From ‘War Criminal’ to ‘Statesman’
by Robert Fisk
from CommonDreams
An Italian restaurant in the Irish village of Dalkey caused quite a kerfuffle when it opened a few months ago. It is called Benito’s and - yes - it is indeed named after Il Duce. And there are Italian fascist newspaper front pages on the wall to remind you just how bravely his men fought in the Second World War. A 1941 cover of La Domenica del Corriere carries a dramatic painting of six RAF Hurricanes crashing into the rooftops of Malta after vainly taking on the Italian air force. On another front page of the same year, four frightened British Tommies - a few of the 19,000 captured in the siege of Tobruk - surrender to black-feathered Bersaglieri troops at Sollum on the Egyptian-Libyan border.
It’s not a joke. A relative of the owner was an Italian air force officer in the Western Desert and there are archive photographs, too, on the wall. A handsome young airman is surrounded by photos of sand encampments and of the nose of an Italian fighter aircraft. (For Independent aero-buffs, it appears to be a Macchi C.200 Saetta (”Arrow”), in service with 372 Squadron in Cyrenaica - part of Libya - in 1941.) At Benito’s, the pizzas are great and the chocolate cakes positively ooze. Good old “Eyeties”, as the Eighth Army probably said after capturing their 20,000 Italian prisoners at El-Alamein in 1942.
Now I know that, compared with the epic cruelty of Hitler and Stalin, “Musso” was a softy. The Italian armies of Europe’s first fascist leader lost in Albania, lost in Greece and lost in North Africa. He ended the war strung upside down in a Milan piazza alongside his glamorous mistress after creating the last-ditch Republic of Salo, a state as ridiculous in its pretensions as the Italian dictator himself.
But in 1935, Mussolini invaded and occupied Haile Selassie’s Abyssinia after using poison gas to capture the country. He sent his forces to fight on Franco’s side in the Spanish civil war. “Musso” was an unashamed anti-Semite; his anti-racial laws were administered by a raving Jew-hater called Giovanni Preziosi and the Duce was too frightened of Hitler to prevent thousands of Italian Jews from being deported to their death by the Nazis. Indeed, he sometimes gave orders that they should be. His Italian fascists, along with the Germans, jointly operated an extermination camp at San Sabba near Trieste. Churchill, who called him “a swine”, once sarcastically noted that Mussolini had proclaimed himself the “protector of Islam” while having fewer Muslims under his protection than Britain. In fact, “Musso” deported 80,000 Arabs from their homes in Libya to make way for Italian “settlements”, and executed the courageous rebel leader Omar el-Mukhtar after a war in which 200,000 Muslims were slaughtered. In other words, Benito was a very nasty piece of work.
(Continued here.)
from CommonDreams
An Italian restaurant in the Irish village of Dalkey caused quite a kerfuffle when it opened a few months ago. It is called Benito’s and - yes - it is indeed named after Il Duce. And there are Italian fascist newspaper front pages on the wall to remind you just how bravely his men fought in the Second World War. A 1941 cover of La Domenica del Corriere carries a dramatic painting of six RAF Hurricanes crashing into the rooftops of Malta after vainly taking on the Italian air force. On another front page of the same year, four frightened British Tommies - a few of the 19,000 captured in the siege of Tobruk - surrender to black-feathered Bersaglieri troops at Sollum on the Egyptian-Libyan border.
It’s not a joke. A relative of the owner was an Italian air force officer in the Western Desert and there are archive photographs, too, on the wall. A handsome young airman is surrounded by photos of sand encampments and of the nose of an Italian fighter aircraft. (For Independent aero-buffs, it appears to be a Macchi C.200 Saetta (”Arrow”), in service with 372 Squadron in Cyrenaica - part of Libya - in 1941.) At Benito’s, the pizzas are great and the chocolate cakes positively ooze. Good old “Eyeties”, as the Eighth Army probably said after capturing their 20,000 Italian prisoners at El-Alamein in 1942.
Now I know that, compared with the epic cruelty of Hitler and Stalin, “Musso” was a softy. The Italian armies of Europe’s first fascist leader lost in Albania, lost in Greece and lost in North Africa. He ended the war strung upside down in a Milan piazza alongside his glamorous mistress after creating the last-ditch Republic of Salo, a state as ridiculous in its pretensions as the Italian dictator himself.
But in 1935, Mussolini invaded and occupied Haile Selassie’s Abyssinia after using poison gas to capture the country. He sent his forces to fight on Franco’s side in the Spanish civil war. “Musso” was an unashamed anti-Semite; his anti-racial laws were administered by a raving Jew-hater called Giovanni Preziosi and the Duce was too frightened of Hitler to prevent thousands of Italian Jews from being deported to their death by the Nazis. Indeed, he sometimes gave orders that they should be. His Italian fascists, along with the Germans, jointly operated an extermination camp at San Sabba near Trieste. Churchill, who called him “a swine”, once sarcastically noted that Mussolini had proclaimed himself the “protector of Islam” while having fewer Muslims under his protection than Britain. In fact, “Musso” deported 80,000 Arabs from their homes in Libya to make way for Italian “settlements”, and executed the courageous rebel leader Omar el-Mukhtar after a war in which 200,000 Muslims were slaughtered. In other words, Benito was a very nasty piece of work.
(Continued here.)
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