Is he a cautionary tale of what happens when a totalitarian dictatorship with a cult of personality meddles with military procurement and logistic chains?
>>65500566He's a cautionary tale about how imperialism and warmongering will eventually destroy the nation engaging in it.
>>65500566>>65500570cautionary tale of italian incompetence
>>65500566Didn't he want to shirk command to the monarchy Franco-style and when it declined only then decided to take the reigns himself?
>>65500575I don't jnow about that. Seems to me that the italians sport quite a force nowadays.
>>65500575It's funny how the same Italian incompetence resulted in there being verifiable court evidence of direct connections between Ordine Nuovo, Propaganda Due, the CIA, the Vatican Bank, the Contras, and Iran.
>>65500578Mussolini went to power larry david style, betting on his straight faced lie about being really tough and serious about that march of rome thing. He was in Milan when his ragtag bunch of glorified maga cultists entered rome, in case the king finally found his balls and he needed to get out of the country quick. But no, the bluff worked and victor Emmanuel turned him prime minister on the spot, giving him immense powers and elevating the fascista party to the only real governing agent.
>>65500566His granddaughter is a decent singer though.
>>65500600His son was a good jazz pianist
Italian military performance was consistently horrible since the middle ages no matter the political system.
>>65500566he had served in ww1 as a soldier, but he failed because a sneaky djinn told him to join ww2 and also then invade greece too earlyhe presumed that, like most commentators at that moment, ww2 was basically over after the fall of france, and wanted to get a seat at the table.for me it's the italian social republic though, if you ever want to read about something fascinating.he also was quite good at the violin, and had ulcers that led him to eat disgustingly plain meals constantly.but my point is, if he had sat out of ww2 like franco, he probably could have stayed in power and maybe even maintained the stressa front by defending austria with the allies in some weird bizarro world. it's insane to say now but at the time there was a real chance of that working out before the invasion of ethiopiaoh yeah he also shouldn't have invaded ethiopia, basically caused everything else to go to shit afterwards because he wanted the funi vendetta
>>65500566there is an argument to be made about binary divisionsultimately
>>65501138That's objectively wrong, italy was at the forefront of military strategy and technological development since the first republic of rome. Really the only point in history where they fumbled really bad was throughout the history of the kingdom of italy from 1861 to 1945, and that had nothing to do with tactics or technology. Logistics build empires and win wars, not weapons. I thought americans would know it better than anyone.
>>65501225The stresa front was diplomatic fiasco. France was uninterested, britain downright opposed italy. It's no wonder italy ended up joining the allies, not out of ideological affinity but rather because they looked like the winning side at the time. Had france and britain put some effort in cajoling italy they would've steamrolled hitler by 1942
>>65501340>joining the alliesAxis, typo
>>65500566The meddling is the whole point of autocracies: the clientelism, the corruption, they're all part of the fundamental structure, and the one who reap the benefits is the capital, while everyone else is left out rotting and dying. Fascism was thoroughly supported by the industrialists of the time and they were rewarded first with fascists-led strike/union busting, and later with contracts. I hate the fucking liberals and mellow leftists because they used "fascist" as an insult so much it lost meaning, and now that the meaning very much fits all the criteria it's powerless.Autocracies favor incompetence because it's fertile ground for corruption, which is necessary to the great leader power, and corruption is extremely corrosive to military efficiency as the powerpoint aussie teaches.
>>65500566The guy was quite unlucky. He was a rather successful / capable peace time leader and didn't trust Hitler much as he heavily fortified the border with Austria all the way till the war.From what I red while he did improve the military it was more of a showroom force, small amounts of really nice botique made military equipment impossible to mass produce reliably, designed to break records or make the country look good ( like that italian seaplane that was flying faster than some of the early jet engines planes, Beretta SMGs, the G55 planes and a ton more "for show" equipment) Musso did not want to join the war well aware that his military looked far better than it actually was. However he took the decision to join anyway, while in hindsight we know it was a terrible decision in that moment it made much more sense.1) when he joined the war he saw Germany winning hands down, US and Russia were NOT in the war, the UK was far and unlikely to ever be successfully invade mainland Europe alone.2) others in his circle said that Mussolini decided to enter the war against France and UK just to sit at the winning table and avoid risking to be the next target of Hitler. 3) as France was struggling just by Musso moving half a million men to the southern French border it took away an equivalent amount of french troops that had to be stationed there when they could otherwise have been stationed north to face the Germans.4) Musso wrongly assumed that after the fall of France the war against the UK would quite soon end up in a "white" ( no loser, no winner) peace deal sooner or later as the UK alone had no chance to conquer all of Europe and Germany didn't have the naval capability to invade the uk so a peace deal was the obvious outcome. 5) most people, not just Musso, did not forsee Hitler invasion of Russia nor Japan attack on the US. If those events did not happen the war with the UK would have most likely have fizzled out as Musso expected.
>>65500575I cooka da pizza!
>>65501340hitler would have been a literalwho with the stresa front it's actually funny. not that italy was some kind of behemoth but if austria was able to be defended then hitler would have been much more intimidated on any kind of full blitz. instead mussolini chimped out in ethiopia and the allies jerked themselves off for a while>>65501459see pic>>65501451essentially this, in retrospect it was all fairly stupid but in the moment it was a series of fairly logical if hasty decisions. Fascism as some have written was made as it grew, starting from the march on Rome and onwards.I genuinely believe that he would have a fair better legacy if he had simply avoided WW2. In America before Ethiopia he was literally renowned as an Italian statesman and JFK/Churchill/Most of wall street were all creaming for him. Even as the war came crashing down you can see a man strung along by forces greater than him, a shell of a man by the end, really. Even today he really isn't nearly as hated as Hitler, either seen as a buffoon, a sideshow character, or something better if not more tragic. Though with that said he must be taken as...well...a Son of the Century.>Aspetto la fine della tragedia, e, stranamente distaccato da tutto, non mi sento più attore; mi sento come l’ultimo spettatore
>>65501388Fascists were frequently intwined with the unions dumb faggot. Look at Nazi Germany.
>>65501554Franco is an interesting contrast to Mussolini as he played the game right and is seen as a hero for it, even though at one point he was collaborating with the Nazis and shooting at US soldiers at the same time.
>>65501388You should read Spirito.in the brief fleeting life that was fascism, there was a fairly wide range of beliefs, with Spirito representing the left wing of fascism. that phrasing might sound weird, but the more you learn about the ideology, the more it reveals itself.as a side note, the way modern liberal states negotiate between the state and the industry and the workers is remarkably similar from the writings of Spirito and his ilk in many ways. At the base of it, it was the same question of how to manage collaboration rather than conflict in the name of class
>>65501580Well yeah, it turns out that when given the choice between collectivist ideologies the working class is going to pick the one that doesn't have occupational parasitism and freeloading as a natural consequence of its policies.
>>65501327I don't consider Rome Italy
>>65500566Their country was poor as shit, regardless of how good their procurement was, they would never have the logistics or mass of equipment necessary to perform adequately in WW2. The only way they could've done better under Mussolini is if they stayed neutral like Spain and approached the West during the cold war. Mussolini was old anyways, and if they stayed out of WW2 he probably would've died fairly early afterwards with his replacement probably being more of a moderate.People shit on Mussolini but he did alot of good for Italy, and if he was willing to sit out WW2 he would be looked at much more fondly today.
>>65501554The one that was most moist over Musso after Hitler was Lenin. He literally got so mad when the Italian commies broke up with Musso because, in his own words, " he was the only guy that could have taken communism into Europe " Hitler before ww2 was literally fargirling over Musso so hard that he asked if he could send him an autograph because he loved his work so much.
>>65501931Old? Mussolini was 59 when he was removed from power. Could have gone on till 1980
>>65501949>older than HitlerHe wasnt very healthy, and IMO he would've died from health issues regardless of what he did. He was getting up there in age and at the time of his death he was already older than his country's average life expectancy in 1940 (56). He probably would've made it to the mid 1950s or even early 1960s. He may have not had as many glaring health issues as Hitler and his parkinsons disease, but he still was old at a time that people didnt live nearly as long, especially in less developed southern Europe.
>>65501451Germany would have won if Italy wasn't such an agrarian shithole and lost their whole fucking army doing stupid stuff
>>65500566Nah, Italy was already an industrial backwater doing most shit out of somebody's auto-garage. They were fine for small orders and the early Fascist obsession with "speed" did produce some really good plywood aircraft of the inter-war era. The issue was that by 1939 they'd fallen far behind. And being Italian everything was always slapshod, for example the Littorio was an excellent ship with shitty ammo which rendered its guns far less effective. They didn't build huge tanks because the terrain of Italy wasn't suited for it as both the Germans and Americans discovered, but they also didn't perfect light tanks they just made ones that were good for 1930 and stuck with them. Any revolutionary political movement which doesn't pursue constant destructive "total revolution" like the commies do inevitably regresses to natural state of the nation which it arose from. Fascism in Italy as a reaction to the incomplete Resurgimento, a feeling that Italy had been cheated in the WW1 peace agreements, a feeling that class division and lack of unity was the reason Italy unerpreformed and thus didn't get what it wanted, and that commies were fucking shit up in the countryside. Fascism only really managed to address the first and last issues, Hitler gave Italy what it wanted territorially and the filthy commies were removed. But it quickly just become semi-secularized Catholic corporatism 2.0. It didn't really change Italy's relationship with industrial production for good or ill. They do good work in specific fields and low quantity, basically a nation of artisans not industrialists.
>>65501964Retard take.The life expectancy rose drastically post 1950s because the world got antibiotics of all kinds actually available.And this would be a state leader. Best healthcare money can buy. And Italy healthcare standards by the 1970s was like top 10 worldwide even above the US. If he didn't croak in WW2 we can see how long the fascist leaders that didn't get killed lived.Franco 82Salazar 81 Hirohito 87
Had the funds and effort dedicated to Italy and Japan's colonial expansion plans been directed toward domestic investment, the situation might have turned out quite differently.
>>65501451On one side Hitler did have a better idea just how subversive the jews where and now much influence they had over England which inhibited an armistice. But on the other hand Hilter was a dreamer and a weird guy in general, Mussolini was much more grounded. His mistake was that he thought everybody else would be shrewd and mercenary in their internal maneuvering. And it turned out that the Bongs were captured by da joos but also by paranoia about losing face and the empire as a result. Murica was full of commie(not all joos) spies and the old WASP(roundhead) elite both wanted to taken Bongland down a peg and prevent both the Catholics and Scotts Irish from staging popularist revolt which would curtail federal power. Germany was a basket case of competing factions held together by an idealist with good instincts but increasingly divorced from reality due to age and his doctors drugging him up. Stalin was pathologically paranoid and also paradoxically somehow a retarded true believer in racial egalitarian shit and really did want to fuck up the world with communism so long as he was top dog. Japan was run by men ruled by pride who wanted to use the Kantai Kessen agaisnt the US and repeat the Russo-Japanes war despite: the US having a shipping industry unlike Russia in 1880, the doctrine being based on Mahan's theses who was fucking American, and the Americans being literate and knowing exactly how the Japs beat Russia.You had a political "realist" who would have done well in a post-Napoleonic "Concert of Europe" style system operating in a madhouse.
Correct me if I'm wrong but weren't most of the high command monarchists? I remember reading somewhere that because Mussolini did not purge them, not wanting to cause a split with the King or the Conservatives, the military had the exact kind of traditional thought that led to so many bad decisions in the First World War.
>>65501979By the 1960s he would be in his late 70s, he was already older than each of the people you listed during WW2, he would have made it to the 1970s at best, but at that point I feel he would have a replacement regardless. His digestive health issues would've made him frail and weak, especially as he grew older and (likely) lost his teeth. It has nothing to do with antibiotics as, barring his digestive issues, he was healthy.
>>65501580Nazi Germany first dissolved worker unions before imposing their own and basically neutering them. It is much better said that fascism has the aesthetic of popular support, while it devolves into autocratic collection of power while pretending it still has a popular mandate.
>>65502000>also paradoxically somehow a retarded true believer in racial egalitarian shitlol lmaoHe not only massacred the Anarcho-Syndicalists when they did a better job at making a worker's state than the USSR, but he also hunted down and unpersoned Lenin's cabinet. Stalin was under no delusion he was using the Soviet Union as anything but his personal army to get back at all the people who wronged him up to that point, and every move was calculated toward centralizing power.
>>65500566The problem wasn't meddling, it was that the Italian industry was minuscule and lacked critical raw materials. The materiel Italy used in Eritrea and in Spain was never recouped because Italy simply couldn't churn out more carcanos, berettas and sparvieros in time. Worse still, they joined the war in the middle of a reorganization effort. Pariani’s reforms robbed Italian divisions from a regiment to make them leaner and faster but it just made them weaker overall. Needless to say, this didn't mesh with their existing doctrine and the new doctrine didn't have enough time in the oven to iron out the kinks. Mechanizing the Regio Ejercito to any meaningful level to offset that lack of mass with speed wasn't possible either, again due to the lack of industrial might and the necessary resources.There's nothing meddling or lack thereof would have changed. Even if Il Dunce's interventionist adventures never occurred, their arsenal was never deep enough, was never going to be deep enough and they never had the capacity to replenish it.
>>65500600Eva Perrone? Madonna was hot.
>>65500566Historically Italians haven't been able to fight since the fall of rome.
>>65502102You seem to have missed the "as long as he was top dog" part. He was apparently in love with some negro fetishizing movie "Circus" and when internal records came out in the 90s it seems the top commies really did talk about stupid libtard commie shit rather than the cold calculus of state power behind closed doors like I had expected. Nobody was more surprised than me, before I merely thought Stalin was a self-defeating fool and adroit politician. When I learned he actually believed the bullshit I some level I began to hate him, I despise idealists in general but libtarded idealists are the worst, they are all delusional retards.
>>65502191They were good mercs, the crossbowmen humiliated the mongols. Then again the mongols never took a single stone European fortification in all of history.
