Ideas - What Mussolini's rise and fall reveals about modern authoritarianism

Episode Date: September 7, 2026

In 1922, Benito Mussolini took power in Italy. Sustained by a cult of personality and iron-fisted suppression of dissent, Mussolini transformed the nation into a single-party state. Nahlah Ayed and panelists discuss the legacy of Italian fascism and its relevance today.

You know a great story when you feel it. Your heart pounds, your mouth waters. And you can't help but grin. Discover the stories you'll feel long after they're over. Watch on APTN or stream on APTN Plus. This is a CBC podcast. Welcome to Ideas.

I'm Nala Ayyed. This is Godfrey Talbot, speaking from Rome. On June 5, 1944, BBC correspondent Godfrey Talbot stood in Rome's Piazza Venezia, staring up at the famous balcony, where Benito Mussolini had just one year prior delivered the last of many fiery speeches to the masses below.

At this moment, the windows of the balcony of the Palazza Venezia, from which Mussolini was to make his speeches, the windows have been open, and has come out onto the balcony, not Mussolini, but three allied soldiers with their steel helmets on and their rifles in their hands.

Beside them, two of the Italian people, and those four are standing there, and they're waving the Italian and the Allied flags. A vastly different scene from the ones which that balcony has staged in the park. vastly different from the scene almost exactly four years earlier on June 10th, 1940, when Mussolini saluted his fascist followers and declared war on the Allies from that very spot. These scenes may sound like the vestiges of a bygone era.

But in the 21st century, authoritarian and would-be authoritarians are once again reshaping our world. We're now living in our own age where information is contested, where truth is contested, and I think it's really incumbent on us as democratic citizens to challenge the myths that are erected around political movements and call them out.

Scholars have, over time, laid out a series of stages that tend to characterize the rise of an authoritarian regime. But what new tools might we gain to combat them by examining the stages of their collapse? That is the question at the heart of our series, how to defeat authoritarianism. Fascism can be defeated if you see the signs. We recorded the series in July 26 at the Stratford Festival in Ontario during a week of events hosted by ideas. It is my pleasure to introduce our moderator to.

today. Please join me in giving a warm welcome to Nala Ayyed. In upcoming episodes, we'll examine the rise and fall of four pivotal authoritarian regimes from recent history and then bring those lessons into a final discussion about authoritarianism today. To start off the series, we ask what we can learn from Benito Mussolini's Italy. The first panelist you'll hear is Joshua Arthur's from the faculty. From the faculty, of information and the Department of Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, and Latin American studies at the University of Toronto. I want to start kind of with an image or an idea or a moment at which Mussolini's fall

became actually possible. It became possible to imagine. The image that immediately came to mind from me is one that I encountered in the research for my upcoming book, which involves a large, rapid. in Piazza Venetia in central Rome. This is the great square that Mussolini had his iconic balcony over, that was the scene of so many important speeches and spectacles for the fascist regime. And I found in the archives a report from a political informant stationed in the crowd. And this informant describes how people in the crowd found a prophylactic, a condom,

which they then inflated and played around with like a big beach ball and whacked around the crowd. And the informant described with horror that it eventually sailed up into the window of Mussolini's offices. Wow. And that the guests must have been horrified inside. And so I think this is a powerful moment. This occurred in May 1943, only a couple of months before the fall of Mussolini. but I think it's a really powerful image for how this spectacle and the cult of personality around Mussolini, that spell had been broken, that the crowd was no longer just chanting his name but was engaging in acts of comedy and play at that moment. What a powerful moment and one that will never unsee, I think, in my mind.

We'll discuss that in a bit more detail shortly when we hear the others. Itana, what comes to mind for you when you think about what the first cracks that appear? that suggested that authoritarianism could be defeated in Mussolini's Italy? For me, it's March 1943, when there were big strikes in Turin, and then they moved to Milan in the Fiat factories. Itana Gia is an associate professor of history at York University in Toronto. And for me, that's the moment where 100,000 people are brave enough to walk out of their jobs, brave enough to defy

Mussolini in the middle of war effort that is not going well and at that moment I think it's when collectively Italians felt that they were strong enough to show those cracks beforehand it had been kind of like

the resistance had been taken different forms but at that moment is when you see that maybe the end is close and it was close and the thing is that by this time the regime was very married to this idea of we are a war-mongering project, nation. And in that sense, not having military victories really hurt the regime's prestige

and the regime's ability to sustain itself. People on the streets, no more powerful image, really, when we think about challenging authoritarian regimes. Robert, what comes to mind for you? Well, a couple of thoughts, but I would begin by saying that, you know, Mussolese fall was always imaginable and it was always imagined. Robert Ventreska is president of King's University College at Western University and a historian of 20th century Europe.

There's a long gap between imagining the fall of a regime and the conditions being created for that to actually happen. I'd also just a bit of context. Mussolini falls twice. Mussolini is removed from power in 1943 by the king, arrested. Eventually then he's freed and set up as head of a puppet government by the Germans in the north. And then, of course, he's executed in April of 1945.

And now the panel's over. We are going to discuss that more detail, absolutely. So for me, the moment is 1935, and it's the invasion of Ethiopia. And it's not really dramatic moment, actually. It's something subtle. And it speaks to the cracks in the facade, if you will, in particular in the relationship between the Mussolini regime and the Catholic Church. The invasion of Ethiopia doesn't provoke a rupture.

But it was a moment at which the radicalization of the fascist project began to really test the limits of the accommodation, at least privately at first, and then more publicly. And so it's a subtle moment. It's not a dramatic moment. But again, it's a moment when you begin to see the incompatibilities. I want to stay with you, Robert, if we can, and talk about before we get to the dismantling of the regime, I'd like to kind of get a better understanding of how it was first actually entrenched. And so when it comes to Italy in the lead-up of Muslimis rise. What do we learn about what makes authoritarianism actually take root? My mind immediately goes to what I would describe as sort of the two faces of fascism that you see in

1990, 1920. There is, let's call it, the origins of the movement, the first stage of fascism, the black shirts, right? They are paramilitary fighting squads by name, the fasci de combatimento. They are, however, in that early stage small, they are violent, but they don't have a huge following. And an interesting data point that I think is very revealing. The fascists sort of present themselves in an election in 1990 as the fasci de combatimito, and they gain absolutely no political traction whatsoever. I don't think they got a single seat in those elections in 1919. But Mussolini also shrewd and pragmatic assumes a parliamentary face, if you will.

And we see pictures of him, wearing black shirts and at the same time suits with top hats. The parliamentary face was the actual constitution of a fascist party. And when that fascist party presents itself in 1921, in the heart of a coalition with the establishment political parties, it gains seats. It gains, I think, about 35 seats. It's still not a large political party. But in the span of two years, you have a paramilitary movement very much from the streets. But now you've got the regime entering the political system, right, which brings legitimacy and now a parliamentary presence. And that is going to take some time, but not coincidentally.

by 1922, Mussolini becomes a viable alternative in the eyes of the king. Where does that sit? Maybe I'll ask Joshua with this. Where does that stage sit in kind of this idea that fascist regimes have a developmental process? Where does what Robert talked about kind of fit on that? Right. And not all fascist movements do make it into that stage.

There need to be certain kinds of preconditions, and they very much were in Italy. Italy, as with the rest of Europe, was traumatized by the First World War. was economically devastated. There was political disorder, particularly in the wake of the Russian revolution. There were leftist insurgencies that were not nearly as coordinated and powerful as they had been in Russia, but this certainly created a climate of anxiety and fear, particularly for respectable middle-class Italians. And so the terrain was very favorable. You had political elites that Robert referenced, who lost control of the situation and who saw in the fascists a mass movement that they could harness, that seemed to be growing in popular support.

And so the entry point is through constitutional means, through elections, through alliances with traditional conservative parties, and then an increasingly aggressive colonization of the state and institutions. Itana, maybe you can pick up from there and kind of explain this idea. What are those stages that regimes go through or governments go through to achieve fascist status? So the three of us find very useful, Robert Paxton's book, The Anatomy of Fascism. And Robert Paxton is a historian at Colombia. He proposes to look at fascism not as a concept static, but as a dynamic process. So the first stage would be the creation of the fascist movement.

In this case, we need to look at what conditions allow Mussolini to create the fascist party. So I'm glad that Joshua mentioned World War I and the Russian Revolution, because we think, So those two events, we don't understand the creation of fascism. So the list is the creation of the movement, 1919, and then the movement taking root, which happens in Italy in 1990, 1920. Those are the two years that they are called the red years, because there's a lot of affeval on the left. So fascism is a violent movement against the left, and that's when it takes root, because

their violence is useful against a powerful left. Then we have the seizure of power, which is not violent. It's not as violent as the previous area, and it is by the elites co-opting or thinking that they are co-opting Mussolini. Then we have the regime as a ruling fascist regime from 1922 to 1945. And then within that ruling, there's a period that Paxton argues that the fascist regime can do two things. One radicalize itself and go into expansionism, which means war. That's why it's in 1930s when radicalization happens in Italy. And then the other possibility would be entropy.

So instead of becoming a radical fascist movement, it becomes more like a military dictatorship. So that would be the cycle of fascism. And I stopped there. No, it's wonderful. It's so hard. We ask such big questions and then we say, say in 30 seconds or less. But I want to actually say with you, Itana, just very quickly, Mussolini famously came to power in 1922 in what many of us know as the march on Rome.

What does that moment in particular teach us about how authoritarian's gain power? Well, it teaches us, so the march on Rome is this idea that different fascist, squadisti columns march on Rome and bring Mussolini to power. And it's a total myth. I mean, there were five columns. Most of them were stopped by police. 9,000 or so black shirts did arrive in Rome. They were hungry.

They were wet. they were demoralized, they could have easily have been stopped by regular police or army units had the king decided that was what needed to be done. But he didn't. So instead of using like a martial law decree to get rid of the squadisti, the king invited Mussolini to become prime minister.

So the myth of the march of Rome is that the fascists took power on their own. And the realities that they were invited by traditional elites to gain a prominent position in power. It's important because the fascists themselves, of course, they want to make themselves look important, but it's also important because the other elites that open the door for them, they really want to remove their guilt. So after 1945, everybody was happy with the myth of the March of Rome, the fascist

because made them look good, and the elites because kind of like make them look like we He couldn't do anything about it, but that is actually not true. Robert, you're smiling in recognition. Yeah, for sure. I mean, such a great summary of such a complex process. I think two things just to build on that. The importance of the march on Rome, I mean, there was, again, we should not underestimate the extent to which there is fascist violence on the streets, and even in the countryside,

especially in parts of the north, which is a phenomenon. It's part of what is drawing the reaction of industrialists and the churches as well as political establishment. But it also I think underscores the importance of spectacle because what Mussolini has in the march on Rome is a story, a story of the dramatic revolutionary, because we are reminded and there are all these debates about fascism as having revolutionary origins. It's at its origins in its founding. It was a revolutionary impulses, right, a kind of national revolution, remaking Italy. So spectacle is important, the myth. It may be myth, but it's powerful. There's both a practical and symbolic value to that. Such a wonderful point,

the power of story. Joshua, one last point from you is the importance of the personality of that who leads. We've sort of alluded to some of this as we've talked to Mussolini's character. Could you speak to how his particular qualities actually

also helped entrench his rule? There I think we can talk on the one hand about Mussolini the man and then Mussolini the myth. Musilini the man there is no question. He was obsessive and genuinely engaged in the minutia of government. He was also really important politically in managing this big, fractious coalition of the fascist regime, that it did include traditional conservatives and Catholics. It also included more radical elements, and Mussolini was the

one who held it all together. But I think for the endurance of the regime, it's really Mussolini the myth that is far more powerful, that in many ways Italians come to identify more with Mussolini than with fascism. He is presented as a family man. He's also seen as a very masculine figure to aspire to, and he's seen as the embodiment of the regime itself, that he's always working for us So that identification with Mussolini is really kind of the oxygen that keeps the whole thing running. I'd like to move on next to how that experience of living under such a regime played out. But I want to stay with you for one moment, Joshua Moore, and ask you whether there were any moments early in Mussolini's rule

when it seemed that he could have been defeated or diverted from where he was heading. And the full transition kind of to authoritarianism could have been prevented. Was there something like that? Right. And those critical moments actually end up cementing his dictatorial powers. So the most salient of these is the murder of Jacamo Matteotti, who was the leader of the socialist party and one of the few remaining in parliament vocal critics of fascism. There's also some evidence that he had incriminating documents about Mussolini's engagement in various corruption schemes and all kinds of fascist. crimes. Anyway, he, in 1925, he is abducted, actually 1924, he's abducted off the streets of Rome,

and there's a huge outcry. Mussolini's opponents say, well, it's clearly the fascists. At first, Mussolini says, I don't know anything about this. And this comes to a head where essentially, everyone is going to pull the plug on Mussolini. All of his coalition partners are going to desert him. And he gives this famous speech, beginning of 1925, essentially saying, maybe my guys did it, maybe they didn't. What are you going to do about it? There's only one person here who can solve this situation, who is able to bring order here. Are you going to let the left take care of this? Right. So all of those conservative politicians and the king himself fall back in line. At that point, they give him all of the reins of power. Immediately, there are laws passed. to make the fascist party, the only legal party in Italy, that now have all these constraints on the press and so on.

So it's that very moment of crisis where if people had pulled the plug, I think we would be having a different conversation. It's that moment where the dictatorship really begins. And so living under that kinder regime, Itana, what would be the primary means Mussolini used to control people in Italy? Well, once you are the only party, you've also kind of like eliminated all possibility of opposition, not just in parliament, which nominally still exist, but there's no trade unions. There's no kind of like alternative society.

Problem is there's another big, important institution. The Catholic Church has parishes, has youth organizations, has all of these kind of like alternative ways of socializing that the fascist. cannot control, even though they would like to. Maybe I'd like to talk about that, actually, because I'll come back to you, Joshua, and then Chaitana. What forms of resistance were possible in those early days when the regime was so entrenched? Was there anything possible? Was there a window available?

The kinds of everyday resistance that we see, we can describe often as being, should we say, a-fascist rather than anti-fascist. They were very ordinary behaviors that were. aimed at carving out space for one's sense of self even. If you worked in a factory, you took the long way around to go for your smoke break. You told jokes in private. There have been studies about working class communities under fascism that always considered themselves reds, that they maintained a sense of a working class identity that was tied to the communist movement, the socialist movement and stories that people were hiding red flags under their beds or circulating

homespun leaflets. Those were small and rare, but they give a sense that people's identities were still very much rooted to locality, to family, to class, to the church, and not necessarily to the grand macroscopic identity that the regime was foisting on them. Itana, maybe you can pick up from there, just at the level of even families and local communities. So imagine if you have kids, right? And are you going to send them to the fascist, the youth group? Or if you don't send them, then it marks them as kind of like being anti-fascist and you don't want to endanger them. So regardless of your religion, regardless of your position, maybe you would send them to the Catholic group instead.

because that would be kind of like an alternative venue. And you're not going to say it, but you are going to create spaces where you feel comfortable. Of course, you keep the jokes for the private domain because you never know if someone's spying on you. So there's going back into the domesticity. It's kind of like for Spain, when people think about the Francoist regime,

they think that it's kind of like a long winter where people just retreated home and they were unable to, connect with others. And that's kind of like how it feels, that you just need to protect your private sphere. Going back to that list of stages that fascist regimes kind of unfold, the fourth stage of fascism is using power to dominate institutions. And I would like to come to you, Robert, to talk about the role of churches, just how social institutions like the church navigate this period. The first thing I would observe is that, you know, we tend to think of the church

as a monolithic institution, and of course it's not. So often what we're talking about the church, we're really referring to the Vatican. But then there are all these, the associational social dimensions of that community. It's a faith community. They're voluntary associations. The question about how the regime

and how the church navigate that relationship, some scholars have described it as an alliance, which I think goes too far. There is an affinity on many fundamental points, like demographic policy, family life. But to It's point, if you are in fascist, Italy, If you have an option to join the Catholic youth, the university student group in particular,

is one notable example. There was a real struggle over the control of Italian university organizations. This actually becomes one of those moments of rupture because it leads the Pope to publicly criticize and denounce the regime's attempt to control youth organizations at university. The net result of it is it was a compromise. These organizations could survive as separate entities, separate from the fascist organizations, but it's a compromise with the cost. And the cost is that those religious organizations are supposed to just focus on religious matters, matters of everyday faith. In other

words, avoid politics. Now, in effect, what happened for many members of those organizations is a kind of inner exile. And while they're not overtly publicly anti-fascist, they nurture spaces quietly, privately, and not surprisingly, some of the future anti-fascist leadership will come from those youth circles. And the future of that anti-fascist leadership may well hold lessons for our own time. That was the first half of a panel about the rise of fascism in Italy under Benito Mussolini. It's the first in a five-part series called How to Defeat Authoritarianism, recorded in July at the 26 Stratford Festival in Ontario.

This is Ideas. I'm Nala Ayed. You know a great story when you feel it. Your heart, your mouth waters. And you can't help but grin. Discover the stories you'll feel long after they're over. Watch on APTN or stream on APTN Plus. Viking. Committed to exploring the world in comfort.

Journey through the heart of Europe on a Viking long ship with thoughtful service and cultural enrichment, on board and on shore. Learn more at viking.com. The advancement of an authoritarian regime, like the fanning of a flame, requires oxygen. What Mussolini has in the march on Rome is a story. It may be myth, but it's powerful. He's seen as the embodiment of the regime itself, that identification with Mussolini has.

Mussolini is really the oxygen that keeps the whole thing running. And yet, as history can attest, that oxygen, that fuel, can be diluted over time. Mussolini also had to condemn with other institutions and other sources of power. Any movement can fail at any stage. I asked each of our panelists at our roundtable on Italian fascism for their view on the conditions that made the dismantling of Mussolini's regime possible. Beginning with Robert Ventreska of York University. Keeping in mind, of course, that each situation is unique,

what is one thing you believe is indispensable to the beginning of a dismantling of an authoritarian regime? Well, in the case of Mussolini defeat in war, or the start of the defeat in war, there is a domestic Italian anti-fascist resistance and an armed resistance, and there's protests that begin, begins in 1943, but at the end of the day, in 1943, when Mussolini is exited from government,

Allied forces have started to arrive in Italian soil, and then German forces arrive. And the other part of Italy, Italy really is sort of three Italy is often described after 1943. And this is why, for some scholars, 1935, the beginning of the radicalization in the invasion of Ethiopia on the surface, the regime is at the height of its popularity and power, but in fact it begins to now draw itself closer to the German Nazi war orbit and isolating itself from other forces and begins to suffer over time a series of defeats.

But what does that play there? Like what is the process? Is it that they look weak to their own people? Or is it that just de facto become weaker as an institution? Well, I think to some extent it reveals the extent to which even military, his own military belief in the fascist project, so to speak, was thin or contested, obviously. That's a point of debate.

research, but at the very least, I think it shows doubt, basic doubt in institutions and in powerful institutions that any regime needs in order to survive. The police, the military, if they're doubting, the project, which looked as if it were moving in a certain direction, but it's actually moving in the opposite direction, is now inviting the invasion, occupation, hunger, dislocation that starts to happen. And it's just a reminder that that's largely driven by external forces at that point. Can I just add to that very quickly? Joshua Arthur's from the University of Toronto. People felt this close to home.

Italy was bombed as early as 1940 by the Allies. Rationing was imposed and there were severe shortages in many occasions. People were sending their sons off to North Africa, to East Africa, to the Soviet Union. Demoralizing. And they weren't coming back. So war really. really brought home on a visceral experiential level what fascism was all about to people. Itana, what is one precondition in your mind?

Without which it would be impossible to escape the grip of authoritarianism. So Ithana Gia of York University. Mussolini, since the invasion of Ethiopia and then supporting Franco in Spain, and then becoming part of the access and then joining the part. Act of Steel and then joining World War II, the whole idea was to resurrect an Italian empire. It is showing the greatness of the fascist man. And once you've built that and Mussolini make himself like the head of the Ministry of War, the Navy and everything, he's personally responsible for how the war effort is going.

Ethiopia went reasonably well for the fascists, albeit it took longer than expected. it. In Spain, they had their first defeat. The thing is that those news didn't bring, didn't make it back to Italy, so it was not a first crack, and then Mussolini kind of like sent even more troops, even more war material in order to really show the power of the Italian army. But the Italian army was having problems all along. It had to be bailed out by the Nazis, and that delayed operation Barbarossa. So defeat, when you've said that, that you are building an empire and maintaining it, there's no way for the fascists to get out of it.

So for me, I think the war weariness could have lasted longer had they been reasonably winning or performing. But under conditions of humiliating defeats, they couldn't just keep going. Robert, you wanted to add something. Yeah, I think defeat, I think the point that then the myth is dispelled on a daily level. But I just think also practically, tactically, right? There's a drain on resources.

as you begin to see some of the economic as well as social costs of war and the inability to sustain that over time. The only thing I would also add is it reminds us that fifth stage about radicalization, right? It is radicalization. I think the fascists have those radical pretensions, but some have argued Italy doesn't actually achieve that fifth stage fully, perhaps largely because of the defeat that begins to experience in war. In 1943, Joshua, the fascist Grand Council voted to remove

Mussolini from power and hand rule back to the king. How did his former allies turn against him? What was the process there? It was as much as anything else, a kind of self-preservation instinct. So as Robert mentioned, the allies had already landed in Sicily, essentially had taken over much of Sicily and were moving towards the mainland. And the fascist inner circle tried to make the calculus that if they could somehow jettison Mussolini, then they could somehow steer Italy out of the war without having to suffer any consequences themselves. That they could pin the defeat on him,

that hopefully both the Germans and the Allies would just leave Italy alone. And that maybe one of them could even come to power in some kind of moderated fascist, regime. That was never going to happen, and it didn't happen. In modern parlance, that would be like a decapitation. Yes. Of a regime. Exactly. But even then, what they did was essentially a vote of non-confidence. And then it took the king of Italy to formally remove Mussolini as head of state now that he saw

essentially that his allies had deserted him. And yet, that was not the end of Mussolini. It was two more years before it really was the end of Mussolini. How did he come back? How did he re-entrench his power given everything we've just talked about. So he's removed from power, and there is a 45-day period where essentially people are trying to figure out what is happening next. There are anti-fascists coming out of the woodwork, and there are fascist loyelists who've not given up on Mussolini. The Germans are essentially plotting for what comes next, and the Italian government is trying to exit the war through some kind of armistice. On September 8th, 1943, they announce an armistice with the Allies.

At that moment, the Germans, who've already been trickling down into Italy, sees most of the country and find Mussolini, who's been imprisoned in a kind of ski lodge up in the mountains, and there's this daring prison raid, and they break him out, and they install him as their puppet in the regions of northern Italy that are under German control. At that point, Mussolini really is a broken man. He is a figurehead for the Nazi occupation. He commands the loyalties of the hardcore fascists who never abandoned him. They do horrific things. They commit vicious crimes against civilian populations. This is the moment where the Holocaust in Italy essentially ramps up, where the fascist loyalists assist the Germans in rounding up Italian Jews and some. sending them off to camps. So it is a really brutal period, 1943 to 1945, what Italians now called a civil war.

And Mussolini is essentially there to give a local face to the German occupation. I'm curious how the resistance evolved in that period. What kind of resistance was even possible, given the circumstances that Joshua just outlined. Robert, do you have an idea? Yeah. My mind immediately goes to, again, two faces of the resistance. There is armed resistance. There are armed resistance and a fairly well-organized armed resistance of various factions. I think probably the most militant and the most successful and the most organized were communist and socialist partisan movements. They were also Catholic and other groups who conducted and organized an armed resistance. But there was also, by 1943, 44, a political layer to that.

And there were six prominent fascist parties that came together. It can be called the Committee for National Liberation. but effectively begin to sort of coordinate and organize both the activities of the resistance, cooperation with Allied command where possible, and then they begin to start to think about governing. The war is not yet over. But they begin to organize and they begin to imagine the political reality to come. But that's already in 1944. And so it's both armed resistance and coordination of armed resistance, but it's also beginning to think about the political order to come, which was to be led by Italians.

I'm really curious about that process of what it is that allows people's imaginations to be altered in thinking about a fascist regime or authoritarian regime when they see people with guns basically resisting, you know, the rule. I'm just curious how you think armed resistance changes the way people think about this regime that they had, the myth of the regime that they had believed in. So I think it's complicated. because on the one hand, the myth of the regime has permeated significant parts of the society and especially this personalization, the cult of personality built over Mussolini.

So acknowledging that you were wrong on that and trying to find other loyalties is always kind of like a period of mourning. It's difficult. You always have like other alternatives, like especially the Catholic Church, and then you have these kind of like left-wing alternatives that start emerging, but people were already kind of like having sensibilities in that direction, and then they make kind of like an appearance. But I think the armed resistance, it's very easy to romanticize it.

But it was hard for the people doing it, and it was hard for the civilians. Because the Nazis, when they occupied Italy, they killed 10 civilians for every Nazi that was murdered. So sometimes the resistance killed three Nazis in a town. Then the Nazis came back and killed 30 or more people from the same town that were completely civilians innocent that they were paying in place of the partisans. So in a sense, it's kind of like, you know they are doing the right thing. At the same time, you're paying the consequences. So a lot of people wanted to be left alone from the fascists, left alone from the Nazis, left alone from the partisans, and they wanted the whole thing over.

But it's not so easy. That's why I said that it was a complex sense. Yeah. We're galloping, of course, through all this history, but we do have to quickly get to the point where in 1945, Mussolini was executed by a partisan firing squad, and then he was transported to Milan and hung upside down in a public square.

What is the political significance of such a graphic end, Robert? Practical significance. he's gone. And gone at the hands, at least as the story was told of Italians, right? Not an allied military tribunal, but Italians. In summary justice, it was done. The symbolic significance comes back to a square, Piazzal de Reteo, origins of the movement itself. I think a year before fascist loyalists had executed partisans.

And again, it's a very macabre scene. But I think we have to tell that story. You know, the bodies of these partisans were, you know, were hung up in the square of public display. So there's profound symbolic significance to returning Mussolini's body, hanging it up in the square. It's then taken down as desecrated, I think, is the only way we could describe what happens. A lot of popular fury is the story.

And again, there's also mythology built up around Mussolini's end. But there's an unmistakable sense that the symbolism here is that this is the work of the Italian people, where it's an act on behalf of the Italian people who have dealt with their dictator on their own terms. The reality is more complex than that, but there is profound symbolism in that moment, but I think symbolism that has a practical consequence. Sure. Yeah, and actually, I'm curious about that

because one can imagine how this is kind of every authoritarian's nightmare. And we've seen more recent examples, very macabre scenes, you know, whether it's Libya or other places. And I'm curious just what effect that kind of graphic end might have on other authoritarian who are operating at the same time, leaders of that era, Hitler at all. Joshua?

Well, Hitler very much said, I don't want to meet the same end as Mussolini. So I don't want to be glib about this, but took matters into his own hands. Yeah, I mean, this becomes a kind of visual trope of the ends of regimes, right? Whether it's, and this was the case in 1943, it was statues.

They didn't get their hands on the man. So it was the symbolic remnants of the regime at that point. And then it takes until 1945 to get their hands on the man himself. And to Robert's point about this being what Italians are actually achieving, it's also a confirmation that he's really gone, right? That we have the body now. And also that it is removing this godlike figure from his pedestal, that this is a kind of human humiliation.

You know, I think about the scenes of Saddam Hussein when he was captured. And it was very important to parade around Saddam Hussein with, you know, an overgrown beard and sort of shrunken and disheveled. And I think those optics are really important for understanding how the cult of personality is dismantled. Yeah. I, Donna, how does that look from the rest of Europe at the time? So hanging him upside down, it's kind of like a sign of infamy. It's a long tradition. It's not even deserving to be hanged in the proper position.

And the idea, I think, not all Terrans have the same fate as Mussolini and Hitler, unfortunately. And I wish it was more of a deterrent. If you go that way, you may end up like Mussolini, but you also may end up like Franco or Pinochet. So Francisco Franco, the dictator of Spain in 30 years, he died peacefully in bed. He decided the very day that he was going to be disconnected from a machine where he was artificially kept alive so that he could die on the November 20th, the same day that the fascist leader of Spain had died, so that he could kind of like reclaim the memory of the other person. So dying in bed means that you are not guilty. You've kind of like,

your service, you are the savor of the country, and the memory of your time in office or your regime is more easily recuperated. You also kind of like decide that you are going to have this vainglorious tomb in the valley of the fallen, on top of a mountain, like an incredible basilica built with forced labor by the defeated people in the Spanish Civil War, and you are there until 2019. So almost 50 years after you die, you still have this wonderful place where people go and do apology of dictatorship. While Mussolini didn't have even a tombstone until 1957, because people didn't want to promote a place where people can gather and still be kind of like fascist. They did gather every 20th of November in that basilica.

This is why Hitler doesn't have a tombstone. so that neo-Nazis don't have a place to gather. So the way a dictator dies, it also has an influence on how much they can be revived. Just kind of to end off here, picking up from my Tana's point, Robert, the way in which a dictator dies has a huge influence also on what unfolds afterwards, what kind of system is possible and how it could be implemented, what flavor it is. You've written a book on the First Democratic Election in Italy. What's it called?

years ago, from fascism to democracy. What's a key lesson that you think that election, that first election after Mussolini holds, about how to move from authoritarianism to democracy? One lesson. Just one. It's a successful transition. It's a successful democratic transition, right?

Italians go to vote. There's a vote in 1946, a referendum where women in Italy vote for the very first time. That's the election that chooses the republic over the monarchy, just barely. That election chooses a constituent assembly which writes a new constitution. That new constitution sort of gets, if you will, kicked off in 1948 with the parliamentary election. Mass mobilization, significant turnout for a country that had known decades of dictatorship and even pre-fascist history, disengagement with the political system. Now you get this real significant degree of participation.

But if I had to pick one thing, I would say that there is limited reckoning with fascism. Because in some senses, yes, Mussolini's end is dramatic and final, you know, his very body, is desacralized, right? The body that had been used to build up the myth of fascism. But there isn't a full reckoning with Italy's wartime record, right? There is no Italian Nuremberg. There are trials of mainly German officials in Italy. There are some prominent fascists who are tried. But by and large, what there is between 1944, there's a brief purge of institutions, which

just means people are removed from the judiciary and so forth, there's an amnesty that follows in 1946. So there hasn't really been, and there wasn't even in that time of full reckoning. What there was was a myth, really two myths I'd leave you with, which is the myth of Italy as an antifascist nation, born of that anti-fascist coalition, that suddenly Italy was a nation of anti-fascists, which in a way is a very convenient way of forgetting the 20 years preceding. But there's also a second myth. Everybody was part of the resistance. We're all resistors, a nation of resistors, right, which of course wasn't true. The resistance was always the work of a minority, even the armed resistance. The second part of it's a corollary is the myth of Italian brava genta. Italians are good

people. We see this myth even in the story of rescue of Jews during the Holocaust, for example. In that myth, fascist crimes, domestic and global, are forgotten, underestimated. Does that hurt Italy's post-war democracy? I argue that it does. And one of its consistent issues has been, for example, trying to find a way towards stability, which is, it continues to elude. It's a project that continues. Project broken progress, yeah. Joshua, you were nodding. Just if you could address just how that end affects the transition to democracy.

I very much share Roberts' take that there is this spectacular moment. There are new myths created to replace the fascist myth, and that that proves to be successful. It is not eternally successful. And frankly, much of contemporary Italian politics are the result of those processes of forgetting and myth-making, that the current Italian government under Georgia Miloni is essentially the successor party to the fascist party, and that its appeal to its base is a sense of grievance that fascists had been extradist. excluded from the nation after the war. That if you say we were all anti-fascists, what happens to the true believers, to those who felt a commitment to those ideals?

They're essentially treated as illegitimate presences in the nation. And so what we're contending with in Italy, and obviously we see this on a global scale now too, is a sort of a return of repressed identities that after 1945 were understood to be illegitimate, but now are returning in full force. To that point that you and Robert made, you know, we still see the persistence of fascist ideologies,

not just in Italy, but around the world. Is there, this is how I was kind of thinking about it, is there still maybe one more elusive stage that would have been necessary to truly defeat, not just Mussolini, but fascism itself? Itana? Well, the problem you have once the fascist regimes are over, is that denazification was perceived to be like an outside imposition by the American occupation in Germany.

So the Germans themselves, when they were forced to go to a movie theater and watch reels of concentration camps, death camps, a lot of people closed their eyes. They refused to understand what they had done. And at some point in 1949, at an hour, the chancellor at the time, abandoned the whole. whole the natification process and said it's hurting Germany. It's not allowing us to rebuild. And in the context of the Cold War, it's better to have a strong West Germany than no Germany at all. So the Americans went along with it. So there was no reckoning with Nazism for many years. True that the new German constitution does prohibit it, kind of like symbolism and affiliation to any neo-Nazi organization.

So all the neo-Nazi propaganda for the longest time was published in Spain, because it was illegal to have it done in Germany. So in Germany, they can ban anti-democratic parties even before they take root, because they learn from the five stages of fascism. So the moment that you create a fascist party, we are not going to allow you to take root. We are going to illegalize you. So in Germany, they do some certain things that they learn from their past. But I would say that it's, I lost my turn of thought.

It's okay. It's a good segue actually because I know historians are generally reluctant to apply the knowledge to the current moment. But I do want to ask you, and it's kind of a lightning round, what you think might be, you know, we've signaled a couple of examples along the way, but if you had to choose the most important lesson that this chapter that we've been discussing holds for defeating contemporary authoritarian leaders, what that would be. I'll start with you, Robert. Defend your social institutions. Two are represented on this stage I can think of. The press, universities, their autonomy, their capacity to be a space for critical thinking,

for dissent, absolutely critical. So defend your social institutions. Thank you. I, Tana. Well, I think the most important lesson is to understand that fascism can be defeated before it takes root. if you see the signs. And part of it is that the elites that opened the door to fascism, those are the elites that have to be held accountable before they decide to open the door for fascists to come in.

So I would say that there were two moments in the Italian case, like the March of Rome and the Matteotti affair, where things could have turned differently. And understanding that gives you an idea of what is our Mateotti? affair today. What would be our hashtag fire today? It's understanding moments when the unthinkable happen, you need to have a clear

head and decide not to give too much power to a tyrant and the executive. You can do it, but it's hard to see the signs. The other thing, if I can do a second one, would be defend institutions. Institutions do not defend themselves. Institutions are way weaker than we think they are, including

the CBC, which will be the one that In Canada, right now, I would say it's the most important institution to defend. And that's on all of us. If we expect somebody else to fight tyrannical proto-tyrants, we are going to end up with one. Because it is all of us the ones that could defend institutions, the one that could prevent those parties to opening the door to a tyrant or to a fascist party. So I would say that we in Canada are in a good place to think and to observe and not to follow, for instance, the route of urban in Hungary or what is happening right now in the States. So it's doable, but we need to pitch in.

Thank you very much. I echo my colleagues, but I would also add, don't believe the lies. Don't believe the spectacle. that the reason why the March on Rome succeeded or the Mattaoti affair did not end the regime was because enough people believed the facade that was erected by Mussolini and the fascists. And then they were able to cultivate this aura of invincibility, this of monolithic unity. And yet, as we've seen by talking about their history, the whole regime was a disaster. right? They led Italy into a war that it was not prepared for and they devastated their own country.

They did not achieve the fascist revolution. They murdered people. They destroyed institutions. And that was because of failures that were inherent to fascism and are inherent to authoritarianism. And so we're now living in our own age where information is contested, where truth is contested. and I think it's really incumbent on us as democratic citizens to challenge the myths that are erected around political movements and call them out. Joshua, Iitana, and Robert, thank you so much for your insights. Thank you. Really appreciate it. Thank you very much.

The first episode in our five-part series on How to Defeat authoritarianism. The topic of our discussion was Benito Mussolini's Italy. Thank you to our guests, Joshua Arthur's, an associate professor in the Faculty of Information and the Department of Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, and Latin American Studies at the University of Toronto, Robert Ventreska, President of King's University College at Western University, and a historian of 20th century Europe, and Itana Gia, the McKenzie Papineau Memorial Chair in Modern Spanish History at York University, Toronto, Canada. Thanks also to the staff at the Stratford Festival. Pauline Holdsworth is the producer of ideas at Stratford.

Technical production Harper Charlton and Danielle Duval, editing by Annie Bender. Lisa Ayuso is Ideas web producer. Senior producer is Nicola Luxchich. Greg Kelly is the executive producer of ideas, and I'm Nala Ayyad. For more CBC podcasts, go to CBC.com. slash podcasts.