Big Brother Urban Legends November 28, 2017
Author: Beach Combing | in : ContemporaryThe three great totalitarian states that dominated Europe in the 1930s were the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy. Did these have their own urban legends? Of course. But what were they? Beach wants only to open one obvious form of totalitarian urban legend: what he will provisionally call ‘the big brother story’. Now, […]
Mussolini and the Water Sprinkler November 14, 2017
Author: Beach Combing | in : ContemporaryThere are few things in life sweeter than self important people being made to look silly. The picture above is one of this blogger’s favourite. The subject is, of course, Benito Mussolini, in the mid, late 1930s.* A group of Fascist dignitaries are prancing up some steps at the Foro Italico: but not all is […]
Mussolini and Cole Porter October 23, 2015
Author: Beach Combing | in : ContemporaryBit of possible cobblers for the end of the month. In 1934 Cole Porter wrote the musical Anything Goes, the most famous song of which is surely ‘You’re the Top’. In that song the following lyrics are alleged to appear. You’re the top! You’re a Coolidge dollar. You’re the nimble tread Of the feet of […]
Counter Factual: Pre-War Politicians and Television October 20, 2015
Author: Beach Combing | in : Contemporary, ModernA modern politician needs to be convincing on television. That these qualities matter was famously demonstrated in the first debate between Richard Nixon and John F. Kennedy in 1960, where radio listeners believed that Nixon had won the contest, but television watchers, shocked by Nixon’s five o’clock shadow, claimed that Kennedy had beaten his Republican […]
Why Couldn’t WW2 Italians Fight? July 8, 2015
Author: Beach Combing | in : ContemporaryThere are endless tales about twentieth-century Italian military ineptitude and more importantly the perception of the same. Churchill said to Ribbentrop of the Italians just before the last war: ‘We had them last time, it is only fair you take them this time.’ In a meeting between British and German WW1 veterans in 1937 or […]
Counter Factual: Mussolini Doesn’t Roll the Dice June 22, 2015
Author: Beach Combing | in : ContemporaryHitler tried to persuade Italy to join Germany in 1939. He failed but German arms did their own devilish work in Poland then in France. By late May 1940, when it was clear that France and Britain were on the edge of defeat, Mussolini made increasingly belligerent sounds. It was then Hitler who held the […]
For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow and WW2 December 18, 2014
Author: Beach Combing | in : ContemporaryA painful moment from 1939, at least for any Britons reading this post. Neville Chamberlain and his capable foreign minister, Lord Halifax, have travelled, 11 January, to Rome for a meeting of minds with Mussolini. In fact, Britain is just nine months away from a World War and a year and a half away from […]
The Rights and Wrongs of Killing Mussolini December 11, 2014
Author: Beach Combing | in : ContemporaryAfter 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 […]
The Truth about Mussolini’s Death? October 19, 2014
Author: Beach Combing | in : ContemporaryThere is no more controversial minute in Italian history. The sixty seconds took place around four o’ clock in the afternoon 28 April 1945 at Villa Belmonte (picture shows a man tracing bullet holes there). In those seconds a wrecked man, old before his time, and his much younger lover were shot dead. The man was, of […]
Totalitarian Leaders, Urban Legends and Motorbikes March 29, 2014
Author: Beach Combing | in : ContemporaryTotalitarian states put their leaders at the very heart of civic life as symbol and reality of fascism/Nazism/communism (or whatever other nightmare a country has fallen into). One of the consequences of the popular focus on the duce/fuhrer/stalin is that the individual citizen comes to feel a special warmth for the head that they might […]
DNA Champion November 24, 2011
Author: Beach Combing | in : Ancient, Contemporary, Medieval, ModernOur DNA is the damnedest stuff, it gets everywhere: not only forensically but also historically. Just the other day, Beach reviewed the evidence (2010) that one medieval Amerindian woman in Iceland passed on her DNA to eighty modern Icelanders. Then there are plenty of other dramatic examples of DNA spreading through history, especially now that […]
Hitler’s Italian Fantasy Life November 16, 2011
Author: Beach Combing | in : ContemporaryBeachcombing offers today an other example of a historical dream. However, unlike the nightscapes of Leonardo or Augustine, here, instead, is a fantasy from Adolf Hitler. Now Hitler’s private life is not particularly well known. There are unsubstantiated rumours about his genealogy and his sexual preferences, and his family relations (including a possibly murdered niece). […]
Image: Arresting Trouble December 4, 2010
Author: Beach Combing | in : ContemporaryThe Beachcombing family has been shook tonight by phantom (?) contractions and Mrs B. is upstairs wondering whether or not she is about to give birth. Beachcombing is a nursing a frullato downstairs confident that the baby is still a month away. But then Beachcombing is wrong about almost everything and that leads him nicely to […]
The Table Leg that Changed History (Kind Of) September 29, 2010
Author: Beach Combing | in : ContemporaryBeachcombing knows that estimates of the number of serious assassination attempts against Hitler vary from ten to twenty. However, the only one of these attacks that actually drew Adolf’s blood was the last, Claus von Stauffenberg’s gutsy solo effort towards the end of the war. In fact, on three different occasions – 11, 15 and 18 July […]