The Rights and Wrongs of Killing Mussolini December 11, 2014
Author: Beach Combing | in : Contemporary , trackback
After Beach’s recent blog on Mussolini’s death several emails about not so much the circumstances as the justification for killing the Fascist leader. The official version of the story claims that the Allies wanted Mussolini for themselves but that the partisans and particularly the Communist partisans had decided to do away with Mussolini as a matter of national pride (and perhaps misguided machoism). Was theirs though a good choice? The first thing to say is that there were very much two moments in the soap opera of Mussolini’s death. Mussolini was (i) discovered, arrested, guarded and then shot with his lover Clara Petacci. But (ii) his body and that of Petacci were famously displayed with two other Fascist gerarchi on the garage in Piazzale Loreto while the crowd shot at, urinated on and threw fruit at their old idols. There are three possible ways to attack the actions of the Communist partisans. First, they killed Mussolini without legal process. Second, they killed his lover, who was not a member of the Fascist government. Third the treatment of the bodies of Mussolini and Petacci was, by any standards of civilised behaviour, appalling. There were similar reactions in May of 1945. Take Churchill’s telegram to Alexander sent 10 May 1945. Churchill, a nineteenth-century gentleman was naturally horrified: and in a distant past he had admired Mussolini in a way he had never admired Hitler.
The man who murdered [significant word] made a confession, published in the Daily Express, gloating over the treacherous and cowardly method of his action. In particular he said he shot Mussolini’s mistress. Was she on the list of war criminals? [This is rhetorical!] Had he any authority from anybody to shoot this woman? It seems to me the cleansing hand [!!] of British military power should make inquiries on these points.
On the lack of a trial before Mussolini’s shooting, most commentators seemed in the end to have been discreetly happy. Churchill himself wrote elsewhere ‘at least the world was spared an Italian Nuremberg’; and in his comments on Hitler Churchill had sometimes suggested that it would be best for Hitler to be killed as soon as he was apprehended, but then Churchill despised Hitler.
With the killing of Clara Petacci the horror was there immediately in 1945 including among many Italians. It is fascinating that all the communist accounts of the killing before, finally, the truth in 1996, claimed Petacci had thrown herself before Mussolini and so chosen death. This was not true, she was going to be gunned down anyway, and it is interesting that the same reports states that the partisans never even considered sparing her. A non-communist partisan did report that Petacci had asked to share Mussolini’s fate, but certainly her death did not depend on the bounty of the Communist partisans.
The final event is the most difficult to grasp even for Italians even today. Pertini, later President of the Republic and a staunch socialist who loathed Mussolini, stated, at the time, that ‘the insurrection has been dishonoured’ after the crazy hours in which the crowds ragged the corpses of Mussolini and his lover: for the surreal description of Clara’s pants follow this link. But it is important, also, to remember that these were corpses not living human beings and the Italians had had a long and humiliating war thanks to Mussolini’s errors and that hundreds of thousands of Italians (including ten thousand Jewish Italians) had been killed or murdered. Perhaps the person who has come closest to summing up what happened in sweaty central Milan was Mussolini’s daughter and the only one of his children who was not a waste of space, Edda. Edda noted simply that true hate begins as love and that Piazza Loreto was Italy’s last act of love for her father. There are worse epithets…
Other thoughts on the justice of killing Mussolini: drbeachcombing AT yahoo DOT com
Bruce T makes the case for killing Mussolini, 25 Sep 2016: Mussolini was a strutting, cowardly, murdering dictator. His Libyan atrocity alone, 80K killed “conservatively”, we both know the “laws of fours” when it comes to these things, that tops it out at a possible 320k on the high end. With the ethnic cleansing, along the murder of women and children for fun by his troops, leaves me with no sympathy whatsoever for he and Clara’s end. Lie with Devil, die with the Devil. She made her choice and benefited well from it long before the end. Those people were innocents. What makes her death any different than the women killed by the Duce’s troops in Libya and Ethiopia who were being held in camps? At least she wasn’t raped in front of her family before being killed as many of those women were. How many women did the Duce’s soldiers kill and assault in their holiday adventure in Spain? Churchill’s, “Killing a woman. Uncivilized.” line galls me. Most of the women murdered abroad by Mussolini above were Brown and Black, part of the final hiccup of the “Scramble For Africa” Were Churchill’s dyed in the wool imperialist “White Man’s Burden” eyes blinding him? After all, Clara was White and the mistress of a European ruler. God forbid the same would happen to her that had happened to the hundreds of thousands of other women who happened to be the wrong hue in that horrific era. Those were wars Churchill cut his teeth in as a soldier, self-promoting himself all the way. The Brits did just as much evil as everyone else that God-awful senseless scramble for wealth and greed. Where was Churchill’s outrage about his fellow troops killing women and children on campaign then? Perhaps due to the color of their skin, they simply didn’t count for a man of his time and with a hands on background in Africa? Churchill’s comments on the affair show him to be a hypocritical ass, pining for Benito and his mistress with a twisted at best sense of “justice”. Clara could have said “no” to his Mussolini, but she didn’t, even when his crimes were well known. What does that say about her? She was no innocent, Beach, not by a long shot. She was a primary confidant and close to the throne beneficiary of the results of his policies and they were together a long time. Justice was done that day, Beach. Fascist and German troops were still fighting the Partisans and Allies to save the Duce on his flight into the mountains to enable safe passage to Switzerland or Bavaria for him to evade capture. What if the remaining Fascists and Germans, still in the fight, had decided to rally to attempt to save Mussolini after his capture by the Partisans? That had to be taken into account by the lightly armed Partisans who held Mussolini. This was war, not a game of marbles. Hitler was still alive and in the Bunker. Mussolini had been rescued miraculously before. Skorzeny, the hero of the first escape, was still flying in and out of Berlin from Prussia and Pomerania on a near daily basis at even this late date to confer with Hitler on the war in the East. Why take the chance of a battle for the bastard in a counter-attack or rescue attempt? Kill the pair and their escorts and eliminate the risk once and for all. There was no question of guilt. When you run your mortal enemy to ground, weakened but still dangerous, you put your foot on their neck and finish the job. That’s what the Partisans did. As for waiting for the Allies, what were the future Allies doing in the 20’s and 30’s re; Mussolini? Praising the man by and large and watching him strut. Turn him over to them? The Allies couldn’t stop him from getting away in their first crack at him. What guarantee was there they’d do anything substantial now? Perhaps toss him in a prison for a few years and out he would be riling up his old followers? ( His tomb is a Fascist shrine as it is now.) This was before Nuremberg, nothing was certain in how these Axis leaders would be handled. Turning him over to the Allies was likely out of the question for any Italian patriot with sense of duty to his country. It had become personal and a matter of pride. Mussolini, his mistress, and his guards were as good as dead when they were captured, it was simply a matter of deciding how to do it. Mussolini and his Mistress met the fate of tyrants everywhere. Let’s face it, her fate could have been much worse, as in what happened to women in Libya and Ethiopia at the hands of those good Fascist boys.
