Word: duced
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Rome-Berlin-Tokyo Axis, and Munich. Like the first, it packs no great historical surprises, but sketches in a lively picture of intrigue and ethical corrosion along with some gossipy portraits of Fascist bigwigs. As a strutting I-witness of fateful events, Ciano thought that he and the Duce were swashbuckling through history like Renaissance princes, when actually, as the diaries reveal, they were only learning to heel every time the Germans heiled...
...faithless nation. Bismark used to say that you can't have a policy with Italy when she is faithless both as friend and foe." Yet no one took a more contemptuous view of the Italian people than Mussolini himself. One incident or another kept him boiling. "The Duce has been made furiously angry ... by the bad behavior of some farmers from Bari who were being entertained in the Party House in Munich -they even relieved themselves on the stairs. A disgusting incident, likely to lower us to an unbelievable extent in the opinion of the Germans; The Chief...
...turn the army, at least, into a Prussian facsimile, Mussolini introduced the "passo Romano," a copy of the goose-step. When old soldiers and short-legged King Victor Emmanuel complained, the Duce's comment was: "People say the goose-step is Prussian. Nonsense. The goose is a Roman animal. ... It is not my fault if the King is half-size. Naturally he won't be able to do the parade step without making himself ridiculous. He will hate it for the same reason that he has always hated horses-he has to use a ladder to climb...
...quickly got on Mussolini's black list-he dared to condemn the Fascist murder of Socialist Giacomo Matteotti and to ask the King to dismiss // Duce...
When Mussolini seized power in 1922, Orlando supported him, but broke with Il Duce over the Matteotti murder in 1924. After that he abandoned politics, until in 1935 Mussolini's march into Ethiopia stirred Orlando's nationalism. He reappeared briefly in the political spotlight when he wrote Mussolini a fan letter. Otherwise, as he explained grandly: "The profound oblivion . . . descended on my name [is] the rational necessity of a historical situation imposed by destiny." In 1943, in his eighties, he presented himself to war-battered Sicily as a "heroic symbol" of Italian patriotism...