Benito the benign
John Ray takes exception to Gareth Parker’s characterisation of him, saying,
Gareth Parker, one of my fellow conservative Australian bloggers has described me as too “lunar” for him. I wonder would he like to point out one claim I have made that is not backed up with good scientific and historical evidence?
One doesn’t need to look very hard. In the immediately preceding post, Ray claims that
The Italian Prime minister has just come under fire for pointing out that Mussolini … was nowhere nearly as vicious as Hitler and Stalin. He is perfectly correct. … The standard Italian Fascist treatment of political opponents was not the firing squad, the Gulag or the concentration camp but a forced dose of castor-oil!
Interesting. While it is certainly true that Hitler and Stalin were worse than Mussolini, John Ray seems to endorse Berlusconi’s statement that “Mussolini never killed anyone.” That is one claim made that is not backed up with good scientific and historical evidence:
Historians say that wide persecution of Jews began in 1938, when Mussolini introduced Italy’s first anti-Semitic laws, opening the way for the eventual deportation of about 7,000 Jews.
It is believed that some 5,910 of them were killed.
Must’ve been some strong castor-oil…
But even if John Ray can excuse Mussolini because he merely deported Jews to a nation that is carrying out a genocide against them, instead of doing the dirty work at home, there is plenty of other historical evidence stacking up against him.
Historian Dennis Mack Smith, who wrote the biography “Mussolini,” said the Italian dictator was not a killer on the scale of Hitler or Stalin, but had certainly been a brutal leader.
“Mussolini never stood over and ordered killings himself,” Mack Smith said. “He would not do it himself because he was rather squeamish. But he had absolutely no compunction in having people killed.”
Everybody knows that Mussolini had a militia whose purpose was to assault and kill his political opponents. The Blackshirts were
Armed squads of Italian Fascists under Benito Mussolini who wore black shirts as part of their uniform.
The squads, first organized in 1919, targeted socialists, communists, republicans, and others. Hundreds of people were killed as the squads grew in number. In 1922 Blackshirts from all over Italy participated in the March on Rome [led by Mussolini].
I never knew the Blackshirts were armed with castor-oil, but they must have gone through a lot of it to kill hundreds of Mussolini’s political opponents.
Then again, as John Ray points out, “the facts can be pretty ‘lunar’ at times. They certainly conflict with a lot of popular notions.”
Interesting to think of Pink Floyd’s The Wall featuring, instead of hammers, teaspoonfuls of castor oil.
(Good catch)
I think it was Don Arthur who said John Ray was a piece of performance art rather than a real person, someone presenting themselves as an extreme parody of everything leftists believe is evil about the right. I’m still trying to decide whether he’s on to something or there or whether Ray really is as lunar as he appears.
This is why they hung him upside down – so the horrors of castor oil woulod drip from his body mouth first.
Read ‘All or nothing’ by Jonathan Sternberg and you get a slightly better picture of Mussolini. I come away with some sympathy. He was amoral and unprincipled and power hungry but he was not a cold blooded killer, nor was he a sincere racist. Apparently his Fascist regime did dither and hold out on deporting Jews for as long as possible – though he himself was not active in trying to save Jews many of his Fascist deputies were and he didn’t try to interfere. It wasn’t until he became totally dependent on the Nazis for protection (when he was freed from a coup and speeded to safety by Nazis )and given his own piece of Italy – the republic of Salo to govern after a coup against him that he went along with the deportation.
Thank God, Jason, that there are still some people who accept that opinions are better when based on some relevant reading.