The topics of fascism and anti-Semitism constitute the core research problems of contemporary scholarship on the political ideas of Ezra Pound. This article shifts the research focus to the topic, ...which has attracted much less academic attention, namely – the influence of republican intellectual heritage on the peculiar style of Ezra Pound’s political thinking. The most crucial text in this regard is Jefferson and/or Mussolini, which contains the most consistent and extensive expression of poet’s views on authority and its relations to economics and culture. By drawing the direct parallels between the two revolutionary leaders, Pound provides us with an opportunity to unveil the elements of American political tradition, the identification with which made it possible for him to support the Axis powers in the course of World War II. The republicanism seems to be a paradigm capable of embodiment and explaining the whole range of seemingly contradictory poet’s ideas. Considered from this perspective, Pound does not anymore appear to be an eccentric artist, whose turn to radical politics is only a continuation of his poetic character, nor is he a provincial chauvinist, but reveals himself as an heir and a representative of the traditional system of values, which has been violently relocated to the margins of political life in the USA.
This article, the result of intense archive work, retraces the influence of Italian cultural propaganda in Latvia starting from the de jure recognition in 1921 until the first Soviet occupation in ...1940. The cultural relations between Italy and Latvia, could be depicted in two different waves: the first one, from 1921 until 1932, where Italy tries to establish the foundations of its cultural influence, not without a few difficulties, and the second one, from 1933 until 1940, when Fascist propaganda increased in Latvia; undoubtedly, this growth of cultural relations corresponded to Ulmanis's takeover. Moreover, a more detailed propaganda strategy abroad was outlined, starting from 1932, with the Volta Conference and with the establishment of CAUR (Comitati d'Azione per l'Universalità di Roma/Action Committees for the Universality of Rome) and of the Ministry of Popular Culture in 1937.
Between 1931 and 1942, on its northern border in the Alps, Italy built a defensive line called the Vallo Alpino del Littorio. This ‘Alpine Wall’ consisted of a double row of underground bunkers armed ...with machine guns and light artillery, all forming a ‘resistance position’. Behind it was a ‘deployment zone’, comprising heavy artillery batteries, ammunitions and equipment depots and barracks. While it looked very impressive, these fortifications in fact suffered from significant weaknesses. Benito Mussolini’s fascist government simply did not have the means to implement its ambitious military policy. Although it was reputed to be invincible, the Fort du Chaberton was incapacitated by French artillery in June 1940, a striking example of the failure of Italy’s strategy regarding its border defense system during this period. In fact, the Vallo Alpino was poorly equipped and the technological advances in the field of armament made it obsolete. In 1947, Italy was obliged to give France 700 square kilometers of its border territory. This explains why many of the bunkers which originally belonged to the western part of the Italian Alpine Wall are now located on French soil. This remarkable heritage is of considerable interest, not only on account of its dramatic appearance in the landscape, but also because of its importance for the history of World War II. Unfortunately, it remains largely unknown today and, as yet, enjoys no statutory protection.
This article considers the effect of World War I on Charles Ricketts’ work for the stage as an avant-garde set and costume designer. It looks at his cosmopolitan designs in the context of European ...symbolism. The first part of the essay focuses on Ricketts’ symbolist manifesto ‘The art of stage decoration’ (1913). The essay then examines his designs for three Shakespeare plays that toured Le Havre in 1918 to entertain the troops. I argue that, in the aftermath of the war, Rickett’s symbolism became the lens through which he assessed the complex political landscape of the 1920s, and suggest that his stance against realism politicized his practice and explains his interest in Mussolini’s fascism.
The main goal of this contribution is to investigate the way in which a figure of memory, the image of a person linked to an event of the past, symbolically travels in a specific culture. ...Investigating the role of recognition and repetition, I will reframe the modality of remembering the traumatic past through remediation. In particular, the analysis of an emblematic example from the contemporary Italian semiosphere, Benito Mussolini, allows me to focus on the creation of a common heritage of knowledge that is synthesized in a single person, culturally defined as a synecdoche of specific beliefs and values.
Entre 1922 y 1945 el gobierno fascista trató de aproximar la ciudad de Roma a la sociedad italiana mediante el direccionamiento arquitectónico, la reinvención de su pasado histórico y la ...sacralización del mito de la Romanidad. Benito Mussolini, promotor absoluto de la resurrección de la grandeza imperial de la antigüedad romana, fue el artífice de una política de masas dirigida a consolidar la hegemonía del fascismo mediante una imagen urbana que ofrecía secuencias inconexas, falseadas y descontextualizadas de la realidad. En qué medida la historia de la urbe romana, capturada por la doctrina fascista y en concreto, por el pensamiento del Duce, es deudora del estrato mitológico quedará expuesto en estas páginas
Analizzando l'esperienza della Repubblica sociale attraverso le lenti del Partito fascista repubblicano e del ruolo di Benito Mussolini, Dianella Gagliani mette in evidenza la centralità ...dell'ideologia fascista per la Rsi.
On 7 September 1933, military officers of the Italian Air Force led by Colonel Roberto Lordi departed from Naples to reach China with the task, agreed upon by Italian fascist and Chinese nationalist ...governments, of building a factory assembling Italian-made aircrafts and training pilots for the Republic of China. The mission was stationed at Nanchang, in today's Jiangxi province. The initiative was developed in competition with a similar American mission, which had operated since 1932 in Hankou, in the Hubei province, at the time led by Colonel John H. Jouett. The Italian government won Chiang's attention with the agreement to use the military airfield and Italian aircrafts against the Communist resistance, which pleased the expectations of the Generalissimo. In April 1934, the headquarters of the Chinese military aviation finally moved to Nanchang. The mission's commander, Roberto Lordi, was promoted Brigadier General of the Italian Royal Air Force and appointed Chief of Staff of the Chinese Air Force. This article presents, through extensive use of unpublished private and public archive documents, the controversial history of the Italian military mission and unveils the circumstances that changed the fortune of that successful story, as well as the career and personal life of its commander.
19. yüzyıl ortalarında İtalyan birliğinin sağlanması sonrası Roma ve civarının da tamamen İtalyan idaresine girmesi ile Vatikan bağımsız devlet statüsünü yitirmiş ve İtalyan idaresine geçmişti. ...Vatikan, İtalyan idaresine girmek istememiş, İtalya’nın Vatikan yönetimine müdahaleleriyle devlet ve kilise arasında bir çatışma süreci yaşanmıştı. “Roma Sorunu” olarak adlandırılan bu dönem, Benito Mussolini’nin 1922 yılında iktidara gelmesi sonrası yaptığı çalışmalarla yumuşamaya başlayacak, 1929 yılında Vatikan ve İtalya Devleti arasında imzalanan Laterano Antlaşması ile de tamamen sonlanacaktı. Bu tarihten itibaren Vatikan yeniden bağımsız devlet statüsüne kavuşmuştu. Bağımsızlık sonrası başta Avrupa ülkeleri olmak üzere çeşitli devletlerle resmî ilişkiler kurma çalışmaları yapan Vatikan’ın Türkiye ile resmî ilişki kurması hemen mümkün olmamıştı. Vatikan’ın talebine rağmen Türkiye, bir din devleti ile ilişki kurmanın laiklik ilkesi açısından sorun oluşturacağını düşünmekteydi. Çeşitli tartışmalarla birlikte Vatikan ile Türkiye arasındaki resmî ilişkiler ancak 1960 yılında başlayabilmişti. Bu makalede, Vatikan’ın 1929 yılında bağımsızlığını tekrar elde etmesi sonrası Türk kamuoyunun İtalya’daki gelişmelere bakışı ve Vatikan ile Türkiye arasında resmî ilişkilerin başlama süreci incelenecektir.
Italy was the homeland of Fascism (proper noun). From 1922 until 1943, a self-described Fascist regime ruled the country. As a result of the national election on 25 September 2022, a political party ...with its roots in that Fascism became the dominant partner in a far-right coalition national government. Does this signify the full-fledged return of the past for Italy's future or does it represent something else again? As Umberto Eco once claimed, Fascism was an unstable cocktail of beliefs and practices associated increasingly with the whims of one man: Benito Mussolini. From this perspective, unlike Nazism, which can be plausibly defined neatly in terms of its central obsessions with biological races and anti-semitism, Fascism has lent itself to multiple interpretations. Hence, fascism (common noun) has become a term used in a myriad of ways to describe a range of political ideologies, albeit all anchored to the singular significance of national identities at the expense of much else. I challenge Eco's claim that Fascism had no elemental ideological core and then trace the history of Fascism in Italy and how its memory lived on after the demise of the regime most intimately connected to it. I then turn to recent Italian politics and what the changed historical-geographical context of the times suggests about which elements, if any, of the original Fascism can be expected to re-emerge under the new regime. I end with the conclusion that whatever “fascism” does presently emerge in Italy will be unlike the original version. In fact, most of the core of what branded the original Fascism looks mostly irreproducible in contemporary Italy.
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