriel Denunzio did prove that his rhetoric wasn't empty. He was not the sort of guy who would urge others on to war and then stay safely in the background.

He repeatedly risked his life over the course of World War One. But the attack on Trieste was probably the most insanely dangerous act of his life. When he landed safely after dropping propaganda and bombs on Trieste and the news broke of his new exploit, Denunzio was more famous than ever. He became the idol of the Italian public, the nation's single greatest living hero. Wow. He could barely go out in public without being mobbed. And he continued to fly, or at least let others fly him.

He dropped numerous bombs and fired machine guns, but his highest preference was at deploying propaganda. Denunzio was well ahead of the curve on recognizing this as the weapon of the future. And his most famous action was dropping leaflets over Vienna, the Austrian capital, near the end of the war. The propaganda would be almost the last significant written work of Gabriel's life. As the New Republic notes, in January 1916, he suffered a detached retina during an air raid and was forced to lie absolutely still for several months to save his other eye. During his enforced convalescence, he composed a text of poetic prose

written line by line on slips of paper handed to him by his daughter Renata. These formed the basis for his memoir, Naterno, which appeared in 1921 and has recently been published in supple English translation by Stephen Sartarelli. It was Denunzio's entry into the stream of consciousness sweepstakes, his most openly modernist work, admired by many, including Hemingway, in spite of the fact that he considered his author a jerk. Naterno was Denunzio's last major contribution to literature. Well, I mean, God, he's just praised as a god his entire fucking life.

And I think a part of the reason why he risked his life, I don't think he was actually ready to die. I think he just felt invincible. Yeah, that might have been it. Yeah, I just think there's so much, I don't know, your brain is a powerful thing. And if you actually think you're invincible, I think there's an element that like, you will, you'll be fine. Like, it's your whole life, you've gone away with every fucking thing. You're not going to die in a plane.

And I don't think he was, I don't think he, I think he knew the whole time he was never going to die. I don't know. I wonder, he wrote a lot about being convinced that he would die on these missions and they were very dangerous, but it is impossible to know, like how he really felt in the center of his heart, because like, obviously you would have to write about being certain you were going to die because part of what you're trying to do is convince other men to go into situations where they'll probably die.

And I'm sure it was extremely dangerous and I'm sure it was... Outrageously so. Like, very frightening and everything, but I do think there's an element to his personality where he just thinks he's invincible, because he's gone away with so much shit and he literally lands and his life starts over again. He's a god, you know what I mean? Like, it's exactly what he's been since birth.

Yep, and this really is the end of his period of time as a writer and an artist of note. Like, he stops really producing work after World War I and especially he stops producing his best work. And while the end of the war more or less brought about the end of Gabriel's career as an artist, it was not the end of his career as an asshole who shoved his dick into world affairs. Italy wound up on the winning side of World War I, but they were by far the junior partner on their side of the war. French, British, and Russians rightly viewed the Miss Turncoats,

who got in late and sacrificed far fewer men than their allies. As a result, Italy got very little in the way of new territory at the end of the war. Gabriel de Nunzio considered this a mutilation, a disgusting stab in the back after all the sacrifices he'd convinced his countrymen to make. One of the things that infuriated him most was the fact that the territory of the Austro-Hungarian Empire was being broken up and given to its own people. He was livid at the establishment of a Slavic state in the Balkans, and particularly livid at the fact that the city of Fiume,

with an insizable Italian population, would be a part of that state. Gabriel de Nunzio decided he was not going to take this lying down, so he decided to raise an army and conquer the city for Italy on his own. Wow. The balls on this guy! I mean, you can see him in the banana hammock. They're not tiny. They're good, good, good old size balls. Little balls. They're huge.

Wow. Yeah. I'm going to put some of the new republic here. Yeah, go ahead, please, please. He called on the Italian government to occupy the city, and in September 1919, after they failed to do so, he took matters into his own hands. He marched on Fiume at the head of a cadre of Arditi, or daredevil stormtroopers, clad in the black and silver uniforms and black fezzes that would be aped like so much that was de Nunzio,

by the fascists. Greeted with cheers by the Italian-speaking locals, de Nunzio announced that he had annexed Fiume, expecting the government would take control, but there was no reaction. Suddenly, the poet-politician found himself in charge of a city in the grip of a delirious, cocaine-enhanced Bacchanal. Eventually, Fiume, with de Nunzio as its deuce, declared its independence. Huh. Yeah.

I keep wanting to, like, analyze this guy, like, really... Okay, I think his fame, when he was a poet, it was revered and beautiful. Like, not beautiful, sorry, I thought of the word I'm trying. He was revered as this, like, artistic guy, and it was this, like, kind of, like, a fan base that was passionate, and would read his stuff, thought he was sexy, whatever. But now, this kind of fame, this lesion,

is this violent thing that I think he's always wanted. He's always wanted to command people that will do whatever he says. And I think he got a taste of that during the war, and it's scary, the kind of power that this guy has. He's always had, but in this scenario, with violence, and with bringing people to literally make an army. Like, he's always had some type of army, is what I'm trying to say. His army as a poet was different than his army in this point in his life.

But it's a little scary, just how... I don't know, it seems like he's really obsessed with being this figure, and it's because he's doing, he's really good at it. I don't know. Well, and again, as is always the case with these guys, everyone kind of gives him what he wants. You know, like, obviously, what he did was profoundly illegal, and like, the Allied forces were like, yeah, fume has to go to Yugoslavia,

you can't let him do this. And they sent an army to stop him when he was marching on the city, but that army was made up of Italians, and they loved Denuncio. They refused to attack him, and hundreds of soldiers deserted to join his army as he marched on the city. That is absurd power, that's crazy. It's almost incomprehensible. Yeah, and so in the fall of 1919,

Gabriel Denuncio found himself as the dictator of a small state on the Mediterranean coast. He was... This guy's life? This guy's life, Jesus, wow. It's something else. He was 56 years old and powerfully ill with the flu as his forces marched into town. The people of fume did not notice his infirmity. They were enormous fans of the celebrity poet,

and thousands of them stayed up all night specifically so they could welcome their new dictator home with rapturous applause. His soldiers were greeted in the streets with women wearing evening dresses and carrying guns, ready to party or do battle against the allies should they try to stop Denuncio. He announced the creation of a new city-state, which he believed would be a model for human society in the future. The state would be based around what he called the politics of poetry. Fume, he insisted, would be a searchlight radiant in the midst of an ocean of objection.

He believed that what they built there would set a fire that would burn down the old order in the world. And so he declared fume the city of the Holocaust. Wow. That was a cherry on top of that fucking sentence. Jesus Christ. This fucking guy. Wow. In some ways, he's most similar to a guy like Elron Hubbard,

who was like, you just kept accelerating right up until the end. Like, never take your foot off the gas. No. Like, not for a fucking second. Yeah. That is crazy. It's wild. What a journey.

And he's young in comparison to the... He's only 50-something in his dictator? Yeah. I'm sure I've got listeners in their fifties. Why haven't you taken over a small city on the Mediterranean coast and established a Republican poetry? Yeah. Come on. Lazy asses.

Now, I'm going to quote again from Lucy Hughes. Oh, wait, no. It's ad break time, isn't it? It is. It is. It is. All right. Well, you know what won't turn your city into a city of the Holocaust?

Whoever the ad is. Whatever the ad is. Exactly. They will not do that. They will not. We do not... That is one of our firm lines with advertisers. Do not endorse.

No. Do not create cities of the Holocaust. Yeah. Okay. See ya. During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations. And you know what? They were right.

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He's a nasty shark. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to heaven. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences in a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday.

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And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991, and that man, Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space. 313 days that changed the world. Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. We're back.

So I want to start with reading a quote from Lucy Hughes Hallett on, like, what happens in fume after Gabriel Denonzio takes over. Quote, the place became a political laboratory, socialists, anarchists, syndicalists, and some of those who had begun earlier that year to call themselves fascists congregated there. Representatives of Shen Fine, which is like an Irish Republican extremist group, and of nationalist groups from India and Egypt arrived, discreetly followed by British agents. Then there were the groups whose homeland was not on this Earth, the Union of Free Spirits tending towards perfection, who met under a fig tree in the old town to talk about free love and the abolition of money. And yoga, a kind of political kum street gang described by one of its members as, an island of the blessed in the infinite sea of history. Denonzian fume was a land of the cognate, an extra legitimate place where normal rules didn't apply. It was also a land of cocaine, fashionably carried in a little gold box in the waistcoat pocket. Deserters and adrenaline starved war veterans alike sought a refuge there from the dreariness of economic depression and the tedium of peace.

Drug dealers and prostitutes followed them into the city. One visitor reported he had never known sex so cheap. So did aristocratic dilettants, runaway teenagers, poets and poetry lovers from all over the western world. Fume in 1919 was as magnetic to an international confraternity of discontented idealists as San Francisco's hate Ashbury would be in 1968. But unlike the hippies, Denonzio's followers intended to make war as well as love. So it's this weird melting pot of like left-wing radicals and right-wing radicals who are all united in their idea that like, fuck everything else that's going on. Let's all take cocaine and fuck and murder each other. Desperation is a really dangerous tool because I think similar to what you said in the last episode about like anger, like people really channeling, being able to like utilize the anger of the masses and channel it in the right way.

I think anger and desperation are really related in that regard because you can unify people with their desperation. And I think that's the case with a lot of extremist groups, honestly. And it's also, it's important to note that Denonzio himself gets hugely into cocaine at this point. Like he's a, not surprisingly, loves cocaine and starts like hailing his fucking body weight every week and fucking in blow. Just like, and that's part of when you try to understand this place in this period, like Denonzio and Fume, it floats on an ocean of blow. Like impossible amounts of cocaine is like the only thing that would make an experiment like this possible. It sounds great. I actually would have loved to be there. Like it sounds like it kind of rules.

It sounds like, I mean, like especially for the time, it sounds like this oasis in a sea of dread, you know? Especially, I mean, it was a safe haven. People making art, yeah. Yeah, it was, well, it wasn't safe because there were also street gangs of fascists and anarchists gunning each other down. Yeah, it's just this lawless, bizarre place where everyone's making art and experimenting with new politics and having gunfights and orgies and cocaine parties on an hourly basis. It's just incomprehensible. That is, his entire life, honestly, I can't really wrap my head around it.

Every turn, I said this before, but every turn is more absurd than the next. Like, I did not think this was going to go here in the beginning. Like, that's crazy. He's a monster, but he's objectively one of the most fascinating people who ever lived. Like, you can't read his life and not be like, what the fuck, dude? He's 100% like one of the most fascinating people. Like a lot of historical figures like Hitler, as a historical figure, very compelling. As an individual, kind of a weird, boring, gross, sad life.

Denunzio, a monster too, but like, fuck, what a life. Like, you got to respect it, like a lot of that. You got to respect the hustle, at least. That's just, I'll give you that. I'll respect the hustle, and he's just problematic in so many ways. Jesus Christ. He's a monster. He's like Elrana Hubbard, where he's like this terrible person,

but you can't turn away from what he turned his life into. I mean, it worked. He got what he wanted every step of the fucking way. Every step of the fucking way, basically. Does this guy not suffer? I'm waiting for this guy to suffer. Just give me that. Well, we're getting to that a little bit.

Denunzio wanted fume to be a work of art made in the medium of human lives, and it was certainly something. Public life was described as a permanent street theater performance. There were constant orgies involving huge numbers of people, and of course, like all the cocaine in the world. There was also violence and constant murder by gangs of black-shirted thugs. But oddly, left and right found a way to meet in fume. This was before fascism had really taken off,

and right as communism was in the process of taking over Russia. The bizarre experiment in fume attracted the support of literally every kind of extremist. Vladimir Ilyich Lenin sent Gabriel a pot of caviar, and called him the only revolutionary in Europe. Benito Mussolini expressed his deep admiration of Denunzio, and the two began along correspondence in letters. Both Lenin and Mussolini love this guy and what he's doing in fume. It's so weird.

That is so bizarre. It's hard to wrap your head around. So many people were obsessed with this guy. I'm thinking about what you said about Hemingway. Even every type of person was like, gotta give it to him. But now there's Mussolini and Lenin. You can't ignore Denunzio. And that's what Denunzio wants.

You have to stare at him. You can't not. He's just like a peacock. He peacocked his entire life. He peacocked the entirety of Europe, which is quite an accomplishment. So fun as it sounds, fume was not a paradise. Syphilis was astonishingly rampant.

And everybody including Denunzio got syphilis. When you said how many partners he had, he must have had some type of consequence. He was after a thousand partners. His body weight was 70% sexually transmitted. He was more chlamydia than man. And Denunzio could also be a brutal ruler. Midway through 1916, he held a plebiscite,

promising to hand over control of the city to someone else if the people no longer wanted him in charge. And he lost the plebiscite, but he did not give up power. His centurions of death and elite corps of black-shirted thugs kept the city under his control. And during this period, Gabriel also introduced an innovation that everyone today is tragically, agonizingly familiar with. The Roman salute.

Now most people know the Roman salute better as the Nazi salute. That weird, creepy, straight-arm salute that fascists and border patrol employees do. Yeah, he invented that. He invented lying about removing your ribs to suck your dick and the fascist salute. Holy shit! Holy shit! I had no idea that one person was capable of achieving so much.

It's amazing. That is... oh my... Hitler gets way too much credit. Yeah, fucking Denunzio, yo. Now, I'm going to read a quote from Count Carlos Forza, an Italian diplomat and an anti-fascist politician who was a contemporary of Denunzio's. He wrote, quote,

It was he who at fume invented that Roman salute, which has now become also the German salute, and which he, overlooking its implications, copied from some statue or fresco, forgetting that in Rome, the civets, the citizens, greeted each other by shaking hands, and that only slaves made the sign which has been adopted by the subjects of Mussolini and Hitler.

So they were very condescending as far as, like, this... He didn't know... He liked the way it looked in statues, and so he made his people do it, and it took off with Mussolini's fascists and then with Hitler's fascists, and now with border patrol employees. Touche.

Wow. I am literally every second of this podcast. My god, drops to the floor. I wish this call was recorded because my face just literally contorts and, like, my mouth is engaged for so much of what you're saying. Like, I cannot believe this guy's life. It's something else.

Damn. Immediately after taking power, Denunzio's first action was to establish a press office, which he used to send out communiques to governments and politicians and media outlets around the world. Journalists flocked to the city, as well as political extremists. Gabriel offered to arm the IRA

with some of the tens of thousands of rifles his forces had captured. He entertained grand visions of invading England, which he hated, at the head of an Irish army. But the IRA was a little too smart for that. They wanted guns, but Gabriel's hatred of the United States was seen as potentially alienating the nation they saw as their greatest ally. Mussolini at one point wrote to him

and suggested the two of them should work to overthrow the Italian monarchy and establish a directory, essentially a powerful fascist central government. Remarkably, Benito didn't see himself as the head of this organization. He wanted to make Denunzio the dictator. But Gabriel was, at least, loyal to the Italian throne and was unwilling to take part in such a revolution. In November of 1920, Osbert Sitwell, an English writer,

joined the crowds of journalists and revolutionaries who'd come to fume. His goal was to see what the man who has done more for the Italian language than any writer since Dante had done with a nation of his own. And Lucy Hughes Hallett writes, quote, Sitwell finds the streets full of colorful desperados. Every man seemed to wear a uniform designed by himself. Some wore beards and had shaven heads like the commander.

Others cultivated huge tufts of hair half a foot long, waving out from their foreheads in a black fez at the back of the head. Cloaks, daggers, and flowing black ties were universal and all carried the Roman dagger. Sitwell succeeds in securing an audience. He passes through a pillared hall full of palm trees and pseudo-Byzantine flower pots, where soldiers lounged and typists rushed furiously in and out.

In an inner room almost entirely covered with banners, he finds two more-than-life-size carved and gilded saints from Florence, a huge 15th-century bronze bell, and the commandant, as Denunzio now likes to be called, in military gray-green his chest striped with ribbons of his many medals. He seems nervous and tired, but bald and one-eyed as he is, at the end of a few seconds one felt the influence of that extraordinary charm, which has enabled him to change howling mobs into furious partisans.

Since Sitwell arrived in fume, the great conductor, Arturo Tuscagnini, has brought his orchestra to the town. To celebrate Tuscagnini's visit, Denunzio lays on a mock battle, which is as lethal as an ancient Roman circus. 4,000 men take part, attacking each other with real grenades. The orchestra, which initially provides a musical accompaniment, Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, becomes involved in the fighting. Over a hundred men are injured, including five musicians.

Now Denunzio, discussing the event with Sitwell, explains that his legionnaires are weary of waiting for battle. They must fight one another. What the fuck? I have so many questions. Okay, first, I remember you said that he didn't even like politics. No, but this is not politics. This is being worshipped by a whole city

and having them fight for his amusement and fucking them. He loves being a god. He's basically a god. For someone who hates religion as much as he does, he loves being worshipped. His religion is just culty and... Worship of himself, absolutely. I've heard it said that the rock stars of the 60s and 70s,

like the Beatles and the Stones and Pink Floyd and stuff, those guys got about as close to being a god as anyone has ever gotten. I think Denunzio is the closest any human has ever experienced at least in the modern era, maybe earlier when people were literally worshipped. In every field, that's the thing that's wild. In every field imaginable, he was worshipped. My other question is, so he actually lost his eye,

so he was bedridden, but then he lost the eye. Yeah, he lost one eye. So now he's even weirder looking than he was before. Does he wear a patch? Is he a pirate? I think he wears a glass eye. Okay. You know what, he's probably still fucking too, so...

Yeah, oh, he is fucking constantly. He never stops fucking. Like Denunzio is always fucking. Did he also invent Viagra? What's next? What turn are you going to give me next? I do kind of feel like he was one of the people who never really needed that. Like he was the horniest man who ever lived.

Like that is Gabriel Denunzio. Now, this whole deliriously mad state of affairs lasted only a few more weeks. In January of 1921, pressed by the League of Nations, the Italian government finally took action against its native son. They sent a gunboat and soldiers and laid siege to the city of Fiume. After five days of fighting and 50-some deaths, Gabriel Denunzio decided he had finally had enough of war. Perhaps he was scared of dying himself,

or perhaps he just had no stomach for fighting his fellow Italians. He left the city. One supporter later wrote descriptively, under a deluge of flowers, he forces his way through a city in tears. The failure of his Fiume venture seems to have drained Gabriel of much of his remaining energy. He was allowed back into Italy with a squad of his colt-like followers, and he ordered them to find him a home with a grand piano, a bathroom, a laundry, plenty of wood, and coal in an enclosed garden.

He told them, if within eight days none of you have found a suitable house for me, I shall throw myself into the canal. Jesus! Unfortunately, they found him a place, and he occupied it for three years or so, until Benito Mussolini's March on Rome ended Italy's quasi-democracy and brought about the establishment of the world's first fascist state.

Mussolini's Italy and the tactics he used to present himself to the people were deeply based in things he'd learned from Gabriel Dunanzio, and the poet knew it. In one letter to Mussolini, he wrote, Am I not the precursor of all that is good about fascism? I'm just speechless, honestly. First of all, a way with a dramatic guy, a very dramatic thing.

Very, very dramatic guy. Find me a house where I'm going to just throw myself. Kill myself. Yeah. But like, he really, I hate to say it, but like, he thinks he's good at everything, and he kind of was. Like, he was very much into Nietzsche,

and like Nietzsche's idea of the ubermensch, and it's one of those guys where it's like, life didn't prove him wrong. Like, if you believe you're a superior being, and you live this guy's life, it's kind of hard not to remain convinced of that. That's what I meant earlier when I mentioned that like, I get this feeling of like, this self-fulfilling prophecy of like,

if you think you're invincible, then you actually will get away with anything and it will be invincible. Obviously, it doesn't work all the time, but with this case, having lived your entire life this way, since you were a literal baby, God. It's one of the things that's interesting to me, this guy being Italian and being very obsessed with like, ancient Rome and Roman iconography.

The ancient Romans had a strategy for dealing with, as most cultures had to develop some sort of strategy for trying to deal with runaway egos, because it's dangerous when somebody's ego gets this out of control, which is Denunzio's whole life is a lesson in that. So they would have these things called triumphs, when like, a Roman general won a particularly great victory. He would be allowed to go on this massive parade through the city.

He was basically dictator for a day. He almost worshiped him for like a day. And they knew that this was dangerous, because it really got on someone's ego. So while this guy is like the center of the entire Roman Republic and then empires attention, the whole day, there's a guy whose job is to stand next to him and repeatedly whisper into his ear,

basically, you're going to die. At some point, you're going to die. Like, remember, you're going to die. You're just a man and you're going to die. Wow. Someone should have been doing that for Denunzio. Someone should have been grounding this person really deep into the ground.

Damn. That's a crazy little, I know that about the... Yeah, it's a cool bit of history. So, you know what isn't the precursor of all that's good about fascism? Shireen. Sponsors and... That's right. People that help Robert stay,

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Hi. Mussolini is in charge of Italy now, and he well understood the value of using someone like Gabrielle. Denunzio was too famous and popular to ignore, and so Il Duce tried to denunzio out for public events and made sure everybody saw the poet embracing him and his new regime. In private, Gabrielle hated this. He saw Mussolini as an imitation,

and his enormous ego could not stand the insinuation that he had merely prepared the way for some other greater Italian leader. Under Mussolini, the Italian state gifted Gabrielle a massive mansion, money, and regularly sent him bizarre gifts, including half of an actual battleship, which he set up on his lawn like a gazebo. He continued to host parties and socialize,

but over the next decade and change, his health gradually declined. He died in 1938, at age 74. Personally, Gabrielle disagreed with most of the decisions Mussolini made. He particularly hated the alliance with Hitler, who Denunzio saw correctly as a monster and a fool. He was briefly courted by the anti-fascist resistance in Italy as a possible foil to Mussolini. But, if that was ever something that would have interested Denunzio,

he was far too old to try. I quoted Counts Forza a little earlier. That was from an obituary he wrote titled Denunzio, Inventor of Fascism, in 1938. And I want to read you how it opens. The war of 1914 to 1918 left in its wake to a certain extent everywhere, and especially in Italy and Germany, a new category of white-collar proletarians,

who saw themselves as troubled wreckage in a society in which capitalism and the world of the working man seemed equally hostile to them. By a strange paradox, it was Gabrielle Denunzio, whose lyric richness had been so splendid, and who became the poet and the prophet of all these pathetic misfits. It was he who was the real inventor of fascism.

Forza goes on to note, quote, It was Denunzio who invented those dialogues with the crowd, which fascism later on found so useful at the Piazza di Venezia in Rome. To whom shall fume belong, Denunzio called down from the capital balcony, and the mob of volunteers who had invaded fume thundered from below, to us, and the poet-dictator, and Italy,

and the mob once more. Renoir, to us, this to us, later gave the key to the real love of Denunzio for the fatherland, a love of possession, not a love of devotion and sacrifice. Lucy Hughes Hallett writes, Though Denunzio was not a fascist, fascism was Denunzian. I think that really gets at the core of it. He personally was a weirder, more complicated guy.

He didn't mean to invent fascism, but the way that he addressed the crowd, the way that he worked with the crowd, the way that he riled people up, the way that he used iconography, the way that his soldiers were dressed, and these black leather uniforms was copied both by Mussolini's stormtroopers

and later the SS, the salute that he invented. And he's exchanging dozens and dozens of letters with Mussolini before the man rises to power. And Mussolini's march on Rome is very much an imitation of Denunzio's march on fume. He didn't purposefully invent fascism. Because of the man he was, he created it as a byproduct of his ego.

Yeah. What year did he die? 1938, right before the war started. Because I know at the time, Mussolini in particular, he was maybe one of the first people to really utilize the film industry in his propaganda. He made an entire film studio

and just used it in the late 30s. I think it was 37 to literally just make propaganda for fascism. And there were just so many pro-war films that were made. The declaration against the Allied forces was also under the film studio that he established. But I think that union of film and politics, I have to say, probably Denunzio paved that way

to this artistic union of politics and creative art. The first thing he established in fume once he was in control was a press office. He was a little too early to really take advantage of television. He was filmed a number of times. He clearly saw the potential.

But he was a propagandist from the beginning. That was what he decided his involvement in war should be. He was just a little too old to have become a fascist dictator. If he'd been born a bit later, the kind of charisma he had, the energy he had, I think that's the kind of path he would have been on.

It was just a little bit early and he was raised in too different of a time. We've really wanted that as much. I agree. I agree. I think Mussolini is a version of what he could have not become. But it's very... I don't know.

Mussolini caricatured him. Mussolini pretended to be him. And it's said that a lot of people say that Mussolini was a socialist initially. And Mussolini kind of converted him away from that. And then Mussolini deliberately aped Mussolini's affectations, the way he spoke to crowds,

the way he addressed people, the way he patterned himself, and just did it with a little bit more of a modern tinge to it and more use of things like television and the radio. And then Hitler iterated from that. And that was like... And I think Mussolini and Hitler,

they both used the mouthpiece of their generation, which was like this new filmmaking. And it was film and propaganda. And if they were born at the time of Denunzio with poetry, I'm sure it would have been that too. But it's interesting because what Mussolini did with filmmaking in Italy was really fascinating and disturbing at the same time.

But I think you're right. I think if Denunzio was born a little bit later, he would have used that mouthpiece the same way he used poetry just to garner worship and fame and use his poetic verse in a different way. Yeah. It's a pretty cool story. I'm really intrigued.

He's genuinely, what you said earlier, I agree with maybe one of the most fascinating people to have ever lived. His life at every turn was more absurd than the last. Yeah. It's kind of hard to really wrap your head around. How much this guy did, how bold he was, how awful he was.

He did so much. And he was so monstrous. Yeah. And I had to leave out so much. I'm sure. Just make this a comprehensible episode. I really recommend the biography by Lucy Hughes Howlett, Gabriel Denunzio, poet, seducer and preacher of war.

It's fantastic. And he is just absolutely a fascinating piece of shit. Yes, a fascinating piece of shit. I would agree with that. Wow. Yeah, he's right up there with Elron Hubbard in my list of like, fuck, what a life. Genuinely.

What a life. He got away with all of it. What a life. He got away with all of it. He got away with fucking everything. And I'm sure he still has a billion of fans out there. You know what I mean? I'm sure he has.

His work is obviously respected still. He's still deemed as a great poet. Yeah, his poetry, his books have kind of fallen out of favor and are seen as sort of like, you know, they were great. They were good in their time and respected in their time. They haven't really continued to have legs. I think his poetry does still have legs. He's still highly regarded as a poet.

I'm obviously not equipped or qualified to comment on Italian poetry or his place in there, but a lot of experts put him, regard him highly in that field. Yeah, it's something else, huh? Yeah, I've learned a lot. I've learned a lot and I don't know. I hate how indestructible he was. I really hate that.

But that's life, I guess. It's one of those things. It's hard to even get that like he does in his life kind of unhappily. Like Mussolini doesn't care about him or respect him. He uses his tactics and like sort of treats him as like a pet almost. Like, yeah, brings him out to like burnish the regime's credibility but ignores him and what he has to say. And it's really like, bums out and infuriates Denonzio.

But it's hard to take too much joy in that because it means Mussolini's in charge. Yeah, we don't win either way. We don't win either way. Wait, how did he die? What was the cause of death? Oh, I think it was like a stroke or some shit. He's just an old man, you know.

He's an old guy. Natural fucking causes, not even like a sex disease. He didn't die from it. There's rumors he was poisoned by a Nazi agent. But I don't see any evidence behind them. I think it's more likely he was an old man who had horribly advanced syphilis and had been doing cocaine for like a decade straight or more,

like for probably for decades. But I mean, even with all that, even with the syphilis and the cocaine to make it to 70, like, that's a full life. He had a good run. He had a good run. Damn. He had a very full life, yeah. Wow.

He didn't leave anything on the table. You can say that. Wow. So, Shireen. Yes, Robert. How has this influenced your own desires in your career as a poet? Trying to figure out the best way to... It's been a long time since someone's led an armed...

You could lead an armed march on the city of Fume. Yeah. I mean, it's been a while since there was a poet that, I don't know, was worshiped. I'll audition for that role. Yeah. You know? Wow.

I don't know. Poetry, I mean, I love poetry. Poetry's powerful, but he really went a different route with it, didn't he? Yeah. He was a living monument to the power of narcissism. Yeah. Speaking of narcissism, you want to plug your plugables?

Yes, I do. I'm Shireen, and I'm a filmmaker. I'm a poet, and I also co-host ethnically ambiguous on the I Heart Radio Network. You can find every podcast app. We'll go listen to it on your favorite one if you want to. And I'm Shiro Hero on Instagram, S-H-E-E-R-O, H-E-R-O. And then on Twitter, it's Shiro Hero 666. And I have a poetry book on Amazon called Dime Piece,

like a coin dime, and then piece, like a piece of a puzzle. And then I'm making my next one, so stay tuned for that if you want. Watch my stuff. I don't fucking care. Just be nice to me. You can find me on the Twits and the Grams and the Twins to Grams at behindthebastards. Well, nope, that's not where you can find me. You can find me on the Twitters at, I write OK.

You can find this podcast on the Twitters and the Grams at BastardsPod. You can find us on the internet at behindthebastards.com. And you can find your way into having an immortal impact on the future by joining my upcoming cult. It's going to be a really good time. We're going to lead a march on, I don't know, what city would be easy to capture? I feel like Sacramento wouldn't put up a fight. Roseville. Roseville?

Roseville. Stockton. We'll continue, yeah. Hit us up on Twitter with which city you think we should lead an armed march on to conquer. Yeah, we'll figure it out. That's the fucking episode. Yeah, thanks for having me. I always learn so much.

I always leave feeling so dead inside. I didn't think it was possible to get more dead inside, but you know what? That's always our goal. With this podcast it is. Make America feel dead inside again. Yeah, that's the tagline to this podcast, right? So if we need to get some hats made. No.

Episode over. Thanks for having me. Yeah, thanks for being on. Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse we're like a lot of goods. But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them?

He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Did you know Lance Bass is a Russian trained astronaut? That he went through training in a secret facility outside Moscow, hoping to become the youngest person to go to space? Well, I ought to know because I'm Lance Bass. And I'm hosting a new podcast that tells my crazy story and an even crazier story about a Russian astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down.

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