January 23, 2020 • 49 mins
Robert is joined again by Shereen Lani Younes to continue discussing the creator of Fascism, Gabriele D’Annunzio.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
M We're back. This is again Behind the Bastard to
the podcast where we talk about terrible people, and we're
talking about Gabriel de Nunzio, the inventor of fascism and
the inventor of claiming you had two ribs removed to
suck your own dick. Um, now, Sharine, how are you
feeling about this guy as we as we barrel into
(00:21):
part do you know he's fascinating? He's fascinating. I am intrigued. Um,
I thought he I mean, I was learned. Every second
of the last episode got more absurd as we continued. Um,
and it ended with me learning what he looked like.
So now that I haven't imagine in my head, it
(00:43):
might be easier for me to imagine what he how
he's going about his life. Um. Yeah, he's his claim
to fit his he has so many claim to fames,
which is he really does, which is crazy because you
would think, I don't know, Uh, he wouldn't quit, He
wouldn't quit. And I can't wait to learn how he
(01:04):
uh literally invented fascism, which is crazy. Yeah. This he's
got a lot of gas left in the tank. This
guy so much bullshit, He so much bullshit. He's lived
a full life of bullshit, and it's it's not even
at the halfway point. Really his activity is notable. That's
(01:25):
astonishing For a little I do want to say, like,
as interesting as I find this guy, his biography Gabrielle
de Nunzio, Poet, Seducer and the Preacher of War by
Lucy Hughes Hallett, I really recommend, like it's it's one
of the best biographies I've ever read. UM Like, very
compulsively readable. Um Hugh's Hallett is a is a fantastic
writer and very a very critical um I in a
(01:49):
really interesting way, Like I, I really appreciate her perspective
on this guy. So I very much recommend that book.
I mean, all the clothes you've read from it are
are amazing. Yeah. Abriel de Nunzio loved planes. Loved planes,
big plane fan. He'd been an enthusiastic fan of the
new technology since its inception. In nineteen nine. He had
made headlines at a famous air show in Brescia for
(02:11):
writing with an American aviator named Glenn Curtis over an
adoring crowd of thousands. The seat he sat on during
the flight was later auctioned off to his legions of
adoring fans. Prior to World War One, Gabrielle had repeatedly
pressed the Italian government to start an air force. When
the war started, Gabrielle's enormous fame and belligerent speeches managed
to secure him a lofty position in the Italian military.
(02:33):
The government expected him to write a song of war,
some brilliant poem that would light a fire in the
hearts of the Italian soldiery and helped to get the
nations fully behind a war most of them still did
not want. He was officially attached to the Third Army
as staff to the Duke of Aosta, but he was
given unlimited freedom to basically do whatever he wanted. He
could go to any part of the front he desired,
partake in any maneuvers or actions he wanted to partake in.
(02:56):
His job was generally to inspire the military in whatever
ways seemed interesting to him. So that's the job this
guy gets. At the start of World War One, Gabriel's
first trip up to the front was delayed by the
difficulty he had designing and hiring someone to sew his
custom uniforms. He eventually solved that problem while thousands of
his countrymen dashed themselves to bloody chunks and Austrian machine
(03:17):
gun nests. He spent so much time waiting at a
fancy hotel to get all of that sorted out that
yet again he went broke. His manager suggested he go
to Third Army headquarters and start working. He'd get free
food and lodging and be paid. But once he arrived
in Venice, the closest city to the front, he yet
again set him up in the fanciest possible hotel. As
much of an incorrigible dandy as he was do Nunzio's
(03:38):
writing during this period shows he was eager to actually
take part in war. On his way to the front,
he wrote in his notebook Sense of Emptiness and Distance,
Life and the Reasons for Living, a lude me between
two streams between past and future, Tedium, lukewarm water, necessity
for action. Surprisingly, this was not just bluster. Two days
after reaching Venice, he was on a naval destroyer doing
night maneuvers, heading towards the Austrian coast. Like two weeks
(04:02):
before he did this, one of those historians had been
sunk by a mind and dozens of guys had died,
so this was a very dangerous thing to do. Um.
His trip wound up not having any combat in it,
but he later spent time up at the front lines,
where he was under machine gun fire and artillery shelling regularly.
He made friends, and he saw them die horribly. Um
and none of this dimmed the nuncio's ardor for war.
(04:22):
Lucy Hughes Howett writes, blessed are those who are now
twenty years old. He said he worshiped and envied their
beauty and took enormous pleasure in the opportunities that war
afforded him to live alongside them as companions and arms.
Their deaths were marvelous to him. When they were killed,
as one after another they were, he took them into
the pantheon. He was elaborating in his writing and speeches,
making them the martyrs and cult heroes of his new
(04:44):
mythology of war. Yeah he's a guy, I mean like
he's he's doing exactly what he wants, which is like infuriating.
You know, he does that, that's his whole life. Yeah, yeah, out,
Gabrielle is is enticing. As he found the front lines,
(05:05):
he had no desire to actually take part in trench
combat because it led to all everyone dying basically anonymously
in huge groups. And if there's one thing he could
not stand, it was being part of a large, anonymous
group of men. Um he had. Yeah, so he decided
that the sky was more like the theater of war
he wanted to get involved in. UM. It had nothing Now,
(05:28):
this choice like had nothing to do with cowardice, but
it was intimately tied to his narcissism. He was absolutely
willing to die, and flying in any any length of
time was very dangerous at this period of time. UM.
What he couldn't abide was dying anonymously, and pilots were
at the time seen as the knights of the sky.
So if he died, you know, in a plane, that
was a romantic enough death for him to be willing
(05:48):
to like take the risk. Very calculated. Yeah, he never
learned to fly, but he figured he was more than
capable of being a bombardier basically dropping bombs by hand
on targets like while the guy in front flew. UM.
And now up at the front, he had befriended a pilot,
a guy named Meraglia, who told him that a bombing
raid had been planned for the city of Trieste, Austria's
(06:10):
chief port. The city had a large Italian population, was
seen by people like Gabrielle as rightfully Italy's property, and
de Nunzio here was struck by a brilliant idea. Not
only would he bomb the city, he had also devised
a way to air drop propaganda onto Trieste to try
and incite the Italian citizens to rise up against their government.
This was not an easy mission. No Italian pilot had
(06:31):
ever flown this far in a single trip, and there
would be numerous machine guns protecting the port itself from
aerial attack. It was an insanely dangerous gambit, seen as
suicidal by many, and Maraglia and Nunzio would be undertaking
this mission alone. Obviously, the attack had little military value,
but the propaganda value of dropping bombs on the Austrian
emplacements and propaganda for the Italian citizens was, in Gabrielle's
(06:53):
eyes huge. For days, he agonized over how to drop
the leaflets, which he wrote himself. He eventually went with
tiny and bags that would help the leaflets fall on
target rather than getting blown to and fro the message
itself was titled to the Italians of Trieste and promised
an imminent liberation. Each copy was handwritten by him, a
sign of how much the project mattered in Gabrielle's eyes.
(07:14):
Once it became clear that what they planned to do,
of course, the admiral in charge of Italy's air force
tried to put a stop to it. So did the
government known with any measure of power, and wanted gabriel
de Nunzio, Italy's most famous living poet and writer, to
die flying over Austria. Morale was bad enough, after the
glorious war against Austria had turned almost instantly into a
blood soaked stalemate. Instead, they wanted him to sit in
(07:35):
his hotel room and write the damn poem they'd been
counting on him to write to help motivate the war effort.
But now up at the front, Gabrielle de Nunzio found
himself unable to write. I have a horror of sedentary work,
of the pin, of the ink of paper, of all
those things now become so futile. A feverish desire for
action takes me do. Nunzio protested against being grounded and
(07:55):
a battle ensued behind the scenes of the military brass. Eventually,
De Nunzio went to the time Minister and tried flattery.
And here's how Lucy Hughes Hallett describes it in one
of the most deliciously catty sections of her book. You,
whose own spirit is so hard working and so generous,
must understand me. He stressed his physical competence. He was
not a man of letters as of the old type,
and skull cap and slippers. He was an adventurer. My
(08:17):
whole life has been a risky game, he boasted of
his past daring. I have exposed myself to danger a
thousand times against the fences and hedges of the Roman Campagna.
He adored fox hunting in France. He had often been
out on the Atlantic and chancey weather, as the fishermen
of the Landez could tell you. He had ventured repeatedly
in the enemy territory on the Western Front. He visited
the front twice, staying on the safer side of the
French lines. Most importantly, I am an aviator. I have
(08:40):
flown many times at high altitude. This wasn't strictly true either,
and he wasn't only brave. He had knowledge and skills
which could be useful. He knew Istria, he knew Trieste,
he had an observant spirit. Having presented his credentials, he
made his request in the most insistent terms, I pray
I beg repeal this odious veto. He hinted that if
he were not allowed to risk his life in his
own way, he would liberately endangered by going straight to
(09:01):
the front to bar one with my past, my future
from living the herolic life would be to cripple me,
to mutilate me, to reduce me to nothing. And the
Prime Minister was apparently impressed by his ardor, and permission
was granted for the raid. So he gets his way,
as he always tells his entire every single time, of
her her way of writing that though I love that,
(09:22):
she's just like I imagine in my head and like
in parentheses being like all this like side note, like
not true. The whole biography is written with the air
of like, yeah, she's just utterly unimpressed by a lot
of this guy's life that I love that, but also
fascinated by him and compelled to chronicle that it's an
interesting book. I mean, I will say, like in my brain.
(09:45):
When you were talking about him dropping uh, propaganda from
a plane, I was I was thinking, like he might
as well be dropping poetry books, Like isn't that one
of the same. Isn't that kind of what they wanted
him to do? Regardless, Like isn't like it's they wanted
him to inspire the people of Italy um, because like
most Italians weren't really on board with the war. Like
(10:07):
he was able to get a lot of them in
the cities on board, but like most people in Italy
were like, why are we Why would we get involved
in this stupid thing? It would be like sends our
suns off to die for this. So that's what the
government wanted, was him to convince them of that, and
instead he really wants to go be in danger um. Yeah,
and no, he just likes being a contrarian. Probably that's
(10:29):
part of it. So Gabrielle and his pilot set off
on August seven, and what followed was an outrageously dangerous adventure.
They were shot at several times and at least one
bullet struck the plane. Just flying a hundred and fifty
kilometers in that period of time was very risky and
it's really impossible to overstate just how fucking dangerous this was.
At one point, a bomb got stuck on the plane
(10:50):
and Di Nunzio had to dislodge it, an act that
could have easily led to the bomb exploding and killing
he and his pilot. Um. I'm emphasizing the danger here
because I want to make it clear that with his actions,
Gabrielle in Nzio did prove that his rhetoric wasn't empty.
He was not the sort of guy who would urge
others onto war and then stay safely in the background. UM.
He repeatedly risked his life over the course of World
War One, but the attack on Trieste was probably the
(11:12):
most insanely dangerous act of his life. When he landed
safely after dropping propaganda and bombs on Trieste and the
news broke of his new exploit, De Nunzio was more
famous than ever. He became the idol of the Italian public,
the nation's single greatest living hero. He could barely go
out in public without being mobbed, and he continued to fly,
or at least let others fly him. He dropped numerous
(11:32):
bombs and fired machine guns, but his highest preference was
at deploying propaganda. Do Nunzio was well ahead of the
curve on recognizing this as the weapon of the future,
and his most famous action was dropping leaflets over Vienna,
the Austrian capital, near the end of the war. The
propaganda would be almost the last significant written work of
Gabrielle's life, As The New Republic notes, in January nineteen sixteen,
(11:54):
he suffered a detached retina during an air raid and
was forced to lie absolutely still for several months to
save other eye. During his enforced convalescence, he composed a
text of in poetic verse prose, written line by line
on slips of paper handed to him by his daughter Nada.
These formed the basis for his memoir Naturno, which appeared
in nineteen has recently been published in supple English translation
(12:15):
by Steven Sartarelli. It was Denunzio's entry into the stream
of consciousness sweepstakes, his most openly modernist work, admired by many,
including Hemingway, in spite of the fact that he considered
his author a jerk. Naturno was De Nunzio's last major
contribution to literature. I mean, god, He's just praised as
(12:36):
a God, his entire fucking life, and I think a
part of the reason why he risked his life, I
don't think he was actually ready to die. I think
he just feels he felt invincible, and I think he
might have been it. Yeah, I mean, like, I just
think there's so much um I don't know your your
brain is a powerful thing, and if you actually think
(12:57):
you're invincible, I think there's an element that like you will,
you'll be fine, Like it's your whole life, You've gone
away with every fucking thing. You're not going to die
in a plane. And I don't think he was. He
I don't think he I think he knew the whole
time he was never going to die. I don't know.
He wrote a lot about being convinced that he would
die on these missions, and they were very dangerous, but
(13:18):
it is impossible to know, like how he really felt
in the center of this part, because like, obviously you
would have to write about being certain you were going
to die as part of what you're trying to do
is convince other men to go into situations where they'll
probably die. And I'm sure it was extremely dangerous and
I'm sure it was outrageously so like very fright frightening
and everything. But I do think there's an element to
his personality where he just thinks he's invincible because he's
(13:42):
gotten away with so much shit and he literally lands
and his life starts over again. He's a god, you
know what I mean. Like it's like exactly what he's
been since birth. Yep. And this like really is the
end of his period of time as a writer and
an artist of note, Like he stops lead producing work
after World War One, and like especially subs producing his
(14:04):
best work. Um. And while the war the end of
the war more or less brought about the end of
Gabrielle's career as an artist, it was not the end
of his career as an asshole who shoved his dick
into world affairs. Italy wound up on the winning side
of World War One, but they were by far the
junior partner on their side of the war. The French,
British and Russians rightly viewed the misturn Coats, who got
in late and sacrificed far fewer men than their allies.
(14:26):
As a result, Italy got very little in the way
of new territory at the end of the war. Gabrielle
de Nunzio considered this a mutilation, a disgusting stab in
the back after all the sacrifices he had convinced his
countrymen to make. One of the things that infuriated him
most was the fact that the territory of the Austro
Hungarian Empire was being broken up and given to its
own people. He was livid at the establishment of a
(14:46):
Slavic state and the Balkans, and particularly livid at the
fact that the city of Fume, with an assizeable Italian population,
would be a part of that state. Gabrielle Donunzio decided
he was not going to take this lying down, so
he decided to raise an army and can or the
city for Italy on his own. Yeah. The balls on
(15:06):
this guy, I mean you can see him in the
banana hammock. They're they're they're good, good, good old old balls. Um. Wow. Yeah,
the new Republican go ahead, please please Yeah. He called
in the Italian government to occupy the city, and in
(15:27):
September nineteen nineteen, after they failed to do so, he
took matters into his own hands. He marched on Fume
at the head of a Cadre of Arditi or daredevil
stormtroopers clad in the black and silver uniforms and black
fezs that would be aped like so much. That was
De Nunzio by the fascists. Greeted with cheers by the
Italian speaking locals, De Nunzio announced that he had annexed Fume,
expecting the government would take control, but there was no reaction.
(15:50):
Suddenly the poet politician found himself in charge of a
city in the grip of a delirious cocaine enhanced bachanal. Eventually, Fume,
with de Nunzio as its deuice, declared its independence. Yeah.
I keep wanting to like analyze this guy, like really okay,
I think his his fame when he was a poet,
(16:11):
were it was. It was revered and beautiful like like
like a beautiful like like not beautiful, Sorry I thought
the word I'm trying. It was he was revered as
this like artistic guy, and it was this like kind
of like a fan base that was passionate and read
his stuff, thought he was sexy whatever. But now this
kind of fame, this lesion, is this violent thing that
(16:32):
I think he's always wanted He's always wanted to command
people that will do whatever he says, and I think
he got a taste of that as a like during
the war. And it's scary the kind of power that
this guy has. He's always had, but in this scenario,
with violence and with with bringing people to literally make
(16:56):
an army, like he's always had some type of army,
is what I'm trying to say. His army as a
poet was different than his army is than this point
in his life. But it's a little scary just how um,
I don't know. It seems like he's really he's really
obsessed with being this figure and it's because he's doing
he's really good at it, I don't know well. And again,
(17:19):
as is always the case with these guys, everyone kind
of gives him what he wants. Um. You know, Like
obviously what he did was profoundly illegal, and like the
Allied forces were like, yeah, Fume has to go to Yugoslavia.
You can't let him do this, and they sent an
army to stop him when he was marching on the city.
But that army was made up of Italians and they
loved De Nunzio. They refused to attack him, and hundreds
(17:41):
of soldiers deserted to join his army as he marched
on the city. That is a third power. That's crazy,
It's almost incomprehensible. Um. Yeah, and and so in the
fall of nineteen nineteen, Gabrielle de Nunzio found himself as
the dictator of a small state on the Mediterranean post.
He was this guy's life, Jesus, well, it's something else. Um.
(18:10):
He was fifty six years old and powerfully ill with
the flu As his forces marched into town. The people
of Fume did not notice his infirmity. They were enormous
fans of the celebrity poet, and thousands of them stayed
up all nights, specifically so they could welcome their new
dictator home with rapturous applause. His soldiers were greeted in
the streets with women wearing evening dresses and carrying guns,
ready to party or do battle against the Allies should
(18:32):
they try to stop. To Nunzio, he announced the creation
of a new city state, which he believed would be
a model for human society in the future. The state
would be based around what he called the politics of
poetry Fume. He insisted would be a searchlight, radiant in
the midst of an ocean of objection. He believed that
what they built there would set a fire that would
burn down the old order in the world. And so
(18:55):
he declared, fume the city of the Holocaust. Wow. That
was ch that sentence. Jesus, this fucking guy. Wow. In
some ways, he's most similar to a guy like l
Ron Hubbard, who was like, you just kept accelerating right
up until the end, like, never take your foot off
(19:16):
the gas, like, not for a fucking second. Yeah, that
is that is crazy. It's wild. What a journey. And
he's he's young in comparison to the he's he's only
fifty something and dictator like that's a yeah, yeah, I'm
sure I've got listeners in their fifties white Even't you
(19:38):
taken over a small city on the Mediterranean? Established Republican poetry? Yeah?
Come on now, I'm gonna quote again from Lucy Hughes.
Oh wait, no, it's a it's ad break time, isn't
it is? It is? All right? Well, you know what
won't turn your city into a city of the Holocaust.
(20:00):
Whoever the ad is, whatever, exactly, they will not do that.
They do not we do. That is one of our
firm lines with advertisers. Do not create cities of the Holocaust. Anyway,
(20:22):
We're back. So I want to start with reading a
quote from Lucy Hughes Hallett on like what happens in
Fume After after Gabrielle de Nunzio takes over quote, the
place became a political laboratory. Socialists, anarchists, syndicalists, and some
of those who had begun earlier that year to call
themselves fascists congregated. There Representatives of shinn Fine, which is
(20:45):
like an Irish republican extremist group, and of nationalist groups
from India in Egypt arrived discreetly, followed by British agents.
Then there were the groups whose homeland was not of
this earth. The Union of free Spirits tending towards perfection,
who met under a fig tree in the old Town
to talk about free love and the abolition of money
and yoga, a kind of political comb street gang, described
(21:06):
by one of its members as an island of the
blessed in the infinite sea of history. Donunzian Fume was
a land of the cognate, an extra legitimate place where
normal rules didn't apply. It was also a land of cocaine,
fashionably carried in a little gold box in the waistcoat.
Pocket deserters and adrenaline star war veterans alike sought a
refuge there from the dreariness of economic depression and the
(21:26):
tedium of peace. Drug dealers and prostitutes followed them into
the city. One visitor reported he had never known sex
so cheap. So did aristocratic dilettants, runaway teenagers, poets, and
poetry lovers from all over the Western world. Human nineteen
nineteen was as magnetic to an international confraternity of discontented
idealists as San Francisco's Hate Ashbury would be in nineteen
sixty eight. But unlike the hippies, Donunzio's followers intended to
(21:49):
make war as well as love. So it's this weird
melting pot of like left wing radicals and right wing
radicals who were all united in their idea that like,
fuck everything else that's going on, let's all take murder
each other. They're just Desperation is a really dangerous tool
because I think, similar to what you said in the
last episode about like anger, like people really channeling being
(22:13):
able to like utilize the mass, the anger of the masses,
and channel in the right way. I think anger and
desperation are really related in that regard because you can
you can unify people with their desperation, and I think
that's the case with a lot of extremist groups honestly. Uh.
But and it's also it's important to note that de
Nunzio himself gets hugely into cocaine at this point, Like
(22:35):
he's a not surprisingly loves cocaine and starts like inhaling
his fucking body weight every week and fucking in blow
just like and that's part of when you try to
understand this place in this period, Like do Nunzian fume,
It floats on an ocean of blow, like like impossible
amounts of cocaine is like the only thing that would
(22:56):
make an experiment like this possible. Um, it sounds great.
I actually would have loved to be there, Like it
sounds like it kind of rules. It sounds like, I mean,
especially for the time, it sounds like this oasis in
a in a sea of dread, you know, especially I
mean art. Yeah, yeah, it was well, it wasn't safe
(23:17):
because there were also street gangs of fascists and it
was gunning each other down. Yeah, it's just this lawless,
bizarre place where everyone's making art and experimenting with new
politics and having gunfights and orgies and cocaine parties on
an hourly basis. It's just incomprehensible. That is his entire life. Honestly,
(23:38):
I can't really wrin my head around it. Every turn.
I said this before, but every turn is more absurd
than the next. Like I did not think this was
going to go here in the beginning, Like that's crazy.
He's a monster, but he's objectively one of the most
fascinating people who ever lived his life. And not be like,
what the fuck, dude, you're the most fascinating people, Like
(24:02):
a lot of historical figures like Hitler as a historical figure,
very compelling as an individual, kind of a weird, boring, gross,
sad life. De Nunzio a monster too, but like fuck,
what a what a life? Like you gotta respect it
at like a lot of that, Like that's you gotta
respect the hustle at least. It's just I'll give you that.
I'll respect the hustle. And he's just problematic in so
(24:25):
many ways. He's a monster monster. He's like, I'll run
a Hubbard where he's like this terrible person. But you
can't turn away from what he turned his life into. Um,
I mean it works. He got what he wanted every
step of the fucking way, every step of the fucking way. Basically, Dan,
does this guy not suffer. I'm waiting for this guy
(24:46):
to suffer. Just that we're getting to that a little bit,
a little bit. De Nunzio wanted Fume to be a
work of art made in the medium of human lives,
and it was certainly something public life. Was described as
a permanent street theater performance. There were constant orgies involving
huge numbers of people, and of course, like all the
cocaine in the world, there was also violence and constant
murdered by gangs of black shirted thugs. But oddly, left
(25:08):
and right found a way to meet in Fume. This
was before fascism had really taken off, and write as
Communism was in the process of taking over Russia, the
bizarre experiment in Fume attracted the support of literally every
kind of extremist. Vladimir Ilioch Lennon sent Gabrielle a pot
of Caviare and called him the only revolutionary in Europe.
Benito Mussolini expressed his deep admiration of de Nunzio, and
(25:29):
the two began a long correspondence in letters. So, like,
both Lennon and Mussolini loved this guy and what he's
doing in Fume. Um, it's so weird and it's so bizarre.
It's hard to wrap your head around. So many people
were obsessed with this guy. Like I'm thinking about what
you said about Hemingway, like even like every type of
(25:52):
person was like I gotta give it to him. But
now there's like really and len like you can't ignore
de Nunzio, Like then that's what Denunzio wants. You have
to like stare at him. You can't not He's just this,
He's he's just like a peacock. He's his entire life.
He peacocked the entirety of Europe, which is quite an accomplishment. Yeah,
(26:15):
so fun as it sounds. Fume was not a paradise.
Syphilis was astonishingly rampant, and Denunzio could be like everybody,
including de Nunzio, got syphilis. When you said partners, he
had wanted to ask like he must have had some
type of consequence. There must have he was his body
(26:36):
weight was sevent like, sexually transmitted like he was more
chlamydia than man um and Denunzio could also be a
brutal ruler. Midway through nineteen sixteen, he held a plebiscite
promising to hand over control of the city to someone
else if the people no longer wanted him in charge,
(26:56):
and he lost the plebiscite, but he did not give
up power is Centurions of Death, an elite corps of
black shirted thugs kept the city under his control, and
during this period, Gabrielle also introduced an innovation that everyone
today is tragically agonizing. Lee familiar with the Roman salute
now most people know. Most people know the Roman salute
(27:20):
better as the Nazi salute, that weird, creepy straight arm
salute that fascists and border patrol employees do. Yeah, he
invented that. He invented lying about removing your ribs to
suck your dick and the fascist salute the same guy shit.
No idea that one person was capable of achieving so much.
(27:42):
It's amazing that is I'm Harry gets way too much credit. Yeah,
fucking de Nunzio. Yo, I'm going to read a quote
from Count Carlos Sforza, an Italian diplomat and an anti
fascist politician who was a contemporary of De Nunzio's. Um.
He wrote quote, it was he who had fume invented
(28:02):
that Roman salute, which has now become also the German salute,
and which he, overlooking its implications, copied from some statue
or fresco forgetting that in Rome the sieves the citizens
greeted each other by shaking hands, and that only slaves
made the sign, which has been adopted by the subjects
of Mussolini and Hitler. So he's they were very condescending
as far as like this, Like he didn't know. He
(28:24):
liked the way it looked in statues, and so he
made his people do it, and it took off with
Mussolini's fascists, and then with Hitler's fascists, and now with
border patrol employees. Um wow, I am amazing. Literally every
second of this podcast blotter off to the floor. I
(28:45):
wish I wish this this call was recorded, because my
face just literally contorts and like my mouth is a
gape for so much of what you're saying. I cannot
believe this guy's life. It's something else down. Immediately after
taking power, De Nunzio's first action was to establish a
press office, which he used to send out communicats to
(29:07):
governments and politicians and media outlets round the world. Journalists
flocked to the city, as well as political extremists. Gabrielle
offered to arm the IRA with some of the tens
of thousands of rifles his forces had captured. He entertained
grand visions of invading England, which he hated at the
head of an Irish army, but the IRA was a
little too smart for that. They wanted guns, but Gabrielle's
(29:27):
hatred of the United States was seen as potentially alienating
the nation they saw as their greatest ally. Mussolini at
one point wrote to him and suggested that two of
them should work to overthrow the Italian monarchy and establish
a directory essentially a powerful fascist central government. Remarkably, Benito
didn't see himself as the head of this organization. He
wanted to make De Nunzio the dictator, but Gabrielle was
(29:50):
at least loyal to the Italian throne and was unwilling
to take part in such a revolution. In November of
nineteen twenty, Osbert Sitwell, an English writer, joined the crowds
of journalists in revolution suctionaries who'd come to fume. His
goal was to see what the man who has done
more for the Italian language than any writer since Dante
had done with a nation of his own and Lucy
Hughes Howett writes quote, Sitwell finds the streets full of
(30:12):
colorful desperadoes. Every man seemed to wear a uniform designed
by himself. Some more beards and had shaven heads like
the commander. Others cultivated huge tufts of hair half a
foot long waving out from their foreheads, and a black
fez at the back of the head. Cloaks, daggers, and
flowing black ties were universal, and all carried the Roman dagger.
Sitwell succeeds in securing an audience. He passes through a
(30:32):
pillared hall full of palm trees and pseudo Byzantine flower pots,
where soldiers lounged and typis rushed furiously in and out.
In an inner room almost entirely covered with banners, he
finds two more than life size carved and gilded saints
from Florence, a huge fifteenth century bronze bell, and the commandant,
as do Nunzio now likes to be called, in military
gray green, his chest striped with ribbons of his many medals.
(30:54):
He seems nervous and tired, but bald and one eyed
as he is. At the end of a few seconds,
one felt the influence of that extraordinary very charm, which
has enabled him to change howling mobs into furious partisans.
Since sit Will arrived in Fume, the great conductor Arturo
Tuscanini has brought his orchestra to the town. To celebrate
Tuscanini's visit, De Nunzio lays on a mock battle which
is as lethal as an ancient Roman circus. Four thousand
(31:16):
men take part, attacking each other with real grenades. The orchestra,
which initially provides a musical accompaniment Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, becomes
involved in the fighting. Over a hundred men are injured,
including five musicians. Now De Nunzio, discussing the event with Sitwell,
explains that his legionnaires are weary of waiting for battle.
They must fight one another. I have so many questions. Okay, first,
(31:43):
I remember you said that he didn't even like politics. No,
but this is not politics. This is being worshiped by
a whole city and having them fight for his amusement.
For he's basically eats religion. For someone who hates religion
as much as he does, he loves being worshiped. His
religion is just CULTI and worship of himself absolutely, And
(32:08):
like I've heard it said that, like you know, the
rock stars of like the sixties and seventies, like the
Beatles and the Stones and like Pink Floyd and stuff
like those guys got about as close to being a
god as anyone has ever gotten. I think the Nunzio
is the closest any human has ever experienced to really
like like, at least in the modern era. You know,
maybe earlier when he literally worshiped, but like in every field,
(32:30):
that's the thing that's wild and every field imaginable, he
was worshiped. My other question is he so he actually
lost his eye, so he was bedridden, but then he
lost the eye. Yeah, he lost one eye. So now
he's even weird, weirder looking than he was before. He's
just like, does he wear a patch. I think he
wears a glass eye. Okay, yeah, you know he's probably
(32:53):
still fucking too, so yeah, oh he is fucking constantly.
He never stops fucking, like always fucking. Yeah? Did he
also invent Viagara? What's next? What? What? What? What I
wanted to give me next? I do kind of feel
like he was one of the people who never really
needed that, Like he was the horniest man who ever lived.
Like that is that is Gabriel de Nunzio. Now, this
(33:18):
whole deliriously mad state of affairs lasted only a few
more weeks. In January of ninety one, pressed by the
League of Nations, the Italian government finally took action against
its native son. They sent a gunboat and soldiers and
laid siege to the city. A few after five days
of fighting and fifty some deaths, Gabrielle de Nunzio decided
he had finally had enough of war. Perhaps he was
scared of dying himself, or perhaps he just had no
(33:39):
stomach for fighting his fellow Italians. He left the city.
One supporter later wrote, descriptively, under a delusion flowers, he
forces his way through a city in tears. The failure
of his fume ventures seems to have drained Gabrielle of
much of his remaining energy. He was allowed back into
Italy with a squad of his cult like followers, and
he ordered them to find him a home with a
grand piano, a bath through him, a laundry, plenty of
(34:01):
wood and coal in an enclosed garden. He told them,
if within eight days none of you have found a
suitable house for me, I shall throw myself into the
Canal Jesus. Unfortunately, they found him a place and he
occupied it for three years or so until Benito Mussolini's
March on Rome ended Italy's quasi democracy and brought about
the establishment of the world's first fascist state. Mussolini's Italy
(34:22):
and the tactics he used to present himself to the
people were deeply based in things he learned from Gabrielle
to Nunzio, and the poet knew it. In one letter
to Mussolini, he wrote, am I not the precursor of
all that is good about fascism? I I'm just speechless, honestly. Like,
(34:47):
first of all, away with the dramatic guy, A very
dramatic thing, very very dramatic, where I'm going to just
throw myself. But like he really I hate to say it,
but like he thinks he's good at everything, and he
kind of was the like he was very very much
(35:08):
in Anetzcha and likes idea of the ubermention. And it's
one of those guys where it's like life didn't prove
him wrong. Like if you believe you're a superior being
and you live this guy's life, it's kind of hard
not to remain convinced of that. That's what I meant
earlier when I mentioned that I get this this feeling
of like the self fulfilling prophecy of like if you
think you're invincible, then you actually will get away with anything,
(35:30):
will be and will be invincible. Obviously it doesn't work
all the time, but with this case, having lived your
entire life this way since you were a literal baby god,
you know, it's one of the things interesting to me,
this guy being Italian and being very obsessed with like
ancient Rome and Roman iconography. The ancient Romans had um
a strategy for dealing with as most cultures had to
(35:52):
develop some sort of strategy for trying to deal with
runaway egos because it's dangerous when somebody's ego gets this
out of control, which is de Nunzio's whole life is
lesson in that. Um. So they would have these things
called triumphs. When like a Roman general went a particularly
great victory, he would be allowed to go on this
massive parade through the city. He was basically dictator for
a day. Everybody almost worshiped him for like a day,
(36:13):
and they knew that this was dangerous because it really
got on someone's ego. So while this guy is like
the center of the entire like Roman Republic and then
Empire's attention the whole day, there's a guy whose job
is to stand next to him and repeatedly whisper into
his ear basically, you're gonna die at some point, you're
going to die. Like, remember, you're going to die. You're
(36:33):
just a man, and you're going to die like like
someone should have been doing that for Denuncie into the ground. Damn. Yeah,
that's a crazy thing. Well I know that about the
it's a cool bit of history. Um So you know what,
isn't the precursor of all that's good about fascism? Sharine
(36:56):
sponsors that's right, That is right, Robert stay Roberto the
Italian unless you believe in the theory that fascism is
the inevitable descendant of capitalism, because capital will always resort
to authoritarian means to preserve itself in the face of
civil unrest um in which well, let's just go to ads.
(37:18):
So let's not linger on that one too much. We're
back so Hi. Mussolini is in charge of Italy now,
and he well understood the value of using someone like Gabrielle.
De Nunzio was too famous and popular to ignore, and
(37:39):
so will do. Trotted De Nunzio out for public events
and made sure everybody saw the poet embracing him and
his new regime. In private, Gabrielle hated this. He saw
Mussolini as an imitation, and his enormous ego could not
stand the insinuation that he had merely prepared the way
for some other greater Italian leader. Under Mussolini, the Italian
state gifted Gabrielle a ma se mansion, money and regularly
(38:01):
sent him bizarre gifts, including half of an actual battleship,
which he set up on his lawn like a gazebo.
He continued to host parties and socialized, but over the
next decade and change, his health gradually declined. He died
in nineteen thirty eight at age seventy four. Personally, Gabrielle
disagreed with most of the decisions Mussolini made. He particularly
hated the alliance with Hitler, who De Nunzio saw correctly
(38:23):
as a monster and a fool. He was briefly courted
by the anti fascist resistance in Italy as a possible
foil to Mussolini, but if that was ever something that
would have interested to Nunzio, he was far too old
to try. I quoted count Sforza a little earlier. That
was from an obituary he wrote, titled De Nunzio Inventor
of Fascism in nineteen thirty eight, and I want to
read you how it opens. The War of nineteen fourteen
(38:46):
and nineteen eighteen left in its wake, to a certain
extent everywhere, and especially in Italy and Germany, a new
category of white collar proletarians who saw themselves as troubled
wreckage in a society in which capitalism and the world
of the working man seemed equally hostile to them. By
a strange paradox, it was Gabriel de Nunzio, whose lyric
richness had been so splendid, and who became the poet
and the prophet of all these pathetic misfits. It was
(39:07):
he who was the real inventor of fascism. A. Sforza
goes on to note quote it was de Nunzio who
invented those dialogues with the crowd, which fascism later on
found so useful. At the piazzaive an Easia in Rome,
to whom shall fume belong? De Nunzio called down from
the capital balcony, and the mob of volunteers who had
invaded Fume thundered from below to us and the poet,
(39:28):
dictator and Italy, and the mob once more a noir
to us. This, to us later gave the key to
the real love of De Nunzio for the fatherland, a
love of possession, not a love of devotion and sacrifice.
Lucy Hughes Hallett writes, though Denunzio was not a fascist,
fascism was de Nunzian, and I think that really gets
at the core of it. He personally was a weirder,
(39:50):
more complicated guy. He didn't mean to invent fascism, but
the way that he addressed the crowd, the way that
he worked with the crowd, the way that he riled
people up. Um, the iconography he used, like the way
that his soldiers were dressed in like these black leather
uniforms was copied both by mussolini stormtroopers and later the SS.
The salute that he invented, you know, and he's he's
(40:11):
exchanging dozens and dozens of letters with Mussolini before the
then rises to power like there and and Mussolini's march
on Rome is very much an imitation of of the
Nunzio's March on Fume. Like he he didn't purposefully invent
fascism because of the man he was, He created it
as a byproduct of his ego. Yeah, well what what
(40:34):
what date? What year did he die? Ninety eight? Right
before the war started? Because I know at the time,
like Mussolini in particular, he was maybe one of the
first people to really utilize the film industry in his propaganda,
Like he like made an entire film studio and just
used it in the late thirties, I think it was
(40:55):
thirty seven to literally just make propaganda for fascism, and
there were just so many pro war films that were made, Uh,
like the Declaration. I guess the Allied Forces was also
like under the film studio that he like established. But
I think that union of film and politics, I have
(41:16):
to say, like probably did Unzio pave that way to
like this artistic union of of politics and like like
creative art. The first thing he established in Fume once
he was in control was a press office. Like he
was a little too early to really take advantage of television. Um,
(41:36):
I mean he was, he was filmed a number of times,
like he clearly saw the potential. But he was a
propagandist from the beginning, Like that was what he decided
his his involvement in war should be. And I think
he was just a little too old to have become
a fascist dictator. If he'd been born a bit later.
The man he was the kind of you know, charisma,
he had, the energy he had. I think that's the
kind of path he would have been on. It was
(41:57):
just a little bit early, and he was raised in
too different of a we've really wanted that as much.
I agree, I agree. I think like Mussolini is like
a version of like what he could have not become.
But like it's very I don't know Mussolini him, Yeah,
Mussolini pretended to be him and it said that like
(42:18):
a lot of people say that, like De Nunzio was
kind of what turned Mussolini was a socialist initially, and
Denunzio kind of converted him away from that. And then
Mussolini deliberately aped de Nunzio's like affectations, the way he
spoke to crowds, the way he addressed people, way he
patterned himself, um, and just did it with a little
bit more of a modern tinge to it and more
(42:40):
use of things like television and the radio, um, and
you know, than Hitler iterated from that and that was like, yeah,
that's that Tasian flattery, same thing, you know. And I
think Mussolini and Hitler they both used the mouthpiece of
their generation, which was like this new filmmaking and and
and it was film and propaganda and um, if they
(43:04):
were born at the time of Nunzio with poetry, I'm
sure it would have been that too. But uh, it's
interesting because what Mussolini did with filmmaking in Italy was
really fascinating. And like disturbing at the same time. Um,
but I think if I think you're right, I think
if the Nunzio was born a little bit later, he
(43:25):
would have used that mouthpiece the same way he used poetry,
just to gardner worship and fame and use his like
poetic verse in a different way. Uh. Yeah, it's a
pretty cool story. I'm really intrigued. Like I there, he's
(43:46):
genuinely what you said earlier. I agree with like maybe
one of the most fascinating people to have ever lived.
Like his life at every turn was more absurd than
the last. Yeah, it's kind of hard to really wrap
your head around, like how much this guy did, how
bold he was, how awful he was, Like he did
(44:07):
so much and he did and I had to leave
out so much, just like make this a comprehensible episode.
Like I really recommend the biography by Lucy Hughes Howett
Gabrielle de Nunzio, poet, seducer and preacher of war. It's
fantastic and he is just absolutely a fascinating piece of shit. Yes,
(44:31):
a fascinating piece of ship. I would agree with that. Yeah,
he's right up there with l Ron Hubbard in my
list of like, fuck, what a life. Genuinely, what a
life he got away with all of this? What a
life he got away? And I'm sure he still has
a billion of fans out there, you know what I mean, Like,
I'm sure he has. His work is obviously respected. Still
(44:52):
he's still deemed it poet. Yeah, his poetry, his books
have kind of fallen out of favor, and our scene
is sort of like, you know, they were great, they
were good in their time and respecting their time, they
haven't really continue to have legs. I think his poetry
does still have legs. He's still highly regarded as a poet. Um.
I'm obviously not equipped or qualified to comment on Italian
(45:13):
poetry or his place in there, but a lot of
experts put him as regard him highly in that field. Um. Yeah,
it's something else. Huh. Yeah, I'm I've learned a lot.
I've learned a lot, and I don't know. I hate
how indestructible he was. I really hate that. But I
(45:35):
mean it's like it's one of those things it's hard
to even get that. Like he does in his life
kind of unhappily, like Mussolini doesn't care about him or
respect him, he uses his his tactics and like, uh,
sort of treats him as a like a like a
pet almost like yeah, brings him out to like burnish
the regime's credibility, but ignores him and what he has
(45:57):
to say. And it's really like bums out and infuriates
de n Zio. But it's hard to take too much
joy in that because it means Mussolini's in charge. Yeah,
we don't win either way. We don't win. Wait, wait,
what how did he die? What was the cause of death? Oh?
I think it was like a stroke or some ship.
He's an old, old man, you know, it's not even
(46:18):
like a sex. There's rumors he was poisoned by a
Nazi agent, but I don't, I don't hear, I don't.
I don't know see any evidence behind them. I think
it's more likely he was an old man who had
horribly advanced syphilis and had been doing cocaine for like
a decade straight, or more like for probably for decades.
But I mean even with the syphilis into cocaine to
(46:42):
make it to seventy, like, yeah, that's a full life,
a good run. He had a good run. He had
a very full life. Yeah, leave anything on the table.
You can say that. Wow, So Sharine, Yes, as this
influence your own your own desires in your career as
(47:02):
a as a poet trying to figure out the best
way to it, you could lead an armed march on
the city of Fume. Yeah. I mean it's been a
while since there was a poet that I don't know
it was worshiped. I'm an audition for that role, you know. Wow,
(47:25):
I don't know poech I mean, I love poetry. Poetry
is powerful, but he really he really went a different
route with it, didn't any Yeah, he was a living
monument to the power of narcissism. Yeah, speaking of narcissism,
you want to plug your plug doubles, Yes, I do. Um,
I'm Sharn and I'm a filmmaker, I'm a poet and
(47:46):
I also co host Ethnically Ambiguous on the I Heart
Radio network. You can thought every podcast app w go
listen to it on your favorite one if you want to.
And Um, I'm Shiro Hero on instagram s h E
R O H E r oh and then on Twitter
at your hero six six six. And I have a
poetry book on Amazon called Dime Peace Like the like
(48:07):
a coin dime, and then piece like a piece of
a puzzle, and then I'm making my next one, So
stay tuned for that. If you want watch my stuff,
I don't care, just to be nice to me. You
can find me on the twits and the grams and
the twin stagrams at behind the Bastards. Uh. Well, nope,
that's not where you can find me. You can find
(48:28):
me on the twitters at I right, okay. You can
find this podcast on the twitters and the grams at
Bastards pod. You can find us on the internet behind
the Bastards dot com. Um, and you can find your
way uh into having an immortal impact on the future
by joining my upcoming cult. Um. It's gonna be a
really good time. Um. We're gonna lead a march on.
(48:49):
I don't know what city would be easy to capture.
I feel like Sacramento wouldn't put up a fight. Roseville, Roseville, Roseville.
We'll continue. You hit us up on Twitter with which
city you think we should lead an armed march on
to conquer? Yeah, we'll figure it out. Um, that's the
(49:09):
fucking episode. Yeah, thanks for having me. It's I always
learned so much. I always leave feeling so dead inside.
Didn't think it was possible to get more dead inside.
But you know what that podcast America Feel Dead Inside Again. Yeah,
that's the tagline to this podcast, right, so if we
(49:31):
need to get some hats made, No, thanks for having me, yeah,
thanks for being on
M We're back. This is again Behind the Bastard to
the podcast where we talk about terrible people, and we're
talking about Gabriel de Nunzio, the inventor of fascism and
the inventor of claiming you had two ribs removed to
suck your own dick. Um, now, Sharine, how are you
feeling about this guy as we as we barrel into
(00:21):
part do you know he's fascinating? He's fascinating. I am intrigued. Um,
I thought he I mean, I was learned. Every second
of the last episode got more absurd as we continued. Um,
and it ended with me learning what he looked like.
So now that I haven't imagine in my head, it
(00:43):
might be easier for me to imagine what he how
he's going about his life. Um. Yeah, he's his claim
to fit his he has so many claim to fames,
which is he really does, which is crazy because you
would think, I don't know, Uh, he wouldn't quit, He
wouldn't quit. And I can't wait to learn how he
(01:04):
uh literally invented fascism, which is crazy. Yeah. This he's
got a lot of gas left in the tank. This
guy so much bullshit, He so much bullshit. He's lived
a full life of bullshit, and it's it's not even
at the halfway point. Really his activity is notable. That's
(01:25):
astonishing For a little I do want to say, like,
as interesting as I find this guy, his biography Gabrielle
de Nunzio, Poet, Seducer and the Preacher of War by
Lucy Hughes Hallett, I really recommend, like it's it's one
of the best biographies I've ever read. UM Like, very
compulsively readable. Um Hugh's Hallett is a is a fantastic
writer and very a very critical um I in a
(01:49):
really interesting way, Like I, I really appreciate her perspective
on this guy. So I very much recommend that book.
I mean, all the clothes you've read from it are
are amazing. Yeah. Abriel de Nunzio loved planes. Loved planes,
big plane fan. He'd been an enthusiastic fan of the
new technology since its inception. In nineteen nine. He had
made headlines at a famous air show in Brescia for
(02:11):
writing with an American aviator named Glenn Curtis over an
adoring crowd of thousands. The seat he sat on during
the flight was later auctioned off to his legions of
adoring fans. Prior to World War One, Gabrielle had repeatedly
pressed the Italian government to start an air force. When
the war started, Gabrielle's enormous fame and belligerent speeches managed
to secure him a lofty position in the Italian military.
(02:33):
The government expected him to write a song of war,
some brilliant poem that would light a fire in the
hearts of the Italian soldiery and helped to get the
nations fully behind a war most of them still did
not want. He was officially attached to the Third Army
as staff to the Duke of Aosta, but he was
given unlimited freedom to basically do whatever he wanted. He
could go to any part of the front he desired,
partake in any maneuvers or actions he wanted to partake in.
(02:56):
His job was generally to inspire the military in whatever
ways seemed interesting to him. So that's the job this
guy gets. At the start of World War One, Gabriel's
first trip up to the front was delayed by the
difficulty he had designing and hiring someone to sew his
custom uniforms. He eventually solved that problem while thousands of
his countrymen dashed themselves to bloody chunks and Austrian machine
(03:17):
gun nests. He spent so much time waiting at a
fancy hotel to get all of that sorted out that
yet again he went broke. His manager suggested he go
to Third Army headquarters and start working. He'd get free
food and lodging and be paid. But once he arrived
in Venice, the closest city to the front, he yet
again set him up in the fanciest possible hotel. As
much of an incorrigible dandy as he was do Nunzio's
(03:38):
writing during this period shows he was eager to actually
take part in war. On his way to the front,
he wrote in his notebook Sense of Emptiness and Distance,
Life and the Reasons for Living, a lude me between
two streams between past and future, Tedium, lukewarm water, necessity
for action. Surprisingly, this was not just bluster. Two days
after reaching Venice, he was on a naval destroyer doing
night maneuvers, heading towards the Austrian coast. Like two weeks
(04:02):
before he did this, one of those historians had been
sunk by a mind and dozens of guys had died,
so this was a very dangerous thing to do. Um.
His trip wound up not having any combat in it,
but he later spent time up at the front lines,
where he was under machine gun fire and artillery shelling regularly.
He made friends, and he saw them die horribly. Um
and none of this dimmed the nuncio's ardor for war.
(04:22):
Lucy Hughes Howett writes, blessed are those who are now
twenty years old. He said he worshiped and envied their
beauty and took enormous pleasure in the opportunities that war
afforded him to live alongside them as companions and arms.
Their deaths were marvelous to him. When they were killed,
as one after another they were, he took them into
the pantheon. He was elaborating in his writing and speeches,
making them the martyrs and cult heroes of his new
(04:44):
mythology of war. Yeah he's a guy, I mean like
he's he's doing exactly what he wants, which is like infuriating.
You know, he does that, that's his whole life. Yeah, yeah, out,
Gabrielle is is enticing. As he found the front lines,
(05:05):
he had no desire to actually take part in trench
combat because it led to all everyone dying basically anonymously
in huge groups. And if there's one thing he could
not stand, it was being part of a large, anonymous
group of men. Um he had. Yeah, so he decided
that the sky was more like the theater of war
he wanted to get involved in. UM. It had nothing Now,
(05:28):
this choice like had nothing to do with cowardice, but
it was intimately tied to his narcissism. He was absolutely
willing to die, and flying in any any length of
time was very dangerous at this period of time. UM.
What he couldn't abide was dying anonymously, and pilots were
at the time seen as the knights of the sky.
So if he died, you know, in a plane, that
was a romantic enough death for him to be willing
(05:48):
to like take the risk. Very calculated. Yeah, he never
learned to fly, but he figured he was more than
capable of being a bombardier basically dropping bombs by hand
on targets like while the guy in front flew. UM.
And now up at the front, he had befriended a pilot,
a guy named Meraglia, who told him that a bombing
raid had been planned for the city of Trieste, Austria's
(06:10):
chief port. The city had a large Italian population, was
seen by people like Gabrielle as rightfully Italy's property, and
de Nunzio here was struck by a brilliant idea. Not
only would he bomb the city, he had also devised
a way to air drop propaganda onto Trieste to try
and incite the Italian citizens to rise up against their government.
This was not an easy mission. No Italian pilot had
(06:31):
ever flown this far in a single trip, and there
would be numerous machine guns protecting the port itself from
aerial attack. It was an insanely dangerous gambit, seen as
suicidal by many, and Maraglia and Nunzio would be undertaking
this mission alone. Obviously, the attack had little military value,
but the propaganda value of dropping bombs on the Austrian
emplacements and propaganda for the Italian citizens was, in Gabrielle's
(06:53):
eyes huge. For days, he agonized over how to drop
the leaflets, which he wrote himself. He eventually went with
tiny and bags that would help the leaflets fall on
target rather than getting blown to and fro the message
itself was titled to the Italians of Trieste and promised
an imminent liberation. Each copy was handwritten by him, a
sign of how much the project mattered in Gabrielle's eyes.
(07:14):
Once it became clear that what they planned to do,
of course, the admiral in charge of Italy's air force
tried to put a stop to it. So did the
government known with any measure of power, and wanted gabriel
de Nunzio, Italy's most famous living poet and writer, to
die flying over Austria. Morale was bad enough, after the
glorious war against Austria had turned almost instantly into a
blood soaked stalemate. Instead, they wanted him to sit in
(07:35):
his hotel room and write the damn poem they'd been
counting on him to write to help motivate the war effort.
But now up at the front, Gabrielle de Nunzio found
himself unable to write. I have a horror of sedentary work,
of the pin, of the ink of paper, of all
those things now become so futile. A feverish desire for
action takes me do. Nunzio protested against being grounded and
(07:55):
a battle ensued behind the scenes of the military brass. Eventually,
De Nunzio went to the time Minister and tried flattery.
And here's how Lucy Hughes Hallett describes it in one
of the most deliciously catty sections of her book. You,
whose own spirit is so hard working and so generous,
must understand me. He stressed his physical competence. He was
not a man of letters as of the old type,
and skull cap and slippers. He was an adventurer. My
(08:17):
whole life has been a risky game, he boasted of
his past daring. I have exposed myself to danger a
thousand times against the fences and hedges of the Roman Campagna.
He adored fox hunting in France. He had often been
out on the Atlantic and chancey weather, as the fishermen
of the Landez could tell you. He had ventured repeatedly
in the enemy territory on the Western Front. He visited
the front twice, staying on the safer side of the
French lines. Most importantly, I am an aviator. I have
(08:40):
flown many times at high altitude. This wasn't strictly true either,
and he wasn't only brave. He had knowledge and skills
which could be useful. He knew Istria, he knew Trieste,
he had an observant spirit. Having presented his credentials, he
made his request in the most insistent terms, I pray
I beg repeal this odious veto. He hinted that if
he were not allowed to risk his life in his
own way, he would liberately endangered by going straight to
(09:01):
the front to bar one with my past, my future
from living the herolic life would be to cripple me,
to mutilate me, to reduce me to nothing. And the
Prime Minister was apparently impressed by his ardor, and permission
was granted for the raid. So he gets his way,
as he always tells his entire every single time, of
her her way of writing that though I love that,
(09:22):
she's just like I imagine in my head and like
in parentheses being like all this like side note, like
not true. The whole biography is written with the air
of like, yeah, she's just utterly unimpressed by a lot
of this guy's life that I love that, but also
fascinated by him and compelled to chronicle that it's an
interesting book. I mean, I will say, like in my brain.
(09:45):
When you were talking about him dropping uh, propaganda from
a plane, I was I was thinking, like he might
as well be dropping poetry books, Like isn't that one
of the same. Isn't that kind of what they wanted
him to do? Regardless, Like isn't like it's they wanted
him to inspire the people of Italy um, because like
most Italians weren't really on board with the war. Like
(10:07):
he was able to get a lot of them in
the cities on board, but like most people in Italy
were like, why are we Why would we get involved
in this stupid thing? It would be like sends our
suns off to die for this. So that's what the
government wanted, was him to convince them of that, and
instead he really wants to go be in danger um. Yeah,
and no, he just likes being a contrarian. Probably that's
(10:29):
part of it. So Gabrielle and his pilot set off
on August seven, and what followed was an outrageously dangerous adventure.
They were shot at several times and at least one
bullet struck the plane. Just flying a hundred and fifty
kilometers in that period of time was very risky and
it's really impossible to overstate just how fucking dangerous this was.
At one point, a bomb got stuck on the plane
(10:50):
and Di Nunzio had to dislodge it, an act that
could have easily led to the bomb exploding and killing
he and his pilot. Um. I'm emphasizing the danger here
because I want to make it clear that with his actions,
Gabrielle in Nzio did prove that his rhetoric wasn't empty.
He was not the sort of guy who would urge
others onto war and then stay safely in the background. UM.
He repeatedly risked his life over the course of World
War One, but the attack on Trieste was probably the
(11:12):
most insanely dangerous act of his life. When he landed
safely after dropping propaganda and bombs on Trieste and the
news broke of his new exploit, De Nunzio was more
famous than ever. He became the idol of the Italian public,
the nation's single greatest living hero. He could barely go
out in public without being mobbed, and he continued to fly,
or at least let others fly him. He dropped numerous
(11:32):
bombs and fired machine guns, but his highest preference was
at deploying propaganda. Do Nunzio was well ahead of the
curve on recognizing this as the weapon of the future,
and his most famous action was dropping leaflets over Vienna,
the Austrian capital, near the end of the war. The
propaganda would be almost the last significant written work of
Gabrielle's life, As The New Republic notes, in January nineteen sixteen,
(11:54):
he suffered a detached retina during an air raid and
was forced to lie absolutely still for several months to
save other eye. During his enforced convalescence, he composed a
text of in poetic verse prose, written line by line
on slips of paper handed to him by his daughter Nada.
These formed the basis for his memoir Naturno, which appeared
in nineteen has recently been published in supple English translation
(12:15):
by Steven Sartarelli. It was Denunzio's entry into the stream
of consciousness sweepstakes, his most openly modernist work, admired by many,
including Hemingway, in spite of the fact that he considered
his author a jerk. Naturno was De Nunzio's last major
contribution to literature. I mean, god, He's just praised as
(12:36):
a God, his entire fucking life, and I think a
part of the reason why he risked his life, I
don't think he was actually ready to die. I think
he just feels he felt invincible, and I think he
might have been it. Yeah, I mean, like, I just
think there's so much um I don't know your your
brain is a powerful thing, and if you actually think
(12:57):
you're invincible, I think there's an element that like you will,
you'll be fine, Like it's your whole life, You've gone
away with every fucking thing. You're not going to die
in a plane. And I don't think he was. He
I don't think he I think he knew the whole
time he was never going to die. I don't know.
He wrote a lot about being convinced that he would
die on these missions, and they were very dangerous, but
(13:18):
it is impossible to know, like how he really felt
in the center of this part, because like, obviously you
would have to write about being certain you were going
to die as part of what you're trying to do
is convince other men to go into situations where they'll
probably die. And I'm sure it was extremely dangerous and
I'm sure it was outrageously so like very fright frightening
and everything. But I do think there's an element to
his personality where he just thinks he's invincible because he's
(13:42):
gotten away with so much shit and he literally lands
and his life starts over again. He's a god, you
know what I mean. Like it's like exactly what he's
been since birth. Yep. And this like really is the
end of his period of time as a writer and
an artist of note, Like he stops lead producing work
after World War One, and like especially subs producing his
(14:04):
best work. Um. And while the war the end of
the war more or less brought about the end of
Gabrielle's career as an artist, it was not the end
of his career as an asshole who shoved his dick
into world affairs. Italy wound up on the winning side
of World War One, but they were by far the
junior partner on their side of the war. The French,
British and Russians rightly viewed the misturn Coats, who got
in late and sacrificed far fewer men than their allies.
(14:26):
As a result, Italy got very little in the way
of new territory at the end of the war. Gabrielle
de Nunzio considered this a mutilation, a disgusting stab in
the back after all the sacrifices he had convinced his
countrymen to make. One of the things that infuriated him
most was the fact that the territory of the Austro
Hungarian Empire was being broken up and given to its
own people. He was livid at the establishment of a
(14:46):
Slavic state and the Balkans, and particularly livid at the
fact that the city of Fume, with an assizeable Italian population,
would be a part of that state. Gabrielle Donunzio decided
he was not going to take this lying down, so
he decided to raise an army and can or the
city for Italy on his own. Yeah. The balls on
(15:06):
this guy, I mean you can see him in the
banana hammock. They're they're they're good, good, good old old balls. Um. Wow. Yeah,
the new Republican go ahead, please please Yeah. He called
in the Italian government to occupy the city, and in
(15:27):
September nineteen nineteen, after they failed to do so, he
took matters into his own hands. He marched on Fume
at the head of a Cadre of Arditi or daredevil
stormtroopers clad in the black and silver uniforms and black
fezs that would be aped like so much. That was
De Nunzio by the fascists. Greeted with cheers by the
Italian speaking locals, De Nunzio announced that he had annexed Fume,
expecting the government would take control, but there was no reaction.
(15:50):
Suddenly the poet politician found himself in charge of a
city in the grip of a delirious cocaine enhanced bachanal. Eventually, Fume,
with de Nunzio as its deuice, declared its independence. Yeah.
I keep wanting to like analyze this guy, like really okay,
I think his his fame when he was a poet,
(16:11):
were it was. It was revered and beautiful like like
like a beautiful like like not beautiful, Sorry I thought
the word I'm trying. It was he was revered as
this like artistic guy, and it was this like kind
of like a fan base that was passionate and read
his stuff, thought he was sexy whatever. But now this
kind of fame, this lesion, is this violent thing that
(16:32):
I think he's always wanted He's always wanted to command
people that will do whatever he says, and I think
he got a taste of that as a like during
the war. And it's scary the kind of power that
this guy has. He's always had, but in this scenario,
with violence and with with bringing people to literally make
(16:56):
an army, like he's always had some type of army,
is what I'm trying to say. His army as a
poet was different than his army is than this point
in his life. But it's a little scary just how um,
I don't know. It seems like he's really he's really
obsessed with being this figure and it's because he's doing
he's really good at it, I don't know well. And again,
(17:19):
as is always the case with these guys, everyone kind
of gives him what he wants. Um. You know, Like
obviously what he did was profoundly illegal, and like the
Allied forces were like, yeah, Fume has to go to Yugoslavia.
You can't let him do this, and they sent an
army to stop him when he was marching on the city.
But that army was made up of Italians and they
loved De Nunzio. They refused to attack him, and hundreds
(17:41):
of soldiers deserted to join his army as he marched
on the city. That is a third power. That's crazy,
It's almost incomprehensible. Um. Yeah, and and so in the
fall of nineteen nineteen, Gabrielle de Nunzio found himself as
the dictator of a small state on the Mediterranean post.
He was this guy's life, Jesus, well, it's something else. Um.
(18:10):
He was fifty six years old and powerfully ill with
the flu As his forces marched into town. The people
of Fume did not notice his infirmity. They were enormous
fans of the celebrity poet, and thousands of them stayed
up all nights, specifically so they could welcome their new
dictator home with rapturous applause. His soldiers were greeted in
the streets with women wearing evening dresses and carrying guns,
ready to party or do battle against the Allies should
(18:32):
they try to stop. To Nunzio, he announced the creation
of a new city state, which he believed would be
a model for human society in the future. The state
would be based around what he called the politics of
poetry Fume. He insisted would be a searchlight, radiant in
the midst of an ocean of objection. He believed that
what they built there would set a fire that would
burn down the old order in the world. And so
(18:55):
he declared, fume the city of the Holocaust. Wow. That
was ch that sentence. Jesus, this fucking guy. Wow. In
some ways, he's most similar to a guy like l
Ron Hubbard, who was like, you just kept accelerating right
up until the end, like, never take your foot off
(19:16):
the gas, like, not for a fucking second. Yeah, that
is that is crazy. It's wild. What a journey. And
he's he's young in comparison to the he's he's only
fifty something and dictator like that's a yeah, yeah, I'm
sure I've got listeners in their fifties white Even't you
(19:38):
taken over a small city on the Mediterranean? Established Republican poetry? Yeah?
Come on now, I'm gonna quote again from Lucy Hughes.
Oh wait, no, it's a it's ad break time, isn't
it is? It is? All right? Well, you know what
won't turn your city into a city of the Holocaust.
(20:00):
Whoever the ad is, whatever, exactly, they will not do that.
They do not we do. That is one of our
firm lines with advertisers. Do not create cities of the Holocaust. Anyway,
(20:22):
We're back. So I want to start with reading a
quote from Lucy Hughes Hallett on like what happens in
Fume After after Gabrielle de Nunzio takes over quote, the
place became a political laboratory. Socialists, anarchists, syndicalists, and some
of those who had begun earlier that year to call
themselves fascists congregated. There Representatives of shinn Fine, which is
(20:45):
like an Irish republican extremist group, and of nationalist groups
from India in Egypt arrived discreetly, followed by British agents.
Then there were the groups whose homeland was not of
this earth. The Union of free Spirits tending towards perfection,
who met under a fig tree in the old Town
to talk about free love and the abolition of money
and yoga, a kind of political comb street gang, described
(21:06):
by one of its members as an island of the
blessed in the infinite sea of history. Donunzian Fume was
a land of the cognate, an extra legitimate place where
normal rules didn't apply. It was also a land of cocaine,
fashionably carried in a little gold box in the waistcoat.
Pocket deserters and adrenaline star war veterans alike sought a
refuge there from the dreariness of economic depression and the
(21:26):
tedium of peace. Drug dealers and prostitutes followed them into
the city. One visitor reported he had never known sex
so cheap. So did aristocratic dilettants, runaway teenagers, poets, and
poetry lovers from all over the Western world. Human nineteen
nineteen was as magnetic to an international confraternity of discontented
idealists as San Francisco's Hate Ashbury would be in nineteen
sixty eight. But unlike the hippies, Donunzio's followers intended to
(21:49):
make war as well as love. So it's this weird
melting pot of like left wing radicals and right wing
radicals who were all united in their idea that like,
fuck everything else that's going on, let's all take murder
each other. They're just Desperation is a really dangerous tool
because I think, similar to what you said in the
last episode about like anger, like people really channeling being
(22:13):
able to like utilize the mass, the anger of the masses,
and channel in the right way. I think anger and
desperation are really related in that regard because you can
you can unify people with their desperation, and I think
that's the case with a lot of extremist groups honestly. Uh.
But and it's also it's important to note that de
Nunzio himself gets hugely into cocaine at this point, Like
(22:35):
he's a not surprisingly loves cocaine and starts like inhaling
his fucking body weight every week and fucking in blow
just like and that's part of when you try to
understand this place in this period, Like do Nunzian fume,
It floats on an ocean of blow, like like impossible
amounts of cocaine is like the only thing that would
(22:56):
make an experiment like this possible. Um, it sounds great.
I actually would have loved to be there, Like it
sounds like it kind of rules. It sounds like, I mean,
especially for the time, it sounds like this oasis in
a in a sea of dread, you know, especially I
mean art. Yeah, yeah, it was well, it wasn't safe
(23:17):
because there were also street gangs of fascists and it
was gunning each other down. Yeah, it's just this lawless,
bizarre place where everyone's making art and experimenting with new
politics and having gunfights and orgies and cocaine parties on
an hourly basis. It's just incomprehensible. That is his entire life. Honestly,
(23:38):
I can't really wrin my head around it. Every turn.
I said this before, but every turn is more absurd
than the next. Like I did not think this was
going to go here in the beginning, Like that's crazy.
He's a monster, but he's objectively one of the most
fascinating people who ever lived his life. And not be like,
what the fuck, dude, you're the most fascinating people, Like
(24:02):
a lot of historical figures like Hitler as a historical figure,
very compelling as an individual, kind of a weird, boring, gross,
sad life. De Nunzio a monster too, but like fuck,
what a what a life? Like you gotta respect it
at like a lot of that, Like that's you gotta
respect the hustle at least. It's just I'll give you that.
I'll respect the hustle. And he's just problematic in so
(24:25):
many ways. He's a monster monster. He's like, I'll run
a Hubbard where he's like this terrible person. But you
can't turn away from what he turned his life into. Um,
I mean it works. He got what he wanted every
step of the fucking way, every step of the fucking way. Basically, Dan,
does this guy not suffer. I'm waiting for this guy
(24:46):
to suffer. Just that we're getting to that a little bit,
a little bit. De Nunzio wanted Fume to be a
work of art made in the medium of human lives,
and it was certainly something public life. Was described as
a permanent street theater performance. There were constant orgies involving
huge numbers of people, and of course, like all the
cocaine in the world, there was also violence and constant
murdered by gangs of black shirted thugs. But oddly, left
(25:08):
and right found a way to meet in Fume. This
was before fascism had really taken off, and write as
Communism was in the process of taking over Russia, the
bizarre experiment in Fume attracted the support of literally every
kind of extremist. Vladimir Ilioch Lennon sent Gabrielle a pot
of Caviare and called him the only revolutionary in Europe.
Benito Mussolini expressed his deep admiration of de Nunzio, and
(25:29):
the two began a long correspondence in letters. So, like,
both Lennon and Mussolini loved this guy and what he's
doing in Fume. Um, it's so weird and it's so bizarre.
It's hard to wrap your head around. So many people
were obsessed with this guy. Like I'm thinking about what
you said about Hemingway, like even like every type of
(25:52):
person was like I gotta give it to him. But
now there's like really and len like you can't ignore
de Nunzio, Like then that's what Denunzio wants. You have
to like stare at him. You can't not He's just this,
He's he's just like a peacock. He's his entire life.
He peacocked the entirety of Europe, which is quite an accomplishment. Yeah,
(26:15):
so fun as it sounds. Fume was not a paradise.
Syphilis was astonishingly rampant, and Denunzio could be like everybody,
including de Nunzio, got syphilis. When you said partners, he
had wanted to ask like he must have had some
type of consequence. There must have he was his body
(26:36):
weight was sevent like, sexually transmitted like he was more
chlamydia than man um and Denunzio could also be a
brutal ruler. Midway through nineteen sixteen, he held a plebiscite
promising to hand over control of the city to someone
else if the people no longer wanted him in charge,
(26:56):
and he lost the plebiscite, but he did not give
up power is Centurions of Death, an elite corps of
black shirted thugs kept the city under his control, and
during this period, Gabrielle also introduced an innovation that everyone
today is tragically agonizing. Lee familiar with the Roman salute
now most people know. Most people know the Roman salute
(27:20):
better as the Nazi salute, that weird, creepy straight arm
salute that fascists and border patrol employees do. Yeah, he
invented that. He invented lying about removing your ribs to
suck your dick and the fascist salute the same guy shit.
No idea that one person was capable of achieving so much.
(27:42):
It's amazing that is I'm Harry gets way too much credit. Yeah,
fucking de Nunzio. Yo, I'm going to read a quote
from Count Carlos Sforza, an Italian diplomat and an anti
fascist politician who was a contemporary of De Nunzio's. Um.
He wrote quote, it was he who had fume invented
(28:02):
that Roman salute, which has now become also the German salute,
and which he, overlooking its implications, copied from some statue
or fresco forgetting that in Rome the sieves the citizens
greeted each other by shaking hands, and that only slaves
made the sign, which has been adopted by the subjects
of Mussolini and Hitler. So he's they were very condescending
as far as like this, Like he didn't know. He
(28:24):
liked the way it looked in statues, and so he
made his people do it, and it took off with
Mussolini's fascists, and then with Hitler's fascists, and now with
border patrol employees. Um wow, I am amazing. Literally every
second of this podcast blotter off to the floor. I
(28:45):
wish I wish this this call was recorded, because my
face just literally contorts and like my mouth is a
gape for so much of what you're saying. I cannot
believe this guy's life. It's something else down. Immediately after
taking power, De Nunzio's first action was to establish a
press office, which he used to send out communicats to
(29:07):
governments and politicians and media outlets round the world. Journalists
flocked to the city, as well as political extremists. Gabrielle
offered to arm the IRA with some of the tens
of thousands of rifles his forces had captured. He entertained
grand visions of invading England, which he hated at the
head of an Irish army, but the IRA was a
little too smart for that. They wanted guns, but Gabrielle's
(29:27):
hatred of the United States was seen as potentially alienating
the nation they saw as their greatest ally. Mussolini at
one point wrote to him and suggested that two of
them should work to overthrow the Italian monarchy and establish
a directory essentially a powerful fascist central government. Remarkably, Benito
didn't see himself as the head of this organization. He
wanted to make De Nunzio the dictator, but Gabrielle was
(29:50):
at least loyal to the Italian throne and was unwilling
to take part in such a revolution. In November of
nineteen twenty, Osbert Sitwell, an English writer, joined the crowds
of journalists in revolution suctionaries who'd come to fume. His
goal was to see what the man who has done
more for the Italian language than any writer since Dante
had done with a nation of his own and Lucy
Hughes Howett writes quote, Sitwell finds the streets full of
(30:12):
colorful desperadoes. Every man seemed to wear a uniform designed
by himself. Some more beards and had shaven heads like
the commander. Others cultivated huge tufts of hair half a
foot long waving out from their foreheads, and a black
fez at the back of the head. Cloaks, daggers, and
flowing black ties were universal, and all carried the Roman dagger.
Sitwell succeeds in securing an audience. He passes through a
(30:32):
pillared hall full of palm trees and pseudo Byzantine flower pots,
where soldiers lounged and typis rushed furiously in and out.
In an inner room almost entirely covered with banners, he
finds two more than life size carved and gilded saints
from Florence, a huge fifteenth century bronze bell, and the commandant,
as do Nunzio now likes to be called, in military
gray green, his chest striped with ribbons of his many medals.
(30:54):
He seems nervous and tired, but bald and one eyed
as he is. At the end of a few seconds,
one felt the influence of that extraordinary very charm, which
has enabled him to change howling mobs into furious partisans.
Since sit Will arrived in Fume, the great conductor Arturo
Tuscanini has brought his orchestra to the town. To celebrate
Tuscanini's visit, De Nunzio lays on a mock battle which
is as lethal as an ancient Roman circus. Four thousand
(31:16):
men take part, attacking each other with real grenades. The orchestra,
which initially provides a musical accompaniment Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, becomes
involved in the fighting. Over a hundred men are injured,
including five musicians. Now De Nunzio, discussing the event with Sitwell,
explains that his legionnaires are weary of waiting for battle.
They must fight one another. I have so many questions. Okay, first,
(31:43):
I remember you said that he didn't even like politics. No,
but this is not politics. This is being worshiped by
a whole city and having them fight for his amusement.
For he's basically eats religion. For someone who hates religion
as much as he does, he loves being worshiped. His
religion is just CULTI and worship of himself absolutely, And
(32:08):
like I've heard it said that, like you know, the
rock stars of like the sixties and seventies, like the
Beatles and the Stones and like Pink Floyd and stuff
like those guys got about as close to being a
god as anyone has ever gotten. I think the Nunzio
is the closest any human has ever experienced to really
like like, at least in the modern era. You know,
maybe earlier when he literally worshiped, but like in every field,
(32:30):
that's the thing that's wild and every field imaginable, he
was worshiped. My other question is he so he actually
lost his eye, so he was bedridden, but then he
lost the eye. Yeah, he lost one eye. So now
he's even weird, weirder looking than he was before. He's
just like, does he wear a patch. I think he
wears a glass eye. Okay, yeah, you know he's probably
(32:53):
still fucking too, so yeah, oh he is fucking constantly.
He never stops fucking, like always fucking. Yeah? Did he
also invent Viagara? What's next? What? What? What? What I
wanted to give me next? I do kind of feel
like he was one of the people who never really
needed that, Like he was the horniest man who ever lived.
Like that is that is Gabriel de Nunzio. Now, this
(33:18):
whole deliriously mad state of affairs lasted only a few
more weeks. In January of ninety one, pressed by the
League of Nations, the Italian government finally took action against
its native son. They sent a gunboat and soldiers and
laid siege to the city. A few after five days
of fighting and fifty some deaths, Gabrielle de Nunzio decided
he had finally had enough of war. Perhaps he was
scared of dying himself, or perhaps he just had no
(33:39):
stomach for fighting his fellow Italians. He left the city.
One supporter later wrote, descriptively, under a delusion flowers, he
forces his way through a city in tears. The failure
of his fume ventures seems to have drained Gabrielle of
much of his remaining energy. He was allowed back into
Italy with a squad of his cult like followers, and
he ordered them to find him a home with a
grand piano, a bath through him, a laundry, plenty of
(34:01):
wood and coal in an enclosed garden. He told them,
if within eight days none of you have found a
suitable house for me, I shall throw myself into the
Canal Jesus. Unfortunately, they found him a place and he
occupied it for three years or so until Benito Mussolini's
March on Rome ended Italy's quasi democracy and brought about
the establishment of the world's first fascist state. Mussolini's Italy
(34:22):
and the tactics he used to present himself to the
people were deeply based in things he learned from Gabrielle
to Nunzio, and the poet knew it. In one letter
to Mussolini, he wrote, am I not the precursor of
all that is good about fascism? I I'm just speechless, honestly. Like,
(34:47):
first of all, away with the dramatic guy, A very
dramatic thing, very very dramatic, where I'm going to just
throw myself. But like he really I hate to say it,
but like he thinks he's good at everything, and he
kind of was the like he was very very much
(35:08):
in Anetzcha and likes idea of the ubermention. And it's
one of those guys where it's like life didn't prove
him wrong. Like if you believe you're a superior being
and you live this guy's life, it's kind of hard
not to remain convinced of that. That's what I meant
earlier when I mentioned that I get this this feeling
of like the self fulfilling prophecy of like if you
think you're invincible, then you actually will get away with anything,
(35:30):
will be and will be invincible. Obviously it doesn't work
all the time, but with this case, having lived your
entire life this way since you were a literal baby god,
you know, it's one of the things interesting to me,
this guy being Italian and being very obsessed with like
ancient Rome and Roman iconography. The ancient Romans had um
a strategy for dealing with as most cultures had to
(35:52):
develop some sort of strategy for trying to deal with
runaway egos because it's dangerous when somebody's ego gets this
out of control, which is de Nunzio's whole life is
lesson in that. Um. So they would have these things
called triumphs. When like a Roman general went a particularly
great victory, he would be allowed to go on this
massive parade through the city. He was basically dictator for
a day. Everybody almost worshiped him for like a day,
(36:13):
and they knew that this was dangerous because it really
got on someone's ego. So while this guy is like
the center of the entire like Roman Republic and then
Empire's attention the whole day, there's a guy whose job
is to stand next to him and repeatedly whisper into
his ear basically, you're gonna die at some point, you're
going to die. Like, remember, you're going to die. You're
(36:33):
just a man, and you're going to die like like
someone should have been doing that for Denuncie into the ground. Damn. Yeah,
that's a crazy thing. Well I know that about the
it's a cool bit of history. Um So you know what,
isn't the precursor of all that's good about fascism? Sharine
(36:56):
sponsors that's right, That is right, Robert stay Roberto the
Italian unless you believe in the theory that fascism is
the inevitable descendant of capitalism, because capital will always resort
to authoritarian means to preserve itself in the face of
civil unrest um in which well, let's just go to ads.
(37:18):
So let's not linger on that one too much. We're
back so Hi. Mussolini is in charge of Italy now,
and he well understood the value of using someone like Gabrielle.
De Nunzio was too famous and popular to ignore, and
(37:39):
so will do. Trotted De Nunzio out for public events
and made sure everybody saw the poet embracing him and
his new regime. In private, Gabrielle hated this. He saw
Mussolini as an imitation, and his enormous ego could not
stand the insinuation that he had merely prepared the way
for some other greater Italian leader. Under Mussolini, the Italian
state gifted Gabrielle a ma se mansion, money and regularly
(38:01):
sent him bizarre gifts, including half of an actual battleship,
which he set up on his lawn like a gazebo.
He continued to host parties and socialized, but over the
next decade and change, his health gradually declined. He died
in nineteen thirty eight at age seventy four. Personally, Gabrielle
disagreed with most of the decisions Mussolini made. He particularly
hated the alliance with Hitler, who De Nunzio saw correctly
(38:23):
as a monster and a fool. He was briefly courted
by the anti fascist resistance in Italy as a possible
foil to Mussolini, but if that was ever something that
would have interested to Nunzio, he was far too old
to try. I quoted count Sforza a little earlier. That
was from an obituary he wrote, titled De Nunzio Inventor
of Fascism in nineteen thirty eight, and I want to
read you how it opens. The War of nineteen fourteen
(38:46):
and nineteen eighteen left in its wake, to a certain
extent everywhere, and especially in Italy and Germany, a new
category of white collar proletarians who saw themselves as troubled
wreckage in a society in which capitalism and the world
of the working man seemed equally hostile to them. By
a strange paradox, it was Gabriel de Nunzio, whose lyric
richness had been so splendid, and who became the poet
and the prophet of all these pathetic misfits. It was
(39:07):
he who was the real inventor of fascism. A. Sforza
goes on to note quote it was de Nunzio who
invented those dialogues with the crowd, which fascism later on
found so useful. At the piazzaive an Easia in Rome,
to whom shall fume belong? De Nunzio called down from
the capital balcony, and the mob of volunteers who had
invaded Fume thundered from below to us and the poet,
(39:28):
dictator and Italy, and the mob once more a noir
to us. This, to us later gave the key to
the real love of De Nunzio for the fatherland, a
love of possession, not a love of devotion and sacrifice.
Lucy Hughes Hallett writes, though Denunzio was not a fascist,
fascism was de Nunzian, and I think that really gets
at the core of it. He personally was a weirder,
(39:50):
more complicated guy. He didn't mean to invent fascism, but
the way that he addressed the crowd, the way that
he worked with the crowd, the way that he riled
people up. Um, the iconography he used, like the way
that his soldiers were dressed in like these black leather
uniforms was copied both by mussolini stormtroopers and later the SS.
The salute that he invented, you know, and he's he's
(40:11):
exchanging dozens and dozens of letters with Mussolini before the
then rises to power like there and and Mussolini's march
on Rome is very much an imitation of of the
Nunzio's March on Fume. Like he he didn't purposefully invent
fascism because of the man he was, He created it
as a byproduct of his ego. Yeah, well what what
(40:34):
what date? What year did he die? Ninety eight? Right
before the war started? Because I know at the time,
like Mussolini in particular, he was maybe one of the
first people to really utilize the film industry in his propaganda,
Like he like made an entire film studio and just
used it in the late thirties, I think it was
(40:55):
thirty seven to literally just make propaganda for fascism, and
there were just so many pro war films that were made, Uh,
like the Declaration. I guess the Allied Forces was also
like under the film studio that he like established. But
I think that union of film and politics, I have
(41:16):
to say, like probably did Unzio pave that way to
like this artistic union of of politics and like like
creative art. The first thing he established in Fume once
he was in control was a press office. Like he
was a little too early to really take advantage of television. Um,
(41:36):
I mean he was, he was filmed a number of times,
like he clearly saw the potential. But he was a
propagandist from the beginning, Like that was what he decided
his his involvement in war should be. And I think
he was just a little too old to have become
a fascist dictator. If he'd been born a bit later.
The man he was the kind of you know, charisma,
he had, the energy he had. I think that's the
kind of path he would have been on. It was
(41:57):
just a little bit early, and he was raised in
too different of a we've really wanted that as much.
I agree, I agree. I think like Mussolini is like
a version of like what he could have not become.
But like it's very I don't know Mussolini him, Yeah,
Mussolini pretended to be him and it said that like
(42:18):
a lot of people say that, like De Nunzio was
kind of what turned Mussolini was a socialist initially, and
Denunzio kind of converted him away from that. And then
Mussolini deliberately aped de Nunzio's like affectations, the way he
spoke to crowds, the way he addressed people, way he
patterned himself, um, and just did it with a little
bit more of a modern tinge to it and more
(42:40):
use of things like television and the radio, um, and
you know, than Hitler iterated from that and that was like, yeah,
that's that Tasian flattery, same thing, you know. And I
think Mussolini and Hitler they both used the mouthpiece of
their generation, which was like this new filmmaking and and
and it was film and propaganda and um, if they
(43:04):
were born at the time of Nunzio with poetry, I'm
sure it would have been that too. But uh, it's
interesting because what Mussolini did with filmmaking in Italy was
really fascinating. And like disturbing at the same time. Um,
but I think if I think you're right, I think
if the Nunzio was born a little bit later, he
(43:25):
would have used that mouthpiece the same way he used poetry,
just to gardner worship and fame and use his like
poetic verse in a different way. Uh. Yeah, it's a
pretty cool story. I'm really intrigued. Like I there, he's
(43:46):
genuinely what you said earlier. I agree with like maybe
one of the most fascinating people to have ever lived.
Like his life at every turn was more absurd than
the last. Yeah, it's kind of hard to really wrap
your head around, like how much this guy did, how
bold he was, how awful he was, Like he did
(44:07):
so much and he did and I had to leave
out so much, just like make this a comprehensible episode.
Like I really recommend the biography by Lucy Hughes Howett
Gabrielle de Nunzio, poet, seducer and preacher of war. It's
fantastic and he is just absolutely a fascinating piece of shit. Yes,
(44:31):
a fascinating piece of ship. I would agree with that. Yeah,
he's right up there with l Ron Hubbard in my
list of like, fuck, what a life. Genuinely, what a
life he got away with all of this? What a
life he got away? And I'm sure he still has
a billion of fans out there, you know what I mean, Like,
I'm sure he has. His work is obviously respected. Still
(44:52):
he's still deemed it poet. Yeah, his poetry, his books
have kind of fallen out of favor, and our scene
is sort of like, you know, they were great, they
were good in their time and respecting their time, they
haven't really continue to have legs. I think his poetry
does still have legs. He's still highly regarded as a poet. Um.
I'm obviously not equipped or qualified to comment on Italian
(45:13):
poetry or his place in there, but a lot of
experts put him as regard him highly in that field. Um. Yeah,
it's something else. Huh. Yeah, I'm I've learned a lot.
I've learned a lot, and I don't know. I hate
how indestructible he was. I really hate that. But I
(45:35):
mean it's like it's one of those things it's hard
to even get that. Like he does in his life
kind of unhappily, like Mussolini doesn't care about him or
respect him, he uses his his tactics and like, uh,
sort of treats him as a like a like a
pet almost like yeah, brings him out to like burnish
the regime's credibility, but ignores him and what he has
(45:57):
to say. And it's really like bums out and infuriates
de n Zio. But it's hard to take too much
joy in that because it means Mussolini's in charge. Yeah,
we don't win either way. We don't win. Wait, wait,
what how did he die? What was the cause of death? Oh?
I think it was like a stroke or some ship.
He's an old, old man, you know, it's not even
(46:18):
like a sex. There's rumors he was poisoned by a
Nazi agent, but I don't, I don't hear, I don't.
I don't know see any evidence behind them. I think
it's more likely he was an old man who had
horribly advanced syphilis and had been doing cocaine for like
a decade straight, or more like for probably for decades.
But I mean even with the syphilis into cocaine to
(46:42):
make it to seventy, like, yeah, that's a full life,
a good run. He had a good run. He had
a very full life. Yeah, leave anything on the table.
You can say that. Wow, So Sharine, Yes, as this
influence your own your own desires in your career as
(47:02):
a as a poet trying to figure out the best
way to it, you could lead an armed march on
the city of Fume. Yeah. I mean it's been a
while since there was a poet that I don't know
it was worshiped. I'm an audition for that role, you know. Wow,
(47:25):
I don't know poech I mean, I love poetry. Poetry
is powerful, but he really he really went a different
route with it, didn't any Yeah, he was a living
monument to the power of narcissism. Yeah, speaking of narcissism,
you want to plug your plug doubles, Yes, I do. Um,
I'm Sharn and I'm a filmmaker, I'm a poet and
(47:46):
I also co host Ethnically Ambiguous on the I Heart
Radio network. You can thought every podcast app w go
listen to it on your favorite one if you want to.
And Um, I'm Shiro Hero on instagram s h E
R O H E r oh and then on Twitter
at your hero six six six. And I have a
poetry book on Amazon called Dime Peace Like the like
(48:07):
a coin dime, and then piece like a piece of
a puzzle, and then I'm making my next one, So
stay tuned for that. If you want watch my stuff,
I don't care, just to be nice to me. You
can find me on the twits and the grams and
the twin stagrams at behind the Bastards. Uh. Well, nope,
that's not where you can find me. You can find
(48:28):
me on the twitters at I right, okay. You can
find this podcast on the twitters and the grams at
Bastards pod. You can find us on the internet behind
the Bastards dot com. Um, and you can find your
way uh into having an immortal impact on the future
by joining my upcoming cult. Um. It's gonna be a
really good time. Um. We're gonna lead a march on.
(48:49):
I don't know what city would be easy to capture.
I feel like Sacramento wouldn't put up a fight. Roseville, Roseville, Roseville.
We'll continue. You hit us up on Twitter with which
city you think we should lead an armed march on
to conquer? Yeah, we'll figure it out. Um, that's the
(49:09):
fucking episode. Yeah, thanks for having me. It's I always
learned so much. I always leave feeling so dead inside.
Didn't think it was possible to get more dead inside.
But you know what that podcast America Feel Dead Inside Again. Yeah,
that's the tagline to this podcast, right, so if we
(49:31):
need to get some hats made, No, thanks for having me, yeah,
thanks for being on
Behind the Bastards News
Host
Robert Evans
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