Mussolini S Propaganda Abroad

This is the first major study in English of Fascist Italy’s overseas propaganda. Using rare Italian and French captured documents, this is also the first investigation into the relationship between Mussolini’s regime and Arab nationalist movements This new account covers propaganda and subversive activities engineered by the Italian government in the Mediterranean and the Middle East from 1935 until 1940, when Italy entered the war. It assesses the nature of the challenge brought by the Fascist regime to British security and colonial interests in the region. Fascist propaganda, in particular in the Arab Middle East, must be regarded as an expression of Mussolini’s foreign policy and his attempts to build an Italian empire that would stretch beyond the Mediterranean, gaining control over the exits, Gibraltar and Suez, which were in the hands of the British and the French. The activities of individual agents and organizations are carefully reconstructed and analyzed to highlight the seemingly contradictory objectives of the Italian government: on the one hand, Rome was courting the Arab nationalist movements in Egypt and Palestine, which were seeking the support of external forces capable of providing political, financial and military backing needed to overthrow foreign rulers; on the other, the regime was promoting further territorial expansion in Africa. These aspects build into an excellent picture of this fascinating period of modern history. This book will be of great interest to all students and scholars of politics, media, Italian history and propaganda.

During the 1920s and 1930s, Mussolini’s fascist regime attempted to promote fascist Italy’s national project in Argentina, bombarding the republic with its propaganda. Although politically a failure, this propaganda provoked a debate over the idea of a national identity outside of the nation-state and the potential roles that citizens living abroad could play in their country of origin. In propagating an Italian national identity within another sovereign state, Mussolini’s initiative also inspired heated debate among native Argentines over their own national project as a nation of immigrants. Using the experiences of Mussolini’s efforts in Argentina as its case study, this book demonstrates how national projects take on different meanings once they enter a contested public space. It details how both members of the Italian community as well as native Argentines reshaped Italy’s national discourse from abroad by entangling it with Argentina’s own national project. In exploring the way in which nations are imagined, constructed, and recast both from above as well as from below, Mussolini’s National Project in Argentina offers new perspectives on the politics of identity formation while providing a transatlantic example of the dynamic interplay between the Italian state and its emigrant communities. It is in short, a transnational perspective on what it means to belong to a nation.

This is the first major study in English of Fascist Italy’s overseas propaganda. Using rare Italian and French captured documents, this is also the first investigation into the relationship between Mussolini’s regime and Arab nationalist movements This new account covers propaganda and subversive activities engineered by the Italian government in the Mediterranean and the Middle East from 1935 until 1940, when Italy entered the war. It assesses the nature of the challenge brought by the Fascist regime to British security and colonial interests in the region. Fascist propaganda, in particular in the Arab Middle East, must be regarded as an expression of Mussolini’s foreign policy and his attempts to build an Italian empire that would stretch beyond the Mediterranean, gaining control over the exits, Gibraltar and Suez, which were in the hands of the British and the French. The activities of individual agents and organizations are carefully reconstructed and analyzed to highlight the seemingly contradictory objectives of the Italian government: on the one hand, Rome was courting the Arab nationalist movements in Egypt and Palestine, which were seeking the support of external forces capable of providing political, financial and military backing needed to overthrow foreign rulers; on the other, the regime was promoting further territorial expansion in Africa. These aspects build into an excellent picture of this fascinating period of modern history. This book will be of great interest to all students and scholars of politics, media, Italian history and propaganda.

A vividly written portrait of Benito Mussolini, whose passion for the theatre profoundly shaped his ideology and actions as head of fascist Italy This consistently illuminating book transforms our understanding of fascism as a whole, and will have strong appeal to readers in both theatre studies and modern Italian history.

The first exploration of how Mussolini employed population settlement inside the nation and across the empire to strengthen Italian sovereignty.

This pioneering book offers the first account of the work of the photographers, both official and freelance, who contributed to the forging of Mussolini's image. It departs from the practice of using photographs purely for illustration and places them instead at the centre of the analysis. Throughout the 1930s photographs of the Italian dictator Benito Mussolini were chosen with much care by the regime. They were deployed to highlight those physical traits - the piercing eyes, protruding jaw, shaved head - that were meant to evoke the Duce's strength, determination and innate sense of leadership in the mind of his contemporaries. The chapters in this volume explore the photographic image in the socio-political context of the time and shows how it was a significant contributor to the development of Italian mass culture between the two world wars.

Between 1923 and 1934, Britain and Italy waged war by proxy in the Middle East. Behind the appearance of European collaboration, relations between London and Rome in the Red Sea were notably tense. Although realistically Mussolini could not establish or maintain colonies in the Arabian Peninsula in the face of British opposition, his regime undertook a number of initiatives in the region to enhance Italo-Arab relations and to pave the way for future expansion once the balance of power in Europe had shifted in Italy's favour. This book examines four key aspects of relations between Britain and Italy in the Middle East in the interwar period: the confrontation between London and Rome for political influence among Arab leaders and nationalists; the competition for commercial and trade advantages in the region; the Anglo-Italian propaganda war to win the hearts and minds of the Arab populations; and the secret world of British and Italian espionage and intelligence. An in depth analysis of these four key areas demonstrates how Anglo-Italian relations broke down over the interwar period and enhances our knowledge and understanding of the factors leading up to the widening of the Second World War in the Mediterranean. This book is essential reading for scholars concerned with Anglo-Italian relations, the activities of the Powers in the Middle East and the tensions between the colonial powers.

In 1945, disguised in German greatcoat and helmet, Mussolini attempted to escape from the advancing Allied armies. Unfortunately for him, the convoy of which he was part was stopped by partisans and his features, made so familiar by Fascist propaganda, gave him away. Within 24 hours he was executed by his captors, joining those he sent early to their graves as an outcome of his tyranny, at least one million people. He was one of the tyrant-killers who so scarred interwar Europe, but we cannot properly understand him or his regime by any simple equation with Hitler or Stalin. Like them, his life began modestly in the provinces; unlike them, he maintained a traditonal male family life, including both wife and mistresses, and sought in his way to be an intellectual. He was cruel (though not the cruellest); his racism existed, but never without the consistency and vigor that would have made him a good recruit for the SS. He sought an empire; but, in the most part, his was of the old-fashioned, costly, nineteenth century variety, not a racial or ideological imperium. And, self-evidently Italian society was not German or Russian: the particular patterns of that society shaped his dictatorship. Bosworth's Mussolini allows us to come closer than ever before to an appreciation of the life and actions of the man and of the political world and society within which he operated. With extraordinary skill and vividness, drawing on a huge range of sources, this biography paints a picture of brutality and failure, yet one tempered with an understanding of Mussolini as a human being, not so different from many of his contemporaries. 'The definitive study of the Italian dictator.' - Library Journal