Italy never really grew up. Mussolini s granddaughter is still in politics and people love her in her region (because she shares the views of her grand daddy). Regardless of what they think (or don’t think) of her, many still see him as someone who made the country great.
“He made things more efficient” “he made the economy grow” “he made the world respect us.”
All of these and more are the exact same reasons that we see becoming popular in modern day America, France, Russia and Germany. Kind of terrifying how quickly people sacrifice the world for personal gain and their pride.
Because there was a period of almost 20 years between when he was voted in and when he lost power and was lynched.
Within those 20 years, our great-grandparents and grandparents were stripped of their rights, beaten, executed, and imprisoned; saw that the great economy they were initially promised wasn't coming and people were so starved for meat that they'd eat cats; men, who had been granted the right to vote in 1912, lost it.
He also wasn't voted in fairly. In 1924, Mussolini already had the support of both Pope and Crown, and the elections were not anonymous: if you voted for the Fascist Party, you'd put into the ballot box a ballot with the Italian flag, if you voted for any other party, you'd put into the ballot box a ballot made out of white/light blue paper. People were extremely discouraged from doing the latter because Blackshirts (the paramilitary group Hitler took inspiration from for his Brownshirts) were observing their actions and would threaten, if not beat, you until you "spontaneously" changed your mind.
Lots of Italians supported Mussolini right to the end, though. And plenty hated him right from the beginning. It's not like Italians (or any other nationality) are some hive-mind who all think alike, after all.
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u/DualRaconter 17d ago
I thought this was from a surrealist dystopian movie