PBS’s “Dictator’s Playbook: Mussolini”, my assessment: very misleading. If you haven’t seen it but plan to, don’t! There are better biographies out there. The thing exudes with the ideological partisanship that grips today’s academic and media hothouses. The program says more about them than Il Duce.
Politically corrupted academics littered their commentary with derogatory parallels to anyone who has serious doubts about multiculturalism, the many tentacles of political correctness, and the fantasyland socialism of the green movement. In the intro, the creators set the stage by connecting Mussolini to the modern rise of populist and nationalist parties in Europe. They couldn’t help but boil their beliefs down to “xenophobia”, as if there’s nothing to worry about in the sudden influx of millions of unassimilated immigrants. Check the crime stats and terror cells coming out of Scandinavia’s “especially vulnerable areas”.
Watch the clip of violent Muslim youth confronting Swedish police in Stockholm.
Trump illusions pervaded, like two profs’ summary of Il Duce’s program as one of “making Italy great gain”. It’s repeated often enough to make sure you get the idea. But think about it: what leader would be opposed to making their country great, from George Washington to Obama? If they weren’t about that, they would have to keep it secret or nobody would entrust them with the keys to the White House.
Mussolini’s political platform is reduced to violence, love of war, violence, nationalism … and did I say violence? One glaring plank missing from the script is summed up in the Fascist Party motto, “Everything within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state”. The Fascists’ love of the state was conspicuously absent from beginning to end. I suspect that modern Progressives are a bit uneasy knowing they share the same love. When you’re too busy lambasting Trump, sometimes you muff the more obvious connections.
Elizabeth Warren and Ocasio-Cortez might very well have a Mussolini problem. All you have to do to see the line of descent is substitute “free” (for all the stuff that they want to give people: healthcare, college, reparations, high wages, you name it) for “the state”. And, indeed, nothing is to be outside “the state”, as Hobby Lobby, Jack Philips, and any traditional Christian who takes 2,000 years of church history and the Bible seriously should now know. Today’s Dem-Left would be uncomfortable with the marching, uniforms, and martial vigor, but not much else.
FDR didn’t have much of a problem with Mussolini’s corporatism. He tried it in the National Industrial Recovery Act and its commissariat, the National Recovery Administration. Likewise, the Dems of today are marching toward a greater fulfillment of the motto with state-aggrandizement in the Green New Deal. Could that be the reason for the slipshod treatment of Il Duce?
RogerG