Re: [Marxism] When We Loved Mussolini
POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. * Thomas makes an excellent point. "We" in the article Louis linked refers to the US government and US business, but the title implies that we all loved Mussolini. My grandfather, Dante Benigni, was a socialist and obviously no supporter of Mussolini. Nor I would bet were his brother and the miners and factory workers who lived nearby. My relatives in the mining town in which I was born were not radicals but they weren't fascists either. On the other hand, I lived in downtown Johnstown, PA in 1970 in a house owned by 2 Sicilians. I doubt they were Mussolini supporters either. But to be able to drink in a bar on Sunday, I joined the Italian Club across the alley from their house, and the positive things said about Mussolini drove me out of there pretty quickly! _ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Marxism] When We Loved Mussolini
POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. * Although the content of the article below appears reasonable, the title, "When We Loved Mussolini," is a poke in the eye. My grandfather moved to upper Michigan from a village near Lucca, Italy, around 1900 to work for the Calumet and Hecla Mining Company, and along with his brothers in the copper mines, joined the Western Federation of Miners that led the great strike of 1913. My Aunt Eva very nearly burned in the fire at Italian Hall set by the company on the occasion of a Christmas Eve 1913 fund raiser for the union. Later the family moved to Kenosha, Wisc., where my granddad worked in the Simmons Bed Factory and Uncle Ralph got a job at the Nash Auto Plant, UAW all the way. They hated Mussolini. My Uncle Frank went with his union brothers, baseball bats in hand, to fascist meetings at a bar in Kenosha in the late 1930's to express that point of view. At a kid I learned from my Uncle Ralph who Carlo Tresca was and why I should never forget his name. "We" didn't invade Iraq. "We" didn't invade Afghanistan. And "we" didn't love Mussolini. T -Original Message- >From: Louis Proyect via Marxism <marxism@lists.csbs.utah.edu> >Sent: Aug 11, 2016 10:43 AM >To: Thomas F Barton <thomasfbar...@earthlink.net> >Subject: [Marxism] When We Loved Mussolini > > POSTING RULES & NOTES >#1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. >#2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. >#3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. >* > >NY Review, August 18, 2016 issue >When We Loved Mussolini >by Adam Tooze > >The United States and Fascist Italy: The Rise of American Finance in Europe >by Gian Giacomo Migone, translated from the Italian and with a preface >by Molly Tambor >Cambridge University Press, 405 pp., $110.00 > >In the early 1960s, in the full flush of postwar Atlanticism, Gian >Giacomo Migone, the scion of a cosmopolitan family of Italian diplomats, >arrived at Harvard to study history. As a liberal Catholic, a follower >of John F. Kennedy, and a fan of Pope John XXIII, Migone was escaping >the conservatism and neofascism of the postwar Italian universities. He >came to the United States in search of the promise of democracy and new >developments in scholarship. What he found was something more >complicated. It was the heyday of the civil rights struggle and he and >other foreign students ventured South to witness the dying days of Jim >Crow. Yet it was not America’s present that would unsettle him but its >past and, in particular, America’s recent history in relation to his own >country. > >Antifascism was the founding myth of the Italian republic after 1945. >But not only did a resentful minority of Italians cling to the memory of >Mussolini, as Migone discovered in the National Archives in Washington, >it was not until surprisingly late in the 1930s that the United States >decided to treat Il Duce as an enemy. man conflict in the Ruhr that caused the >US >to reengage with European affairs in the autumn of 1923. By then, for >Italy’s first generation of Atlanticist liberals, it was too late. >Mussolini had seized power in October 1922. > >_ >Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm >Set your options at: >http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/thomasfbarton%40earthlink.net _ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] When We Loved Mussolini
POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. * NY Review, August 18, 2016 issue When We Loved Mussolini by Adam Tooze The United States and Fascist Italy: The Rise of American Finance in Europe by Gian Giacomo Migone, translated from the Italian and with a preface by Molly Tambor Cambridge University Press, 405 pp., $110.00 In the early 1960s, in the full flush of postwar Atlanticism, Gian Giacomo Migone, the scion of a cosmopolitan family of Italian diplomats, arrived at Harvard to study history. As a liberal Catholic, a follower of John F. Kennedy, and a fan of Pope John XXIII, Migone was escaping the conservatism and neofascism of the postwar Italian universities. He came to the United States in search of the promise of democracy and new developments in scholarship. What he found was something more complicated. It was the heyday of the civil rights struggle and he and other foreign students ventured South to witness the dying days of Jim Crow. Yet it was not America’s present that would unsettle him but its past and, in particular, America’s recent history in relation to his own country. In 1965, the theme of Ernest May’s legendary seminar at Harvard on American foreign relations was the 1920s, and Migone was given the task of exploring US policy toward Italy. This was a ticklish assignment in a double sense. The 1920s were a decade commonly identified with American isolationism, a period in which the US was not credited with actually having had a foreign policy. And Italy in the 1920s meant Mussolini’s regime. The question was how the Republican administrations of Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover, committed to their nationalist program of “normalcy” and modernization, had engaged with the first effort to build a fascist dictatorship in Europe. As the Vietnam War escalated in the background, it was an assignment that would shake the young Migone’s naive assumptions about the alignment of Western power with democracy. Published in Italian in 1980, after many years of pioneering research in American and Italian archives, Migone’s book established him in Italy as an authority among left-liberal scholars of the fascist era and launched a career that would lead by way of the University of Torino to a seat in the Italian Senate. Still, in an age before the Internet and Google Translate, Migone’s scholarship remained largely unknown to an Anglophone readership. Like other classic works of European international history of the 1960s and 1970s, many of which were centered on the United States—in German one thinks of Andreas Hillgruber’s Hitlers Strategie, Michael Geyer’s Aufrüstung oder Sicherheit, and Werner Link’s Die amerikanische Stabilisierungspolitik in Deutschland—this European interpretation of American power was mostly ignored in America’s own historiography. We owe thanks to Cambridge University Press and Molly Tambor, herself a historian of postwar Italy, for finally bringing us this highly readable translation. Antifascism was the founding myth of the Italian republic after 1945. But not only did a resentful minority of Italians cling to the memory of Mussolini, as Migone discovered in the National Archives in Washington, it was not until surprisingly late in the 1930s that the United States decided to treat Il Duce as an enemy. In the interwar period, unlike after 1945, Americans did not assume that democracy was the natural destiny of all Western European states. Mussolini’s American admirers ranged from the Hearst press to Columbia University’s president, Nicholas Murray Butler, who gave a platform to fascist propaganda in the Casa Italiana on the Upper West Side. Both Presidents Hoover and Roosevelt expressed their approval of Mussolini’s regime. Fascism promised to bring order and progress to Italy while holding at bay the menace from the left. Already in 1972 John Patrick Diggins, in his Mussolini and Fascism: The View from America, had revealed the widespread enthusiasm for Mussolini among progressive American intellectuals. What Migone’s book laid bare was that these affinities were founded on more than ideas and politics. Behind the scenes, financial interests had a part in orchestrating the connubio between America and Italian fascism. As he puts it in his preface, Migone may not have started out as a Marxist, but through “reading documents produced by central banks and investment bankers” he sometimes felt as though he might “become one.” One of the obstacles to acknowledging the amicable relationship between Wall Street and Italian fascism was the commonplace view of the interwar period as an era of economic nationalism. Mussolini was famous for his
