“Fascism was not an idea. It was an emotion—the emotion of a generation that had seen the abyss and decided to become it.” — Benito Mussolini, The Doctrine of Fascism (1932)
Mussolini dispatches his first squadristi —not soldiers, but avengers. They drive trucks painted black, carry castor oil and wooden clubs. Their leader: a brutal, illiterate thug named Amerigo Dumini (later known as “the executioner”). mussolini: son of the century series
The “movement” is a joke. At the general election of November 1919, Mussolini’s candidates win zero seats. Zero. A newspaper cartoon shows him as a puppet with broken strings. “Fascism was not an idea
That night, alone in the editorial office of Il Popolo d’Italia , he rips up the returns. His mistress, Margherita Sarfatti—a Jewish intellectual and his true ideological architect—watches from the shadows. Their leader: a brutal, illiterate thug named Amerigo
She lays out a new map of Italy, not of regions but of wounds : the Fiume wound (the “mutilated victory”), the Red Biennium wound (factory occupations), the peasant wound (land stolen by absentee barons).
“We have been betrayed. The socialists called us deserters. The liberals call us savages. The king calls us cannon fodder. No more.”