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THE TIMES
SATURDAY MAY 05 2001
'Parallel' Mussolini muscles in on election
FROM RICHARD OWEN IN ROME
YOU may not remember the role played by Mussolini’s troops in helping the Americans to defeat the Vietcong in 1968, or the pride Il Duce took 20 years earlier when his forces captured Stalin before he could flee his crumbling Communist empire.
This is because in the real world Italy’s Fascist dictator was killed by partisans in April 1945, and Fascist Italy was defeated along with Nazi Germany.
But Mario Farneti, a best-selling Italian author, has constructed a “parallel universe” in which Mussolini did not perish in the flames of the Second World War but led Italy into a glorious and prosperous future in which the country and its “noble Roman values” dominate the West.
At any time a re-evaluation of Mussolini would cause controversy in Italy. But Farneti’s taut and witty thriller Occidente (“West”) has dropped into the middle of an election campaign in which the Mussolini myth is far from academic. Alleanza Nazionale, one of the main parties in the centre-Right coalition tipped to win the election in a week’s time, traces its roots to Mussolini’s Blackshirts, although it has broadened its appeal by shedding much of the Mussolini legacy.
Farneti, 51, imagines that in 1940 Il Duce does not join forces with Hitler — as could easily have been the case, and almost was — but decides to stay neutral. As a result, Italy is rewarded by America and the Western Allies with huge economic and military aid. The blackshirted Italian army becomes the envy of the world, with its officers using ancient Roman titles such as centurion. The Vatican is run by Cardinal Giulio Andreotti, the wily and subtle Secretary of State, and the Cinecitta propaganda film studios are headed by one Federico Fellini.
In Occidente Hitler is killed in the July 1944 bomb plot and the Third World War is hot rather than cold, with the Russians crossing the Oder to attack the West in 1945. With Soviet Communism defeated, Italy not only retains its empire in North Africa and the Balkans but acquires protectorates in Ukraine and Belarus. By the end of the book the Fascists appear to be in a position to transform Italy into a republic in which their “ideals” will survive. Farneti firmly denies that he intended to fuel nostalgia for the Fascist past. “Fascism is dead,” he said at the Foro Italico on the Tiber, one of the few parts of Rome that retains symbols of the Mussolini era in the form of an obelisk inscribed “Mussolini Dux” and outsized heroic statues of athletes. “I am neither Fascist nor anti-Fascist. I believe we have superseded both.”
There is, however, a danger that some authoritarian habits of thought have survived, he said. Not only the Left but also some venerable conservative commentators have compared what they call the cult of personality promoted by Silvio Berlusconi, the centre-Right leader and media tycoon, to that of Mussolini. Indro Montanelli, the grand old man of Italian journalism, has suggested that if the centre Right wins power on a law and order platform it will create an atmosphere of conformity and intolerance.
For Farneti, the problem is that Italy has never really faced up to the past. “Italians prefer not to think about the Fascist era, and in a sense they are right,” he said. “But you cannot move forward unless you first come to terms with the past.”
His own family had been divided by the Fascist experience. “My father joined the Resistance, my uncle the Fascist militia. This was not untypical, and the resulting traumas explain why many Italians prefer to forget.”
In his book he had imagined “objectively” what would have happened if history had taken a different course, “and if this helps people to assess what really happened, I am glad”.
Occidente by Mario Farneti (Editrice Nord, € 16,00)