What has this to do with our theme of assassination? Just this, that during the first twelve years of Mussolini’s dictatorship he was attacked twelve times, and several of the attempts only failed by the narrowest margin.
One of the earliest and most serious attempts was by a former general who hired a room a couple of hundred yards away from the Palazzo Chigi, equipped himself with a sporting rifle fitted with telescopic sights, and waited for Mussolini to come out on the balcony to speak. This event may have inspired Geoffrey Household’s Rogue Male. The general was betrayed at the last moment, arrested, and sentenced to life imprisonment on the Lipari Islands. That is another index of the comparatively mild character of the Italian despotism. At that time the Fascist legal code still had no provision for the death penalty for a plot against the life of the head of the State.
Q. In spite of everything you say it still seems difficult to see why some person half-demented by persecution or the cruelties inflicted upon his family and friends should not have tried to take vengeance against the tyrant. There must certainly be among the victims of Nazi or Bolshevik brutality many persons too tortured in mind to be able to remember all those considerations you have advanced?
A. Undoubtedly there are, but these persons are generally too demoralized to act. If they are sufficiently distorted by their suffering to forget the consequences to their family and friends of an attack on the tyrant, they are too enfeebled to move. Fear paralyzes them. The modern totalitarian tyranny, as the German and Russian, by reason of the ideology of the ruling party and superior organization of its police force, ferrets out, identifies, and disciplines a larger percentage of its opponents than any tyranny was ever able to do in the past. The ideology of the party makes an ex-officio police agent out of every Communist in Russia and every Nazi in Germany.
The G.P.U. and Gestapo are superior to the police systems of former modern tyrannies because this is the first time that tyrannies have not been ashamed of their political police, but acknowledge, boast of them, and coerce the population to cooperate with them. The amorality of Bolshevism and Nazism, or rather their rejection of the Christian standard of behavior, is best illustrated by the exceptional position of the political police systems. Under a regime such as the Czar’s, the political police, the Okhrana, was likewise an instrument of repression, and as such the regime showed constant evidence of being ashamed of it.
The efficiency of the Okhrana suffered correspondingly. Today, in view of our experience with the G.P.U. and the Gestapo, the Okhrana seems like a benevolent association for the benefit of wayward Russians. It is instructive now to go back and read the memoirs of that great opponent of the Czar, the noble revolutionary, Prince Kropotkin. To note the comparative triviality of the offenses charged by the revolutionaries against the regime, and then to note the comparative leniency of the punishments inflicted by the Czar upon his enemies is to measure the chasm which the Bolshevik Revolution and the Red Terror dug between our New Dark Age and the imperfect, liberal, easygoing Past, the like of which no one in our generation shall ever see again.
Under the Okhrana the number of political assassinations in Russia culminating with the killing of Alexander the Second, reached an all-time high. This fact, like the attempts on Mussolini’s life, corroborate the thesis that mild Terror is ineffective, while extreme Terror may be completely effective. It seems to me to be useful to stress this fact about the Nazi or Bolshevik Terror, because one of our American democratic illusions to which we cling most fondly is that good will always triumph, liberty will eventually win over tyranny, and despots will ultimately be overthrown by their oppressed victims.
This doctrine is not only false, but one of the most harmful of our wishful thoughts, since it leads us to believe that all may come right with this very wrong world without our having to do anything about it. Another instructive pursuit is to get a copy of the old Who’s Who of the Russian Communist Party and observe that there was not a single leading member of the Party who had not been at one time or another, and frequently many times, under arrest by the Okhrana. Stalin, supreme butcher of the lot, was five times in the hands of the men whom he later was to help exterminate. One can conservatively say that if the Okhrana had been operated on the principles of the Soviet Police, not a single leader of the Bolsheviks would have been left alive, and there would have been no Bolshevik Revolution as we know it, and no Soviet Union with its melancholy record of life-taking failure, and perhaps no Nazi party in Germany, and who knows, perhaps no World War now.
Absolute Terror not only physically removes the more dangerous opponents of the tyranny but it reduces the survivors to morbid obeisance, to a sort of unwilling, servile, unconscious idolatry of the tyrant. The tyrant, when he attains the stature of Hitler or Stalin, becomes the Omnipotent Father in the subconsciousness of all his subjects, including those hostile to him. This makes it all the more difficult for the rebel to raise his hand in patricide. Those who insist that the modern tyrants are mere gangsters overlook the aura of mystic power which is created around the figure of a ruler daily greeted by choruses of adulation and abasement from tens of millions of his people. It is no more to be resisted than the rhythm of tom-toms.
When the Lion of Judah, Emperor Haile Selassie, declared formal mobilization of his ragged soldiers, he had two batteries of war drums, one in major, one in minor key, beating their defiant message all day and all night from his palace in Addis Ababa. The pulsations of the drums at the Ghibi more than two miles away came to me in my room in the stables of the Imperial hotel with a mesmeric force that made me long to follow their rhythmic directions. The same effect is obtained in the great tyrannies by the mass salutations of the tyrant worshipers.