Former Totalitarians

Issue 217

Rome 2016

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Here’s a true story about a life: Dino Grandi was born in Mordano, Italy in 1895, started to practice law after World War I, ended up in politics, and then died in 1988. That sounds just fine, although it is probably necessary to add that he was elected to the Italian Parliament as part of the National Fascist Party in 1921, and pretty much what you expect comes next: he’s ruthless, driven, militant, and therefore rises in the hierarchy—as those behaviors aren’t deemed a drawback for a Fascist. He takes various positions over two decades, from Interior Minister to Ambassador to Speaker of Parliament’s Lower Chamber, which is a powerful if slightly tenuous position in a dictatorship. In general, he’s loathsome and weaselly and reprehensible, which, during these years, means effective. And that’s a reasonably accurate précis of a life, a life that held a leadership position in a horrific regime, a life that should be judged based on those facts.

Here’s another true story about a life: In 1943, over the course of several months and most specifically on the night of July 24th and into the morning of July 25th—because conspiracies always take forever—Dino Grandi maneuvered to confront Benito Mussolini at the Grand Council of Fascism, which wasn’t, well, the typical route to a long life. Grandi was certainly a Fascist, but he was more of the lukewarm variety, preferring his militant policies to have a veneer of civility, so ousting the more fanatical Mussolini felt, to him, principled. To achieve his objective, a legalistic and parliamentary objective, it would require a majority of the Fascist leadership to openly defy Mussolini in his presence. Grandi brought two grenades to the meeting, his confidence in the outcome not exactly high, though I suspect that this wasn’t the only Fascist meeting where someone held surreptitious grenades. Remarkably, Grandi’s motion passed: the lawyer and politician and longtime party member induced a roomful of Fascist Generals and hardline officials to vote against Mussolini. A laborious and dangerous plot, months in formation, managed to work. And there’s something notable, too, about how the politician Grandi employed a legal maneuver to achieve a procedural victory that he considered ethically necessary, one that triggered Mussolini’s arrest the very next day. Although the story is a tad more convoluted, and also contains a second conspiracy by other figures, that’s a reasonable précis of one decision made during a life.

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It is worth noticing that the visionaries, the people who maintained an ethical position from the earliest days of the regime, weren’t in the room. By the time that we reach 1943, all that’s left are brutes and ghouls and sadists. To be ethical from the beginning, to have both foresight about what’s coming and the willingness to act, ensures that you’ll be absent from the finale. Which obviously isn’t a case for supporting an unethical or grisly position. There’s no simple lesson for pragmatism in these facts, just the simple awareness that the worst people are often all that’s left when it comes to the most consequential decisions. An insightful, ethical person knew in the early 1920s that the blackshirts were dreadful, but that insightful, ethical person was, at best, long forgotten by the 1940s. 

It means that everyone inside Palazzo Venezia on that crucial night in July 1943 had spent their childhood torturing small animals. But that’s always true: once the situation devolves into the muck, there’s nobody left but monsters. The disturbing political lesson about ghastly regimes is that heroic figures must first be cowardly figures. This is a troubling but necessary conclusion, one worth pondering whenever the political temperature begins to rise. Stated more concretely: if the decision to vote against Mussolini is easy for you, then you won’t be inside the room for the vote.

Thankfully, at least some portion of the population does remain ethical in even the most harsh environments, yet they’re stuck outside, ideally straining to cajole and agitate and campaign. Obviously that’s beneficial. Obviously that’s necessary. Obviously that increases the probability of a catalytic moment. But even in more prosaic times, when the political issues are wonderfully unclear, less ethically charged, when the temperature is closer to a simmer than a boil, only those most committed will populate the rooms where decisions are made.

I wouldn’t want to ever discount the importance of the outsiders, the figures who agitate and gather, those who organize from the very beginning against what they see so clearly as unjust. But I am, too, interested in the shuffle from denial to support, in those figures who spend so many years as monsters only to end up hesitating about their horrendous beliefs at just the right moment. Not because I want to forgive them. Not because I want to rehabilitate their story. But because what they decide so often ends up being so consequential for everyone else.