Mussolini and the Quadrumvirs during the March on Rome in 1922

Source: Public Domain

This week marks eighty years since the death of Mussolini on 28 April 1945. All the more surprising, then, that he is currently Italy’s reigning Man of the Year.

The prestigious honor was bestowed by right-wing Italian newspaper Libero, which placed Musso’s image proudly on its front page on the final day of December 2024, albeit only in jest. The paper was satirizing the way Italian left-wingers, desperate to undermine the nation’s present anti-immigration PM Giorgia Meloni in any way possible, constantly refer to the Melon-Woman as being little more than Il Duce in drag. An accompanying editorial jibed that, in the absence of any coherent arguments against Meloni’s actual policies, the left “cannot do without the Duce” as a cartoon scarecrow to warn the more gullible and easily spooked portion of the electorate away from her.

Mussolini Re-Dux
It would be more reasonable for today’s Italian leftists to smear a different national politician as a direct political descendant of Benito, namely Alessandra Mussolini, Il Duce’s literal flesh-and-blood granddaughter. A former actress and model, Alessandra became the first woman to lead an Italian political party in 2004. Just like the editors of Libero, she also accuses today’s Italian left of bearing an unhealthy obsession with her granddad.

In 2019, when Rome-based Italian soccer club Lazio lost 2–1 to Glasgow Celtic in the Europa League knockout tournament, the game was marred by Lazio fans goose-stepping through the Scottish city giving fascist salutes. Celtic fans retaliated by unveiling a huge banner depicting Benito Mussolini hanging upside down dead from a lamppost, his real-life fate at the hands of commie partisans in 1945, together with the slogan “FOLLOW YOUR LEADER.”

Alessandra Mussolini responded with a mocking tweet after Celtic soon lost to their fierce local rivals Glasgow Rangers in a domestic matchup, leading one Celtic fan to retweet Alessandra the score line upside down, with the mocking message “Edited the result so your grandfather could read it, hope it helps.” Alessandra reacted by labeling this as a new form of hate-crime incident she dubbed “Ducephobia,” defined as being “a crime which doesn’t yet exist, but which I propose to include in our judicial system.” Why not? Every other minority group gets one.

Roman Holiday
Far from Ducephobia, many contemporary Italians seem to labor instead under a state of Ducephilia. In 2017, the beachside resort of Chioggia, near Venice, suddenly began marketing itself as a Mussolini-themed holiday destination, with regular hard-line political messages broadcast over a speaker system and signs referring to gas chambers and special new “Anti-Democratic Zones” popping up all over the place. This predictably led to parliamentary calls for such glorification of fascism, even if made only for novelty tourist purposes, to be banned.

Yet this may be difficult. Unlike in Germany, where citizens have been lectured into such crippling shame about their Nazi heritage that the entire volk is currently engaged in the process of systematically abolishing itself in the name of boosting demographic “diversity,” Italian reeducation about their fascist past is hazy, with many citizens having only a vague impression of Mussolini as a model of energetic industry, a big fat bastard in a funny feathered hat who got things done, unlike many corrupt and lethargic Italian politicians today.

Thus, his birthplace of Predappio is also now a tourist destination, with souvenir shops selling themed ashtrays, mugs, shirts, wine, and even underpants, all bearing Il Duce’s imposing image, his face in this latter instance not intended simply to be farted on.

Mussolini calendars, meanwhile, are perennial bestsellers nationwide, depicting him as a literal pinup model, heroically clutching a gladiator sword or giving the fascist “Roman” salute. The year printed upon them may as well still be 1925 as 2025.

Blood on the Tracks
Hero worship of Benito is nothing new. Cole Porter’s classic 1934 stage musical Anything Goes originally featured a catchy number with the lines “You’re the tops/You’re the Great Houdini/You’re the tops/You’re Mussolini,” indicating how, during his first, pre-WWII decade in power, Musso was widely admired as an efficient strongman leader who followed through on his promises. Like Hitler, he was even once Time magazine’s Man of the Year, making Libero mere imitators in this respect today. Ironically, Mussolini’s later archnemesis Winston Churchill was also an early fan, gushing in 1933 about the “Roman genius” being “the greatest law-giver among living men.” He was certainly better than today’s ECHR.

Even peace-loving Mahatma Gandhi once visited Mussolini in pre-WWII Rome wearing his usual big white bedsheet, whilst Hollywood silent-screen stars Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks were quite happy to be photographed giving fascist salutes in his honor. Another celebrity fanboy was Charlie Chaplin, who opined with many other pundits of the prewar era that, whatever his other flaws, at least the real-life Great Dictator “made the trains run on time,” reforming the previously notoriously unreliable Italian railway system for the better. Unfortunately for the allegedly Jewish Chaplin, some of them were later to head directly toward final destinations like Auschwitz.

In fact, Mussolini’s reputed expertise as a timetable-fixing Fat Controller is untrue. There are plenty of accounts from fascist-era travelers of trains being late, with Mussolini only truly improving a few major lines, selected for easy propaganda purposes when important foreign guests used them.

Nonetheless, the myth of universally punctual trains became a symbol of Il Duce’s alleged restoration of law and order to a previously failing and chaotic post-WWI Italian state, and the lie caught on and stuck. It’s much the same way that, whatever people think about Pol Pot today, they still tend to immediately remember how his innovative, roundabout-based traffic-calming system in Phnom Penh was amazing.

Rome Wasn’t Rebuilt in a Day
No matter what his many flaws, it is indisputable that, just as in his own 1920s and ’30s heyday, many people still find Mussolini fascinating—not unreasonably so, because, unlike most of today’s drone-like Western politicians, he was demonstrably an interesting individual, like one of the more psychopathic, Caligula-style Roman emperors returned from beyond the grave.

Indeed, Mussolini’s chosen title of Il Duce was derived from Dux, an old Latin term meaning “leader” or “dictator,” and he was always eager to pretend he was the 20th-century incarnation of an old Roman Caesar, restoring Italy to its former imperial glories. In 1932 he had a 300-ton Trajan-echoing obelisk erected in Rome, together with a time capsule containing propaganda about his time in power. His Italian fascists financed archaeological digs to uncover ancient Roman relics, and it was intended that, one day, their own buried treasure would be excavated by future scholars, revealing Mussolini’s genius as equal to that of the emperor Augustus.

Together with golden coins was an inscribed Latin text, the Codex Fori Mussolini, portraying Il Duce as a god on Earth, as many emperors had once also claimed to be. During WWI, “by some divine command and will a MAN appeared,” the Codex said, in whose “divine mind” a plan emerged to restore Italy back to being “a light for the entire world”—this “MAN” being Mussolini, and his holy plan fascism. If some total gray non-eminence European politician like Keir Starmer or Olaf Scholz tried doing something like that in 2025, people would just laugh.

Castor or Bollox?
As befitted a man who idolized the era of the gladiators, from an early age one of Mussolini’s favorite hobbies was stabbing people. As a schoolboy, he was expelled more than once for jabbing fellow pupils and their teachers alike with a penknife he was supposed to be using to sharpen his pencils with; his story is soon to be retold anew in the second upcoming series of Adolescence. Benito later entered teaching himself but kept on attacking his pupils’ parents, too.

Following WWI, the future dictator exploited a postwar fashion for political duels to position himself as an iron-willed hard man, fighting so many that his wife, Rachele, complained of the cost of buying him new shirts to wear for each new combat (no self-respecting Italian would ever consider dying in anything less than the latest of Milan fashions).

Whilst a youthful newspaper editor, Benito had already gone against recommended HR practices by forcing his employees to settle their petty differences via sword fights. Dodging the police, Mussolini openly insulted political rivals to place them in a position of either challenging him to a rapier duel or being publicly dishonored; the consequent gladiator sessions drew blood from both Mussolini and his adversaries, necessitating the purchase of yet more clean shirts. Once he seized power in 1922, Mussolini felt constrained by the pressures of public life to abandon his old pastime, much to his annoyance. From now on, he would have to kick the shit out of opponents by other means.

So it was that Mussolini supposedly began to use castor oil, a known laxative, as a tool against his enemies—albeit some sources deny this ever happened, calling it a mere attempt to blacken (or embrown) Benito’s previous good name. Blackshirt thugs would tie opponents to chairs, force open their mouths, and pour an entire bottle of “the golden nectar of nausea” down their throats. For the next few days, the victim would effectively be imprisoned on their own toilet, unable to move away without soiling themselves.

Humiliation was the main consequence, but major health problems could also follow. Extended diarrhea can lead to serious dehydration and, in theory, death. Even today, Italian politicians accused of abuse or coercion of opponents are figuratively said to “use castor oil” against them.

Far-Wrong About the Far-Right?
So you can see why fascination for Mussolini endures, both at home in Italy and abroad: He was a genuinely interesting man. As such, instead of smearing Giorgia Meloni as one of his disciples, if the Italian left were truly wise, they would instead try to co-opt him as one of their own. Unexpectedly, this would not actually be too difficult, as Mussolini began his career very much as a man of the left.

Fascism is usually seen as the most far-right of far-right movements possible, but its origins inside its original home country, Italy, lie firmly within the left-wing trade union movement. Mussolini himself grew up in a far-left household, was a member of the Italian Socialist Party for fourteen years, and made an early living writing and editing various workers’ newspapers. His socialist father christened him Benito after Benito García, a socialist president of Mexico. Musso even knew and corresponded with Lenin, founder of the not notably overly conservative Soviet Union.

Mussolini’s close associate Giovanni Gentile, chief philosopher of Italian fascism, openly declared that “fascism is a form of socialism, in fact it is its most viable form,” a totalitarian ideology in which all public life and business was subordinated to the interests of the centralized corporatist state, like today’s U.S. Democrats, U.K. Labour Party, and transnationalist E.U. also dream of bringing to pass.

So perhaps it’s no wonder Mussolini couldn’t actually make the trains run on time after all. If my own past experiences with British Rail and their constantly delayed transport fleet down the years can teach us one thing, it’s that socialists never do.