Mussolini: you might think he was just a blustering fool in a fez,
but once upon a time many people took him very seriously. I remember my
shock when, aged 15 or so, I learned from my history teacher that
Churchill had spoken approvingly of the black shirts in the 1920s. This
week however I was reading a biography of the first Fascist and learned
that Winston was not alone. Franklin Roosevelt praised the Italian
dictator as a gentleman; Chiang Kai-shek asked for a signed photograph;
and even Gandhi (yes lovely, non-violent, vegetable-munching Gandhi)
described him as the “Savior of Italy.” Hmm. That’ll be the guy who let
his soldiers use live Ethiopians for target practice and ended his
political career shipping Jews to Hitler for extermination? All right
then!
"If only this was Mussolini's face."
The phenomenon of intelligent people saying stupid things about
tyrants is a constant of 20th century history. The USSR under Stalin is a
veritable Klondike of intellectual embarrassment and/or mendacity, ranging from
the reporting of Walter Duranty, the Pulitzer Prize Winner who defended
Stalin’s show trials and denied the Ukrainian famine, to the bumptious
witterings of George Bernard Shaw who in 1932 declared (as millions were
starving) that reports of a famine in the USSR were “nonsense.” How did
he know? "I have never eaten as well as during my trip to the Soviet
Union."
It was Lenin who first identified the genus of Western intellectual
known as “the useful idiot,” but it was Stalin who showed how incredibly
easy it was to seduce them: a free holiday, dinner, a little flattery
and wa-hey- the knickers are off! But then Stalin died, the USSR became
much less violent and the useful idiots lost interest.
Searching for a new utopia, many pinned their hopes on revolutionary
Cuba, where a bearded mega-bore named Fidel Castro was in the process of
transforming a corrupt satellite of America into a corrupt satellite of
the USSR, even poorer and less free than before. Like Papa Joe, Fidel
knew how to flatter and soon he had the likes of Picasso, Norman Mailer
and Susan Sontag (“the Cuban revolution is astonishingly free of
repression”) eating out of his palm. My favorite Castro quote comes from
Abbie Hoffman, a justly forgotten 60s radical bed-wetter who compared
Castro to… well, read for yourself:
“Fidel sits on the side of a tank rumbling into Havana on New Year’s
Day… girls throw flowers at the tank and rush to tug playfully at this
black beard. He laughs joyously and pinches a few rumps. .. He is like a
mighty penis coming to life, and when he is tall and straight, the
crowd immediately is transformed.”
Ahem. Then there was Castro’s pal, Wee Ernie Guevara, a totalitarian
loon who praised Mao, invaded the Congo and died in Bolivia after
attempting to inspire revolution among people he knew nothing about.
Sartre declared him "the most complete human being of our age."
Speaking of Mao, he had his celebrity admirers, too. In 1973, Shirley
MacLaine, who was very good in The Apartment with Jack Lemmon, went on a
tour of some Potemkin villages in China and wrote a glowing report
afterwards. She was especially approving of the absence of advertising
billboards, and the general atmosphere of calm which left her feeling
“serene.” She never thought that perhaps China was quiet because 60
million people had just been murdered and everyone was very, very
scared. Mao was a big hit among 60s students and one of his erstwhile
fanboys, Jose Manuel Barroso, is today president of the European
Commission.
But Mao and Castro weren’t the only totalitarian despots considered
groovy in the 60s and 70s. Eldridge Cleaver, a prominent Black Panther
leader, declared that while America was a hell-hole of oppression, North
Korea under Kim Il-sung was the best place in the world. In the run up
to the Iranian revolution, Michel Foucault, a Frenchman, paid several
visits to Iran and later praised the “political spirituality” of the
Ayatollah Khomeini who, given the chance, would have had him executed
for his homosexuality.
And so on, and so on. These days, it’s not quite as bad though I hear
Hitler has his fans in the Middle East and Hollywood morons, inspired
by 60s nostalgia, still show up in Cuba from time to time. But it’s hard
to find the pure strain of tyrant admiration, though for a while I was
fascinated by a blog entitled Reflections on the Ruhnama, written by
“Steve from Wisconsin” who apparently took at face value all the
gibberish the deceased Turkmen tyrant Saparmurat Niyazov had scrawled
with a colored crayon in his notorious book.
Maybe it has something to do with the loss of religious faith. You
know, these intellectuals no longer believe in paradise, so they project
their yearning for redemption onto some exotic place, then climb
through the wardrobe of their imaginations and emerge in magical lands
governed by wise talking lions. Yes, I like that, though surely vanity
also comes into it. It pleases certain intellectuals to adopt
counter-intuitive positions, believing it gives them “depth” and
“sophistication.” And thus clever people are often the easiest to fool.