hitler

236of rapturous delight, the gargantuan jaws of Italy‟s dictatorgrind the opposition to powder. But soon he relents and withthe smile of the father looking over his numerous offspringhe tells them of their famed ancestry and holds out the hopeof another Rome, mistress of the world.A less familiar but more important setting for the blackshirtedCaesar is the Palazzo Venezia. In the Colosseum,Mussolini is a demagogue, here he is a statesman. The vitaldifference between Hitler and Mussolini is that the Nazichieftain is almost always in the arena, and would be out ofplace in the workaday atmosphere of the Palazzo.The son of a blacksmith, Mussolini shares with Hitlerand Stalin the distinction of being a proletarian by birth. Inhis youth he thought it was a great honour to be poor and hungry.As a school-teacher he became a Socialist and was expelledfrom Switzerland and Austria for revolutionary views.He led a rebellion against Italy‟s campaign in Tripoli and wasjailed. Three years later he mounted the soap-box to talkItaly into the World War on the side of the Allies. As aPacifist he counted on the War to end all Wars, and as aSocialist he was anxious to hasten the collapse of the militaristicCentral Powers.He was a Socialist when founding the first “Fascio diCombattimento” in 1919, but he had ambitions that couldnot be gratified in a party in which the rule of seniorityhad precedence over revolutionary zeal. He perfected theunion of socialism with reaction, and the product was fascismo.This thumb-nail sketch suffices to show that in the back-