The European Dictatorships : Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini (Cambridge Perspectives in History)

Rating:
Summary: European dictatorships & the American connection
Review: A very informative book. Could use more info on whether U.S. socialists created the straight-armed "Roman salute" and caused WWII, the Holocaust and the Wholecaust? In 1892, Francis Bellamy was a national socialist in the U.S. and created the Pledge of Allegiance to the flag using a straight-armed salute. Bellamy wanted the government to takeover all schools and create an "industrial army" of totalitarian socialism as described in the book "Looking Backward" (a bestseller written in 1887 by Edward Bellamy, cousin of Francis Bellamy). Government-schools spread and they mandated racism and segregation by law and did so through WWII and beyond.

Edward Bellamy's best-selling book was translated into 20 different languages, including Russian, German, Italian, and Chinese. It was popular among the elite in pre-revolutionary Russia, and Lenin's wife was known to have read the book, because she wrote a review of it. John Dewey and the historian Charles Beard intended to praise the book when they stated that it was equaled in influence only by Das Kapital.

25 years later, Bellamy's totalitarian ideas continued. The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics began in 1917. The National Socialist German Workers' Party came into existence in 1920 (with electoral breakthroughs in 1930 and dictatorship in 1933). In 1922, Mussolini gained power. The People's Republic of China began in 1949.

The socialist Wholecaust followed shortly after the worldwide impact of Bellamy's totalitarian ideas. While the Holocaust was monstrous, it was part of the bigger Wholecaust. Under the industrial army of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, 62 million people were slaughtered; the People's Republic of China, 35 million; and the National Socialist German Workers' Party, 21 million (numbers from Professor R. J. Rummel's article in the Encyclopedia of Genocide (1999)).

Benito Mussolini was the leader of the Socialist Party of Italy. Like many modern media Mussolinis, he was a socialist and a journalist. Between 1912 and 1914 he was the editor of the Socialist Party newspaper, "L'Avanti." In 1914 he started his own socialist newspaper "Il Popolo d'Italia" ("The people of Italy"). He was considered by socialists to be a great writer about socialism. He was a staunch proponent of revolutionary rather than reformist socialism, and actually received Lenin's endorsement and support for expelling reformists from the Socialist Party. He was in fact first dubbed "Il Duce" (the Leader) when he was a member of Italy's (Marxist) Socialist Party. When Mussolini differed with some Socialists it was over participation in World War I, not over abstract theory, or economic doctrine. Many socialists were neutralists in the First World War, whereas Mussolini correctly foresaw that the Austro/German forces would not win the war and therefore wanted Italy to join the Allied side and thus get a slice of Austrian territory at the end of the war. During World War I, Mussolini publicized what he admitted was his new brand of socialism.

On October 28, 1922, Mussolini led his "March on Rome", which brought him to power for 23 years.

In late 1937, Mussolini visited Germany and pledged himself to support the National Socialist German Workers' Party. In 1938, he introduced his 'reform of customs.'" Hand-shaking was suddenly banned as unhygienic: a salute was to be used instead - the right forearm raised vertically. He imposed a new march on the Italian Army which was simply the goose-step of the National Socialist German Workers' Party. According to the book "A Concise History of Italy" by Christopher Duggan, these reforms were introduced mainly to underline ideological kinship with the National Socialist German Workers' Party and to impress it's leader. The so-called "Roman salute" (saluto romano) is as much of a fiction as the so-called "Roman step" (passo romano) as is the idea that the National Socialist German Workers' Party emulated Mussolini and not vice versa. The most notorious instance of Italy imitating the National Socialist German Workers' Party was in the racist laws imposed in November 1938.

Before and during it all (from 1892), children in the U.S. attended government-schools where racism and segregation were mandated by law, and where they performed a straight-armed salute to the U.S. flag, and were forced to robotically chant a Pledge written by a national socialist who wanted to produce an "industrial army" for totalitarian socialism as popularized worldwide in a best-selling novel.

WWII began in 1939 when Poland was invaded by the National Socialist German Workers' Party and by the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, as allies in their scheme to divide up Eastern Europe.

The raised-arm salute is one of the best-known symbols of the National Socialist German Workers' Party, and supposedly used by Mussolini from a classical Roman custom. According to Martin Winkler in "The Roman Salute on Film" of the American Philological Association, no Roman work of art displays this salute, nor does any Roman text describe it.

Winkler notes that well before Mussolini and the National Socialist German Workers' Party, the salute frequently occurs in films set in antiquity. What Winkler fails to realize is that every film he cites was produced after 1892 and thus after the widespread use of the Pledge of Allegiance to the U.S. flag, and it's original straight-arm salute.

Winkler cites the American Ben-Hur (1907) or the Italian Nerone (1908), although such films did not yet standardize the salute or make it exclusively Roman. In Spartaco (1914), even Spartacus used it. Winkler states "In imitation of such historical films, self-styled "Consul" Gabriele D'Annunzio appropriated the salute in its now familiar form as a propaganda tool for his political aspirations upon his occupation of Fiume in 1919. Earlier, D'Annunzio had been closely involved in Giovanni Pastrone's colossal epic Cabiria (1914), in which variations of the salute occur several times." Notable other examples of the salute, by then a standard part of ancient iconography in the cinema, appear in Ben-Hur (1925) and in Cecil B. DeMille's Sign of the Cross (1932) and Cleopatra (1934), although the gesture was still variable.