The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – The Perfect Fascist: A Story of Love, Power, and Morality in Mussolini’s Italy by Victoria De Grazia

Episode Date: October 2, 2020

The Perfect Fascist: A Story of Love, Power, and Morality in Mussolini’s Italy by Victoria De Grazia Victoriadegrazia.com “As Fellini did in film, The Perfect Fascist takes us into the dark and complicated heart of Italian fascism…It is an extraordinary story that illuminates the ways in which the all-consuming nature of fascism distorted Italian society and destroyed the lives of individuals. I could not put it down.” ―Margaret MacMillan, author of Paris 1919 “With lyrical precision, The Perfect Fascist reveals how ideology corrupts the truth, how untrammeled ambition destroys the soul, and how the vanity of white male supremacy distorts emotion, making even love a matter of state.” ―Sonia Purnell, author of A Woman of No Importance Through the story of one exemplary fascist―a war hero turned commander of Mussolini’s Black Shirts―the award-winning author of How Fascism Ruled Women reveals how the personal became political in the fascist quest for manhood and power. When Attilio Teruzzi, Mussolini’s handsome political enforcer, married a rising young American opera star, his good fortune seemed settled. The wedding was a carefully stage-managed affair, capped with a blessing by Mussolini himself. Yet only three years later, after being promoted to commander of the Black Shirts, Teruzzi renounced his wife. In fascist Italy, a Catholic country with no divorce law, he could only dissolve the marriage by filing for an annulment through the medieval procedures of the Church Court. The proceedings took an ominous turn when Mussolini joined Hitler: Lilliana Teruzzi was Jewish, and fascist Italy would soon introduce its first race laws. The Perfect Fascist pivots from the intimate story of a tempestuous seduction and inconvenient marriage―brilliantly reconstructed through family letters and court records―to a riveting account of Mussolini’s rise and fall. It invites us to see in the vain, loyal, lecherous, and impetuous Attilio Teruzzi, a decorated military officer, an exemplar of fascism’s New Man. Why did he abruptly discard the woman he had so eagerly courted? And why, when the time came to find another partner, did he choose another Jewish woman as his would-be wife? In Victoria de Grazia’s engrossing account, we see him vacillating between the will of his Duce and the dictates of his heart. De Grazia’s landmark history captures the seductive appeal of fascism and shows us how, in his moral pieties and intimate betrayals, his violence and opportunism, Teruzzi is a forefather of the illiberal politicians of today.

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast, the hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show, the preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. Get ready, get ready, strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms and legs inside the vehicle at all times. Because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain now here's your host chris voss hi folks this is voss here from the chris voss show.com the chris voss show.com hey we're coming here with another great podcast oh my gosh we have a most brilliant author she's written a a ton, a little ton, like we measured it. We sent a truck out, measured it. She's run a ton of great books. She's probably sold a ton of great books,

but she's written a ton of great books as well. And we're going to have her on the podcast here coming up. So stay tuned. No clicking. You can see the video version of this interview on youtube.com forward slash Chris Foss. Hit that bell notification button. I got to tell you a secret. If you hit the bell notification button on YouTube, you get a special feeling just right deep in your chest and your heart. There might be gas, might be, you know, something you drank, but it's kind of a special feeling.

So hit the bell notification button. Our newest syndication is off of Amazon music. You can see the podcast there. You can also follow me on Goodreads under Chris Voss. The Chris Voss Show just set up a book club over there we're trying to build out. So follow us on goodreads.com. You can see all of our reviews, all the books we're reading, which is a lot these days, and all that good stuff. Refer your friends to the show, thecbpn.com or chrisfontspodcastnetwork.com. This is kind of a really exciting and topical book right now because some of these words are being run around in our politics.

But this is also a beautiful story interwoven with government history and politics, etc., etc. Let's just get right to the title, Chris. Kut Stalling, The Perfect Fascist, A Story of Love, Power, and Morality in Mussolini's Italy by Victoria de Grazia. And Victoria, like I say, she's written a ton of books. She's a more collegiate professor of history at Columbia University. She was born in Chicago. Chicago. Grew up crisscrossing the continental U.S. with her family, and they finally settled in Princeton, New Jersey. She now has dual U.S. citizenship and Italian citizenship.

She currently lives somewhere between New York City and the province of Siena in a town called Sorrentino. I'm not sure I got that correct. Did I get that correct, Victoria? It's good enough. Good enough. Welcome to the show, Victoria. How are you? Fine.

I'm very happy to be with you. Very happy that you're here with us as well. So give us your plugs so people can find you on the interwebs. Okay. So, book, Perfect Fascist. You can find it on Amazon. That's the quickest way. But let me start before you go and buy it. Let me convince you that it's important. You've all heard the word fascism, some point or another. It's being bandied around in the US a lot.

There are those who call the President of the United States a fascist, but he denouncing Antifa, which means anti-fascist, which he should pronounce Antifa or Antifa. Well, in any case, he calls them fascists. So the word is being tossed around. My book is not about today. It's a history. And it's about what I call the perfect fascist. So I'm trying in this history to tell you through a story of a man.

He could be a Michael Flynn on steroids, if you want. If Michael Flynn had come out of the army, had joined a politician with, as they would say in some language, very smart politician, and then organized his militia to get him elected, that would be the type. Though he would also have to be much better looking in a uniform, much younger with a big red beard, a ladies' man, and so on and so forth. So this story then is designed, because I thought it was an extraordinary story, of this man, an Italian fascist who marries an American Jewish woman, a young opera star, 17 years his junior,

in a big wedding with Mussolini as best man. This story, which weaves all the way through, which starts with him being in the army, joining the colonial army as a young man, poor man, it then stretches through and it's a way for you to understand what fascism was in its time, which strikes me as very important to understand, if we want to understand how that term is used today, and what it means that we even want to use it to describe our country, our government. And it's a beautiful story because you've interwoven the history and talked about the history of Mussolini and the rise of fascism in the state.

But it's also a human story, which I think a lot of people, when they throw around, well, that guy's a fascist or this government's being a fascist, we don't see the three-dimensional element of that there's human beings involved, that there's love, that there's all these different dynamics. And that's a lot of what you get into in the story. Am I correct? Right. I found this man. I found him because he married this American and she left an archive with all these photographs of him, of her as an opera diva. But him also on campaign fighting in Libya against the Senussi and the Bedouin warriors. This is in the 1920s. So my question, well, who is this man who decided he was going

to marry this American diva in Italy with Mussolini as his best man? And what is he? You know, a little guy, you know, comes from the lower classes of Milan, making his fortune, disappointed by the outcome of the war and the disrespect for the veterans who says, okay, none of the present parties are good for me., who says, okay, none of the present parties are good for me. I'm going to go with this new party, which promises to get rid of the liberals, which promises to make Italy great again. And so this man Terruzzi then, you know, a little guy, you know, maybe he would have gone into commerce if things were calm, becomes this head of the black shirts. He becomes a minister of Italian Africa.

And so his human story, bad marriage, divorce, annulment, another woman, love child, hiding out from the Nazis in northern Italy at the very end, in prison. Wow. Go through a lot of Sturm und Drang. It's a real melodrama, the story. But, you know, I try to weave it through to make people understand, you know, what this man was trying to do, how flawed he was, impetuous, mediocre in some ways,

but very loyal, very loyal. That was, if you want, what was important about his loyalty, but to what kind of cause, that's a question that we're trying to get at. What's he loyal to, and what that means for his choices in terms, especially of his wife, children, a child, and so on. And this is the story of the journey of life that we all go through, the beginning, the end, the things, the passions that we go through. And so I think that's what really makes it a beautiful, enduring book to read because you go through everything. And it's a real tale.

And it spins through this history that has a lot of prominence of Mussolini. I mean, we all know kind of how that whole thing went. But what I like about it is it talks about, like in the book, you talk about how, you know, Mussolini was all about love, and then somehow they end up in, you know, a very loveless sort of government. And they all want, you know, peace, and everyone's going to hug each other and stuff. And that ends up being a very, you know, brash government, if you will. Yeah, well, I think the upshot is like this love and death.

You've got this old European notion, you've got to die for love. Love is death. Very long, far from Hollywood kind of view. Much more like an opera, a grand opera. In fact, I structured it in some way that way, but that's because how they lived it, strive, grasp, overreach, and then fall.

But that was also the way the fascist regime worked. This coming out, we're going to change everything, we're going to do the revolution, then every kind of compromise. Finally, overreaching align italy with hitler a much greater power much more power willing to throw everything into winning global power and then destroying itself and everybody allied to it so this is a embodied in this man marching along with his girlfriends all around him his cronies because

he men loved him uh with his close friendship with mussolini who was really impossible to have a friendship with because he was always changing and changing course uh you can get the story of what it meant to be a fascist and then what fascism meant in terms of making Italy great, but the cost of such corruption that ultimately the nation was lost. The nation was crushed in war, and they were destroyed too with their families. It's quite the journey. I mean, it's the beginning to end, the road you're on and the road you end up on. Now, the book starts out, I believe, with a wedding, does it not?

Yes, it starts out with a photograph of Mussolini right in the middle, best man. I think he was the groom and the bride from the looks of the picture. And next to him, this black shirt and then the consort, a very large diva American, you know, a very sort of Wagnerian soprano, a large, solid woman, who is wildly in love with this man. She's there to make her coup in the opera world, and this man, Teruzzi, is making his coup, marching on Rome, and then, you know, a coup to become successful.

And so they seem like the ideal power couple. And that's what struck me as the ideal couple, this American woman with her idea of the inner circle. We're now going to, I'm going to advance his career. What this idealism that's gone so, so misbegotten on the part of this American woman that she is going to protect this man and then bring him into Mussolini's inner circle, which is a maelstrom of conniving and gossip and people

going behind each other's backs and terror and real terror and killing opposition figures just this time so there is a moral he it's not only shall we say his immorality but there it's her innocence shall we put it that way her the american innocence which allows her to be brought in and think that she's going to change this regime make it not not to make it more liberal but to make it more illustrious, more cultivated, calmer. And that's sort of the marriage that is a sign that the fascists are settling down because they're bourgeois, which doesn't last. A few things do. Now, I think this was, you said in the book, this was Mussolini's first time he'd ever officiated a marriage?

It was. It was his first time that he's being asked not just as duce, leader, but also he's the prime minister. So this is a great honor, though he's very cynical. You know, he'd say, oh, you know, this is great. You know, you want to get married. He's very interested in Tuitsi settling down because this is a, you know, you want to get married. He's very interested in Tuitsie settling down because this is a black shirt.

He's around beating people up, or not him, but certainly conniving and knowing who is doing that violence. So it's very good for this man who is notorious as the head of the squads, the militia of Milan, that he now become a statesman and not keep messing around.

He gets one woman pregnant that's very embarrassing he's torn by all of these new courtiers and when man becomes very prominent like that and he has no capital of his own uh he needs friends and they begin offering him you know apartment here uh give me a zoning permit there. By our standards, it's small potatoes. But this is the path that you'll get more and more of that. And pretty soon, the society is having big problems with the corruption of the government. And the black shirts, were the black shirts like the brown shirts of Hitler? Was that their role? Yes yes it's the the same and once

mussolini seizes power the coup so you know let's make comparison sort of proud boys but teruzzi's role was to make the proud boys discipline squads you know so they wouldn't be running around showing up at demonstrations where they get beaten up arrested and you know cause trouble he wanted he's an army man so he wanted them boom boom boom boom and get nice uniforms too you know you don't want people running around it scares the bourgeoisie to have people like that running around in milan some of you might have it some you know it's like running around in paris or if they were in new y, it's very scary. So the idea of this fascist leadership was to get them organized as militia.

Black shirts, Lurk teaches them how to do parade routines, get them out any time there was the Italian Fourth of July, which is November 4th, in honor of the World War I dead, make sure that they were there with the flags to show that they were the only patriotic people, that they, not the socialists who were against the war, the Catholics against the war, the fascists were the patriots. So he plays an important role always creating a lot of disorder and then boom, order. Denouncing corruption and then corrupt marriage solid

marriage and then the marriage perforce breaks up because you can't have this big bumptious american woman with all of her pontificating and moralizing uh she she causes endless trouble uh for for him especially after wall street crashes and there's no more capital involved and Wall Street begins to be seen as, ooh, you know, some sort of Uncle Shylock. And since she's Jewish, anti-Semitism starts to creep into the story. So it's a big part of it, the growing anti-Semitism of the fascists. Does the story take part then when the war breaks out and continues on through the war? Yes, I followed it.

I mean, they continued on relations with each other through the annulment court. So think divorce courts that are secret, run by the Catholic Church, because there was no proper divorce in Italy. If you think you've had problems with divorce, divorce, lawyers, angry exes, this is a, this is a, you know, a couple from hell. Once they break, break up, he gets his police to throw the wife's family out of Italy. He tries to, you know, threatens to get her sent to exile. He blackballs her, even though she wants to stay in Italy. She has an Italian citizenship. He tries to corrupt all the courts to get,

if not a divorce, to get this annulment, which means he's trying to corrupt the Pope, I mean, the church hierarchy, the church courts. So that goes all the way on to the war. But then I'm very interested in following him up to that point of the war, because we're saying, hey, you know, a loyal guy, he's saying, Mussolini's screwing this up. He's losing the war on the side of Hitler. The Americans are coming in. You know, the Allies are crossing over from Italy. And therefore, the question then is, well, what will Mussolini do? Should he leave office and hand over power to the other, somebody else? What's more important, Mussolini or the nation? Now, that's a big decision that good, so-called good fascists, some of them said, we'll get rid of Mussolini

and give the army back to the king. Turetsu doesn't do that. I mean, he stays loyal to the man, which is sort of his final flaw because that means the Germans then occupy the north, the Americans occupy the south. occupy the North, the Americans occupy the South. So the nation is left in ruins. That's the ultimate irresponsibility that your people are dying. That's the ultimate responsibility when you don't protect your people

and your nation loses. So by the end, the Second World War, the stakes are huge and the perfect fascist is an utter failure so if you and he feels that his family too he can't protect a child uh and who is jewish uh he has to hide with her she's deeply traumatized and so on big story saga think of it like an opera like an opera saga just beautiful i i like how it's interweb throughout history and tells a story because this is the journey that people go on. This is the beauty of a great movie or a great story in what it details. What did you find in the book surprised you when you were researching it? Well, I always wanted to hear, you know, if I knew more about Tarruzzi, I mean, you know, maybe he, I said, if I knew more about Teruzzi,

I mean, you know, maybe he was in prison, maybe he had a confessor. And by God, I went to this island where the old penitentiary was, giant bourbon castle, formerly been Dudgeons. And the priest was still there. That is, he had retired. Gorgeous guy lying in bed with his James Bond-looking nurse, you know, gorgeous Russian nurse. And he was able to tell me some about this Tarruzzi.

He lied dead at 92 years old. You know, he said, very impetuous, bad temper. But he had reformed. He had become patient and quiet. He was the head librarian in the prison. And his old quality of man of order was he would be very, very angry if anybody scribbled in the books. So in the very end,

this loyalty was transferred to the prison chaplain and his skills in keeping order were transferred to being this librarian in the prison. And that was, you know, let's say, poignant, surprising, you know, that, wow, that I could have that strange contact. Oh, then there were other moments, too. I was able to get to the site where he had been captured by the partisans in a big shootout. We walked over the fields where the partisans had tried to ambush him as he was escaping to Switzerland. Big, you know, firefight. And the little boys were saying they remembered. There was a little boy who was now 70, 80 years old. He said, Oh, yes, they started firing, we jumped on each other,

and we peed on each other. And we were so scared. So this kind of connection with this past, which in some people, the old people's eyes is still very immediate. I think that was what constantly surprised me, that human factor in writing this book. So giving a kind of humanity to the period, which also shows how inhuman it was. Yeah, that's extraordinary. You're able to track down the people. That is awesome, because then you get that rich history that just makes so beautiful into the context of the book, right? Yeah, it makes it does it does i think you know you readers will find that it's a bit it's very this very human

story that even the man is so awful my feminist friends say how can you spend spent so many years researching tracking this guy down i said well of all, you got to drive a stake through his heart. You really have to work at it. And then, yeah, but he's human. He's got all of the passions and feelings and family love and his love of Mussolini and his love of the nation. Not the king. He hated the king and he was an anti-clerical. But, you know, and then you see how it's deformed. You see how things get warped in that kind of politics, which suffocates and bends and warps people's moral compass. And so it is a story of moral compass that gets bent out of shape in individuals and in groups,

but then in a whole nation under that kind of despotic rule. And that resonates. We see when politics goes out of kilter, you get such crazy emotional behavior and people making choices that are more and more incomprehensible even, unless we can somehow step back and grasp where politics is going. It's interesting to me, and especially in the story of life and the story of this book, is everything starts out in love and everyone's got good intentions, and then it snowballs, and then suddenly you're on the path to hell, and things aren't working out, and one thing leads to another, and you can see how it unfolds.

How did you come across the story? You said you had been given or discovered a box of photos. Yes, I was very interested in probably strong man, you know, strong man, strong man, one word, and, you know, fat leaders,

especially they were seem to be coming back in the 1990s. And then I was given this box of papers and then I looked it through. I saw this woman marrying this black shirt

and their family wanted to know why did our nice, talented Jewish girl was going to have such a great career as an opera singer, a professional opera singer, not a cabaret singer. With all respect for all other kinds of music. Why did she marry this man and give away her career? You know, that's a kind of me too question. And then why did he marry this man and give away her her career you know that's a kind of sort of me too question and then why did he renounce her throw her out as if she was some sort of piece of baggage uh and that story was so extraordinary and promised you know finally i can dig into the

background of one of these guys, you know, nail them, get behind the facade of the uniforms and stuff shirts with all of their medals, which you look at any kind of documentary on fascism, that's what you see. Spreading around, all these other men spreading around, posing, posturing. So it's like, how do you get behind all this posturing? Who lies behind? Who gives them strength to do what they do every day? Females.

There are a lot of women in this story, and a lot of strong women. Even if they end up with these guys and give them a lot of strength, they're real. They're real. And that's also a question of their complicity with the system by being good wives or bad wives, lovers, the mothers of the children. So it's a story about a perfect fascist, but his mother, his wife, wives, his lovers, his male cronies. It's all very sexy because the emotion of the fascism sexualized everything.

It made everything very, this word love being bandied around, passion, passion and death, and you should die for your passion. So it's quite a story in that sense very um emotional i like stories like this because i think we look at history from a from a uh 2d sort of effect we're like yeah uh journey had the war there and they did some really awful horrific things and and then it ended and you don't see the interwoven story of millions of people. I remember one of my favorite artists in the band Rush, Neil Peart, he wrote that when the wall fell in Russia, a lot of people were happy.

And he was like, I'm really angry. He goes, because I'm thinking of the millions of people and all their stories who suffered, who stood in bread lines, who endured the horrific thing. And in Warren and Mussolini's time, and I'm sure in your book, it tells the true story of what goes on, these interpersonal relationships, the mothers, the fathers, the family, the kids, the wives, the ex-wives. And it's not that 2D sort of thing that we look towards history. There's a depth to it. There's heartbreak, there's loss, there's love, there's passion, there's good intentions, there's good intentions that go wrong. And you see the summation of those as they go through the story, correct? Yeah. I think it's very important to bring back those feelings and

to understand, you know, how the personal ideas and feelings connect with politics. In some sense, we've been used in this country to say, okay, politics is out there, and every four years, we're going to get all enraged and fight about it. But now we're in a position where everybody's completely enraged and involved emotionally. And that was very similar to that kind of regime. You know, kind of constant emotional upset. And one can imagine

how big the stakes were so that people began in their individual lives, even aligning. You know, a fascist would not marry an anti-fascist and vice versa. Families were affected by whether they were fascist or anti-fascist. It became very, very important how you identify yourself politically in order to survive.

And that's something that we want to think about. It's not only about the Shoah, and that's something that we want to think about it's not only about the shoah and that's usually where americans focus they say that's the that the terrible thing about fascism in italy or germany goodness in europe is the the death of the of the jews which comes late i mean which is not in any way to underestimate. It comes under the cover of war. But there's also this 20 years starting in Italy in 1920 when people are being forced to emigrate abroad because they're anti-fascist. This battle is going on between fascists and anti-fascists

from 1920 all the way continuing to 1943. And you can imagine that period roughly from 26 when Italy begins to stabilize, you know, how people lived in very passionate and difficult ways. There was one story, and then, you know, we have a lot of stories. I interviewed a woman who knew, again, one of the protagonists. And she was a school teacher, very, very, you know, she sounded like she was a good Democrat or, you know, in any case, not involved in politics. She was retired. And she said, oh, you know what? I was going to marry Mussolini.

She was 10 years old. And then I heard everybody laughing and screaming because he had been overthrown. And I cried and I cried and I cried because they teased me saying, now you're not going to be able to wear your white dress and your shoes. He said, well, he was my first great love and my heart was broken when he was overthrown. So, you know, there was a huge investment on the part of, especially by the time the little kids who were all these little organizations, fascist organizations. So I sort of ended on that, how emotionally charged this regime was, Mussolini over everything, people, then their lives having to be made to kind of in rhythm with what he was doing. Even as he got older and they began to see he was corrupt, and that he had a girlfriend, it became known he had a lover, and he was always shown as a family man,

and he no longer controlled people like Cherutzi, who were acting out, terrible libertines who had all sorts of relations and they began to pull away and become more and more disenchanted. So the flip side of that emotion is that when things got bad, war, bombing,

people losing their lives, you could no longer protect them, then the terrible disenchantment set in. Get rid of them. Get rid of them. Get rid of them. But it took 20 years. Wow. What's your favorite story in the book that you prefer, you like the most?

I think I like the most the way, finding out that Liliana, the way she would mobilize, even in Italy, she would go around, she's a big woman and say, ah, you know, ah, ah, you know, I'm going to fight this. I'm going to fight this. He's, he's ruining my, he ruined my reputation by, by, by, by trying to divorce me. And there was no, no cause. I had no lover. And so she mobilizes everybody to, I mean, not everybody, but anybody who had a grievance against the fascists and who was not going to get knocked off by them,

she got to support. And so she got some of the leading divorce lawyers in Italy to support her, who understood, you know, that they could do it and not, you know, be beaten up or forced to leave. So Liliana, before the judges you know this proud Jewish woman defending her honor and her mother when the verdict comes in at one point which will then be reversed saying that the

marriage will not be annulled her mother writes Liliana by herself, she defeated Mussolini and the Pope. I just love that idea. Their little Babylon, their little Jewish child, she had resisted the Pope. And it was very important, Catholic Pope and Mussolini, to keep her marriage to this fascist cat intact and thereby save her honor as a woman. So she's like the original Me Too woman who keeps going, who keeps going. The Italians are very passionate people, and so that's probably what makes this story a lot of fun.

Yeah, you know, it's a say, you know, he, on the day of their, when their marriage is consummated, riding in the king's train going north to Vienna, he sings Calaf's song, you know, which Pavarotti, I will triumph, I will triumph. he's triumphed over the ice princess so they themselves live a lot of opera roles as they as they live their so called daily lives it is a lot of mixing in because you're talking about very fundamental human loyalties

and ideas about family and loyalty and fate, and as you were saying, in destiny and life. And so the book does get down to those fundamentals, which are the subject, if you want, of opera and of a certain kind of humanistic ideas of a society that the fascists played on

and corrupted. The story of life and the beauty of life, love, and love lost and life lost and everything else. What do you hope people take from this as they read the book and close out of it?

I think that they really want to think about both the human story and how humans get implicated in despotic regimes. You know, we in some ways

in the U.S. have always prided ourselves in not having to band our personal selves to authoritarian politics, which in some ways is why we're shocked by how vehement the politics are today. And so I think that you could take away the story of people and how they respond

and how they're influenced. I think, too, the moral question, you know, how we think about moral choices. They're complicated. They're very complicated. And it may be that just denouncing moral flaws really isn't enough. You've got to kind of get behind why that behavior, what permits it, and not just to say, denounce, denounce, denounce. Get behind, get behind. be destructive of the society, and not just denounce them morally, but understand the political causes that lie behind them. It's a bit of a complicated

message, but I think it's not so complicated. It's a difference between understanding the politics that permit awful behavior, the laws that are broken, and then just denouncing the symptom, which is immoral behavior. Yeah, that was beautiful. I mean, I think you gave it a perfect analogy. Do you see similarities when you're writing the book to the politics going on in America, or do you see any doppelgangers? Well, historians often, you know, you playgangers? For historians, often, you know,

you play back and forth, your head changes, you know, in other words, the way I saw fascism 30 years ago, different, clearly, one lives in society, we're human beings and so our thinking gets clarified to ask

new questions about it and you know, I would never have thought that by writing about human beings, I would understand better that society. So that said, you're not, I mean, I think listeners really want to hear something more. Well, I mean, think the militarization of society, that was so clearly behind the fascist rise to power coming out of World War I. All of this militarization, this blowback from the army, which then military from wars, which then militarizes your police, poor slobs who get all this weaponry. And that seems to be

the good. How do you deal with trouble? Bring out the heavy weapons i mean that started in the 1990s very important that militarization that war is a way to solve things that's what the fascists brought in like terutsi into the society very important another order and disorder okay create disorder and then hey we're for order. Very old thing, you know. Socialist baiting. Oh, my gosh. The heyday. That's what the Mussolini and his others did.

The socialists are anti-national. They were against the war. A lot of people were against the war. But they insulted our soldiers. Well, maybe some did, a few. You know, that's not. But then, oh, so they're the enemy. Socialists are the enemy, and we're the good Socialists are the enemy, and we're the good.

Catholics are the enemy, and we're the good. And then it becomes Bolsheviks are the enemy. Jews are the enemy. Lurid Arabs are the enemy. The British, oh, my God, how I hated the British. You know, the British bosses around, they're arrogant, they're impotent. Feet, the French, impotent, sterile, and so on. Pretty soon, you know, you keep working.

They're cause disorder, and we bring order. We bring greatness back to Italy. It sort of goes on and on. Corruption, look, corruption, it goes with the terrain. When you get non-professional politicians who, you know, have need to use the public trough to grease their friends and so on and so forth, because there's not a proper political party and the political party is no longer regulated by law about civil service. There's all kinds of laws that have been put into place to make sure that you're not lining your pockets. And the IRS used to be very careful about who gets what, checking and checking and checking. So when you're growing up scared to death, but if I deducted pencils at which I wasn't using for work,

we used to keep all the tags and so on and so forth. Well, when those rules begin to be broken, because you've got a party which is not responsible to the public and then it's not easy to get rid of it, you've got problems. It's constitutional. They think they could break the law because the law is not made for them. These are sort of recurrent problems. It's not just fascist Italy. It's any despotism. That's the nature of it.

You begin to put your military in the wrong place. You begin to say, there's disorder. We need the order. You begin to say, law, it's not for us. It's for others. It's bad law because it doesn't allow us to do this and to do that. So, you know, in that sense, this book is very clear, not on lessons, because history teaches we don't learn,

let's put it that way, but it makes you, it resonates, and it makes you therefore think about the world, I hope, in a different way. That should be the upshot. You know, you've read this story, which is so sad in some way, but I tried to make it a woman's way of introducing you to the problem of fascism in that time, in its original time, the 20s and 30s, under Mussolini.

Well, it's an extraordinary book. Anything more we need to know as we go out? Well, get it. And if you like it, let people know. It's not an easy time, but I can't be with you in person. It's very human to see you, Chris. But we are in a situation where it's difficult to get the word out and to talk to

people personally. So while you've given me a great audience, read the book, read it. If you like it, comment on it. And I would agree to check out the book. It's a beautifully well-written book.

I was enthralled by it and, and it's a love story too. So there's, you know, there's a bit of love in there. There's that. Give us your plugs one more time, Victoria.

So people look you up. Perfect fascist, Victoria de Gracia, but the perfect fascist is enough story of love, power, morality, and go to Amazon and purchase it. And check out her other books as well.

And yes, Irresistible Empire about America's advance to global power over the 20th century. That has got a lot of interesting insights into how America became a truly great power. Not so much both by force, but a lot by Rotary Clubs and Hollywood movies and the Marshall Plan and so on and so forth. So that is a book I'm very proud of, too. I think I noticed a theme through a lot of your books. There's a lot of different love, passion. There's even one, the sex of things, gender and conception. I'm very interested in power.

And power goes through a lot of banging of heads, but also a lot of seduction. Right. These two faces, you know, the seductive power, all of the wiles, and the, you know, the carrot and the stick, let's put it that way. Or like Machiavelli's Prince, he said, you know,

what's better, to be loved or hated? And he says, well, first I better be hated, but then I better be loved. Sounds like my first marriage. I'm just kidding. The Perfect Fascist, a story of love, power, and morality in Mussolini's Italy. Pick it up, guys. You can go to Amazon.com and check it out. You can also shop all the books from all the great authors who have been on the show.

It's a special shop we have on Amazon, amazon.com forward slash shop forward slash Chris Voss. You can hit that thing there. And then you have a.com as well, don't you, Victoria? You want to plug that? VictoriaDeGrazia.com. I know that's a, think Italian Victoria, D-E-G-R-A-Z-I-A.com. There you go. Thanks for being with us today, Victoria. We certainly appreciate having you on the show. Thank you very much, Chris. Thank you all of you for listening.

Thank you. To my audience, be sure to watch the video version of this on YouTube.com, 4chesschrisfoss at the bell notification. Thanks to Amazon for putting us on to Amazon Music for the podcast. Go to goodreads.com. You can see our reviews over there and the books we're reading. I've made it a point of saying currently reading everybody who's ever

been on the show so far, so it's quite the list. People are like, he's reading a lot of books right now. But go to Goodreads. You can see all that there and join the book club that we're building and all the good stuff. To my audience, we certainly appreciate you guys. Stay safe. Register to vote, and we'll see

you guys next time. Ditto. Say it. That, too. Register to vote. Be very safe. Be very safe. Thank you very much, Tobiah and Sid and Victoria.