. . . a murdering dictator shouldn’t be afforded extra privileges. The New York Times reported that in Predappio, Italy, where Benito Mussolini is buried, the city has become a shrine to his memory. Fascist followers – many who were not even born during his reign of terror – make yearly pilgrimages to celebrate his life and death.
So it goes in Predappio, three times a year, to commemorate the day of Mussolini’s birth (on July 29, 1883, in a house not far from the cemetery), his death (at the hands of partisans on April, 28, 1945) and the so-called “March on Rome,” that brought Mussolini’s party to power in Italy in October 1922.
The adoration of terrible people is confounding. Yet invariably, there are those who recall the good-old-days, which they never lived through, with irrational fondness. Mussolini was, like most of the world’s dictators, a meglomaniac, whose ego influenced his ideology, which was responsible for terrible human and inhuman horrors. The stupidity of y0ung Fascist acolytes (see slide show) can be excused by ignorance. But to build a town around Mussolini’s memory is just plain criminal.
(Photo below: Mussolini, center, mistress, right, and cohort, left, after being shot by Partisans.)
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