Soaring rhetoric

Many conservatives criticize Barack Obama’s fecklessness, but in one sense I’m happy to see it. True, the Obama-Pelosi-Reid triumvirate was ruthless in pushing through Obamacare, and yes, Obama could be impeached for his unconstitutional executive orders and law-breaking—if mainstream journalists treated him as their predecessors treated Richard Nixon. The bad/good news, though, is that we live in an ironic era where soaring rhetoric is suspect, so Obama could not get away with Mussolini-like speeches.

Besides, Benito Mussolini—Italy’s fascist dictator from 1922 through World War II—didn’t have to put up with talk radio and Fox News. One result: Until he went too far as Adolf Hitler’s ally, he had two decades of support from Italy’s public voices (and many of the private ones). That’s the story told, and told well, in Christopher Duggan’s Fascist Voices: An Intimate History of Mussolini’s Italy (Oxford, 2013).

Except, as Duggan relates, one man almost stopped Mussolini in 1924, two years after he seized power, and two months after elections gave the dictator a two-thirds majority in Italy’s legislature. Giacomo Matteotti, a left-wing but courageous lawyer, rose in the Chamber of Deputies to argue that Mussolini’s victory was “the consequence of obscene violence.” Fascist delegates brandished their fists at Matteotti, and one shouted, “We will teach you to respect us by kicking you or shooting you in the back.”

Matteotti kept talking: “You want to hurl the country backward, toward absolutism. We defend the free sovereignty of the Italian people, to whom we offer our salute and whose dignity we will defend by demanding that light be shed on the election.” Matteotti’s few supporters applauded: He smiled at them and concluded, “And now you can prepare my funeral oration.” (Mussolini the day before had interrupted a speaker by saying, “Twelve bullets in the back are the best remedy for enemies.”)

Matteotti had assembled a dossier on crony fascism, such as the Mussolini regime’s virtual giveaway to its supporters of huge stocks of salable war equipment, and its acceptance of bribes from corporations seeking monopolies. Soon after giving the speech five men seized him as he walked along the Tiber, threw him into a car, stabbed him to death, and dumped his body 15 miles outside Rome. But a bystander had seen the kidnapping and jotted down the number of the car, so the perpetrators were soon arrested.

Mussolini reportedly told members of his staff, “If I get away with this we will all survive, otherwise we shall all sink together.” He sprang into action, handing the investigation to the fascist chief of police, and making sure that huge amounts of money would find their way to the killers, if they kept their mouths shut. He then rose in Parliament to declare he was driven not “by love of power, nor by ignoble passion, but solely by strong and boundless love for the fatherland.” Viva Mussolini! the shouts rang out, and Italy was in for 20 more years of agony.

Mussolini: ASSOCIATED PRESS/ap • Matteotti: akg-images/Newscom

Short stops

In May I recommended (with some reservations) Philip Kerr’s super series of detective novels centered on World War II–era German detective Bernie Gunther. This year’s Kerr novel, though, is a departure: Prayer (Putnam’s), set in modern Houston, is a sloppily written screed against Christianity with a central character who moves from atheism to a belief that God exists but is evil. How the mighty have fallen!

On a happier note: W. Mark Lanier’s Christianity on Trial: A Lawyer Examines the Christian Faith (IVP, 2014) is a good book to give to the lawyer who has everything except the belief that alone makes those things significant. Steven Miller’s The Age of Evangelicalism (Oxford, 2014) describes, with an emphasis on politics, the past 40 years of evangelical waxing and waning.

For those who have used M’Cheyne’s yearly Bible-reading plan, David Beaty’s An All-Surpassing Fellowship (Reformation Heritage, 2014) tells us about the young man who developed it. —M.O.