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Reader Post | By Charles
Just finished reading the first volume of William Shirer’s 3-volume autobiography, 20th Century Journey. I loved reading this book … it was a great way to learn history of the early 20th century. Shirer’s first-hand accounts of events, people and places. It took awhile for me to read this one; I took dozens of detours to read Wikipedia pages about the events, people and places Shirer knew.
I’m surprised this book has never come to my attention … there’s not even a Wikipedia page for it … just a mention of the “three volumes of his autobiography, 20th Century Journey, which was published by Little, Brown in 1976, 1984, and 1990″
Shirer witnessed the rise of fascism in Europe in the early 1920’s. And, for what it’s worth … we’re seeing all the signs in Western societies today. ___Charles
The emphasis is my own:
From abroad foreign dignitaries applauded [Benito Mussolini’s rise to power through a political assassination]. In England the Archbishop of Canterbury began to see the strutting Italian dictator as “the one giant figure in Europe” and even Winston Churchill, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, was taken in. Meeting Mussolini in Rome shortly before my arrival he hailed him as a great European leader and especially for his “struggle against the bestial appetites of Leninism.” At home the banker Otto Kahn said of Mussolini: “The world owes him a debt of gratitude.” And Thomas Edison thought him “the greatest genius of the modern age.”
The Italian people, moreover, were too civilized, too down to earth, to be interested in his ambitions, which they saw as false. Certain industrialists, bankers and landowners, to be sure, were learning how to profit from the regime. They were relieved to be free from the threat of socialism and strikes. The always conservative and backward peasants apparently supported him. But the bulk of Italians, most of the middle class and all of the workers (and almost all of the intellectuals), so far as I could see, did not take Fascism very seriously. They were too intelligent for that. They suffered it but seemed to be sure that it would not last very long, that it was a passing phase. They had passed through so many periods of aberration in their long and colorful history. As an Italian historian, who had been ousted from his university chair, put it to me one day, behind the façade of Fascism there was only emptiness, and inside Mussolini’s strutting figure there was only sawdust. George Seldes, a colleague of mine on the Tribune, had seen that. He had called the Duce “A sawdust Caesar” and had been expelled from the country forthwith.
Most of the leaders in the Western democracies praised Mussolini to the skies. Even one so intelligent and cynical about the human race as George Bernard Shaw was taken in. He spoke out his admiration for the man. He was even going to write a play about him, he said. My own guess was that Mussolini, like all dictators, would eventually overreach himself. Power would corrupt and corrode him, as it did all tyrants. I would feel the same about Adolf Hitler in the early years of his dizzy successes. But for many years, in both cases, it looked as if I couldn’t have been more wrong.
___
from the first volume (Published 1976) of William L. Shirer’s autobiography, 20th Century Journey
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