Historically High - Benito Mussolini

Episode Date: January 1, 2025

Mussolini has a general reputation as the bumbling idiot of the axis powers. While he does appear to be at a glance, history should not sleep on Mussolini. The man actually founded Facism. That word that seems to still be prevalent in our world today, yeah he created the Facist Party. The Father of Facism started from humble beginnings and through a combination of radical ideas, his trademark oration, and basically flip flopping political beliefs whenever he felt the wind blowing in a new direction, he found himself as the de facto dictator of Italy. Now this whole Facism thing actually started before the Nazi party got into power, and provided a solid blueprint for Hitler to follow during his rise. Without Benito, I don't think we get Hitler running wild all over Europe. Now from a military standpoint, yeah maybe the bumbling idiot moniker is more fitting, but we get to that and everything else on this weeks Historically High. Support the show Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Oh, holy shit, have we got a good one for you today. We're rounding out the big three, the big evil three of World War II. Which is crazy. Oh, no, we're not rounding it out. Oh, I guess we're not, we haven't done Hirohito yet, but. He's not the big three. That's true. What's even crazier is the big three within those.

One of them was actually on our side. We were partners with one of the big three. Yeah. Maybe arguably the most ruthless of the big three. is on our side. Speaking of on our side, I am your co-host, Adam. My co-host, Chris, is sitting to the right of me. Hey there.

And we are getting ready to ring in this holiday season with a story of a man who I don't really know how history looks at him. We look at him more as like a buffoon. I look at him just because of the baldness aspect of it. He is the curly of the three stooges of just terrible. people in World War II. I thought the same. Despite my extensive World War II research, for some reason, I just kind of glossed over Mussolini.

It seemed that there was so much more that was more interesting. And then actually sitting down, doing the research, I feel like we almost should have done Mussolini first before Hitler, because so much of the groundwork that Mussolini laid, Hitler just watched that and was like, oh, cool, yeah, I'll just do that. Oh, he can do that. No reprisal? Oh, cool. We'll just do that here. He basically, you know, in addition to being the father of fascism, he kind of was the guinea pig for that totalitarian regime that ended up leading into World War II. And him being the OG fascist, I think what did Hitler describe their party as was, socialist Nationalist social It was the national socialist Workers Party

So yeah And then remember they would just highlight Whichever name Depending on which one applied And you can call yourself Whatever you want We know that the Nazi regime Was fascist

And the whole idea For this fascist form of government Comes from Mussolini's own creation That he sort of flip-flopped his way into This wasn't These weren't Hard and fast beliefs

that he had held his entire life. This was a very quick turn from a socialist belief system, kind of an anarchist socialist belief system, to just straight into fascism. So he swung from the left all the way to the very far right. This guy changed lanes, just whichever way the wind was blowing. He could detect it. That's what he was at the time.

And then he finally found something that stuck and ended up essentially ruling Italy for 22 years. Which, I mean, if you think about it, somebody that constantly agrees with you and tells you that you have good points and believes in the same thing, probably not a bad guy to have around. But unfortunately, you can't really build a structure to support an entire country on just saying what you think people want to hear. And not really having an idea of how you're going to do it. Yep. Before we get into the episode, I just wanted to, you know, I don't really know even what to make of it, but how well the podcast has done this year. the growth, the numbers, your guys' feedback, the communication. It's all been amazing. So thank you.

This is the reason why we keep doing this is because you keep listening. For those of you have been with us since the beginning or picked us up recently. And for those of you that are listening for your first time, you know, hop on board. We got a lot more coming up for you guys. But, you know, sincerely from the bottom of our hearts, thank you guys for your support. and we look forward to a fantastic 2025 of hopefully making you guys laugh and teaching you something at the same time. Just to build on that, to see your guys as Spotify raps and to see that we are being listened to the same amount as podcasts that we listen to, that we enjoy, that we are, you know, turning to kind of for our own just enjoyment beyond any sort of study or anything like that. and to know that you guys like us,

in a sense, close to the same way that you like them, is just absolutely incredible. Yeah. All right. So without further ado, let's get into this spaghetti-eat-bastard. So much talking with my hands this episode, I feel like.

Like you're holding a tiny mouse. Yeah, like your hand is a bulb of garlic as you're trying to explain. And these names are just so perfectly Italian that, It's, you got to do it. You got to put the emphasis on it.

You got to put a little bit more the tomato sauce on the pasta just to get some of these names out. All right. So before we get into it, there's going to be words that are now kind of umbrella terms, nationalism, fascism. This is essentially the founding of fascism. So just so everyone knows, definition of fascism. And I'm going off Miriam Webster here. It is a populist political philosophy. movement or regime, such as the fascistee, which is the one we're going to be discussing today,

that exalts national and often race above the individual, that is associated with a centralized autocratic government, basically a totalitarian, headed by a dictator, a dictatorial leader, and that is characterized by severe economic and social regimentation and by forcible suppression of opposition. So it sounds really fun. just to drive home how fun it sounds there's a guy named Umberto ECHO I believe is how you pronounce his last name ECO

that had actually lived under this regime of Benito Mussolini and he lists these 14 common features of fascism your first feature is going to be a cult of tradition so you need to play the hits you need to focus on what you've done done in the past, that tradition that you've had to try and replicate that.

Going back in their big point is going to be the glory of the Roman Empire. Which, hell, I mean, if you want to sound big, bad, and powerful, the Roman Empire is not too bad to model yourself after. If you got to dip into the hits, that's a pretty big fucking hit. Yeah. The rejection of modernism. So, like, the Enlightenment, the age of reason is seen as the beginning of modern depravity. In a sense, fascism can be defined as a rationalism. I miss the good old days.

Yeah, this is how it used to be. The cult of action for action's sake, action being beautiful in itself, it must be taken before or without or any previous reflection. Thinking of a form of emasculation. So you are taking action because you are able to take that action. That's something that you can do because it's within your parameters to do. And that was a huge push for him is this envisionment and this, uh, I'm trying to think this projection of the the apex Italian man, who is also the apex man, kind of in the same way that Hitler is pushing the Aryan supremacy type shit, which,

crazily enough, Mussolini somehow even spins that in to also include him being like, oh yeah, by the way, the Italians are Aryans too, so we're part of that master race. Yeah, just a quick little throw in there on his part to be like, yeah, no, we actually fit the mold. That's perfect. Despite looking completely different. None of us have blonde hair. None of us have blue eyes. Disagreement is treason.

The critical spirit makes distinctrons and to distinguish is a sign of modernism. So you're just not allowed to disagree with the status quo of what we're doing. Appeal to social frustration. Always an easy one. You hear these. Now I think we call them more like social issues. but even back then we definitely do that with social issues now. But excuse me, back then, you look at a situation like, I mean, if there's a bread shortage, who is there to blame?

You always need somebody to blame because if you can blame that on them, then that puts a face to the issue and that issue is not you because you're not being an effective leader. I think that's where the populist portion of it comes in. So basically populist is a person, especially a politician who strives to appeal to ordinary people. who feel that their concerns are disregarded by the established elite groups. We still see this shit today. We're going to stay on Mussolini at this point, but one of the aspects of doing the research of this is a lot of it sounds insanely familiar. Take that as you will.

Listen the episode. Try to listen with an open mind. I'm not saying anything more than that. I'm just saying it seems like a familiar playbook. Yeah, I would say that it's something that's kind of happening all over the world. Yes. The obsession with a plot. You always want to stick to your plan.

You're obsessed with making sure that it follows the exact pathway that you want it to, no matter what's thrown in your way. So this would be Mussolini's goal of making Italy a world power? Yep. Okay. The enemy is both strong and weak. So you look at that enemy and you say, they're holding us down because they have the power to do it. But we can defeat them because they're weaker than we are. So you want to try to project them as this big, strong, overbearing power that's holding you down, but they can be defeated.

But by also defeating a strong enemy, you yourself are showing yourself to be stronger. Exactly. Pacifism is trafficking with the enemy. I think that's pretty on the nose because you can just be complicit with somebody like Hitler. Yeah. Making the moves that he did. Number 10 is contempt for the week. So, elitism is a typical aspect of any reactionary ideology.

You're always going to look down as the problems that are going on in society start at the lowest rungs instead of the highest rounds. Social Darwinism type shit. Yeah. Okay. Everybody is educated to become a hero. Which, I mean, that's not a terrible thing to have. We have all sorts of Disney movies and kids movies that talk about how anybody can do anything they want. It's just...

Especially if you get orphaned. That's when you really hit your sweet spot of... becoming something. Yeah, but anybody can rise up. Anybody can lead the next great battle. They can be the next great general. You all have that potential. Number 12 feels pretty

it's just so perfect. Machismo and weaponry. So you got to walk around with your nose in the air and your chest puffed out. You have to be that big barrel chested Mussolini that'll cross his arms and he'll fire those eyes actually those weird cold dead eyes that he has. And you

have to show that bravado off that you have. Oh, guys, like in Dala's eyes. 13, selective populism. There is in our future TV or internet populism in which the emotional response of a selected group of citizens can be presented and accepted as the voice

of the people. So, yeah, I mean, if you can... The loudest people. You think that the loudest people are speaking for everybody, but you forget about that whole silo majority type shit. Exactly. And finally, fascism speaks, newspeak. All Nazi or fascist schoolbooks made use of an impoverished vocabulary and elementary syntax in order to limit the instruments for complex and critical reasoning.

So if you dumb these people down, they're not ever going to try to think to overthrow you. They're not ever going to look any deeper than what you're telling them because you're telling them in just straight, plain language that you're the best. and there's no reason to doubt that. You're conditioning them to have a lack of understanding, therefore they can't challenge you because they don't understand what you're doing. Yeah, it's just, it's a foundation that, again, we're not talking about some ancient form of rule that's come through. We're not talking about democracy being started by the Greeks all the way thousands of years ago.

We're talking about something that was just created and popped up in the early 1920s. taking pieces and bits from a lot of other things and then basically getting that, you know, mashing that into one thing and then branding it as your own. Yeah. So we get to Benito Amlicar Andrea Mussolini, born July 29th, 1883 in Dovia de prepapito in Romania, to Alessandro, who was a socialist blacksmith. and Rosa, who was a Catholic school teacher. Alessandro, not religious at all.

In order to name Benito, what he wanted to name him, which was after the Mexican socialist president Benito Juarez, he went ahead and made a deal with his wife, and he goes, I want to name him Benito, I want to give him two names of Italian revolutionaries. In exchange for that, you can baptize him after he's born in the church. He's like, I get to name him after three socialists in exchange for a baptism. Deal.

Yeah, that's a pretty good exchange rate, I think. You get to name your kid in hopes that the baptism may not take because it's not real. Yeah. His early world and political views were just shaped by his father. He spent a lot of time in the forge working with his father. And his father had these nationalist ideas. He was pretty much an anarchist. and he was a very strong socialist.

And I don't know if I ever really had it when I was a kid just because we didn't ever really talk about politics in my family. But I didn't really know any of that stuff until like junior high in high school where my parents lean politically or anything like that. But if you're hearing that all the time as a kid and you're being drilled with these socialist beliefs and all of these political things that you're hearing, you're probably going to develop that taste early. It's a nature versus nurture debate, and nurture wins that every time. Well, there's so much other shit going on. But if you have someone that's so involved in kind of the socialist movement like his father, I see him as the type of guy at his forged doing his blacksmith shit that's just ranting and raving while he's doing that.

It's the state of affairs. And that stuff essentially seeping in. Now, again, we're talking essentially about his father being, you know, a socialist here. So this is where he essentially starts out. and then in the end ends up on the completely other end of the spectrum. Yeah. Along with socialism and anarchism and nationalism, Alessandro was a womanizer.

Alessandro had himself a mistress, and when they didn't have any money, they were very poor. Rosa was kind of the main income bringer. I'm going to let you know on a secret. They're all going to have mistresses. Well, I mean, he had to learn it from somebody, and he learned it from his dad.

who would spend money in time with his mistress instead of spending time with his three children and making his wife make all the money for him. He'd be sent to a boarding school that was run by Catholics and I think it's called Fienza. Fienza. Didn't go well at all.

Didn't do much good for Benito because he was very rigid in his beliefs. He clashed with the priest probably trying to fight them off. Well, that was also the fact that he was like, his father was very anti-religion. And so those were also his views as well,

as he just didn't believe in the church. Pretty quick to violence, he ended up stabbing a fellow schoolmate with a pocket knife after an argument that they had. It's pretty crazy to think of a little kid stabbing with a pocket knife. No shit, right? But after the stabbing incident,

good enough for him. He gets run out of that Catholic boarding school, goes to a non-denominational school that he was able to actually do pretty decent in grade-wise. It was in four, nah, never mind. It was in Italy somewhere. His grades improved.

Somehow he ended up graduating as an elementary school teacher in 1901. The fascist dictator of Italy that killed hundreds of thousands, if not a million people, was an elementary school leader to start his career. Well, he lasted a year. And then when it came to rehiring, they're like, yeah, you're a little much. So we're not going to bring you back next year. That and you keep banging every woman in our town.

Yep. And there's a lot of people that you've run afoul of, mostly the husbands of the women that you've been banging all across. cross town. The fathers of your students. Yeah. So you're not getting put back in. Also, in Italy, we have a mandatory military service.

And that wasn't something that his socialist views allowed him to believe in. He didn't believe in fighting, didn't believe in the military. He was also like a staunch anti-colonialists. So he had these views that like, countries did not have the right to go out and have colonies. Remember that. And Italy had quite a lot of colonial pressure that they put on Ethiopia and Libya. Libya, yes. So instead of sticking around to see what he could make of his life there,

maybe try to find another school in another town that hadn't heard about his sexual proclivities or his pretty extreme beliefs, he set out for Switzerland. And Switzerland, the whole saga seems very odd to maybe. Because the further he got away from Italy, the more he got involved in Italy. Yeah. So the way I understand it, so he ends up fleeing to Switzerland to avoid the compulsory military service, gets there, gets hooked up essentially with a socialist group there. And this is one of those situations that we got to put ourselves in the mindset of the size of Europe. Yeah.

We are used to a lot more space. If you talk about, you know, our capital's on the completely different side of the country. Their countries are like our states in the West. Yeah. So you do have like all these like expats and everything like that that are in all these other countries. I think because they're easier to get to. Yeah. It doesn't take as much. So there are these, you know, socialist Italian movements that are in Switzerland. And they're also there because then they don't really have to worry about any political opposition because they're not really in Italy, but they can kind of organize themselves. The Swiss government's probably not going to give too much of a shit about Italian revolutionaries plotting something in a different country. No, no, no, because in 1903, he's arrested and booted out of Switzerland for basically advocating violent strikes of their businesses there. Yeah, that is the issue, is even though he's focusing on Italy, he's still probably going to be riling some shit up in your own country. While he was over there the first time, and then consequently the second time, he studied a lot of Nietzsche.

And a lot of the sociologist named Alfredo Pareto, he... You got to jazz of these things. Paredo. I didn't know if the V in Italian is anything like the V in or the WN. A will and a V in a V. But he gets a lot from Nietzsche. Nietzsche sort of runs counter to the socialist belief system. He has a different spin on what he thinks society should look like and about the norms of society and about class

warfare a little bit. He kind of shies away from this aspect of class warfare. As Chris said, is a part of the Italian socialist movement in Switzerland. He ends up getting booted only to return to Switzerland in April 1904. Yeah, so he gets, so the Swiss arrest him. They turn him over to the Italian police. They then release him like a matter of days later. And then he just ends up going back to Switzerland.

and then is arrested again in Geneva in 1904. False passport. He had done something like he had tried to manipulate the expiration date on his passport, and they found it immediately. It's like... You're trying to get back in. At that point, it's just like print. It doesn't have any type of security measures.

You just have to not be fucking dumb about it. Yeah, man, just not great. But he was a lot... I don't know if he... Yeah, he had... have just stayed in jail there for a little while because he ends up returning to Italy in December 1904. He returns to Italy under the guise of this military desertion amesty that Italy had put out and obviously since he dodged his military service he needed to get back. He was convicted of being

AWOL and absentia while he was off in Switzerland. And in order to get his amesty back, which this part doesn't make any sense. He had to serve in the army for two years. There it is. I wrote that down. I was just like, I was reading that. I had to read it three times. I was like, so he gets amnesty for desertion, but the punishment to receive the amnesty for the desertion, he has to just do the same thing that he was going to have to do anyway. Yeah, that doesn't seem like amnesty to me. I thought amnesty was kind of forgiven, forget, but maybe he would have been punished more for the first desertion. It's like, hey, just do it this time? Well, I mean, he does his two years of service, and then actually goes back to teaching.

Not sure. Had it had to have definitely been in a different area. Mm-hmm. Yeah, I just, the teaching aspect of this, it makes a lot of sense when we start talking about kind of his use of manipulation that maybe being a teacher prepared him for it, but at the same time, he's teaching children, which is so weird to me.

1909, he goes ahead and goes abroad to Austria. He becomes the secretary of the labor. party in Trento and he is editing a paper called la Avenir. That's French. Sure. I don't know if it's Italian or French. It's a word that's odd to me. Aveniere.

Yeah, that actually sounds right. It was pretty short-lived. He ended up returning home to Italy. He stopped in Milan in 1910 and then he ended up going back to his hometown. He edited a weekly newspaper there called Lata de Classie, the Class struggle. He was a fairly smart dude. He was, I don't know if you called Nauda Didac. He spoke Italian, obviously.

He spoke French. He had a lane. I think he had a lane. Yeah. He was good at studying. He was self-taught and all these things. His major downfall was he believed he was good at German. Yeah.

And we'll talk about that coming up. He underestimated a lot of stuff. He had published these editorials and pro-radical newspapers in kind of magazines. One was La Voce. He even wrote a smut novel called The Cardinals Mistress. Hell yeah. And his disbelief in Christianity, Catholicism, church, anything like that comes full circle. Well, it will come full circle, but it's on full display with the Cardinals' mistress.

is he basically just writes this dirty novel about a cardinal and a church. Cardinal Emmanuel Madruzzo and Mistress Claudia. Oh, that's hot. Yeah. It's hot the way you say it too. Just a complete slap in the face to religion. So you would think that there's just no way

that he would ever come back to religion. But if it suits what you need to be doing, probably not the worst thing in the world. By 1911, he'd become a well-known socialist. He had participated in a riot protesting the Italian war in Libya. And he called the war an imperialist war. So as Chris alluded to earlier, he didn't like this whole idea of colonialism, imperialism, pushing on to other people's lands. You would say would be something that he wouldn't like, right?

At the time. 1912, he becomes a member of the National Directorate of the Italian Socialist Party. and along with that he is the editor of the party newspaper Avanti So at this point he considers himself an authoritarian communist and Marxist Like I said This guy is all over the fucking map

And I think I feel like what's happening is he's getting a book And he's like oh I'm this now This sounds really good And then the next book he gets he reads and he's like Actually I'm now this He's swapping it like people swap fucking diets in the first three months after the new year.

He's like a literary chameleon. Yeah. Anything that he reads, he just becomes a part of him. So he rejects egalitarianism, which is a core belief of socialism. So he ends up rejecting that. And then basically in August 1914 during World War I, the socialist party is against the war. So that's their position. They're not in a seat of power enough.

to prevent Italy from being in the war. Again, these are smaller political groups, but they're in opposition. So technically, during that time, Mussolini is part of the party, should also be in opposition. Well, the monarchy was also against the war to start out with, too. The socialist that he was working with

believed that this wasn't their war to fight as Italians. They didn't have a horse in this race. This wasn't something that they needed to become involved in because they didn't want to sacrifice the lives of their own people, which he astutely points out, the rich people don't fight the wars, the poor people fight the wars,

the poor people bear the brunt of war. And if you're already have a lower class that's very poor and not doing very well, going to war and dying for the aspirations of rich people is not going to help that. It's a legitimate, correct. He's not wrong. He hit the nail on the head.

That's how you're able to appeal to a broad basis. You just have to have a couple things. that people agree with and just have them focus on that and not the rest of your fucking mission statement which involves like fucking death and shit um so with that he ends up supporting the war so muslin he comes out in support of the war believing that it could actually lead to a socialist revolution in his eyes the war is essentially started and it's the same shit that kind of the world deals with today you have the military industrial complex it exists around back then the people that own the arms manufacturing, you go to war and those people are getting rich. Those people are

usually the ones in higher positions of power. So in his eyes, he's basically saying we're fighting, these people are getting rich. But if we go to war and the armies out and everything, that could lead essentially to an uprising, a socialist revolution where we may be able to kind of oust the current government. This is an opportunity for them to have their attention elsewhere while we're over here doing our thing. He also saw it too as a way to liberate Italians that were living in Austria because they were living under imperial rulers, they were living under the Habsburgs, that they've always Someone else, I believe in World War II uses that excuse to invade Austria because there's their people are living there. It's, it sounds familiar. I wonder where he would have gotten that

idea. It makes you wonder where Hitler may have come up with that idea, huh? Mystery. But along those lines, his just, just complete switch into supporting the war wasn't lost on everybody that was around. Because again, he wanted to liberate the Italians living in Austria. So he would be aligning himself away from this triple, what was it, the triple entente, the triple alliance in World War I? Yes. And then we were the triple on taunt.

We were just the allies. No, we weren't the triple on taunt. We were the, fuck, I don't know. He aligned himself with the good guys in World War I instead of the bad guys. The agitators weren't the ones that he wanted to align himself with. Just going along those lines, he really decided to advocate to the point to where he's like, yeah, well, you know, I'd go over and fight in the war. I would be there.

He was actually writing when he was writing and being critical of the social, Party stance before he ends up going over to war. That gets embouted from the party. He basically abandoned the idea of support for this class conflict, and he adopted this stance of revolutionary nationalism, where he believed that the leader could come from any class of life, but if they were going to lead and they were going to be effective, it can't just be anybody.

It has to be somebody that's smart and educated, knows what they're doing. And this idea of nationalism, like you were talking about in the beginning, this belief in the Italian man, the prototype for what you should be in life. A true man can't prove that he's a man unless he's fought. All of those Roman statues, look at these men. The men that fought in the gladiatorial, well, those guys actually were slaves brought from other countries. So the guys watching the guys in the gladiatorial games in the calls. see him. So this is a man without a party at this point. He's declared himself like Adam was saying,

revolutionary nationalist. But he's not a man without a newspaper. He's not. He ends up founding the El Popolo de Italia. It's the people of Italy, which I, how often did you just go around saying Popolo? Popolo El Popolo de Italia? After, I had it's fucking stuck in my day for days. So this whole time, I always thought he was El Ducche instead of Il Ducche, because I think. I think, thought it and I kept thinking about it's like well his name was benito and he was el duchy you do the el in spanish and spanish yeah yeah but ill ill must be the masculine form yeah so crazy thing about this paper that he ends up starting is part of it he's receiving funds of course he has to have funding he's not like independently wealthy so part of it is funded by

because of his position he is funded by some like richer people are businesses. He's also funded in part by France and Britain. They're providing him money to print this socialist paper because the social or it's in, sorry, anti-socialist paper. Sorry. See, I get it mixed up too. I'm switching like he is. Basically, this, what's becoming the foundation for fascism, these are the ideas that he's putting forth in this paper. And he's also saying, hey, we need to get into the war. We need to get in on the war on the side of the French and the British. And French and British are looking at this and being like, yeah, we should be supporting this because he's putting out the idea that they should, like if we can try to bolster him a little bit, get some public

opinion on our side, maybe that will put pressure on the government to actually come into the war on our side. Am I five cut him a check every single month? How crazy is that that the British intelligence, MI5. What, Bond was MI6? Yes. So the different level in there was cutting the future fascist dictator of Italy a check to push them towards the war. And this is kind of the time when he ends up forming the political movement, the fascistee.

And we know it is the fascist. So he gets the name. The name is from Fassi. Now, a Fassi in Roman times or antiquity. It was a bundle of rods that had, I think, a hatchet sticking out of it. And it was basically a Roman symbol of like a magistrate's power and his position. So it was one of those images a lot like if you're, you know, you see the S with the Omega sign and everything. It's a certain type of like, it was what like Roman soldiers would have tattooed on them.

You see certain things that like iconography that will make people remember the glory days. And he's, he's pretty clever. He's fucking charismatic and he's clever. He's like, I'm going to use a symbol, or not a symbol, but I'm going to use a word that harkens back to that strong Roman history that we want to try to recreate here. So that's where it actually gets its name. It's from this bundle of rods that was a magistrate's symbol of power and they become the fascist party. He would go on to denounce what he referred to as orthodox socialism in late 1914 in a speech where he derided them for the failure to recognize the significance of national loyalty and identity over class

distinction. So he's looking at them saying, you're more worried about putting them in a class of people instead of just reminding everybody that they're an Italian. It doesn't matter. Rich, poor, middle class, lower class doesn't matter. And Italians, an Italian and Italians fights for his country. He's basically like I'm class blind. I just see us all as Italians. Yeah. And to go along with that, a guy that dodged the war before in 1915, Mussolini ends up getting drafted into World War I. He was sent to the Asanso Front, which is, we know from the World War I overview that we did, they fought this Asanso War like 50, or I think it was 12 times. Yeah, so he's, he dodges it in 1902 when they're doing the whole Libya thing, I want to say.

Yeah, then World War I kicks off. They finally decided to come in on the side of Britain and France. and yeah so he actually goes in to sign up but because of his record and they know who he is he's a flaming socialist yes they're basically like no we're good we'll call you if we need you he ends up like he said getting called up on reserves in august of 1915 he ends up making it to corporal but he's in one of the trenches during this battle and a sin i think he's in a mortar trench so he's part of like the crew and this fucking mortar ends up blowing up which I'm sure in World War I because it's such new technology and fucking dangerous as shit how these shells are getting packed.

This had to have been a common thing, especially based on the technological disadvantage we'll get into with World War II in Italy. You got to imagine that even fighting in this war getting in a little bit later, the Italians probably weren't at the cream of the crop for development of these things. No, and they weren't. There's no way that they were not just being supplied with these and being like, hey, Here's how you do it. You stick this in the pipe. You pull the string. It fires out. Make sure it's pointed in the right directions.

Any questions? And they're like, Ah. Load, ram, light. Load, ram. And he's sitting there and he's like, light, load, ram. What was the order again?

We'll figure it out. Yeah. I heard multiple different stories of how he ends up getting injured. I heard the mortar that you were talking about. I heard that it was another mortar that landed in the trench next to him. And then I heard that it was somebody

that had just dropped a grenade and the pin had fallen out to get him. I don't know if it would have been the grenade because from what was said, he had like 40 shards, little pieces of shrapnel that they had to remove. There's so much about him that, and we'll talk about it a little bit later when we kind of get into some of his, on his way to power. But his personal life is just so incredibly messed up that he had, I believe he had two wives. he had a lot of mistresses. He had a lot of just kind of sneaky leaks. He'd get out there and he'd get after it with him.

But I can't... This guy fucked. Yeah. I think he only had like six kids on record. There's no way in hell he just had six kids with as many mistresses as he had and the kind of sex life that he was living. His first wife, and I'm trying to remember in what year he married her,

he proposed to her basically while holding a gun. and when she was kind of like on the fence and she hadn't given an answer, he was like, if you don't marry me, he's like, I'll kill you, I'll kill your family, and I'll kill myself. I don't know what passes as Italian romance at that time, but that doesn't seem it. I also watching a documentary. So I'm going to say we review a lot of, you know, different sources and everything. This one seemed very legitimate. and it also noted that he had stated in a book that he had written later on,

he'd actually raped a neighbor as a teenager. I don't know if you heard that. I didn't hear that one. I heard one later after he comes to power. So if he does it then, chances are he did it when he was younger. Yeah. I had also heard from a, seemed like a fairly reliable source,

that he had dated his stepsister. Like, there's just, there's so many stories out there. For everyone in this story. Just to get back to the point of where we were, there's a lot of different stories about them. There's a lot of different kind of like, this happened, no, this happened. Well, this detail was different. And really, it's because, again, we're getting history that was shaped by the people that were underneath him. It's hard to separate fact from fiction.

This is because the waters get fucking muddy. So he ends being discharged August, 1917. And at that point, you know, he goes back. He's been at war. goes back and finds El Popolo has kind of been on the rocks a little bit. Apparently, the guy he left in charge had been taken profits from the newspaper and spending them on a mistress. So I think that might be called irony. And I don't know what it's called in Italian, but it's kind of funny.

Hey! But yeah, so he comes back and basically has to try to kind of rescue his sinking paper. And the whole time. he always has a paper and if you have a paper you have a voice and if you have a voice you can get to the people as he comes back he builds popolo back up um and just to he always has some way to try to attract people to him and when you have that ability and you can start to get you know more readership to this paper you can do things like four new political movements i feel like i have to remind myself of this sometimes because it's always you know a or some type of like brochure pamphlet, your publication. This was at a time when there was nothing else but publications. You had radio and everything, but at the same time, not every family probably had a radio, but a newspaper, a newspaper that you could pick up and read,

and that was some of people's only form of entertainment or keeping up to date on anything. That's, you know, you would have a huge advantage over anybody else if you had your own way of dispersing that information where you didn't have to be there. It wasn't that common. Well, and the thing about it, too, that just like you're talking about, that I always forget and that I have such a tough time because we live in such a different age now, if you read something in the paper, where do you go to verify that it's true back then? Yeah. Like, there's just nowhere. Or if you don't have another resource, like, you're like, well, I read this other paper and it didn't really even talk about that, so it didn't disprove it. Yeah. So, yeah. And even there, is that, that,

their spin. No fact checking. You just have to make it sound good. Yeah, it's impossible to do. So through this fascia deia zoni revolutionizaria, um, they were referred to themselves as fascists.

Um, they were very small a number to begin with, but they would participate in these violent clashes with the socialist because that's who Mussolini was pointing the finger at for all these shortcomings. And it sort of helps shape their belief that political violence is a way

of getting a point across. This is literally at a time when, like, they're meeting in the street and they're literally, like, beating the shit out of each other with clubs and everything, or they're raiding offices and, like, destroying property. Like, this is serious shit. Yeah, and it's, it extends anywhere like you were talking about from, like, the hooligan level shit where it's like, we're going to meet here and we're going to have a showdown. But at the same time, if you can start rating these offices and start causing issues within

their party, that they have to then take a look at it. at, you're going to kind of make your mark. He writes this paper that calls for a man who is ruthless and energetic enough to make a clean sweep to revive the Italian nation. And that sounds like he's making a call for a revolutionary to step in and make that happen. He's not naming names. No, no. But everyone knows who he's talking about.

Yeah. He might as well just put an arrow back up to who. wrote the just a picture of himself with a big arrow pointing up this guy so you need guys you need guys to go out there and really shake things up and he ends up lining himself up with this other kind of group that was called the fascia italia de combatamento the italian combat squad which had 200 members these 200 members were known as the black shirts basically the These are the enforcers. These are the street level guys that are going to go into these, you know,

fights and everything with the other, like, socialists. They're going to be the ones that are also kind of out in the public eye. So while they're also trying to beat the shit out of these socialists, they're also doing things like helping run or, like, helping clean, like, the streets and everything. He's having these guys go out and be seen in kind of, like, a benevolent way to also kind of, like, garner, I guess, more support, like some fans. Yeah. And we'll talk about the black shirts kind of with the combination of another group that they went in together with. But these black shirts were called black shirts because they wore black shirts. And the black shirts that they wore were oftentimes the combat uniforms that they had worn during World War I.

Yeah, a lot of previous soldiers that came back. A lot of them, obviously, if it's a kind of fascist group, it's going to have all the same ideologies. he basically has just now found his small military arm of fascism as he's trying to build this up. These guys would also have like they wore their helmets and sometimes they would put like a skull on the helmets. What was their motto? I don't give a damn. I don't know if I ever heard a motto. I didn't think they would. I'm almost positive that that was actually the motto is like I don't give a damn.

That sounds right. As you talked about earlier, this ideology that they came up with wasn't just out of left field. they took a lot of these, or not they, Mussolini, because he created this, took a lot of ideas from Plato,

Sorrell, Nietzsche, and Pareto. Plato, I thought, was very interesting that it was a source that he used, but Plato had written

a book called, like, The New Republic? I mean, if you take one line from Plato that's taken out of context, he could be like,

hey, I got it from Plato. True. Yeah, and it also sounds legit like, like, oh, Plato talked about that.

His idea, for foreign policy that he puts into place later on is he wants to create something called the spasio vitale, the vital space, and he wanted to use the footprint of the ancient Roman province of Italia or the Roman Empire. This might sound fairly familiar to you. Leibn-Srom?

Yeah, Leibons-Rom, I think. Or living space that Adolf Hitler used to justify going into Russia to try to give them as much room as possible to be able to live. Because there was this belief that the overpopulation didn't have enough room in Germany. So if they had a little room to spread their legs, they would be able to be more economically strong. Yeah, Lieben-Trump was basically the German term for living space. The big appeal that would gather more support about this is, again, that thought of restoring the glory of what they previously had. like we previously had this, why shouldn't we have it now? Also the fact that because Italy was smaller and at this time it was going through kind of a social economic flux, it stuff was kind of

unstable. A lot of people were going and working outside of Italy because there wasn't work available. Well, you're taking a workforce out of Italy and you don't have anywhere to put them elsewhere, so you're losing out on that workforce. And part of the selling point about this whole, what was it called again in Italian? Spasio Vitale. Spasio Vitale was. basically like, hey, we're trying to, we want to gain more territories. So we have a place to also spread out and establish this empire, but also a place where you guys have work to do. Well, they also had an argument that was in a way to explain it that is hard to explain

legitimately illegitimate. Because technically, they were a part of the winning side of World War I. So you would be inclined to believe that they, they would get some spoils of war, some extra land from the Austro-Hungarian Empire that was very close to Italy that they would be able to keep and hold. Now, saying that, the reason that it's illegitimate is because they really didn't do shit during the war. The argument that Mussolini would make for this point was that I believe 600,000

Italian casualties occurred. Sorry, deaths. There was over a million casualties that Italy had, you know, suffered. during the war. I'm not saying that like that's not a lot and they shouldn't have been compensated, but at the same time they did come in maybe when there was a little bit of writing on the wall for who was going to win in that scenario. But just like we can view the Hitler situation about how he was able to garner so much support in Germany, again, like there's so many parallels between this. You basically have him stating, hey, we were on the winning side and we got ripped off in World War I,

Like, we need, why don't we have more land? We beat the people that literally have the land right next to us, so we should get some of that. Whereas Hitler's big thing is like, hey, we shouldn't have had our land taken away during World War I or after World War I. So a little bit different argument, but it's kind of the same selling point. Like, we should have this back. We deserve this. One was we deserve it because we're a proud people and we got overly punished. The other one is we deserve this because we were on the winning side.

Well, it also sort of neglects the fact that a million casualties and 600,000 dead is a lot, but it's not like they were under leadership of another country. The generals that were sending them into war were their own Italian generals that got a hell of a lot of people killed. Yeah. So, I mean, it's like I say, it's legitimately illegitimate reason to want this extra land. Some of his beliefs on race were odd to me. I heard it specified as not necessarily racist, but then when I explained to you kind of how he felt,

I sort of feel like there's a lot of racism in it. He believed that his Slovak neighbors in Yugoslavia were beneath him. He believed that they were a lesser people, just as he did, the African nations that they were in, the people from Africa, were an inferior race of people. I thought that was racism. Yeah, I'm kind of sure.

That's one of the core components of it. He made a quote of something that he would gladly spend 50,000 Italians that he could send in to take out 500,000 Slavics and that it would be a worthy sacrifice. Yeah, it's wild that I kept hearing that it wasn't necessarily racist. You justified taking a lot of this land for the Spaziovitali that he wanted to is a relief for Italy's overpopulation. I believe they were like 40 million strong at this point in time, which seems like a hell of a lot of people to be in that little boot. Apparently, you didn't lose too many people in World War I. No, no, not. Yeah.

They had some to give. But he believed that the main issue standing in their way was these plutocratic nations that were standing in the way of the proletariat nations like Italy from achieving economic growth. The West. Yep. Capitalist societies as well. That was a big thing that he was. against was capitalism. Yeah.

So, I mean, if you're looking for somebody to blame, there's definitely somebody to blame there because these other nations that you fought alongside so hard and lost so many soldiers, not your fault, but you definitely lost all these soldiers, definitely not your fault. And they didn't give you anything. I, it's, I don't know. It's, obviously it's wrong. It just feels like I'm trying to make it make sense and it just doesn't. It's, in hindsight, it doesn't because you know what it leads to.

but if you put yourself in the situation where you're there in Italy and you hear somebody say, hey, we're on the winning sign. We didn't get anything. And we lost, you know, we had a million casualties. That's going to make your ears perk up and be like, yeah, that's fucking unfair. And again, how do you fact check that? Yeah. You can't.

There's no other way to look at it besides you're just believing what you're hearing. There was this rapid growth of these fascist parties in it concerned the hell out of the liberal government. especially with the political uncertainty of the Chamber of Deputies, they had five prime ministers from 1919 to 1922. They had five changes of government. They had to vote five times. Five p.m. In three years.

Shit was like nothing was sticking. Well, and every single time you introduce another prime minister, you have to have a general election to create this chamber of deputies. And also at the same time, just like in Germany, people are looking and saying like, there is no stability. But the only thing that is the same is King Emmanuel, right? That was his name? Yep.

King Emmanuel III. That's the only consistency, but they're having to swap out all these prime ministers. Anything is going to start sounding good that sounds like it's going to have stability. And you're not going to have to worry about all this fluctuation. So that's why there's this huge growth within the Thash's party during this time frame, because everyone's looking around and nothing is consistent. They can't count on anything. And then all of a sudden, you have this party that's coming.

in and has, you know, a few good ideas about like, yeah, the Italians should be a strong people. We are a strong people. We hope when World War I, we used to be a world empire and a superpower. We should be again. That kind of stuff is going to sound like goals, something you can strive toward, a plan where you're looking at the government, and apparently no one has a fucking plan. You just want to wake up and roll over in bed and look over and see the same prime minister that you fell asleep with the night before. Like, it's just, you want that in your life. Um, Mussolini ended up winning a seat in this chamber of deputies, uh, in a 1921 election, uh, along with that 1921 election, uh, the liberal party leader Luigi Factor ends up becoming the prime minister. And I love it when a stereotypical name makes its way in.

Luigi is a stereotype for a reason. Seeing this rise in fascism and knowing that Italy just won this seat in the chamber of deputies, facta goes to him. He's like, hey. Oh, that fascism want a seat? Well, that Mussolini was sort of like the number one fascist leader. No, no, correct. You said Italy won't a seat in the chamber. Oh, want to seat in Italy's chamber of deputy.

Fascists want a seat in the chair. He goes to Mussolini and immediately tries to offer him higher positions in government. And Mussolini's like, I really just want your job. In fact, it's like, well, I have my job. So you can't have my job. But I will make you a secretary of. the interior, whatever, this or that. You can, I'll give you

a lot more power, something more than just this regular chamber deputy seat. Mussolini's like, nah, man, Prime Minister Mussolini is well. He's like, I feel like you're trying to put me away where I can't make noise, where I can make a lot more noise in the chamber. So, Factor goes ahead and

threatens him with martial law if he doesn't stop these fascist violent attacks from happening all over the city and he gets a socialist. The fact, he ends up going to King Emmanuel III. He's like, hey, got to declare martial law. We got to clean up this fascist problem that we have. And Emmanuel was kind of in a tough position because he was a little bit sympathetic to the fascist cause and the beliefs.

What was his known as the Little Sword? Because he was very short. He was scared, also scared shitless. He just wanted to stay in power. Well, part of the reason he wanted to stay in power was because he had a cousin that would be in line for the throne that was very, very fascist. So, excuse me, if something went wrong and he declared martial law and the fascists were to overthrow him, they could then depose the king and they could bring in the next king that was a full-blown fascist. And one of the ways that that was going to, oh, King of Manuel was like, no martial law. Sorry, fact of you're on your own.

In fact, it's like, okay, quit. Just hired me, just put me in this position of prime minister, done. I'm out. No more of this. These dudes are going to kill the shit out of me because I just threatened them. with martial law. The king really having no choice in what to do is kind of starting to look around like well maybe if we just put Benito in power we can avoid this whole thing.

And one way to want to push Benito into power is to march on Rome. Very similar tactic that Hitler had taken. Bear Halpitch? Yes. Well, this one was successful. Yeah. So, yeah, so fact is out. And at this point, there's already been some talk.

Like, because there has been civil unrest, the king has definitely seen kind of what the socialists are doing around the country and knows that they're a growing and sizable force at this point. And probably the main threat, the main threat that's opposed to him. The fascists aren't on the socialist. Correct. The one that he's not probably in control of within the current government. So you basically have Mussolini kind of threatening that him.

and his guys might take a trip to Rome. And so they're having this big rally. Was the rally in? It wasn't in Milan. Where was it? It was, I believe they formed everybody outside of Rome because they were going to be marching on Rome later on. He did a speech and I want to say maybe Pisa or something. It would have been probably Milan if it wasn't in Rome because that was the headquarters.

That was the hotspot. So then he basically is like, this is the date we're going to march on Rome. He even gives them kind of a date. and sends all the guys out and he just stays back in Milan. He's not actually going with them, which also kind of sounds like Hitler, because didn't Hitler hold back a little bit?

Oh, yeah. This whole entire time, though, is they're getting ready for this march on Rome and they're making these movements. Mussolini keeps popping in and marching for a little while and getting some pictures and getting a good look

and shaking a few hands, well, not shaking a few hands, because that's not what they did. We'll talk about that in a second because that's wild interesting to me. But he wanted these photo ops. And at the same time, when they were marching through the mud and it was raining, he would jump in a vehicle and he would head back to wherever he was staying and hang out. And then later on, he would go by car and catch up to the marchers.

And he'd go back out and he'd take some pictures, I'm sure when it was sunny again. So he wanted to put in the face time with these soldiers to let them know, hey, I'm with you. I'm one of you. I'm marching with you. Just not the whole time. It just, it got a little cold for me the other day. My tootsie's got cold. So Emmanuel calls Benito, and he doesn't answer the first time, I think. Second time he answers, and they come to an agreement that he's going to step into the prime minister role. Not only is he stepping into the prime minister role, he's stepping into like three other ministerial positions that are in charge of, like, public transportation, the police.

I'm trying to remember what the other one or two were. But essentially multiple positions within the government to where he now has control over pretty much anything he needs to solidify power. When he got the call from Emmanuel finally and went to meet him, he actually was like, all right, you guys keep marching towards Rome. And then he jumped in a car and sped off to Rome himself. So he wasn't going to come with his forces. He wanted to be there front and center immediately because I'm sure he knew what was coming. And so he's chosen as prime minister. he's told to form this new government in 1922.

He becomes the youngest prime minister in the history of Italy, I believe, at age 38. Is that what he was at the time? Yeah, close to it. All right. Well, he's now in power. I think when we did Hitler, we took a break and then transition to what he does with his power. So I think we should take one now. Go.

Oh, my God, Adam. What is that up in the sky? It's a bird. It's a plane. It's... Socials! Oh my God. It's faster than Instagram.

That's historically high pod on Instagram. More powerful than X? It's historically high, historically H.I. on X? Able to leap tall threads in a single bound. Back to historically high pod on threads. And, I mean, I guess there's still Gmail, right? We got that too. That is historically high podcast at gmail.com.

All right, guys, back to the show. All right, but Benny's in office. What's got to do? Oh, do we start? Yeah. Okay. Well, you'd think that once he finally becomes prime minister, a lot of this fascist violence would stop.

Yeah, he's got what he wants, right? Yeah, it didn't. It just, if anything, it intensified and got worse. And these black shirts were out there just causing all sorts of panic in the streets. pretty vicious and violent guys. If they pulled you out of your house and you just got your ass kicked, that was kind of a win. They had a few other ways of torturing people. One of them was feeding them live frogs, which that seems like a pretty tough task.

The castor oil thing. Yeah. So the other thing that they did is they would make them shit on socialist documents and writings. And now when I heard that, I thought, well, that's weird. How do you just make somebody shit? Is this like a payday squeeze type situation where you just grab them around the gut and just squeeze them until they shit? No, they would feed them so much castor oil that they would just lose control of their bowels and they would just dump their pants or all over socialist literature. They would do sometimes just have them shit their pants and then walk with shame.

It's just a wildie. It's a crazy, such a childish, like, that's like fucking Dennis the Menace type stuff is making Mr. What's his name? Mr. Wilson? Yeah. Mr. Wilson like fucking take Xlaxers, some three ninjas. shit. Yeah, dude, it's not funny. It's a terrible, awful thing.

I can't imagine drinking castor oil. I think I've only smelled it. It's not a pleasant smell. Weaponizing diarrhea, man. Yeah. That's dirty pool. And it makes sense. Okay, so just a timeline of events.

Basically, you have this all going down in Rome. Italy is, you know, it's small, but it's still a fucking country. So you have this going down in Rome in a very quick amount of time. Other people in Italy probably have. no idea what's going on. Maybe, you know, in the larger areas, but rurally, probably not. All of a sudden, you now have this new prime minister. Well, the way that Mussolini got into power was so quick and frankly kind of lucky because if he wanted to, the king could have called in the military and completely just disbanded the fascist and it never would have happened. Yeah.

So now you have all these other places that are not fascist in Italy that are basically waking up to a fascist regime. And there has to be resistance. essentially from all of the socialists, that they're not just rolling over and being like, nope, we're done with this. They're going to fight against this. His power base or his power is not solidified at this point. So he knows now that he has some authority,

he can use that and he can make rules and laws about shit that are going to fight against these guys. But in the meantime, until those can get passed, he's just going to resort to the shit that's been working before and silencing him. Yeah. And the early years of Mussolini's reign as prime minister, which eventually becomes the longest reign of a prime minister ever in Italy. He's working within this mixed party government.

It's not just a full-blown fascist government that he installs immediately. He's working within these different groups. And the status quo hasn't changed enough so fast in the beginning that it's not some big revolutionary thing where everybody's eyes are transfixed on what's going on in Rome. he's just kind of slowly taking this power. And then he's trying to flex his muscles a little bit. 1923, the invasion of Corfu,

an island off of Greece. They go in and just sort of bully the Greeks around a little bit. And we also have this thing called the League of Nations that was created after World War I that's supposed to respond to countries acting hostile towards other countries. That's right here what they were supposed to do. Should have done it.

Didn't do. shit about Corfu. Just a very shitty response of like condemning it, but then also at the same time not really following through on any sanctions or anything. And this is going to kind of be the playbook. Classic League of Nations. Yeah. This is going to be the playbook going forward for a lot of

this stuff. Um, June 1923, we have something called the Aserebo law. What happened in Corfu though? Uh, did they end up taking it over? I believe they came in and took the island. Okay. The Aserbo law, in June 1923, I can only say is probably the dumbest thing that I've ever heard passed.

This law was passed and it was just narrowly passed, so it wasn't like it was everybody was in agreement with this. But the upcoming elections would grant two-thirds of the majority to the winning party within our party that scored over 25% of the vote. So if your party could get more than 25% of the vote and carry the majority, majority, you wouldn't just get the seats that you won based upon the votes or based on where the votes were cast. You will get two thirds, which is the majority to pass laws within the parliament. And this was a law that was put into place because they wanted to be able to have a government that was functioning and there wasn't a bunch of, they didn't want new bills or laws or anything like that to get caught in the quagmire of parliament that's divided.

This isn't a time when there's just a two-party system, because it sounds kind of weird if you just say, well, if they get over 25%, but it's the majority of the vote, you have multiple political parties that are within, you know, this, I guess it's their version of Congress. Yeah, and they form, like, factions, basically. So even if you're like a post-war liberal Democratic party and there's a socialist party. You can agree that your beliefs are close enough to where you can align in a coalition

and then that coalition can get enough votes and then you'll distribute the seats evenly among the parties within the coalition. So basically saying that the party that gets at least 25 percent and then that's the majority all you got to do is get a

little bit over a quarter and you get two thirds of the actual control of that Congress. And of course, the National Alliance won with 64% of the vote. Which is, that was like the, the fascist coalition that was put together. The fascist was essentially the figurehead, probably the largest portion of that. But then they had their little other puppet parties that probably wanted to try to kind of feed it at the table. Yeah, they're far right conservative parties that were with them.

And so, yeah. And this was also at a time when, because they're in control of the voting, this is going to be your classic fucking totalitarian regime, where you are going into the polling station and you have the black shirts there watching you vote and knowing if you're not voting for them. So yeah. Yeah, it was a squeeze job. When you're posting black shirts at all of these polling stations to get these votes and there's enough voter intimidation going on, these things can be changed. Also, you have party officials that are being squeeze to either recount votes,

find votes, anything like that. This was definitely not a fair election that happened. And when these things happen, there's always somebody that comes out and tries to be the voice of reason. And this voice of reason was a guy named Giancomo Mattoe. Mateotti.

Try it. Giacomo. I think it's MacHoddy. I thought it was Matioti. Sure. Because there's four T's. Okay. It's Giacomo.

So Giacomo was essentially kind of the figurehead or like one of the bigger guys in like the opposing political party. And during this whole election, everything, it was basically, I don't know what the German equivalent. There was something. It wasn't like the night of long knives. But basically it was called like the black terror because of all the black shirts and everything. And during this time, this is when there. are also kind of shoring up other loose ends. Union leaders, which are going to be, unions are going to be a big no-no, no striking allowed, any of that kind of shit, are killed. And then, again,

really any political opponents are kind of either trying to be silenced or intimidated, but this Giacomo guy, he decides to end the chamber, basically denounce the fascist in this election, everything. And surprisingly enough, survives for, what was it, like two weeks? You know how he? He ended his speech in front of parliament. No, tell me. As he was walking off, he goes, now you can start planning my funeral. So he knew.

He knew that the black shirts were coming for him. He probably didn't expect to make it out of the building. No, probably not, actually. Yeah. He just, I believe he got scooped up on the side of the street and thrown into a car and wasn't seen alive ever again after that. No. Oh, they found him.

No, no, no. They found him like two months later. Yeah, it wasn't found alive. Oh, there we go. Yeah, he'd gotten shot or stabbed, or both probably been. He'd gotten stabbed, and when they found the body, the knife was still sticking out of the body. So they didn't even care enough to pull the knife out. Let him keep it.

Souvenile a parting gift. Is that sending a message? Probably. Parting gift into the afterlife. Well, I mean, who are you going to blame? Probably the party that he just blamed for a fraudulent election. And I'm not trying to give Mussolini out. I truly believe that this is probably what went on.

Not because I don't think he. he wouldn't have called for this, but because there were a lot more radical fascists than he was. Like, he had pumped guys up enough to where even he was like, whoa. Yeah. You are a little out there. You're not going to get me elected. Yeah, but like that, that level. I like you, though.

Yeah, you're, you're going to be, you're going to be working for me. So I kind of have to like you. The other reason I think, and it could have been either way. He could have called for it. It could have just been done. and he's not too broken up about it. The difference between this and Nazi Germany, one of the biggest in regards to political opposition,

is that although people were killed, Mussolini sent a lot of people to isolation or to just, like, prison. And I think there was even like a town or village on an island. There was a prison on an island, and then there was also like this compound village type area that was built on an island. Now today it's one of those fucking picturesque, like Mediterranean, all the different colored buildings. And it used to be like a prison camp for these like political revolutionaries guys that were in opposition to him.

So I mean, he could have just, I'm not giving him, like Adam said, not giving him out. I'm just explaining that there's a difference to where he didn't have a problem just taking the guys and just making them go somewhere else. No, but he wasn't the main shot caller of these people. He still, honestly, at that point, too, probably still knew that there was a chance that like he could still be deposed. Yeah. There was still enough people that if there was a strong enough social uprising against him, that he didn't have enough control to prevent that from happening. Well, his response to this is like, oh, shit.

That sucks that that happened. Turns out that the guys that were fingered for this crime. Not literally fingered. Maybe. But they might like that part of it. he knew the guys that were in charge of Jim Como's hit he knew that it had happened and he was

pretty well affirmed in that belief when the ringleader, the one that he knew the most, walked up and handed him a chunk of the bloody back seat of the car that Giancomo was pulled into and you would think that everybody would go nuts and they sort of did. There were opposing parties that responded by Boycromo caught in parliament. I'm not positive what that does. I don't know if you need everybody there

for a parliamentary session. I don't think that's actually the case. At this point, you're literally just allowing them to then do what they want. Yeah. Because at this point, they've already altered the law that all of a sudden, and this is actually going to come up here in just a second, there's going to be stuff changed like, oh, you didn't hear. Yeah, as soon as you guys went ahead and left and did the boycott of parliament, we actually passed a new law that says if you're not actually at parliament, then your vote doesn't count. It's a lot. It's not like we can't vote. It's just that you don't get a vote. Yeah, just that I don't know what they thought was going to happen at that point.

But the response wasn't like on a world level, a major political figure getting snuffed out by the party of the prime minister should make some waves. At the same time, how quickly is that getting out and who's it getting out too? and do those people even really give a shit? They probably look to, if they're looking in it on, you know, looking in on Italy, they're probably like fucking five prime ministers now six and have over many years. They're like, this place is a shit show. A politician gets killed. Ah, that's Italy.

And that's, that's the wild thing about it is a lot of the world response was just kind of like, yeah, people die in Italy all the time. Every day somebody dies in Italy. It's not, we're not talking about the most shocking thing in the world. Catholic Church is kind of like, eh, not really our. business. How many carbs they eat? Yeah, dropping it all the time.

So Mussolini kind of goes out on the lip. He does something that most dictators wouldn't do. And on January 3rd, 1925, Mussolini gives a speech, taking credit for all this, what they're called, squadistae violence that's going on in Italy. And he doesn't mention Giancomo by name, but he does kind of reference. like I alone am responsible for the violence taking place inside of this country. So I think he tried to do that in a way that whereas what it sounds like is he's not doing it to take credit for it. He's doing it, I think, to take responsibility for it. So the people

that are for it see that in the way that he's taking credit. And they're like, yes. He's also pointing himself out to be accountable or trust. Ryan to do that of saying like, I didn't approve that, but because it happened under people that are in my party or that share, you know, this view of fascism, I'm responsible for it. And I think he was trying to garner being like, well, this is someone that will take accountability for like even bad shit and not try to hide it. Part of his speech was essentially him saying, you got to crack a few eggs to make an omelet. Yeah.

You have to be strong. You have to be powerful. you have to be an Italian man. That was him justifying the violence. After he essentially was just like, yeah, I'm responsible for it. But sometimes you have to do that. I think he was saying that violence, if it's for violence sake to cut out what he considered would be like a cancer, then it's definitely worth violence.

Yeah. After that, like Chris was talking about before, he would use the squadistri to go in and obviously when you have a guy who has done nothing but preach for the common man for the workers and more of a Marxist as the workers are supposed to own the means of production and all that kind of stuff, anybody that's a factory owner, an elite, a member of the bourgeoisie, is that? Yeah, we discussed that I think during the Stalin episode. That's what they would consider like the upper crust.

The people that you're made to point out when your main base is people that have felt like they've been downtrodden, you just point them at the bourgeoisie and be like, it's their fault. But when you want the bourgeoisie on your side, you go ahead and punish the proletariat that you used to be on the same side with. And you would use the black shirts to break up any fears that they would have of labor strikes by stopping these labor strikes from happening. So again, here's that huge pivot. So you get in essentially trying to be a representative of the common worker. That's who part of like your basis and how you got into that position. That's part of fascism. As soon as you get in there, you realize that those people put you there, but they're not going to keep you there.

The people that are going to keep you there are the fucking factory owners and the bourgeoisie. And so in order to keep them happy, you need to go ahead and make sure that those workers who you represent don't get their representation. and camp form unions. So basically, like Adam was saying, these guys are basically, just think of them kind of like the SS or the Gestapo more, right? Yeah.

Yeah, more so Gestapo. And would basically be, you know, strike breakers. They would also, at the same time they're breaking up these strikes, they're out there running the trolleys and everything. Because if workers are going on strike, guess who's filling in the gaps

to basically make themselves, you know, ingratiate themselves with the populace. you have black shirts that are running the, you know, the fucking trolleys. You have them cleaning up the streets. You have them running in public works. And now all of a sudden, you're looking a little bit better to even those people that may not have supported you initially, you're doing things for the people. He did these big public works. Like there was this area that was like to the south of Rome that since antiquity had basically been kind of like a swampy marsh area and it couldn't be farmable or anything. And he did this huge public works project. to basically open up that land to try to be able to provide people jobs and kind of boost the economy and lower unemployment and stuff. It's a beautiful system that anybody who comes along in a country has. He's holding out the stuff that people want and they're watching that hand and then he's doing

all this other stuff off to the side with his other hand, but they're not paying attention to that. Well, and even then, they're not going to know or even really care about what's going on in parliament or anything like that. As long as you're doing what you set out to do by putting food in people's mouths, putting a job in somebody's or putting somebody in a job, putting a little money in their pocket. And if you're doing all of that, plus you're boosting the economy because all of these factories have to build new things. They're building new manufacturing equipment to make all this stuff happen. You're raising, it's basically what they did to get us out of what, uh, Roosevelt did to get us out of the depression. Yeah. You pump a bunch of money into public works projects. You start rebuilding highways, anything along those lines where you can put somebody to work.

And you can sort of raise the status of what's going on in your country. And this is also kind of where propaganda also comes into play. And Mussolini was huge on imagery and propaganda. Again, I really feel like this is where Gerbils got the idea of how powerful this stuff was. this wasn't something I think he thought up on his own. I think this is another thing that the Nazis actually pulled from Mussolini and the fascist. He was so good at it. But this is, like we've talked about, this is the age of unverification. You couldn't verify anything. So whatever you were hearing, especially if it was coming out in press releases or over the radio from the government, and, you know,

they're doing great things up in this area, and you're down south and they say they're doing this in the north. You don't have any way to verify that. Of course, the government's not going to lie to you at that point. You know, so you have the perception. You get to shape the narrative in a lot of these situations. So, of course, you're doing a public works project to the south of Rome where there's going to be a lot of visibility on it. It's a great thing to try to open up this land for people.

You're doing photo ops. This is working its way all over the country. And the perception is that everything is going this way. Everything is benefiting. Even then, if you're not wholly on. bored to believe what the government's putting out. He began controlling the media, which, I mean, the guy knew the media game. It's not like it was a surprise that he knew how to control the media.

He started having a camera follow him around to not only get video, but to also get pictures for photo ops. Well, he would control the media by outlawing journalists who weren't given this governmental journalism license. And they would have to basically pledge the loyal. that there wouldn't be anything negative written about the regime. I see it like an SNL or Jesus, I said that weird. An SNL, S&L audition where they're like, okay, you are a fascist and go.

Also, we'd like you to turn in three fascist articles showing us your writing style and then we'll approve you if we find it. We deem it to be worthy. Well, the certification was given and taken at their own will. So if you were to be certified to be able to write in these newspapers or a journal or anything like that, if you wrote something that even leaned a little bit anti-fascist, they could just pull your license. I'm sure they had receipts too. Oh, yeah. Everyone goes in and they just drop a bind, and they're like, let's go through your last articles.

Well, and the other brilliant thing about it was you would be a little bit concerned as a member of the public to hear that they have to be certified by the government to be able to write. any articles or anything like that. You think you'd be concerned. Well, they kept all the certification secret. So nobody in the public knew that these journalists had to be licensed in order to be able to contribute to, like, newspapers or anything like that. And, I mean, the guy knew exactly how to use the news because he had been the news for so long. When he took off to become prime minister, he left his brother in charge of the paper, the Popolo.

El Popolo de Italia. Yeah. And the funny thing was he left his brother in charge because he believed that if anything went south, he could just go back to running the paper and get it back from his brother. I figured out why I think it's funny now. It reminds me off Bearfest,

the little creepy puppet, Popo. Oh, yeah. The one that landslide is running. Or a Kefer or a Donald Sutherland holds it up. He's like, Popo belong to my grandfather. There became kind of this slow, move towards this totalitarianism that started in 1925 with something called the Christmas

Eve Declaration. The declaration was changing Mussolini's title from head of the government instead of what it previously was as president of the Council of Ministers. So he's giving himself a different title to where instead of being the president of the Council of Ministers, he's just the head of the entire government. He's still called PM. He's still a prime minister. It wasn't just a name change, but it actually stripped Parliament of the power to govern, basically giving Mussolini the sole ability to call a council, set the agenda, exactly what it sounds like. He's in charge.

Yeah, this council was called the Grand Council. And it was basically governmental advisors that he was the only one that was in charge of calling. He was the only one that could set the agenda. And the other constitutional change that this made was that only the king could remove Mussolini from power, could remove the prime minister from power. Little sort ain't doing that. No, he's, if things are going okay, he's great. But it moves away from having the parliament be able to check anything that Mussolini does.

The parliament's basically worthless at this point because they have no power to be able to do anything because this grand council is going to be the only one that's going to be able to. It's like shown up for jury duty not getting called. God damn, yeah. I know that. Um, 1926 was a, an assassination heavy year for Benito. An attempted assassination heavy year. And coming from just all sorts of crazy angles.

Um, April 17th, 1926, this woman named Violet Gibson, who was like, Scottish or Irish? Irish, I believe. A nice Irish lass. Yeah, it turns out she had some, um, deficiencies mentally, uh, didn't end up killing him. This one shocked me the most October Opportunity number one

Yeah Surprisingly October 31st Entio Zamboni A 15 year old boy Looking at a picture of this kid He looks about 10 Head most yeah

Fails another assassination He was the one that actually fired the shot at him That went through Benito's nose right It grazed his fucking nose Well Bullets grazing presidents you know, it's all the rage.

Yeah. Similar bandage situation. The final one, Gino Lesothi. It was a failed bombing attempt. He actually, I believe, ended up smuggling the bomb in and setting the bomb, but it... Did heister it? It's got a bigger bomb than that. Got to Kistre it.

But, again, just another failed attempt. One of these three things could have changed the course of history a little. I'm not going to say. a lot because the groundwork of how Mussolini rose to power was already laid. And I think Hitler would have caught on to it regardless of if it ended 1926 or not. All other pilot are through this Christmas Eve declaration, all other parties were outlawed following the Zamboni assassination as well. Excuse me, because they didn't like this political unrest. It was the legé, legie fascistime.

And basically it was like the legal fascist doctrine or whatever. Funny thing about this of what it covers is that it was actually not drafted in response to the assassinations. It was drafted like much earlier and he just held on to it until he had an opportunity and a reason to be able to go ahead and submit it. This thing basically took away. This thing is what turned it into a. a dictatorship. So what this fascistime thing did is it abolished all civil, Jesus Christ, abolished all civil liberties.

All trade unions were banned except for the fascist trade unions. Which is a wild juxtaposition. Yeah, the two terms do not go together. No newspapers that were unfriendly to the fascist party. And then a single political party being the fascist party. Well, and, you. Even the more interesting thing about it was it banned all political parties and all political gatherings, including fascist political gatherings unless they were called upon or unless they were called for by Mussolini. That's when you don't trust your own fucking people.

Yeah. So you can't even have them trying to get a groundswell of support by having these other fascist meetings to try to run Mussolini out of town. And before he ended up taking credit for killing Mataloti, there was. were people within his party, within the fascist party. They're like, hey, man, step aside for a little while, let us take care of this. And then you can come back in. He's like, no. You think that if I jump out of this position, I don't believe that one of you guys is just not going to let me back in and take over like this. That's not going to happen. I created you. I bore you out of my own Italian ass. You guys are not going to get me out of power. So even though he's worried about all of these other parties. He's still worried about his own party. You can't scheme if you don't,

if you don't get together. The other thing that he did. And also, you guys don't need to have any ideas. It's all my ideas. Now. Why are you guys even needing to get together? Go enjoy yourselves. Yeah. I'm in power. I tell you what you think. You don't tell anybody else. I don't need your ideas. It's all, it's all up here. His other kind of just brilliant shuffle to keep his own party from eating him and the rest of themselves was he would appoint these people to all of these different positions within the government. And it sort of took their eyes off the prize because they've been rallying against this government forever and talking about how they weren't doing enough and about how they weren't ever effective. And then once they're sucked into the government and they're

putting these positions, they have to focus on doing well in those positions or else they're going to be cast out. One thing he did that, you know, he did a lot of clever things. So I'm not just going to say one thing he did. Another clever thing he did is positions that required very specialist roles, stuff for like economic advisors, you know, that type of stuff. He didn't go with people within his party. He wasn't just putting in kind of his cronies into those positions because he put the

people that would do the best job or who he felt would do the best job in those positions. He was still, they were in positions that they weren't going to have control over him. but he also knew that if he just put one of his fucking buddies in there and he fucked up, it was going to make the entire party look bad. So he still had to run a functional government and keep it running well. He was just going to be the one in charge of it and take all the credit. Yeah. 1928, the electoral law is abolished for all parliamentary elections.

And since this is a single party country at this point, the last election that was to happen was in 1928 and the ballot was filled with nothing but handpicked fascist choices. Yeah. So obviously they swept that one, cleaned it up nice. Who's of assholes.

Harkening back to our Italian mafia episode, he appointed a man named Cesar Mori to go in and eradicate the Sicilian mafia from Sicily in 1927. Good fucking luck. He did it. He said that he cleaned them out, but what he really did was all of the protection rackets. Go back to that episode. If you haven't listened to it, it's great.

Basically, the mafia started because wealthy farmers were trying to stop their things from being stolen. And it turns out that people were stealing from them were actually in cahoots with the people that were providing protection for them. So they kind of had their own loop. of money making that was going on. And when the mob ended up getting kicked out, they were just replaced with fascist leaders that did the same thing. So they get the revenge in the end. Yeah, you're still replacing bad people with bad people.

It wasn't an improvement. I mean in the sense is when they start, you know, working with the United States and the Allies. Yeah. Just, yeah, I guess that's right. Luciano brought them back into Sicily, didn't he? So along those lines, you have to figure out. Now, you've got the government figured out.

You've got the mafia figured out. You are moving towards this totalitarianism control. You've got to look back at this vital living space that you want to hold. Libya had been fighting back for quite a long time. and all of a sudden Mussolini turns his attention back to Libya. He's like, we have to pacify these guys. We can't keep having these uprisings in Libya.

We need this land because we need to spread this out. And Libya was a part of the Roman Empire, back when the Roman Empire was ruling everything in the world. That was a huge thing. Sorry to get off. I do that a lot of them. No, you're good. During his speeches, and I know that it's going to be hard to kind of get that kind of stuff in,

but his speeches used a ton of just callbacks. Even at some point before, you know, once Germany starts to kind of enter the picture, the Nazis start to enter the picture, he even uses things against them like, well, these people couldn't even write. We had people like Caesar and Augustus. And so he's building this national belief

of like supremacy and everything. And the way he gives speeches, I text this to Adam during research this week, and now I think it ruined it for him. He's like a fucking wrestling character giving it. Is it a promoting? He's the macho man cutting a promo. And he does, and other people have used this type of speech giving before, watch Mussolini speech.

And it's just certain mannerisms. But he will say very succinct short things that are almost just like catchphrases or little just, not catchphrases, but just little snippets. It doesn't really give you anything, but it's meant to give. you're riled up. Like he says one, he's like, the plow makes the furrow, but the sword defends it, and then just stops. And everyone's like, yeah. And then he's like, they're made of the heart and steel that lies in all Italians' hearts. And then he pauses, and it's like, yeah, but he has it time to where he's like a comedian waiting for the pop. He knows when the joke is done. And he's waiting for the pop to happen. So he'll say something. And then literally just sit back

arms crossed, giving a face, opening his eyes wide, shaking his head, nod and everything. Like, the crowd is getting into it, and he's just, like, feeding off that. He's pointing down at people in the crowds. He's responding to people that are like, someone's like, the workers love you, Muson. And he's like, yeah, I bet they do. Well, in his cadence, you can tell it, too,

because he always emphasized the first word of a sentence and the last word of his sentence. So that's how they knew that a new thought was going on, which to me is interesting because, an orator, I think that he was great. That's one thing that kind of dictators, aside from, I think, Kim Jong, have in common is that they're charismatic and they're great at fucking talking. But they did it. He did it his way and Hitler did it a very different way. Because like I say, he would emphasize his first word and his last word.

Like you said, he would pause for effect and all that kind of stuff. Hitler was a gifted order because he could rile himself up and then he could carry that through the entire speech. Whereas Mussolini would use it during certain times, but he knew when to use it. Whereas Hitler was like a goddamn machine gun, just firing anger all the time to rile people. It's clicking the comparison now. Mussolini could have a cue card in large font and maybe have 12 lines, but have a rally for half an hour off those 12 lines because he would say half a line, wait for the pop. Everyone would calm down.

Next line, wait for the pop. Hitler went so rapid fire that Hitler would cover four pages of a speech in the same amount of time because he wouldn't let anybody breathe. And I think that's the biggest thing is if you're just pumping speech into somebody and you're saying the things they want to hear, you're and you say something they don't want to hear. You're already on to something they want to hear again before they even have a chance. Mussolini was just playing to the crowd. And he did it well

He was very effective In the way that he did it And like you say It wasn't ever really anything of substance It was just some shit that sounded good He referenced at one point in time He said something like My father used to bend the steel

Use or bend the red hot steel Using his hammer to shape what he wanted I'm not bending steel I am bending souls I like your Mussolini voice I can't do the good one He had a very distinct voice, too. So he was quoted as saying, the multitude, like a woman, is made to be violated.

And that's kind of how he viewed the citizenry is he knew what was best for them, and they were going to deal with it regardless if they wanted to or not. Before we get off the woman topic, he had some, it just wasn't good. But the way that he kind of looked at women as sort of. sort of a return to domestication almost whereas he believed that they needed to be in the house to raise the family

he had said that the preferential number of children for a woman to have was five yes he was actually actively trying to like initiate like I'm not saying I'm sure there was actual like a plan written out for like how many people they had to have for this new area that they were planning on you know conquering

and all that shit but it was basically him trying to like push a breeding program to basically create more Italians. I think he figured by the time if they had to go to war, he figured they needed the country to be like 60,000 or I'm sorry, 60 million people. Well, he also saw that as a sign of vitality in a strong young nation. And we'll talk about that when it gets to Britain and France. But he wanted to push this agenda, partially because I think he wanted justification for this vital area that they wanted to take over. And getting back to that, this pacification of Libya lasted from 1923 to 1932. And it was kind of like the Libyan version of apartheid in South Africa.

They went in, they stole the land, they gave it to Italians, and basically the Libyans were just put into bondage. the Libyan genocide claimed 20,000 to 100,000 people. The population declined from 23 to 32, from 225,000 Libyans to 148,000 Libyans. That's a lot of people in a short amount of time. And guess who's not doing shit during this? Good old League of Nations.

Right around this time too. We have something that we referred to last week. And again, this whole thing was just a coincidence because our episode that we did last week on the Vatican City, we didn't know that Mussolini was going to make an appearance in that. I didn't at least. Yeah. I didn't think it was going to happen.

But 1929, the Lutern Pack was, or the Lutern Axe, shit. I forgot what they were. That episode will not be coming out before this. What? Yeah. Remember we have for the anniversary next week. Little teaser, it involves a bulge. We already did that.

Bulge, Vatican, Mussolini. We didn't do Battle of the Bulge. We're recording it next week. But it's already out. Oh, that's true. There's a little look behind the curtain. You just blew my fucking mind. There's a little look behind the curtain of how we're recording these.

Fuck. That's my spot. Regardless of when this comes out. Oh, 1929, the Lutern Acts were the acts that legitimized the Vatican City, making them their own sole sovereign nation. Yeah, this is when they're like, hey, sorry we took all of your territory from you. We'll make you guys your own tiny little cute city, state, country, whatever you want to call it. And here's $80 million for compensation. For all the lands that we took from you guys during that time.

and as a way to get back in with the Catholic Church, not only did he do that, I had read that he had actually married, and again, the marriage dates don't line up with this, but he had actually married his next wife in a Catholic church. Yeah, so the guy that's completely against the whole religion thing now basically gives the Catholic Church to their own country, Vatican City. And then also is like, yeah, go ahead and put crosses in all the schools now. Go ahead and you guys can do that. But he also knew that that's what was going to keep him in control. He had to appease. If the church was cool with him, they would tell all their people and all their people would be cool with them. It's brilliant marketing.

Like they don't have to support what he's doing, but they can just say, well, he allowed us to do this. So I guess he's not all bad, right? He also did squash the Cardinals' mistress book, too, and tried to pull that out of print. It's true. Kind of try to erase his footprint of negative things you'd set out the Catholic Church. We know about it. But to go along with that, he's just growing this cult of personality to where now Catholic people look at him. And Catholic.

He's such a, he's such a chameleon. Yeah. He's anything he needs to be. Catholicism reigns supreme in Italy in anybody that's a good Catholic is going to go by the church. And if the church is cool with him, they're going to be cool with him too. Okay. So getting back to the women thing, because I thought you were going to touch on this too. So, and this is going to be over the span of the 22,

fucking years that this guy is in power. So he's not shy about his mistresses. He doesn't even really try to hide the shit. In fact, he goes so far not trying to hide it that he's living in the, I can't remember the name of it, but it's like this huge palace that's in Rome. And he turns the entire top floor basically into like his sex floor. And this is where he entertains his ladies. His secretary said that he averaged one mistress a day. He would pick them out from letters sent in from all over Italy. And each lovely lady would gain around 15 minutes with Ilducci. And we haven't even touched on Ildeuchet.

We haven't even referred to him as Ildeuche yet. Yeah, the leader. Okay. This also goes to something that I kind of proposed to you was that do you believe that STDs could have possibly led to any type of like mental stability or decline? Yeah, he got, I'm only going on one source at a the many, but they said that he had acquired syphilis. Oh, of course. And I'm running with it because he definitely had a syphilis mind.

And with the amount of women that he betted, I'm shocked that most of the women in Italy didn't have syphilis. That's what I was going to say. So not only is he probably directly responsible for the spread of a lot of syphilis in Italy, but also does syphilis compound? So like if you're just getting syphilis, syphilis, syphilis, syphilis, does it become just like super syphilis? Multipliary effect. Yeah, just start fucking eating your brain. I don't know how syphilis works. I have never contracted syphilis.

Thank heavens. Yep. Knock on some wood. I better not contract syphilis. I'd be in a lot of trouble if a contracted syphilis. Both of us would be for sure. He was the Wilts Chamberlain of dictators. Yeah.

Which is insane. Because what we're going to get to when he first meets Hitler and one of his first impressions is just like the fuck paul calling kettle black yeah um i don't know when he said it but he did say it churchill had said of oh my god he said if i'd been italian i'm sure i would have been with him from the beginning now everyone's going to fucking take their lumps on this podcast we've made that pretty apparent by now we did an episode on churchill we gave him a lot of shine he did a lot of great fucking things many more good things than he did bad things but he did go ahead and say he would have been with Il-Douche from the beginning, kind of early on.

Of course, before they're trying to fucking kill each other in the war. But just simply the fact that that's, you know, that's committed to print is probably not one of his prouder moments. Our guy. It would have been not FDR. Pre-Truman. Yeah, Truman was after FDR, wasn't he? Yeah.

Truman was about the bomb. He was a bomb guy. Oh, that's what it was. Churchill's wife was very taken. It was the eyes. With mostly, yeah, his, the eyes that freaked me out. Apparently, she was a big fan of his eyes because she was very smitten with him. She thought that he was a good order to.

Just to know that this guy, they weren't living in Italy. They weren't seeing the day to day. They didn't really understand. But he had talked about what kind of a triumph he had done with this new form of government that he had created the third government. Hoover. Was it Hoover? Might have been Hoover. Coolidge, I think, didn't.

Yeah, I think I heard Hoover's name. Pop-up. Was very complimentary of the way that he was running Italy. And again, this is all taking place and happening is this cloak and dagger act where everybody's looking at it from the outside and seeing all these public works and everything being built and all the changes that are going on. But at the same time, not everything is going very. well because during a stretch of the Great Depression, they were doing things.

It was called gold for the fatherland. And gold for the fatherland is when they convinced all of the Italians to turn in all of their gold rings. I'm sure there were so many gold chains that they handed over because it's Italy. They said there was this big push like husbands and wives would come in and turn in their rings at the same time. And when they would do that, they would be given a... It's like evil UNICEF. They would be given a... steel bracelet that said, uh, for the fatherland.

Said El Ducche on it? Well, did they call themselves the fatherland? Because El Ducay believes that masculinity was the way to go. Because everybody usually uses the motherland, right? Uh, no. I think the Germans used fatherland too. Did they? Uh, Russians use motherland.

Okay. Uh, but they were in such dire straits financially that they needed to collect all the gold from their citizens. then they could melt them down into gold bars and distribute them throughout the banks in Italy. Like that was how tight things were getting. They also started basically the government was going around and starting to control businesses. And they were imposing price controls and attempted to turn Italy into this self-sufficient country, which is a really, really bad idea because in the south you can't grow shit.

And in the north, you can grow stuff, but you're not going to be able to grow enough to support. a country of that size and continue to grow and continue to try to stock a military. Yeah. Just it was never ever going to work, but it was just his blind faith and belief that being an Italian that the land would provide. Yeah. Meanwhile, you're trying to make them produce so many more kids in a land that can't already support the amount of people there.

It was just a bunch of errors that he made that all looked good from the outside. Yeah. It all sounded good from the people because it wasn't having an immediate impact. The impact isn't fell on those promises for years and years. But once they do start being felt, that's when he starts to get into a little bit of trouble. The first meeting between Hitler, because we're now at the point when the Nazi party has kind of had its rise, and now I believe if we're talking about 34, is Hitler, Chancellor at that point? You think we would remember that But information has to go in and out

Before we get to that I want to talk about this OVRA The OVRA was his version of the secret police So his version of the SS Gestapo The Gestapo yes They monitored all of the public temperament They were there to quell any rebellions

Or anything like that Anybody that was talking of trying to overthrow the government They moved into the education sector as teachers and professors at universities were forced to swear an oath to defend the fascist regime at any point in time. Much like we talked about with those 14 tenths of fascism, teaching became simplified. Higher education was abolished in favor of trade and skilled labor. So you take away the ability for somebody to rise up to social caste if you try to keep them in that same position that they are there. You teach them basic elementary trades and skills that can still provide.

for their families, but there's never that chance to ascend up into something great. So that whole hero aspect was immediately stripped away from them because even though they were told they could be that, they were being educated in a way that would keep them down and kind of keep them dumb. You can be that just you can't be that right now. We need you to be doing other shit. So Hitler being chancellor at this point, the first time they met was actually in Venice, June 13th, 1934. So these are the first impressions of.

Hitler from Mussolini as he told kind of his cabinet and his little entourage. He thought he was a madman and Attila. And this is my favorite one, a sex maniac. I want to know because I imagine, okay, they're in Venice. You've got to imagine that, you know, this is one of those situations where they're trying to impress each other or LDJ is definitely trying to impress Hitler. There's a lot of hookers, right? Okay. So it's just a straight up like party. A lot of Venetian. tale for sale. I got to wonder what Hitler was into to make Mussolini think he was a sex maniac. Like, I'm wondering, like, what he saw Hitler do that made him think that.

You think they were in a group activity and he looked down and he only saw one nut swinging from Hitler. He's like, oh, my God, he went so hard he popped his other one. I thought he, I think he walked in and it was a little Nikki situation where Hitler was wearing like a maid outfit and having someone jam a pineapple of his ass. And he's like, this guy's crazy. I love that he also referred to him as an emotional little clown. Yeah.

Like, that was his belief. The best part about it was when they met, like I said, he thought himself to be a great German speaker. He was decent of French, right? He was very fluent in French. And also, shockingly enough, for what he does to the French and feels about the French, he took a lot of his thoughts and beliefs and revolution from the French. revolution. So he taught himself French to read revolutionary literature and then immediately

he's like, well, this is great, but the French sucks. So I'm going to keep focusing on what they said, but I'm going to try to attack them later. But he shows up. Sands interpreter, Sands German interpreter, because he believes that he can speak with Hitler, finds out very quickly that he's just like good at a little bit of conversation. Like you could probably ask him where the bathroom was. It's got to also be at the same time. time like, it sometimes gets lost. Just like here in the United States, we have different dialects for stuff. Ours aren't as far removed from each other. Like, usually it's kind of slang. Like, we can

pick up what everyone is saying. Sometimes in, like, Germany, you would have places, because again, there's not as much intermingling. Travel's not as big of a thing. So you're not spreading out as much from different places. So people would have different dialects or ways of speaking. So, like, Hitler being Austrian, had an Austrian way of speaking like German. So Lucille was probably like, Oh, I speak perfect German. Then he starts talking. He's like, this dude ain't speak in German. Well, they shared not only these kind of ideas for domination,

but they stole things from each other, which is so funny to me that they were both so petty. And neither one of them would ever admit it. But shockingly enough, the first Heil Hitler signs were made by Mussolini. The Nazi salute is not the Nazi salute. It's more known for that. but it was actually the Roman salute that was developed in, as like taken as one of the like symbols or like the salute of the fascist party.

Yeah. And then Hitler tweaked it just a little bit. I think instead of just the straight raise, he was the man that implicated the forearm wave. As to distinguish the nuances of the Nazi versus a fascist salute, basically the way I kind of saw it is I saw Hitler do the, the fascist salute more because Hitler always did the one where he kind of put the hand up and then the wrist kind of went up and he was like, lay, he was like, hey, whereas most of the

time you would see, I'm, God, I can't believe I'm actually just like mechanically actually trying to do it, but it would be the arm straight out at like the 45 degree angle, like straight at an angle, whereas more like Hitler would be doing in parades, you would see it was more of an arm up with like kind of the hand raised or the hand flipped. Well, and before I found that out, I was so confused because I was watching a documentary and I kept seeing him doing that. I was like, why the shit's he doing that? Yeah, I was trying to figure out the timeline. I mean, it's like, is this after? Is this pre? And then

what did the Italians take from the Nazis? The goose step. The goose step. The goose step and making all of their public servant, or not their public service, their civil servants wear military uniforms. Yeah. So, Hitler got the salute.

Mussolini got the walk. Yeah. And you know, the first meeting apparently not going too well because a few weeks after Venice they actually almost came to blows as far as their militaries in Vienna. Now, apparently Hitler

had tried to assassinate like the leader, I think, of Vienna, or the leader of Austria or like someone like the Prime Minister of Austria. Whoopsies. Yep. Without understanding that he was actually like a fascist, like sympathizer, like

he was actually fascist maybe, or like some type of like a fascist pupil. according to Mussolini. And so Mussolini marched like several divisions into Vienna and basically confronted the Nazis about this and they almost actually

kind of came to blows, but nothing actually came of it. They have such this just weird intertwined. It's almost like they, obviously Hitler came up in the shadow of Mussolini. He was a big fan of

Mussolini before. Mussolini turned him down a couple times before meeting until he became the head of state. So it was kind of like, yeah, I don't have time for you. And then once he became a thing, he's like, all right, I'll give you five minutes. I'll come and I'll speak some shitty German to you and you can look at me like I'm a big balding

asshole. Well, and they developed enough of a relationship because, again, they're kind of running the same fucking goddamn. Playbook? They're pretty much, yeah. They're running the same playbook in both their countries.

And so all of a sudden, Europe's looking at Germany. Germany's starting to kind of mobilize and build up their forces. I'm not sure if they had marched into Austria yet at this point. But tensions were high, and this is where the Munich Agreement comes in. And the Munich Agreement was essentially France, Britain. I'm not sure if the United States was involved in that. I don't think so. France, Britain.

And then they were like talking to Mussolini, and they're like, hey, would you kind of mediate this thing between us and Germany? You're friendly with Germany. I think you can get them to the table. And so they end up doing this Munich agreement where France, Germany, England, or Great Britain, and Italy all signed the Munich agreement basically like, yeah, yeah, yeah, we're not going to war. No one's going to war here. And Hitler's really signing it being like, oh, I am so going to see a fucking war. We talk about this every single time. A treaty is not worth a shit.

It's just they're never going to hold up. Yeah, it doesn't matter who fucking signs it. It's just not a legally biting document. One thing that really emboldens Hitler to be able to do what he wants to do is from October 1935 to February 1937, Mussolini invades Ethiopia. And this is a wholly one-sided affair. So Libya is basically kind of like due south from Greece, kind of probably southeast from Italy. You also have, and the reason that I think it didn't raise a huge thing is that,

you know, you look at fucking like Great Britain down in Egypt and everything and they see Italy going into Libya and they're probably like, can't really get on them about doing stuff that we're doing down there. Well, they start to go into Ethiopia which is there were two other countries

that were kind of bordering Ethiopia, right, like kind of on the Red Sea or that area where it enters into the Red Sea. Suez-Kinellepson, huh, huh? And they wanted to, they had territory there. The Italians did. They were going to use that as kind of staging ground and take Ethiopia so they had that entire region, the land and the resources.

This was probably the one time, you talked about having a hard time watching some of the documentaries for the West Memphis 3. This might have been the first time where I was watching a documentary in seeing film footage of them using mustard gas against the Ethiopians, whereas I was watching it. is like, I got to fast forward this a little bit. Like, I couldn't. So biological or weapons like that chemical weapons were fucking banned after World War I by the Treaty of Versailles. Yep. The Treaty of Versailles was signed by Mussolini.

He knew full well that that was fucking banned. But he ends up using mustard gas. And like you said, some of the images, it's just fucking like the skin and what it does and everything. I mean, those are the fucking lucky ones. but basically he's trying to kind of almost launch because of the use of chemical weapons. It's considered kind of a genocidal because it kills indiscriminately. Yeah.

It's a genocidal campaign that they're trying to go, you know, basically impose on Ethiopia. And that's from October 1935 to February 1937. And again, it's one-sided. 70,000 were killed between 120 and 200,000 casualties. civilian casualties. Not even war casualties, civilian casualties. So where's the fucking League of Nations? The League of Nations is hearing the fucking Emperor of Ethiopia address them and being like,

what are you guys going to fucking do? Like, they're literally using outlawed fucking weapons, and they shouldn't even fucking be in our country. And the League of Nations is like that kid with his head down, kind of kicking the rocks. I mean, like, oh, gee, I don't know. I mean, what do you want us to do? And the entire time, Hitler's just watching this like the fucking popcorn meme and just fucking washing this shit like, are they going to do something?

Are they going to do something? And they don't do shit. And Hitler's like, fuck yes. Yeah, dude, it's just, there's so many times when somebody could have maybe sent Hitler a message. And he definitely wouldn't have received it because he was not able to do that. But we had to draw a line at some point. The League of Nations just refused to do that. we kind of get a comparison early on before kind of pre-World War II during the Spanish

Silver War which a another fascist leader um general leissimo franco yes fascist Franco yeah um they both go down there they provide support everywhere we talked about this during multiple world war two episodes this was kind of like the test run for the Germans to see how their military would handle and kind of live action. They were pre-gaming. They were. And they did really well. And on the flip side of that, the Italian forces yet again shit the bad. They did not. They had more forces there too. Yep. The Germans were basically testing out like machinery and like planes and tanks and all that kind of stuff, not committing a ton of troops, but you know, every fucking tank is worth how many troops. I think it was 40,000 to

70,000 Italian troops were actually sent to Spain to try to fight the Republicans, right? That's a lot. Yeah. And they just, they didn't do well. And they took a lot of losses and they took a lot of casualties. This is going to become something that's very important because in the coming years, we are going to start to see World War II form. And if you take a hell of a lot of losses in the pregame, the pre-workout beforehand, you're not going to have a full, alleged fighting force because they died in Franco's fascist civil war. A lot of Fs.

And it's not only that, you have committed a lot of resources also down in Ethiopia for men and machinery and all that kind of stuff. You're kind of spreading yourself out. And it's going to come real soon when Hitler is basically like, so like, just be ready in case I do anything. Like you're going to be ready. You're like, you'll back me up if I do anything. He's like, oh, yeah. And by the late 30s, Mussolini had this belief that Great Britain and France were declining powers because they were becoming old. There was a quarter of the British population that was over the age of 50 and the French had these declining birth rates. And when he looked at that, he thought that they were just kind of starting to fade,

that they were weak because they weren't these strong young nations of these young, strong Italian populations and that they wouldn't be good partners because, again, they're on the, decline. They're on the downslope. We want to be young. We want to be fun. We want to partner up with the Germans. They got some crazy shit going on. Couldn't be a coincidence that we have the exact same governmental structure or anything like that, but... We're Pepsi. They're Coke. Yeah. So as Chris was talking about a little bit earlier, just kind of around the Greece time, April 1939, the invasion of Albania, with Italy quickly or quickly occupying the country after beautiful. Couldn't be more Albanian. King Zog, the first. Hell yes.

Please the country. All hail Zog. And so they have this kind of launching off point closer up into the European theater. May 39, right after literally a month after this happens

after they invade Albania and Zog packs his bag and takes off. They sign the Pact of Steel with Germany. they did skip the involvement when the Germans initially started their attacks. And at this point in time, during the Pact of Steel, Hitler basically was like, you're ready to go? You ready to ride? We're going to make this happen? He's like, we need a little time. Well, Hitler was like, so they sign it. And like during the signing it and everything, I think Mussolini was like pretty worried about this.

But, you know, again, they're still kind of recovering from Ethiopia. They're still recovering from the Spanish Civil. war. And so he kind of tells Hitler, he's like, oh, yeah, like, I mean, if we had to be, like, we're totally ready, but, you know, it's always better to be a little bit more, you know, prepared. And Hitler's like, you know what, don't even worry about it. We're not going to do anything until 1942. Well, he's not going to look like an unprepared, less than leader than Hitler. If Hitler ask him to go to war, he's going to, regardless of what the state of his military. He's like, we're probably stronger than you. Yeah, exactly.

But I mean, this, you know, but we'll back you in case happens. But I do like the sound of this 42 thing. And so let's just hold off on the war until 42. And Hitler's like, totally. I gotcha. 39 rolls around. And Hitler's like, I've been edging myself this entire time. He's like, fuck it.

We're going into Poland. And Hitler invades Poland. So. Czechoslovakia and then Poland, right? Yes, I believe so. But remember, there wasn't a lot of outcry for the, the whole Czechoslovakia and the Austrian and all that kind of stuff. It wasn't until Poland.

They were like, God damn it off. But yeah, so Poland in 39, a good two and a half, three years ahead of schedule. And Mussolini has to be looking at this and being like, what did he fucking do?

He's like, are you fucking kidding me? I told him, he said not until 42. Like, I told, what did you tell him? I told him we were ready.

Are we ready? No, we're not fucking ready. So during this kind of initial, invasion is they'd light about their readiness to Hitler. They come in and basically, or sorry, after Poland is taken, and then after France is taken by the Nazis, they don't really contribute to Poland at all. When it comes to France, they do kind of attack the south of France where the two countries meet. They showed up at Alpine Ridge. They get shut the fuck down. They don't take any. They don't take

any territory. And so after the Nazis occupy France, the establishment of the Vichy government, which is basically like the Nazi-friendly French government that occupies the South, they were still looking at the Italians and is like, we just gave half our fucking country to the Nazis, you ain't getting shit. You didn't even invade. You didn't even get in here. And they're like, yeah, but we're with them. And you gave them some land, so we want some to. And they gave them this tiny little, fucking strippelin. They're like, there, go fucking home. It was like Nice though. It was the south of the beautiful south of France. It was not enough room for them to fucking have this living space that they needed though.

Buddy, they had a piece of France. That's all they wanted. They wanted a lot more French territory. This is what happens when you show up to the battle for France 11 days before the French and German signed the armistice. Well, and technically they don't even really declare war until after the Nazis have like two thirds of Europe. Yeah. Well, I mean, you want to back. a winner. That's just what you do. So basically, Nazis invade France in May, and they have France by June. Italy declares war in May. I'm guessing after they see how much room or how much headway the Germans are making, they're probably like, oh, oh, yeah, by the way, we also are at war with

France and Britain. So then they can come back and say and be like, you know, we actually declared war before you guys had France, right? Like, that's us. We get some of that. Yeah. So all of a sudden, guess what? Now you have the axis. They're in control of France. They're in control of Poland, Czechoslovakia, a lot of territory. Well, you know, Musilini wasn't ready to help out there, but do you know what he

is ready to do on October 28th? Go back to Africa? No, he's ready to invade Greece. Oh. And not only is... Are you sure? Yes. I thought they invaded Greece after he went to Africa. Wasn't it, 1942?

1940 I'll go ahead and check it but how he tells Hitler is hilarious and they actually have the meeting like being filmed I don't know if it's the moment that he tells him that because I'm thinking there would have been a little bit more of a reaction from Hitler

but he basically has Hitler come down they're having a meeting and during the meeting he's like good news good news buddy he's like we're invading Greece and Hitler's got to be like when he's like tomorrow he already had everyone stationed and everything he's like yeah it pops off tomorrow aren't you happy you surprised i'm hard to surprise you and hitler's just like you didn't help out in poland and you basically just tickled the nuts of france like and now like you're committing all of these people to like a campaign in greeze and i'm just now hearing about he's like yep

pretty cool right you guys didn't even get a shot off in france and now you're going to try to come do this. So my research took me to Africa first a little bit before that. The initial push into East Africa was fairly successful. They had vaded into Egypt. They were attacking British Sudan, British Kenya and British Somaliland. And they were making pretty good headway by August 3rd, 1940. Then moving into October 28th, 1940s when Mussolini issues Greece. Yeah. The seating territory ultimatum. the Greek prime minister tells him to go shove a canoli up his ass and they go to war. The Greeks actually push the Italians all the way back to Albania, that stage that they had made.

They did have a little bit of help from the Royal Air Force, but I mean, that was just classic Greece versus Italy, a tale is old as time. Well, you got to imagine one of the other reasons Hitler was, now that you mentioned that Hitler being pissed off is he's like, do you have fucking North Africa? lockdown. Yeah. Like that's, you're supposed to be handling that shit. And now you're like, you're wanting to fight like, you couldn't fight one front. And now you're trying to fight on multiple fronts. He's like, I would never fight on multiple fronts. That is idiotic. Yeah, you guys just kind of wandered through the forest in France. That didn't work out too well. You went down to East Africa. You started out pretty good from the status reports. We're getting things seem to be going pretty well down there. Maybe let's not go into Greece. Maybe let's let's let. Greece be Greece for a little while longer. Too late. It's happening. So, yeah, the Italian advance is blocked within days and within 30 months, oh, sorry, I think it's like 30, was it 30 days or 30, oh, fuck, I'm not to look that up. I guess I put 30 months. It's back to its own turf. And that's when basically Hitler has to send in like the reserve Nazis who take Greece in three weeks. Yeah, so I'm not trying to shit on the Greece military at this point, but you whipped up on the Italians.

That seemed like it wasn't too tough. And Hitler just comes in and smokes you. That shows the level of difference between the Italian military and the German military. So like 30 weeks. 30 weeks? Yeah, I have no idea how I fuck that up. Yeah, October 28th, they invade. And then the Germans actually invaded Greece on April 6, 1941.

Jeez. back down into Africa early 1941 Operation Compass pushes the Italians all the way back to their starting point at Libya

this might be the funniest thing that I got out of this whole entire thing because I didn't know that it happened this way June 22nd of that same year Mussolini learns of Operation Barbarossa

This is just payback you realize he's like oh I didn't know we had to tell each other about operations Hitler didn't tell him shit about going into Russia. He had so little respect for Mussolini and being a part of the Axis together that he didn't even decide to mention it. I think part of it maybe had to do with the fact that Hitler also had to send Rommel to bail out the Italians in Libya.

And that didn't even work. No. So I'm pretty sure that he was like, this guy can't even fucking keep the shit that he's already taken. He's like, now I got to send like one of my best guys down there just so I can hang on to that area and not expose my underside. And of course I'm not going to tell him about Barbarossa. What's Mooseley? He finds out about Barbarossa. He was just jumping around like, hey, hey,

Dolph, hey, Dolph, hey, Doff, hey, Doff. I got some guys. I got some guys. I got some guys. And he's like, were they the guys that got run out of Greece? Because I don't want them. He's like, no, no, no, I got more. He's like, let me send you people for this operation. And that all has to do with the fact that I want to be able to have some

credit for this and I don't want you coming back and saying that I didn't contribute or, you know, I didn't help out with this. So yeah, I'm going to send you guys to the fucking Eastern Front. Have fun, guys. Well, we haven't really mentioned it a whole lot. But again, he has this grand council back in Italy and he has the king of Italy that he has to kind of talk with too. And at every turn, they weren't a big fan of Hitler. They didn't really want to side with Hitler. but since he was controlling he was the minister of foreign affairs

or whatever because he had given himself that title he was the one that was ultimately making that decision for them I believe he actually made his son-in-law the minister of foreign affairs at that point. It was his daughter her daughter had married a count and the count was made

yep so oh go ahead he is at every turn when he's like okay well we're going to go do this and the king's like I don't want do that. He's like, Hitler's doing it, though. And we're on Hitler's side. We're already

pot committed to Hitler. We have to make sure that he's going to win. And plus, he's kicking ass right now. You saw we, okay, we might have made some mistakes in Greece, but you saw what he did after that. And at that point, too, you got it in his head, his mouth is probably saying some of that. She'd been in his head. He's thinking he's like, yeah, he could wipe the floor with us based upon what I've seen our military be able to do at this point. We just pretty much have to hitch our horse to this wagon. We got to hitch our donkey to this wagon and hope to God that we can help him pull this one out because then we at least will get maybe some territory and then we won't be conquered. And at the same time, Hitler's probably bailing this guy out. And this was his thought,

you know, later on in the war, as he was just like, yeah, I think after I'm done with this, I'll probably just turn to Italy and do the same thing. Well, it's the next closest thing. If I already have control of Greece and everywhere else. And then I can have their territories that they're conquering down in North Africa and everything. Mussolini attacks the Suez Canal. Oh, we've got to finish up Barbarossa. Oh, okay. Because this is, I don't know how we miss this in the Stalingrad episode.

Between 114 and 130,000 Italian troops died at Stalingrad. There were 30,000 that were just killed in the initial Operation Barbarossa. We did kind of touch on it. So the part we touched on is when they were actually trying to retreat back, remember how they had put the forces that they weren't really using out on their flanks? Like the people that they'd taken over, the Italians were part of that. And they were like, you guys just watch the sides. We're going to go ahead and be like the main thrust because we're the professionals. And so, yeah, they were.

And then remember how they had collapsed so quickly. And then that's how they ended up getting surrounded in that what the false A or Felice pocket or whatever it was called. How do you come back to your country? I feel like, I know. Remember those guys I sent to help Hitler? We're not getting any of them back. Yeah, I made some decisions. I lost potentially 160,000 of your countrymen, of your fathers, of your brothers, of your sons.

How many did you lose, Ben? I don't know. Like, um, 1,000. Just that amount of people. has to start turning the tide of your public against you. Have you seen how many pregnant women are out there? We'll replace them in no time. Yeah, it's just, that's so many people to lose.

The U.S. introduction into North Africa helped bolster the British troops who ended up taking Libya. They launched kind of one last effort in the Tunisian campaign and again had to be rescued by German forces who then eventually would fall to the Allies. They just, they could not get anything right at any point in time. And it's so bad at home that, as Chris alluded to earlier in July, 1943, the Allied troops launched for Sicily and were greeted as liberators. Yeah. So basically, it, it, it, the losses just stack up year after year.

So Mussolini has this idea that he's going to attack the Suez Canal. He's going to take Egypt because if he controls that, he controls essentially, the movement of like troops and everything through the canal and through the Mediterranean. So important. Yeah. Well, the army gets cut off across the desert by the Brits. And basically, he loses those forces. They're kind of just neutralized at that point.

He also, also, to add insult to injury, the Brits end up taking Ethiopia in 1941, just five years after Italy had taken it. So that additional land that they had, that Vitale, whatever it was called, yeah, that's now gone as well. You mentioned that he basically asked Hitler. He's like, please let me send troops to your fucking winter wonderland. My people are used to cold. And then in late 1942, that's when the Allies had gained enough territory in North Africa that they were able to start sending over bombers and Italy started getting a taste of aerial bombardment. Now, I had to kind of like think about this for a little bit.

that had never ever been an issue before. So you got to be sitting there as Mussolini in Italy being like, okay, shit, they took North Africa. All right, well, things aren't that bad. We still have the entire Mediterranean between us and them and all of a sudden. And you just look up and you see nothing but bombers coming in to start bombing shit. And you're just like, oh, right, they can fly a lot farther now. Yeah. If you land in Sicily and you can use Sicily as a launching point, you're going to be able to hit places like Rome.

Well, they, oh yeah. Well, I was going to say they were even able to reach like the south of Italy just from North Africa. Oh, really? Yeah. And then as soon as, but what that allowed is because what's going to be the closest place there that's not mainland Italy that our planes can reach to soften up and then we can land troops.

And it's going to be just like you said. It's going to be the invasion of Sicily. There's no way that they bombed Venice, right? I don't. Because Venice, if you hit Venice with bombs, it's. Well, there were certain things. that were off limits as crazily enough as that sounds. So they didn't touch.

I don't think they may have hit certain areas of Rome, but they still stayed well clear of Vatican City. Yeah. That was a, you know, a non-negotiable. I think also, because remember early on, London, Hitler wasn't hitting London or anything like that. And then all of a sudden he stepped in and he's like, no, now hit only London. Well, their main bombing campaigns in Italy were focused more towards the manufacturing

in the north as well. So Rome being a little bit more central probably wasn't hit as much, but you still have to hit them in their capital at some point. Yeah, you got to send a message at a certain point. So the invasion of Sicily ends up being successful, and they're greeted not only in Sicily when they get their, the Allies as liberators, because they're like, fucking finally, some stability here. It does not take long after the invasion of Sicily. Finally, after 22 years, July 25th. So July 9th is the invasion of Sicily, took it pretty quickly, and on the 25th, Mussolini is actually removed from his position. Oh, sorry, after 21 years.

And kind of how this went down was basically you still had not really a functional counsel that was really doing anything, but you still did have people in those positions. And they still technically had power along with the king to go ahead and make a change. so people within his own party basically saw what he was leading Italy to. They were telling him at certain points, just fucking like surrender. Like we're not going in the right direction. And we talked about this beforehand. He was basically just standing there on a ship heading straight into a cliff. And they're like, turn.

And he's like, can't do it. They're like, turn or we're going to crash. He's like, but Hitler's on the other side of that. And I think we can go straight through it and get to Hitler on the other. signed. They're like, nope, you're not turning their ship. So finally, somebody was like, pitch him over the side and turn the fucking boat. And when they removed him from power, it was basically a coup within his own fascist party involving his son-in-law, actually the one that he appointed as the minister of foreign affairs, and they ousted him from power. He was delusional

enough about this, that he actually showed up for work the next day. And the king was like, they actually replaced him as PM, right? Someone, else got in there. It was a general, like a previous Italian general. And he showed up for work the next day. And the guy's like, yeah, we're not going to do this. And ends up having him arrested and sent to this prison in Sardinia. And then shortly after that, they were like, okay, well, we just can't keep him actually in prison. So they sent him to basically a resort that was just like guarded and just Mussolini was there. It was a ski resort. Yeah. And it was like 100 kilometers from Rome. So the way that this all went down, he is the only one that can summon these grand council meetings, right?

Yeah, supposedly. He's forced to summon this meeting in order to talk to them about the bombings that are going on because he had just had a meeting with Hitler, or with Hitler. He had actually had a meeting with Hitler the same day that Rome was first bombed, and that happened later on in the day. So he kind of had to go in and give a status report. As he shows up, they start talking to him about what Hitler said. he's saying we need to stay the course

just like you're talking about. Hitler's on the other side of that cliff that we're plummeting straight into. There is a vote called for basically a confidence vote. They voted 19 to 8 in favor of this no confidence vote.

And like you said, Mussolini was just like, what can they do? I'm Mussolini. As we talked about before, shit, we might have talked about it pre-episode. but this wasn't a complete totalitarian government because there was still the order of the monarchy who was able to remove him,

but also the Italian army didn't answer to Mussolini it was the King's Italian army or the Royal Italian Army. I don't think he felt that way. No, he didn't feel that way, but when push came to shove and everybody else votes this no-confidence order, he's still the belief that he's running things,

in all actuality, the king has control of the army. So there's nothing that Mussolini can do. Like you say, he was taken away. They said that as they were marching him out of the royal court, they swept him into a Red Cross van to take him away. But he was actually seen wearing just a regular suit instead of what he wore every day, which had to be a military uniform at all times, probably. So it was just, he was so delusional that he believed it did not matter.

that he got this vote of no confidence and just goes back to work the next day. He's like, dude, what don't you get about what we just did? I don't know why they didn't just arrest him because I think what happened is they were like, okay, you're out. And then they had to have been, after he left, they've been like, should we have let him leave? Because like, he could just go back to the fascist and just basically gather everyone to march on Rome right now, kill the king, and just seize power.

And so I think that was probably kind of a fortuitous series of events that he showed up the next day. And they're like, oh, he's delusional enough to think he's still in charge. Okay, yeah, we need to get rid of him. And so they couldn't kill him because that would have caused a fascist uprising. They were still fighting in the fucking war at that point. So they really couldn't afford to do that, which I think is also one of the reasons they probably moved him from the prison to be like, no, he's fine. He's up at a fucking ski resort. Well, part of that too.

like you were talking about earlier, he was replaced by a guy named Pietro Badoglio who on September 3rd, 1943, dissolves the fascist party and signs an armistice with the allies and it or consecrates the armistice between

the allies and Italy for their consummates works too. For them to basically stop fighting each other. And part of the terms of that armistice and the agreement were that Mussolini was to be turned over to Allied forces.

So they were trying to hide him because they knew that he was going to be a hot commodity for the fascist to try to break out, but the Germans weren't going to allow him to be taken by the Allied side. And so they had to keep him under lock and key. And that only worked for so long. So you have a situation where, because the Allies are working their way up from the South, you have these liberated areas in the South. you still have this central base of fascist power that's actually based in the north. And with Hitler looking at this and saying they're fucking marching up from the south,

but they're still in the narrow, you know, the narrow leg, essentially, the dick of Italy, the dick of Europe, sorry. And like, okay, we need to hold them off here. We still need some protection. So, and I name this as the great canoli caper. I like it. We come to September 12th. And I had no fucking clue this happened. upset at myself because this is amazing. The Woffon SS Commando unit finds out where Mussolini is at this resort.

And during the night, Mussolini is sitting there looking out the window and he can hear the engine of a plane. And as he's looking up, he sees a plane, no sound, gliding in, and it lands on the lawn of the resort, followed by 11 of the island. other gliders, all bearing the swastika on it, either the Iron Cross or the swastika. What do you do if you're basically at that before? You're just like, oh, no. Well, he had said he's like, I knew it. I knew he wouldn't abandon me. Oh, so he looked at this as good.

Yes. Yeah. Well, as good as he could because he knew he wasn't going to get back into power, but this had to keep him out of at least protect him and not get turned over to the fucking allies. Yeah. So it had to at least be the positive on that. So now, the thing about gliders is you can detach them from an airplane, land them, but they have no power. They then landed a little two-seater, little high-wing one-engine plane that they were able to actually land, loaded them up.

I think the lead guy with the SS that was there may have gotten in with him, but they ended up taken off and flies him back to the waiting arms of Adolf. I saw this in no less than five documentaries, and it never, ever registered to me until I was listening to a podcast today, and it finally became clear. When he gets off the plane to go meet Adolf, the first thing they do is shake hands. And that completely bypassed me is not something weird that happened. And then this historian was explaining that that was one of the greatest signs of fascist disrespect possible because every time they had met before they had stood and saluted each other. But Hitler had such little respect for the fascist that just got thrown out of office before him. They had actually gone to a point in Italy where it was illegal to shake hands and you were only allowed to salute each other as a way of greeting. know that.

So Hitler hits him with a handshake instead of a salute because he's so disgusted with Mussolini. He's probably like, what are you the leader of? He's like, you're not a, this is how I would greet someone of a lower station. Yeah, do. Talk about disrespect. And not only that, but it immediately basically led into Hitler being like, come over here. He's like, I'm giving the orders now.

He's like, what I'm going to do for you is I'm going to put you back into a position of leadership. of the Italian Social Republic, the Salo Republic, which was going to be based in northern Italy. And it would be the job of, you know, of Benny to basically run that. In essence, Hitler would be running it, but he had to keep the support of the fascists that were there. So he had to have Mussolini in there as essentially a figurehead. And at this point now, I think Mussolini had just, he probably did also resign himself. He knew what was going to happen. He's like, I have no. power now. I don't know what Hitler. Hopefully he'll protect me. But at the same time, he was like,

that the unknowing of that is better than the alternative of getting turned over to the allies. Every time. And so after he heard that he was going back to Italy, he was just like, yeah, I don't really have, there's no other options. Because he basically told him, he's like, if you don't go back and do this, what I'm going to do is I'm going to bomb Milan, I'm going to bomb Venice, and then I'm going to bomb Rome. And he was like, first and foremost, what was the thing? He was always, he was always Italian. Yep.

And so at that point, he was like, and I'm not saying this is a redeeming quality, but at that point, the Italian was like, I can't allow my country to go through that. So I should probably do this. Plus, I have no other fucking alternative. No. But at that point, he was just basically a husk. Well, and you might be wondering, too, would. Italy signed this armistice with the allies.

Why in the world is all this still happening? There was German occupation. They had basically occupied Italy. And regardless of any armistice that was signed between the allies in Italy, you had German soldiers basically holding Italian soldiers hostage almost to force them to continue the fighting against the allies that were advancing up towards the north. The armistice is signed by monarchic Italy. Did I pronounce that correctly? That sounded good.

Yeah. So that's what took over after they ousted socialism and installed the new government. That's who the armistice was signed with. It wasn't signed with essentially the fascist government of Italy. That was still, like Adam was saying, dissolved. Yeah, dissolved. Well, it was reconstituted essentially by Hitler with him in charge. Yeah, this Salah Republic that was just in the north, just in the part that was still controlled,

not the part that the allies had swooped in on or anything like that. And a big fall falter point of this Italian army, not the reason, but a major reason why things were just going so badly for them. And in turn for the people of Italy is because they were trying to supply the Italian soldiers with all of the weapons and machinery and everything that they had. But they didn't have any natural resources to do it because, again, they're Italy. They weren't importing anything from anywhere else because they were supposed to be this nation that was self-sufficient. Yeah, they didn't have mines and timber and all that stuff like Germany had that they were able to get ore and make metal and all that. And then you also, you know, have the fact that any area that they had for the Navy is now probably taken over and is in allied hands. And the Germans at this point occupy the northern half of Italy.

So he's going to be in a position because he's in the north when he's still. in Nazi occupied territory. And at this point, as you can assume, he's actually provided bodyguards, SS bodyguards. Now, these bodyguards wouldn't even let him go swimming. These guys were basically there to control him and make sure he was doing as he was told. And not really letting him do anything that he might try to hurt himself, I guess, because he gets out in that water and ends up going under. And he's like, oh, save me. You know, then it's their ass.

They only gave him one foot of rope every time he has to tie something. something together. They weren't even going to give him a length of rope just to make sure. A very nasty thing that Hitler did, or had done too, was he obviously wanted revenge against the guys that kicked his lackey out. So he ordered Mussolini to convene one last grand council meeting. And luckily everybody didn't show up because Hitler had the SS take everybody that showed up hostage and then summarily executed them in front of Mussolini. Including his son-in-law. Including his son-in-law.

Why you would even go up there to me with him? I have no fucking clue. What this basically, and what's going on here is, it's not like just because the Nazis hold the northern half of Italy, that that's all area where everyone there is loyal to the fascists or anything. You have a whole bunch of like partisans that are fighting against all over Italy, that are fighting against, you know, the Nazi occupation and also the fascist. So you have also now the Nazis focusing on these partisans and killing a bunch of Italian, you know, Italian citizens.

And so this is also sparking an issue. Now it leads to essentially a civil war within Italy that you have like the fascists against the so, or whoever the regime under the monarchic, you know, regime would be against like Germans and Parsons. It's just this huge thing where Italy is now in itself. in a civil war and then you probably have the allies being like everyone just calm the we're just trying to get north like just get us through and get north and help us out while we're doing it um also during this time as the you know Nazis are losing ground the fascists are losing ground there was a point during this when in order to appease Hitler and to the you know really solidify that partnership he adopted certain ideologies that the Nazis had including you know stuff against the Jews Fuck, we missed it.

1938. Okay. So we got to rewind just a fuzz. So you did have situations and it wasn't in the numbers that it was in in Germany because you also had them being pulled in from Poland and all those other, you know, eastern European countries. But I think they want to say it was between like 10,000 to 40,000 Italian Jews were sent to concentration camps. And this was one of the things, you know, they were holding them in Italy at a certain point. But once the, you know, Nazis. started to lose ground. Hitler was like, you know what, while you're down there running

stuff, make sure you send those, you know, all your prisoners, all the Jewish people up here and we'll go and take care of him to make sure it gets done. Yeah, I don't know where I fall on this because we said Mussolini clearly had some racial beliefs and just based upon the things that Hitler was doing in 1938, he introduced the Italian racial laws. And what the Italian racial laws did was They just basically segregated the Jews away from anybody else, put them in their own area. Didn't intern them. I'm not trying to downplay this at all, but... When you're making the comparison between that and Nazi Germany, yeah.

Yeah. Anything is going to sound good. It banned all books written by Jewish authors, excluded Jews from public offices and higher education. The additional laws would strip them with their assets, restricted their travel, and finally provided their confinement in internal exile because they were basically political prisoners at that point. So they were already sectioned off and cordoned off in 1938. So when it comes time for Hitler to order Mussolini to send these Jews up to concentration

camps. Yeah. They were already kind of in a line. And kind of touching on that meeting that he had when he was like, hey, by the way, when you go back there, you're going to need to take out all those fascist guys that turned against you. That actually took place during their last in-person meeting, which was June 20th, 1944. Now, this meeting took place after the Allied invasion of Normandy and also after the fascist had lost Rome. So this was two huge blows that kind of spelled the writing on the wall.

The Allies had landed and got a foothold in mainland Europe. And at that point, Hitler knew that, you know, it was only a matter of time. He was already depleted from fighting over on the Eastern Front, and it was desperation. But during... There wasn't a need to round up all the Italian Jews and sent him to prison camps and concentration camps, unless you were trying to speed up the process of... Yeah. And during this, they, Hitler was overheard as like Mussolini's on the train. He's like leaning out the window.

You know, like, oh, you always see the movie when they're waving goodbye and everything. He's leaned out one of the windows, and he's talking one-on-one with. Hitler and Hitler leans in close to him and goes to like, you know, give him a handshake and everything. And it said it was overheard and Hitler was like, you're my only friend. And I'm not saying that in like a sad way other than the fact that like that clearly shows at that point the mental state of that dude of being like, I don't like you. I don't respect you. I'm controlling you and yet somehow you're my only friend because you're the only one that maybe I don't fear is going to try to like kill me because this was also right after the assassination attempt at

the wolf slayer and so he's peak fucking tweaked out he's peak fucking paranoid but i just think that it's sadly funny it's pathetically funny that at the at the last moments when he knew the writing was on the wall, he's looking at this man who he's just degraded and has no respect for. And he's like, this is my only friend. This is my only friend. Well, I'll never feel bad for either one of these. No, fuck no. But at the same time, you can kind of see in saying that to Mussolini that it's almost like,

you and I are the only two that have ever ascended to do what we've done. We're the only two fascist dictators besides the dude in Spain, Franco, that have accomplished what we set out to do. You created fascism. I improved fascism. We're equals on a level that nobody else understand. He's like reminding him. He's like, yeah, remember, we both did this. So when it comes time for the fucking Nuremberg trials, he's like, just remember, we did, it's the West Memphis three shit where he's like,

remember they're going to come after us. He's trying to do that. She's like, we're friends, right? He's like, you're my only friend. Hey, who's my only friend? He's like, I am Hitler. He's like, that's right. Oh, so, yeah, that was their last meeting. In December on the 16th, this is the, and I may try put in parentheses, make it rhyme, the last stand in Milan. And this was basically the last time Hitler had addressed like the fascist party. This took place on the same balcony where he had actually kind of announced the creation of the fascist party. So it was disgustingly poetic, I guess, in a way. And this was the last time that he'd ever kind of like made a speech or kind of appeared in public. He had lived in Salo, which was in northern Italy,

for like one and a half years. And of course, in true fucking Ilducci fashion, he made sure that his mistress actually was just located in a villa down the street. Clara Patachi. Also, we forgot to mention the fact that one of his main mistresses also happened to be like a Jewish author. Yeah. And when he put the racial laws into effect, he actually safely sent her to the United States. Yeah. So for a guy who was putting in these racial laws, his Jewish sidepiece, he made sure that she had safe passage.

Yeah. And at this point, he was just, he knew his. time was limited. He knew he was going to, you know, he was either going to be killed by, you know, soldiers and everything, or partisans got a hold of him or he was going to stand trial, which for him, which for him, I believe, was going to be even worse. And so as the Allies end up moving into that territory and undertaking Northern Italy, the Nazis are getting the fuck out. And he's like, take me with you. I'm going with you guys. And so changes his clothes, dresses up as a Nazi officer or Nazi soldier, of course, takes his mistress with him, has to have her along.

Miss Patachi. And they are, like, very quickly captured by Italian partisans. This is the happy part of the episode. Mm-hmm. I'm sorry you had to wait two hours and 40 minutes to get to the good part. This is the episode that should bring a smile to everybody's face. They run on to, I don't know, were they Italian, I thought they were calling me to sympathizers. Maybe they weren't.

Well, you could have been that because they were. Italian partisans, but that's the party that they could, because everyone was against the fascist at that point. So as they run into these sympathizers, these partisans, the partisans stopped the group of Nazis. They're looking through. And the fact that this dude tried to dress himself up as a Nazi soldier and get away with it and think that nobody was going to see, the guy whose face has been plastered all over the entire country for 22 years.

You actively wanted everybody to know your fill. I'm sure this was also a picture in the home situation. We just talked about that. Vatican, right? Yes. I'm sure this was a picture in every home type situation of being able to wake up and be like, look at El Ducce, do it for El Ducce. So, yeah, pretty sure everybody was real familiar with what Muslini looked like.

And him and his mistress were, I'm not sure in the method in which they were killed. I believe it was stabbed and shot. Yep. Shot and stabbed, much like he did to that one guy, Giacomo. This is a quick turnaround that happens. April 27th, captured. April 28th, shot and killed. So there was no time wasted between capture and kill.

By April 29th, his body and her body were sent down and dumped in a location where he'd given like some big, like, fascist speech in Milan. The bodies were then strung up by the ankles, hanging up. upside down from like a bridge or something like that. It was from a service station. From a service station. And then just relentlessly pelted with rocks and anything people could throw. You got to imagine, you know, this is the, this is the man that put your country essentially through hell led to the death of, you know, countless brothers, sisters, fathers.

And I mean, I don't know how I would feel. we kind of had this this conversation last night about like there from interviews that I listened to there were people that were kind of like almost sounded as if they were cheated of the fact that like the partisans had done this and they didn't have him stand trial and answer I mean he's not going to fucking answer for it but answer for for the things that he put the Italian people through so I think they're also that that's I think the um the hindsight thought But at the same time, he had been taken out of power. So I don't know if he felt like, but I guess he was also in charge of Northern Italy and everything.

So he had to still feel like a threat. So yeah, in the moment, I guess that's the thing that is the natural thing to feel is like, we're getting rid of this motherfucker. He's not escaping again. We're making sure of that. Then at the same time, the people that were maybe also kind of put under his thumb and, you know, made their lives hell for the 21 years he was in power. like, I wanted to see, I wanted to be the one that did that.

I wanted to see that motherfucker hang. True. Like, I wanted to be there when it happened. So I think there was maybe a feeling of getting cheated a little bit. But in the end, I think everybody is probably satisfied to a degree for, for what happened there. Yeah, it's not a, it's a very unceremonious way to go out. And it's almost like post-mortem was worse than the way that he was killed.

This happened three days before Hitler decided to kill himself. And this, I, I, I, don't see how this couldn't be directly responsible for why Hitler went out the way that he did. When you see his body being treated like that and what happened to him, Hitler was instantly just like, nope,

I'm going to do it myself, and then you were going to burn the shit out of my body. Now, maybe. Maybe did that happen? Did he escape to Argentina? I don't know. Go back to the episode and listen that we did on Nazis escaping from Germany. But at the same time, Had he, you know, killed himself, maybe, that definitely would have been the kicker, the catalyst for why he chose to do that.

Yeah, that's probably where the idea was formed. So, I mean, they went out within like three days of each other. Yeah, I had no idea that it was that close. It's the whole thing is just their ends are so fascinating. And to think that they had such little respect for this guy that they strung him up by his ankles. Yeah, you know who definitely didn't escape? is the guy hanging from the service station. They finally pulled him down.

They buried him in an unmarked grave in a Milanese seminary or a cemetery. Could have been next to his seminary. Possibly. Cemetery is next to seminaries. His body was unexchumed and it was brought back to Prapio. Pradapio. And it was buried in the family crypt or tomb or whatever it was. Something interesting that we were talking about after or before the podcast was

It seems like Italy sort of gets a pass in what happened after World War II or during World War II Yeah Part of that we were kind of talking about was there were the Nuremberg trials that happened in Germany There were the Tokyo trials that happened in Japan to hold those people accountable There was never a trial that happened in Italy There wasn't even an occupation of Italy Nope. They were free and fair. Part of the reason of that, I think, and I had heard it explained, was they had already kind of, since the fascist party had been dissolved, basically all of the agitators, the people that were behind everything were already out of power. They had moved forward into a new government. I believe it was communist. They said like 10 and 20 fascist militants or whatever were like hunted down.

like after this and like for a while i think they said the violence continued all the way up until 49 i'm sure there was like incidents that happened after that but the main portion of the violence happened for quite a while of hunting these guys down well so much of it too was it was it was an ideology and a belief that they had in fascism but it's pretty incomparable to what happened in germany well if there's any fascist fans out there hope hope not but you needn't look at further than those two examples and then also the example in in Spain and say did this work no it didn't so obviously it wasn't a good ideology i i mean i guess it's it should be as simple as that it should be um unfortunately kind of like we talked about i think a little bit during the civil

War episode and kind of the reason that we still had Confederate leader statues everywhere is the PR after these things if left untouched you had the daughters of the revolution that would go through and they would build these statues to the confederates I believe maybe it was the daughters of confederacy sounds yeah it was probably more likely but they were able to spin this in a way that it wasn't the Nazis that were the

or it wasn't the Italians that were the provocateurs of the war. It was all Germany. They didn't really give two shits about Japan. I don't think they could just pin everything on Germany. And I'm sure it's taught in Italy. Never been to a class in Italy, so I don't know how their history is taught. But it must have been taught in some sort of a way to where fascism has slowly still kept a hold in Italy. And right now they have a prime minister that I believe,

came for or that comes from a neo-fascist party yeah so a post-fascist party so it's still going around yeah it's still hanging out in the open somehow but at the same time it's and i pose this question to you just completely just as a thought project had the wars not happened would fascism have survived yeah you asked me that like early on in the week um so like had It just stayed isolated in Germany and Italy. Because the war, what was going to cause the war was trying to expand the territory. That's what would cause it. So that's not going to happen.

If that doesn't happen, there's no reason to go to war. Do I believe if that didn't occur, would that still... Like, would there be a third player in the Cold War? Would it not just be communism, capitalism, fascism? But would there be a Cold War? Okay. So follow me on this. If you're still hanging in, follow me.

The war ends up leading to the invention of the atomic bomb. Yes. Out of necessity to try to win the war. The arms race between the superpowers of Russia and the United States, trying to gain more arms and power after World War II of gathering up all these little satellite states and everything like that, that is essentially what the crux of the Cold War is about, about the ideological battle between communism and capitalism. Now, if there is fascism, see, that's what I'm going to get caught on on this.

Do you get the Cold War without World War II? You're eventually going to come to a head between capitalism and communism. I think that was kind of inevitable, so that maybe happens later. But I don't know, like, how many countries are still actively fascist around the world. I think it's maybe like a type of ideological Darwinism that if it was, is supposed to work, it's still going to be working today. It's still going to be something that's in effect today. Democracy has kind of been in different iterations. It's still young in regards to the United States way of interpreting democracy. But again, that's lasted a lot longer than the 21

years that it lasted in Italy and then the 13 or 14 years that it lasted in Germany. So, yeah, I mean, I think it eventually would have kind of worked itself out. And I don't believe, I'm going to air on the side of not believing it would still be a really like big thing. Yeah. Yeah, would that have been a potential? We had the red scare with communism and McCarthyism that happened in this country. Would there be a fascist scare as well? Yeah, and how much of the red scare it's going to be insane to do that episode and then like

branch out into the Cold War more than we did with the Berlin Wall episode. But without the threat of nuclear war, what are the tensions like between capitalism and communism. Like how much did the thought of nuclear annihilation play into the seriousness and how like scary that whole thing was? Because when it comes down to it, like the fucking, um, blockade in the Cuban missile crisis. That was about moving weapons. Yeah. And so that, you know, if the weapons aren't there or anything like that, like is that, does that happen to escalate and keep the Cold War going? Yeah. It's just, it's kind of an interesting thought. thought. Yeah, it's, yeah, you got my brain working. And now you're going to have it working the entire drive home. So thank you. Be prepared for a lot of incoherent text for the next three hours. Deal. All right, man, you got anything else?

I, I like that we're, we did this. It was three hours long ass episode. No denying that. I don't think we could have gotten a two episode or out of them. like we did with Hitler and with Stalin. But those were such psychological cases, too, to try to figure out why they were the monsters. This guy was just a Poonhound who wanted power. Yeah. And it was addled by syphilis. I'm not saying that this guy's not a monster.

Something that you said prior to this, I think we were texting last night about it, when you said that you hadn't really focused on Mussolini much. I slept on him. Because we focused on Hitler so much. He's such just such a pragmatic figure. But at the same time, without Mussolini, is there a Hitler? That's, yeah, I know.

That's, that's what makes this so fast. That's, I feel like ending a phenomenal year, thanks to you guys, with a phenomenal episode about something I had no idea about that essentially, like, this is a foundational pillar in what happens during World War II. Like if these ideas aren't out there for Hitler to seize onto and see the League of Nations fucking flaccidly responding or not responding to this kind of stuff, does that even happen? Does he have the nuts to try to invade places? I don't think he does. Had the League of Nation stepped in and done something the first time?

I don't think he does anything. It all kind of starts with this. Yeah, absolutely. All right, guys. Well, judging on the date, this is going to come out, which is going to be right before Christmas. correct? I think so. Means that we're technically going to have another episode. Not sure which one it's going to be, surprise, surprise before the end of the year,

but I'll just say this since we're recorded now. Thank you guys so much for 2024. Can't wait to see what 2025 brings. And you guys are going to be a huge part of that. Absolutely. All right, guys, thanks for joining us on that episode and we'll catch you next week. Peace. All right, ladies and gentlemen, thanks for joining us for another episode.

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