‘Losing Sleep and Plagued By An Ulcer’
Road trippin’ with Ruth Ben-Ghiat’s ‘Strongmen’
‘What Times Those Were’
Benito Mussolini was ‘losing sleep and plagued by an ulcer’ — the murder of the Socialist leader Giacomo Matteotti had de-popularized the Italian strongman, known as Il Duce.
As Ruth Ben-Ghiat wrote in ‘Strongmen — Mussolini to the Present’, the lawyer Matteotti was ‘tall, urbane, and known for his integrity’ — everything Mussolini was not — but most notably, he had been compiling a dossier of Mussolini’s corruption.
‘The fastest way to lose your life to a strongman is to publicly denounce his corruption.’—Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Strongmen
Matteotti wasn’t just an outspoken anti-fascist, Ruth wrote, but a crusader for government ethics.
Matteotti’s dossier was exhaustive — containing bribes paid by the American oil company Sinclair — because oil is always at the heart of these mob stories — and according to Ruth, Matteotti was set to read his findings publicly at the next parliamentary session.
Then two Mussolini-linked allies, one a former squadrist, murdered Matteotti on June 10, 1924, and when the investigation put Mussolini on the defensive, his core supporters pressed him to resign, including military veterans, who turned in their party affiliation cards.
Critics then wrote of two dead men — Matteotti and Mussolini.
Accustomed to flattery and applause, he was now a pariah — declared ‘finished’ by a Liberal leader in the London Times.
So Mussolini deployed the ‘strongman’s golden rule’ — ‘do whatever is necessary to stay in power.’
On January 3, 1925, Mussolini announced the first fascist dictatorship.
‘I, and I alone, assume political, moral, and historical responsibility for all that has happened … If Fascism has been a criminal association, I am the head of that criminal association … Gentlemen, Italy wants peace, quiet, work, and calm … We will give it by love, if possible, or by force, if necessary.’
‘Strongmen’
‘Stand by, and stand back’… echoes of Trump’s stochastic terrorism swirl in my mind as I drive through the desert night, listening to Ruth Ben-Ghiat’s Strongmen on audiobook. I am on a desert retreat, but I brought Ruth’s words with me, so it’s the world of ‘Strongmen’ I am retreating into. It has been three years since my interview with Ruth in Byline Times, which laid out how a crisis in masculinity paved the way for fascism.
Trump’s refusal to denounce the white supremacist Proud Boys in a 2020 debate was a strongman move, and yesterday, when Proud Boy and good friend of Roger Stone Enrique Tarrio joined his seditionist J6 colleagues by receiving a long prison term — 22 years — the US Justice Department strongarmed back.
My podcast partner Jim Stewartson often says, ‘History isn’t echoing, it’s plagiarizing.’ And I hear that clearly as I listen to the reading of Ruth’s book — the most important book for this moment in time.
‘Strongmen’ should be mandatory reading beginning in middle school.
As I absorb the content of her book three years after my first reading — having interviewed hundreds of experts in the interim and witnessed extremists deploy the fascist playbook note for note — the importance of her work cannot be overstated.
The current batch of authoritarians are unoriginal, their plays are telegraphed, and by revisiting ‘Strongmen’ with the urgency it deserves, we can better resist. For as her book teaches us, people power in the form of collective resistance to fascist leaders is often their undoing.
‘The Fascist Era’
Her book is divided into three key sections:
Getting to Power
Tools of Rule
Losing Power
In ‘Getting to Power’, Ruth delineates three periods of strongmen rule:
the fascist era (1919 - 1945)
the age of military coups (1950 - 1990)
and the new authoritarian age (1990 - present)
In her writings on military coups, we learn that patriarchal leaders often mask their desire to overthrow democratic countries by saying they’re doing it in the name of God and the people, to save the people from some imagined ‘other’. The coup may not look like a military coup, the message may be delivered by a once-respected general, allied with retired and active military.
If that once respected general has been working directly for dictators, ignore the propaganda he uses to justify his calls for violence and focus on his actions.
“Michael Flynn is one of the great villains of our time, because he is trying to radicalize the military, while also connecting the dots between religious extremism and disinformation.”—Ruth Ben-Ghiat
Currently, the US is allowing its first amendment to be used as a weapon of war by foreign enemies and domestic traitors.
Deeply concerning to me is a retired military man such as Mike Flynn, who uses violent rhetoric to incite war, has a brother in a leadership role who already failed the people by leaving Capitol police offers undefended when they were attacked on January 6 by an armed militia. Today, we learned the Grand Jury in Georgia recommended that Flynn be charged for his role in the scheme to overturn the 2020 election. And yet…
I ask you, what words should we use to describe such events?
An attempted military coup?
Ruth writes in her book that 75 percent of the countries that lost their democracy to authoritarianism post World War 2 were due to military coups.
As David Frum wrote in the Atlantic in January 2017, after Trump was installed with the help of the Russian military and such men as Mike Flynn and Paul Manafort, who worked for pro-Russian forces: ‘If this were happening in Honduras, we’d know what to call it. It’s happening here instead, and so we are baffled.”
I am not baffled. American traitors in fealty to Putin and other foreign enemy leaders are attempting to overthrow our democracy — by military coup, or any means necessary. That members of our law enforcement and intelligence agencies are sympathetic to these attempts, is unsurprising.
As Ruth notes in her book, citing a study of active and retired members of law enforcement, by ‘2019, studies of posts by former and retired police officers active in Facebook groups found that 1 in 5 current officers and 2 in 5 retired ones have made racist and dehumanizing comments about Blacks, Muslims, and other groups targeted by the Trump administration.’
Mussolini’s rise to power relied on veterans and law enforcement, and in the US, we must take a page out of German history and create an anti-fascist police force, dedicated to rooting out extremists.
Nothing is unsolvable, but we must imagine greater possibilities and then take appropriate action.
We are up against the amoral and the corrupt, for whom nothing is out of bounds.
“In propaganda as in love, anything is permissible which is successful.”
—Joseph Goebbels, Nazi minister of propaganda
We are in a communications war — we are dealing with mass murderers of truthful communication. That Trump named his QAnon propaganda site Truth Social is a supreme example of the intentional death of truth.
That we were’t informed enough in America about global politics to see that what Trump was to Putin was just another Yanukovych — even using the same handler, Paul Manafort — was our failing. That media normalized Russian and foreign enemy state assets Trump and Manafort is their failing.
The parallels to Putin’s ally Silvio Berlusconi and Trump are laid out neatly by Ruth.
Berlusconi, a sleazy media creature whose ‘election campaign marked the first time a political party was created and launched by a corporation’, declared his candidacy while he was personally in debt and his friends were going to prison. He owned 85 percent of the TV media so his face and presence was everywhere, and Trump was given corporate media carte blanche to create unreality and feed it to tens of millions of Americans. Already under contract to NBC for his unreality show, which in retrospect was another crime perpetuated against our citizens, the media created this Frankenmonster. Sleazy Trump, too, was in debt when he declared his run in autocratic fashion, descending a gilded escalator with extras paid to cheer him on, a model escort beside him.
The destruction of press freedom is a theme in ‘Strongmen’, which is why Trump’s first memorable words were ‘fake news’.
“The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction and the distinction between true and false no longer exist.”-Hannah Arendt
Although he never said it, Joseph Stalin is credited with saying ‘the death of one person is a tragedy, the death of a million is politics’ and this unquote holds true — we have become numb to numbers, as discussed in RadPod’s recent interview with Dr. Ian Garner on Putin’s trafficking of Ukraine children.
“Strongmen disappear people and knowledge.”—Ruth Ben-Ghiat
The reason independent investigative reporters are so dangerous to authoritarians is we not only know where the bodies are buried and make sure our readers also know, but we also re-appear knowledge over and over and over again.
Revisiting Ruth’s words years after my first reading is like finding a wellspring — it’s all there. She demystifies these strongmen and reveals men whose corruption causes desperate, criminal moves …
‘Losing sleep and plagued by an ulcer’…
For Mussolini to declare the first fascist dictatorship was a desperate act by a man desperate to stay in power.
People should resist when they have the chance, rather than endure decades of corrupt rule. In his death, like in Gaddafi’s, the people revealed how they feel about such men. Just as Putin will find out in his death how the people really feel about him — a thief, a mass murderer, a child trafficker.
Stripped of their propaganda and marketing, their bought journalists, and amoral speechwriters, in their death, the truth is freed.
‘The History of a Dream’
As Ruth writes in the conclusion to ‘Strongmen’:
“When autocrats fall from power, their people outwardly repudiate them and banish their memory. They use images of having lived in a state of unreality, forced to act out one man’s destructive fantasy. An Italian journalist referred to Fascism as ‘the history of a dream’, although many would term it a twenty-year long nightmore of violence and fear.”
‘Losing sleep and plagued by an ulcer’… that’s the true reality of strongmen.
‘The Demon of Fear’
Why I wrote in my ‘Oligerks’ short stories of a pill-popping Russian leader haunted by ghosts.
These mass murderers face a brutal reckoning, and Trump will be no different. His time in the barrel is coming.
According to Ruth, despite the pageantry and PR, these strongmen live in a secret state of dread at losing everything.
“Even as the strongman proclaims his infallibility, he is pursued by the demon of fear.”—Ruth Ben-Ghiat
The list of fears is long, because this was never a love story. These are mob stories, of cutthroats and blackmailers, who retreat to bunkers where they hide their wealth — ill-gotten gains that never save them in the end.
‘Keep Your Heart a Desert’
As I drive through the desert in Joshua Tree, catching as many sunrises and sunsets as I can, listening to Ruth’s words and recording notes to myself to share with you, I marvel at how much of my time is spent staying out of despair.
I have had a lot of practice in the last seven years.
“Despair is the enemy of action.”—Heidi Siegmund Cuda
I record Ruth’s poetry — such words as ‘what times those were’ — a translation from Spanish from the words of a man whose baby rattle from when he was nine months old was returned to him at 80, a rattle taken to the grave by his murdered mother. Words as metaphors — the Valley of the Fallen - a monument where Franco’s body was booted, the people resisting, refusing to venerate him.
Strongmen try to impose cruelty as the norm, and it’s our duty to recognize this war on empathy as an authoritarian device.
‘Keep your heart a desert’, Mussolini told a journalist, when asked the secret of his success.
As Ruth detailed in her book, a filmmaker who grew up under fascist rule said ‘the absence of love brought many tragedies that could have been averted.’
‘Unity’
Families are being fractured by wannabe strongmen in the US, who are using our First Amendment as a weapon of war — selling virility, corruption, and violence in a lunge for power… cheap blackmailers and cutthroats.
They are dividers of families, deployers of information warfare — dividing the people to weaken the country, so monsters like Putin and Trump can continue bloodying our world.
I have a show that preaches unity — finding common ground with family and friends who may be temporarily lost to radicalization — no one brainwashes themselves, it’s important to keep loved ones close.
My mother — who is part of the Greatest Generation — suffered a health crisis this week.
As I sit beside her, the privilege of holding her hand through the pain she is enduring and typing this report with the other hand, she asks what I am working on and I tell her.
She tells me a story I’ve never heard before.
‘My sister’s father-in-law went to prison for three months for denouncing Hitler,’ she said.
In Bavarian slang, she recites what he said, which amounted to ‘That shithead Hitler ought to be shot by a firing squad.’
He was at a beer hall when he said it, and an informant turned him in. After his wife’s repeated pleadings, he was released from prison on Christmas Eve of 1944 to be with her and their six children.
He resisted and lived.
A story to be told in a new century by my mom to her daughter who resists.
“What would things been like if during periods of mass arrests people had not sat there, paling with terror at every bang on the door..but understood they had nothing to lose and had boldly set up in the hall an ambush of half a dozen people?”
—Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
As Ruth shares story after story in ‘Strongmen’ of the power of Resistance, the power of people who come together to protest in hundreds of thousands, including here in the US, when we showed up in the millions on the day of the Women’s March in 2017, it is abundantly clear that our duty is to continue to Resist.
But we resist with the knowledge that she provides us — the ability to cut through the propaganda for what it is — corruption and violence, delivered by the mirage of strongman virility.
‘Losing sleep and plagued by an ulcer…’
As Ruth reveals their weaknesses, she give us strength.
****
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(Mussolini’s empty suit, Mussolini Museum, Italy)
