The Avant-Garde, Occultism, and Fascism

Woody Guthrie

Over the years, LoS has made some posts about swastika-shaped buildings people found on Google Earth and then claimed are homages to Nazism.  Finding that preposterous, those posts were rather sarcastic.  But this year we've looked at some monuments seen from the air that were indeed intentionally created to honor not just Nazism, but Lenin and Mussolini as well.

Snark, begone!

This present post began when we looked at fascism in the 20's and 30's and examined the parallels between the backgrounds of fascist leaders.  The political parties involved invariably had uniformed paramilitary arms (almost always identified by the color of their shirts).  The dictators, almost to a man, had a background in the arts and an interest in occultism and/or mysticism.  Leaders of various fascist movements around the globe, prior to their political lives, were poets or novelists, playwrights, or, in the case of Hitler, a painter.   Some of them had been pretty successful at it.  There are a handful of journalists in the mix.

Naturally, there are a lot of fascist flags and emblems in this post in order to compare and contrast their aesthetics.  If you're triggered by that sort of thing, you might as well stop here.  Just to be clear, fascism is not something we find amusing or with which we sympathize.  I think I can speak for The Gid when I say we are not only completely unsympathetic to fascism, but we are decidedly anti-fascist.  Not black-bloc Antifa types hurling bricks at ATM's, but just good-old American anti-fascists, like our grandparents.  Like Woody Guthrie.  You know, like it was before Herr Trump and his GOP and Fox News enablers made "anti-fascist" sound like a sinister thing.

So, with that said, we are unapologetically intrigued at how many of those fascist leaders were artsy types involved with mysticism and the occult.  And colored shirts.

The earliest fascist party we'll talk about is the NSDAP, aka the Nazis.  The movement's influences from Viennese occult lodges are well-documented.  See The Occult Roots of Nazism for details.  The book is a legitimate work of scholarship, not whacky conspiracy nonsense.  It's a long book, too long to summarize, but it shows how much of the more esoteric ideology and imagery Hitler used in his Nazi aesthetics and ideology originated with his involvement in these groups, especially the Thule Society (1918).  

Thule was a mythical place believed by the ancient Greeks to be the northernmost region of the world.  The Thule Society, and the Nazis, believed it to be the homeland of the Aryan race.  This is why both used the swastika as an emblem.

Seal of the Theosophical Society

The Thule Society itself was influenced by The Theosophical Society, founded in 1875 and based primarily on writings of Russian occultist Helena Blavatsky (Theosophy = Theology + Philosophy).  Theosophy quickly became quite influential in European occultism.  The Thule Society embraced a more racialized version of Theosophy called Ariosophy (developed by Lanz von Liebenfels). 

"Ario" refers to the Aryans, an ancient Indo-Iranian people.  They, like many ancient Eurasian peoples, used the swastika as an important religious symbol.  Until Hitler tarnished it, the swastika was a widely-known symbol for good luck in the West, and is today still widely-used in India and East Asia by Hindus, Buddhists, and Jains.  The Theosophy "logo" contains a Hindu-style swastika, facing right and set a at a 90° angle.

"Swastika" is a Sanskrit word (roughly meaning "conducive to well-being") and can be found decorating Hindu and Greek temples, Hopi designs, and has even been found in an ancient synagogue in Capernaum.  Some years ago Microsoft removed the swastika from it's "special characters" Unicode after customer complaints.  It had been included because Japanese maps use the symbol to indicate the location of shrines and temples, much as on Western maps use a cross to indicate a church, a Star of David a synagogue, and a crescent, a mosque.

SA Flag

The Nazi flag is pretty well-known, so I won't include it here.  What I will show is the flag of the SA.  Note the lightning-bolt motif.  The SA (Sturmabteilung, 1921) was the paramilitary wing of the NSDAP (Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei,, 1920).  Not to be confused with the SS, the SA were uniformed, paramilitary members of the political party and commonly referred to as the "Brownshirts."  They served as bodyguards and muscle for the fledgling Nazi party.

Hitler had served with some distinction as a corporal in WW1, after which he embarked upon an unsuccessful career as an artist.  Germany's defeat left him deeply embittered, and his artistic failures only deepened that bitterness.  He details how he came to blame both of these experiences on Jews in Mein Kampf.  The theatrics and spectacle of Nazism may be the expression of his frustrated artistic ambitions.  He was a very hands-on dictator, designing everything from the cutlery to the furniture he used in the Chancellery.  Even as the Russians marched on Berlin in his final days, he pored over Albert Speers' plans and models for the Berlin of the "Thousand-Year Reich."

It was during his lean years as a starving artist that Hitler became involved in the occult demimonde in Vienna and was exposed to Ariosophy.  It was here he picked up on the swastika, Aryan lore, and even the idea of a "master race."  

To what degree he believed in the mystical ideas is unclear, and one must be careful not to overstate the degree to which he adopted the beliefs of these occult groups into his worldview, but he knew political theater, and effectively used it to manipulate an entire nation.

Flag of the Regency of Carnaro

Gabriele D'Annunzio had an important if indirect influence on Hitler's theatrics.  He was both rival and influence on Mussolini.  The black shirts of his paramilitary group, the famous balcony speeches....he was even at times called Il Duce.  When Hitler became the dictator of Germany he took the title Der Führer or "leader," a practice he picked up from Mussolini.

D'Annunzio adhered to a mystical philosophy and had became involved in an esoteric form of Italian Freemasonry.  His political ambitions were briefly successful in creating the Italian Regency of Carnaro (1919-1920) where he was sometimes called "Comandante." Basically a city-state, its charter was an odd mix of anarchist, proto-fascist and democratic republican ideas.

He started as a poet, playwright, orator, journalist, (and aristocrat).  He ended up founding his city-state and is credited with creating Italian fascism.  Like Hitler, he served in WW1, but as a lieutenant. 

Benito Mussolini was influenced by portions of the constitution, and by D'Annunzio's style of leadership as a whole. D'Annunzio has been described as the John the Baptist of Italian Fascism, as virtually the entire ritual of Fascism was invented by D'Annunzio during his occupation of Fiume and his leadership of the Italian Regency of Carnaro.  These included the balcony address, the Roman salute, the cries of "Eia, eia, eia! Alala!" taken from the Achilles' cry in the Iliad, the dramatic and rhetorical dialogue with the crowd, and the use of religious symbols in new secular settings.  It also included his method of government in Fiume: the economics of the corporate state; stage tricks; large emotive nationalistic public rituals; and blackshirted followers, the Arditi, with their disciplined, bestial responses and strongarm repression of dissent.

The Roman salute, BTW, is never depicted or even described in Roman art and literature, and is now known as the Fascist salute. Although D'Annunzio created it, it's now most commonly associated with the Nazis.  And D'Annunzio's influences on Mussolini evoke many of Hitler's practices.  No Eia, eia, eia! Alala!" but plenty of Seig Heils!

Flag used by Italian Fascists

MSVN Flag

As we said above, Benito Mussolini also had his Blackshirts, the MVSN (Milizia Volontaria per la Sicurezza Nazionale), the paramilitary wing of the National Fascist Party (1921-1943).  Their flag features a skull reminiscent of the Nazi Totenkopf, sans crossbones.

As dictator, Mussolini took the title Il Duce, but he'd actually first been called that after being made editor of the Socialist newspaper Avanti!.  He too had served as in WW1.  Like Hitler, he both rose to the rank of corporal and was wounded in action.

The Great War clearly had an immense impact upon the three future dictators.  Not having read their own words on the subject, I wouldn't want to begin to armchair-psychoanalyze them, but I'm willing to bet there's no dearth of material on the subject.

Filippo Tommaso Marinettii was a poet, art theorist, editor, and fascist.  He co-wrote the Fascist Manifesto (1919).

Marinetti was also the principal architect of Italian Futurism.  Futurism had an enormous impact on Modernist art.  It was roughly contemporaneous with Dada, and each movement influenced the other. Many Dadaists went on to become active participants in the Surrealist movement.  From Surrealism grew Lettrism and Situationism, the latter of which proved very potent; in May, 1968, students inspired by its ideas spearheaded a series of strikes and street protests that almost toppled the French government.

The Dada-Surrealism-Lettrism-Situationism lineage was decidedly Marxist.  Futurism, on the other hand, in Italy, was fascist in nature.

Among other Modernist movements, Italian Futurism influenced the development of concrete poetry and music.  Indeed, the essay The Art of Noises gave birth to an entirely new kind of music, musique concrète, that integrated everyday sounds into compositions:  train whistles, honking horns, engines, etc.  Music critic and cultural theorist Greil Marcus traces the development of late-20th century Punk and Industrial music back to Futurism and Dadaism.  

The term "Industrial" hearkens back to the ideas of Italian Futurism.  The very name "Futurism" derives from the movement's concern with technology, invention, and its effect on art.  Electronic music and sampling led to Industrial, House, Hip-hop, and a whole slew of avant-garde experimentation.

(See Ubuweb for examples of Lettrist, Situationist, Dadaist, and Futurist works, among other Avant-Garde  movements.)

Throbbing Gristle Logo

Noises produced by everyday objects would wind up in the compositions of Edgar Varèse, sometimes called the "Father of Electronic Music," and of course the early Industrial genre, especially Throbbing Gristle (TG), Z'ev, Boyd Rice, and Cabaret Voltaire (named after the cabaret in Zurich which was one of the birthplaces of Dada, ca. 1916).

Rice has called himself an "aesthetic fascist," is an occultist and was once a highly-visible member of The Church of Satan.  TG, friends of Rice, also flirted with fascist imagery and used Oswald Mosley's lightning bolt as a symbol for the band.  

David Bowie also used the lightning bolt symbol in his stage sets.  In the coked-up years around 1976, Bowie famously said in an interview that "Adolf Hitler was one of the first rock stars."  His mother was in Mosley's BUF - see below - and he did flirt with fascism, although I don't think he was a fascist.  

I think Bowie was making the same connection between the adulation of rock stars at concerts and fascist rallies Pink Floyd made in The Wall.  In the film, rock star Pink has a mental breakdown, and, in a drugged state, imagines himself as a fascist dictator and holds a series of rallies.  The black and red crossed banners of Pink's political party, the black uniforms of Pink and his followers, the violence they stir up, are clearly modeled on real-life English fascist Oswald Mosley and the Nazis. 

 

Marilyn Manson's best songs all seem to be covers.  And he covered the imagery of Rice, Pink Floyd, and Mosley on his Antichrist Superstar tour when he used a similar lightning bolt-in-a-circle logo, black military-stye uniforms, big podiums, and banners in his stage sets.  Manson was also a friend, even a protege, of Rice, and joined the Church of Satan. 

Manson seems to have put on the show Rice wishes he could have staged, but couldn't, because Rice's music is simply far too extreme to make the kind of money Manson has made during his career.  Oh, and don't forget channeling Alice Cooper.  In Cooper's day it was "shock rock," or what the "Decadent" French poets, including Baudelaire and Rimbaud, called "Épater la bourgeoisie," that is to say, shock the middle classes.  

 

But most of it was show.  For a real transgressive rocker, check out G.G. Allin!  That dude ate laxatives before his shows so he could shit on stage, smear it over his usually naked body, fling it about, and punch up audience members.  Not really on point, but he transgressed the norms in ways that make Cooper and Manson look like Girl Scouts.  Need it be said that at times Allin adopted fascist elements in his look?

TG co-founder Genesis P-Orridge went on to found Thee Temple of Psychick Youth, an "anti-cult" with strong influences from The Process Church of the Final Judgement, whose symbol in some ways resembles a swastika.  Both groups toyed with fascist imagery and embraced convoluted occult doctrines.  The Process Church also inspired the name of Adam Parfrey's Process Media.  Parfrey was a pal of Boyd Rice and published Anton LaVey and works about the Process Church.

Flag of the BUF

So, Oswald Mosley, finally.  Like D'Annunzio, Mosley served as a lieutenant in WW1 and was an aristocrat (Sir Oswald Mosley, 6th Baronet).  After serving as an MP for different political parties, he founded the British Union of Fascists (1932).  The BUF had a paramilitary wing called the "Biff Boys".  They wore all black uniforms and their flag was a lightning bolt with a similar color scheme to the Nazis.  Like the NSDAP and the Italian Fascists, his party's uniformed paramilitary put a little fisticuffs into his politics.

A brief aside.  Biff Boys....Can't help but think of the Proud Boys.  The Proud Boys are an alt-right and some say Neo-Fascist group who serve much the same purpose as the Biff Boys or any other x-shirted group.  They like brawling with leftists.

Proud Boys Flag

They favor black and yellow Fred Perry polo shirts, a brand previously associated with skinheads (much to Fred Perry's chagrin).  The Proud Boys aren't the paramilitary arm of a specific party, but they tend to wear MAGA hats and thus, identify as pro-Trump.  They engage in street brawls with Antifa, BLM and other progressive or leftist groups.  They espouse pretty much what you'd expect of any reactionary group:  Western chauvinism, anti-Feminism, anti-Communism, homophobia, racism, antisemitism, and an unabashed belief that a good punch-up is an effective way to keep the left in line.

The Proud Boys was founded by English-born Canadian Gavin McInness.  He was a journalist and a co-founder of Vice magazine.  I wonder if these journalists, frustrated by the lack of direct results with their words, turn to fascism and street-fighting as a way to more effectively propagate their views.  Instead of op-eds, why not pop heads?

Across the pond, The Silver Legion of America (1933), was founded by William Dudley Pelley as a direct result of Hitler becoming Chancellor of Germany, where Hitler, presumably, was busy designing spoons. The "Legionaries" were informally called the Silver Shirts.  Like Mussolini, Pelley had been a journalist, but he was also an award-winning screenwriter, and had become a spiritualist.  He never became a dictator, just a fascist sympathizer, but like Hitler and Mussolini, he took a title anyway.  Followers called him "The Chief."  Another writer/journalist mystic with a thing for shirts.  He first became famous in 1933 when he wrote about an out-of-body experience during which he claimed to have visited other planes of existence and which left him able to levitate, see through walls, and leave his body at will.  His religious system has been described as "a mixture of theosophy, spiritualism, Rosicrucianism, and pyramidism."  

His politics were typical fascist fare: anti-Communism, antisemitism, patriotism, corporatism, and something which persists today among Neo-Fascist Christian Identity movements, British Israelism.  During WW2 he opposed FDR and was eventually charged with sedition and later, securities fraud. 

After being released from prison he developed a religious philosophy involving UFO's and aliens. Which is a whole other canna worms.  There's a whole slew of literature about Nazis, UFO's, the Thule Society, and the Vril Society.  This latter is a weird one.  A genuine religious ideology based on a novel.  You've heard of Marmite for sure.  What about Bovril?  The founder of that goop believed it would boost your "Vril energy."  Alien-given super powers!  

Some posit that there was a Vril Society that served as an inner circle of the Thule Society before WW2, and others claim a Neo-Nazi group in Vienna continued the work, which is where it is alleged the UFO-links were elaborated.  Thing is, the Vril concept comes from a novel.  But many occultists, including Blavatsky, believed it was based on actual occult knowledge.

Flag of the Falange Militia

 

Francisco Franco took the title "El Caudillo," and the fascist paramilitary of the FE de las JONS (1934) was known as the "Falange Militia," unofficially called the "Blueshirts."  Caudillo roughly translates to "Warlord" or "Strongman," but could just as easily be translated as "Chief" or "Head Man," like our next (non-fascist) artistic mystic who went into fringe politics.  

Alone among our fascists, Franco wasn't into any mystic stuff, not a poet, journalist or painter.  He did write a novel, Raza, at some point, but he wasn't really an artist.  He was a career military man, and his fascist ideology was your typical antisemitic, nationalist, anti-Masonic stuff.  Franco never really made use of the grand theatrics, eye-catching symbols, or rallies, etc.  But he was also the only fascist dictator who lasted.  After the Civil War that put him in power, there was pretty much peace.  He was authoritarian and brutally repressive, but Spain experienced economic prosperity, and, after, his death in 1975, his successor King Carlos was able to help transition Spain back into democracy.  And it remains democratic.  

Every few years my wife gets her ballots in the mail, and it seems half of them are for Falangist candidates.  I once bought a clay kid's figurine of a Blueshirt giving the fascist salute from what I suspect was a German Neo-Fascist. He gave me 50% off because it was "for the boy" and "it is cute, no?"

 

I no longer have it because I broke the fucker.  A kid's toy, basically a fascist kewpie doll.  One of my weirder lapses of ethics

Flag of the Social Credit Party

John Hargrave was involved in Scouting and first created the Kibbo Kift Kindred (unfortunately abbreviated as KKK, 1920), which morphed into the Green Shirt Movement for Social Credit (circa 1932), finally becoming  the Social Credit Party of Great Britain and Northern Ireland (1935).  During his KKK days he was known as the "Head Man" (Caudillo?).  His party's Green Shirts marched, provided security, and brawled with Mosley's Blackshirts and Communist Red Shirts.  Although not a fascist, Hargrave was a charismatic and authoritarian leader, known for his theatrics, ritual, and the use of a uniformed paramilitary.

These paramilitary groups almost remind me of street gangs, and like the Crips (blue) and Bloods (red), signaled their allegiance by the color, not of their bandanas, but their shirts. Hargave was also an occultist:

John Hargrave was many things; a pagan cult leader, a brick hurling radical, a pioneer of universal income, a thriller novelist, a psychic healer, an inventor of note, a control freak, and always, to the very end, a utopian dreamer.

Boyd Rice Wolfsangel

Boyd Rice, mentioned before, is best known as as avant-garde musician of the early Industrial scene, a more pop-based kind of musique concrète that grew out of a melange of the "classical" tradition and Italian Futurism.  Rice is also an artist, essayist, novelist, and occultist.  He has definitely "flirted with fascism," integrating the ouroboros, as in the Theosophy "logo," and the Wolfsangel, an old German rune, into his personal iconography.

Similar runes figure on several German coats of arms.  After its use by the Nazis, including several SS and Wehrmacht units, it has been adopted by several Neo-Nazi groups, including the Aryan Nations.  Rice says it represents the occult principle of the "reconciliation of opposites," but given its association with Neo-Nazis, it's a dubious choice at best.  Note also that the ouroboros figures on D'Annunzio's flag of the Regency of Carnaro.  Rice cites D'Annunzio as a personal hero; perhaps the archetypal "aesthetic fascist...." 

 

Church of Satan Emblem

 

During later years the Church of Satan adopted an inverted pentagram traversed by a lightning bolt, recalling Mosley and its (ironic?) use by Bowie, Manson, and TG.  The Satanic Bible uses quasi-fascist rhetoric cribbed from the Social Darwinist and antisemitic Might is Right.

The Church of Satan, though not explicitly fascist, embraces strength, force, vengeance, and rule by the elite.  Its iconography and doctrines have always leaned right, even though the Church itself denies any political ideology.  Members such as Marilyn Manson and Rice have embraced fascist aesthetics, and though they themselves might not actually be fascists, toying with its imagery, if anything, neatly demonstrates the foundation of this post.  Namely, the intersection of art, fascism, and the occult.

Flag of the the Tatenokai

Emblem of the MSVN

 

 

 

Another author that dabbled in fascistic, ultra-nationalist politics was Japanese author Yukio Mishima, who created a paramilitary group called the Tatenokai (楯の会, 楯の會) or "Shield Society."  They were ardently anti-Communist, nationalist and sought to restore the Emperor to power.  They even attempted a coup in 1970.

Though there's no indication Mishima was directly inspired by D'Annunzio or Mussolini, the speech he gave to try and rouse military cadets to rise up against the government was given from a balcony, a staple of Italian fascist stagecraft.  The flag of the Tatenokai brings to mind the emblem of the MSVN, but I think this is more coincidence than anything else.

The flag includes the symbol of the Japanese emperor, the sun, and a samurai helmet.  It resembles the MSVN flag in form.  Both flags evoke power through armed might, and both pay homage to their nations' imperial pasts; one with the fasces of the Roman emperor, the other with the sun of the Japanese emperor.  Fascist rhetoric evokes the mystical past because the present often sucks, the future's uncertain, and past is always easy to portray as "glorious." Atavism is a staple of right-wing ideology (Make America Great Again).

By the by, Mishima was apparently wont to evoke the ouroboros towards the end of his life.  No other indication, as far as I know, that he was into the occult...

 

Would-be fascist occultists are still walking around.  Have you heard of one Augustus Sol Invictus, born Austin Mitchell Gillespie?  Better call Sol.

"Invictus" is a Florida lawyer who attempted to win office as a Libertarian, yet who has been denounced as a Neo-Nazi.

During his campaign for the US senate he was accused of dismembering a goat and drinking its blood.  Invictus admitted he made this sacrifice as a way of thanking the gods after a pilgrimage he made to the Mojave desert.  He denies being a fascist, and apparently has renounced his past enthusiasm for eugenics, but who knows?  He was a Thelemite, but was expelled from the OTO, ostensibly for the goat sacrifice, but also just as likely for his popularity among white supremacists.

That said, I should point out a certain hypocrisy regarding the sacrificed goat. 

Near Tampa is the community of Tarpon Springs, a community founded by Greek immigrants.  The Greek Orthodox Church remains an important institution there today.  Normally, it it forbidden to keep and slaughter animals in a residential area or without a bevy of permits.  But in keeping with Greek tradition, Tarpon Springs residents are permitted keep and slaughter a sheep at their homes to celebrate Easter.  One hopes it's fast and not cruel, but whatever the case, a whole community sacrifices animals at Easter and it's a-ok.  A Thelemite does it and it's bonkers.  

Of course, the Greeks don't drink the blood, I think.  Not literally, anyway.  If you believe in transubstantiation, Catholics literally drink the blood of Christ and eat his flesh.  Every week.  Sol Invictus may be a weirdo, but hell, millions of other theophagists are just fine.

If I were much more clever, I would try to figure out why the occult, art, and fascism often hold the same allure.  But I won't.  I think it's clear artists want to say something, to bring something from nothing.  To make manifest their will.  Isn't politics something like that as well?

I believe Crowley was the one who defined "magick" as making one's will manifest. "Do what thou wilt."  Makes me think of Triumph of the Will (1935).

 

Without getting overly heady, in many ways art, occultism, and magick boil down to effecting one's will.  It's not done by voting or by committee, but by thinking it and willing it into existence.  Fascist states were essentially big canvases upon which a leader imposed his vision, without scruple.

I don't know how to end this thing, so I suppose I will simply end it here and let you make of all this, erm, what thou wilt....

Burn Baby, Burn!

On the 20th we posted about monuments which can only be seen from above or from afar, including geoglyphs such as hill figures, effigy mounds and the Nazca lines.  What started it all were a few examples of monuments made of living trees.  One was a benign Celtic cross, a few were celebrations of Lenin's birthday centennial, and then there were the swastikas.  Three of them!  (See Forest for the Trees, Stones for the Mountain)

But we neglected to include another fascist monument.  In this case it's a monument to Hitler's pal Benito Mussolini, aka "Il Duce".  The tree memorial in questions spell out "DVX" ("leader"). But we'll get back to that in a moment.

Mussolini was officially the Prime Minister of Italy from 1922 until he was formally dismissed by King Victor Emmanuel in July, 1943, then promptly arrested.  Ensuing events are too complex to summarize here, but as the Allies began to advance into Italy in April, Mussolini and his girlfriend Clara Petacci decided it was time to flee.  As they were heading to Switzerland to catch a plane to Fascist Spain, he and Petacci, along with some of his closest cohorts, were captured by Communist partisans on April, 27th.  A day later, the couple and most of their cohorts were shot in the village of Giulino di Mezzegra -- only two days before Hitler and his mistress killed themselves just outside their bunker as the Russians advanced upon Berlin.  The bodies were then brought to Milan.  The long-suffering Italians were none too happy with their former leader, to whit:

After being kicked and spat upon, the bodies were hung upside down from the roof of an Esso gas station. The bodies were then stoned from below by civilians. This was done both to discourage any Fascists from continuing the fight, and as an act of revenge for the hanging of many partisans in the same place by Axis authorities. The corpse of the deposed leader was subject to ridicule and abuse. (Wikipedia)

His corpse had an active afterlife.  It was buried in an unmarked grave, then dug up a year later by Fascists.  It was found months later after being constantly moved around in order to avoid being discovered.  The body was then stuffed into a trunk and hidden in a town near Milan.  There it was kept for another decade before the authorities agreed to allow Mussolini's body to be re-interred in the town of his birth.  Here he was accorded the courtesy of a crypt, flanked by marble fasces and topped with a marble bust.  

Hitler's remains also had a curious afterlife, but the Russians weren't taking any chances and the exact fate of his remains, erm, remains unknown.  Like the US did when they hid the corpses of Che Guevara and Bin Laden, the Russians kept the location of their burial unknown from preventing it from becoming a pilgrimage site (See No Body Home)

Il Duce derives from the Latin word dux (leader), and gives us the word "duke" in English.  The title had been used outside the traditional noble usage to refer to Garibaldi in 1860, although he never used it himself.  King Victor Emmanuel III was called "Duce Supremo" during WWI, and Gabriele d'Annunzio used the title as dictator of the Italian Regency of Carnaro in 1920.  Incidentally, D'Annunzio was an untranationalist who, though he never self-identified as a fascist, is often "credited" with partially inventing Italian fascism and was an influence on the ideas and Fascist aesthetics (the Black Shirts, balcony speeches, etc.) of Mussolini.  D'Annunzio was critical of Mussolini, and the latter saw him as a rival and a threat to his leadership, especially his alliance with Hitler.  It is said Mussolini supported D'Annunzio financially as a kind of "bribe" to keep him out of politics.

Of course, Mussolini is who we usually think of when we hear the title Il Duce, just as we think of Hitler when we hear the title Der Führer, which, incidentally, also means "leader".  Indeed:

This position was the model which other fascist leaders adopted, such as the position of Führer by Adolf Hitler and Caudillo by Francisco Franco.

Mussolini actually was first called by the title as early as 1912, after he was appointed editor of Avanti!  This paper, founded in 1896 "as the official voice of the Italian Socialist Party," still exists, although in 1976 its political alignment shifted to social democracy  (a socialist tradition, it promotes a gradual and democratic, as opposed to revolutionary, move towards socialism within a capitalist "mixed" economic system.  I'm sure that's a bit simplistic but you get the idea).

Enter the "fascist forest".  On Monte Giano, about 100k from Rome, cadets at the Scuola Allievi Guardie Forestali (a forestry academy) in the aptly-named town of Cittaducale ("ducal city") planted about 20,000 fir trees in 1938-39 to honor Il Duce by spelling out "DUX." 

 

A first attempt to eradicate the forest took place in the 1950's, and in 1998, after years of neglect, the center-left regional government allocated over 100,000 USD to both revitalize the forest and obscure the letters.  But in 2004, the neo-Fascist leader of a by then far-right regional government started to restore them.  Then in 2017, a motorist passing through the area was cooking tomato sauce (can't make this stuff up) accidentally (?) started a forest fire which did what earlier, human-led attempts failed to do.  

"Accidentally?"  According to The Local, -- "Italy's News in English":

...forestry police....found paper balls and inflammable liquid on the mountain believed to have been used to spread the fire deliberately, according to Rome-based daily Il Messaggero.

That report was on August 29th.  I like the way Italian newspaper Il Messaggero put it on the 25th, a few days before police discovered the evidence of arson:

No revisionism, no carelessness, no chainsaw:  in the end tomato sauce was enough, a pummarola (tomato sauce) that was stronger than the delusions of grandeur of the Regime.

According to the same article by The Local:

In clear weather, the letters – which are 630 feet tall and 1,360 feet across – could even be seen from Rome, some 50 miles away, but due to fire damage, only the 'D' has been left intact.

It also states that:

....Alessandra Mussolini – the granddaughter of Benito and an MEP with Silvio Berlusconi's Forza Italia party – said she would visit the forest.

 She said that she would talk to local authorities about the possibility of repairing the homage.

The far-right group CasaPound has already launched a fundraising effort to restore the   forest as well as a call to farmers to help with the restoration, under the slogan 'You can't erase history'.

So, I'm not sure of the exact state of the letters today, but Italian Wikipedia, citing Corriere Della Sera, says:

In February 2018, a group of CasaPound volunteers planted 1000 pine trees on Mount Giano in order to restore the writing.  The operation was deemed unnecessary by members of the local community, due to incorrect timing.

The original article quotes the VP of CasaPound as writing that up to 200 people from CasaPound, the Salamandra civil protection group, and the ecological association La Foresta che Avanza planted "a thousand Austrian pines, similar to the old ones destroyed, purchased thanks to the fundraising in which many Italians participated."

Not quite sure why the Wikipedia article mentions "bad timing" because the original article doesn't mention this at all.  And anyway, what a weird objection.  When would any time be "good" timing? 

So, those final days of Mussolini, and Italy's turnaround vis-a-vis Germany, is fascinating stuff.  As is the story of D'Annunzio.  Makes me think I should do a bit on ultra-nationalist poets and artists with political pretensions.  One example being Japan's then-most famous novelist Yukio Mishima, a right-wing nationalist who wanted to restore Japan to its former imperial glory, even forming his own private militia reminiscent of the Black Shirts and Brown Shirts of the Fascists and the Nazis.

Mishima formed the Tatenokai for the avowed purpose of restoring sacredness and dignity to the Emperor of Japan [something Hitler and Mussolini evoked endlessly].  On 25 November 1970, Mishima and four members of his militia entered a military base in central Tokyo, took its commandant hostage, and tried to inspire the Japan Self-Defense Forces to rise up and overthrow Japan's 1947 Constitution, which he called "a constitution of defeat".  After his speech and screaming of "Long live the Emperor!", he committed seppuku [ritual suicide].

I looked briefly at Mishima's Wiki page and was struck immediately by a photo of that speech, from a balcony; you may recall that speeches given from balconies was one of the influences D'Annunzio had on Mussolini's Fascist aesthetic.  (Follow links for images of the rival "Duci" doing just that.)

There's a great photo of Mishima's balcony speech here.

Anyway, here's a cool collection of (non-political) 8 Extraordinary Pieces of Architecture Grown From Living Trees.

There and back again: A week in Italy and Provence

I spent three years in Italy as a child, in the late-Seventies (the "years of lead", so-called because of all the political violence) and had studied there for a Summer back in 1990, so I was excited to be heading back for the first time as a family.  My wife went to Naples and Sicily, where she has roots, two years ago, but the kids and I stayed home for that one and felt jealous.

Our destination was Apricale, named one of Italy's most beautiful villages, which is saying something.  And it was indeed a beautiful old town, perched upon a small mountain, built for defense, a reminder of the time when "Italy" didn't exist, but a collection of small feuding states, some of them merely cities.  It's still a hard place to govern, which is partly by design; as a re-constituted republic (1946) recovering from Fascism, the constitution created a weak executive.  Governing Italy requires creating and then leading coalitions.  In a parliament with many small parties, this leads to political instability.  If one small party leaves a coalition, the government can fall and a new one needs to be put together.  Which has happened around 60 times since 1946.  But for the most part, the country "works".

Italy is an ancient place, rich in traditions which lend a continuity to daily life one might not expect if only the number of governments is considered.  And for all the differences between the north and south, as soon as you cross the border you know you're in Italy.  Nice was until relatively recently part of Italy.  I've never spent time there, but I can imagine that like Toulouse is France's "Spanish city", Nice's is France's "Italian city".  Which is to say that although you can feel the Spanish vibe in Toulouse, it is first and foremost French.  Likewise, I'm sure, with Nice.  Borders may be the result of history's vagaries, maybe somewhat arbitrary, but they do generally conform to natural boundaries more ancient than human:  the Pyrenées in the Southwest and the southernmost peaks of the Alps in the Southeast.  Despite very strong regional attachments, Italy does have a strong national identity and in Apricale, a few kilometers across the border, you feel its heart beating just as strongly as if you were in Florence, Naples or Rome.

Our route led us due east to Narbonne, then along the coast past Sète, Montpellier, Nîmes, Arles, Marseille, Cannes, Nice, Monaco and then in Italy, Ventimiglia.  A short jog north and you're in the canyon over which Apricale and a handful of other small towns are perched.  The older parts of these towns are small warrens of alleys that are not only formed by two buildings, but are often cut right through one of them.  It's as if you are both inside and outside at the same time.  You'd be hard-pressed to get an army far enough into the town to get to the top; possible, of course, but a hard slog.  I'm sure in some of these towns the streets ran with blood on at least one occasion.

It's kind of hard to imagine though, because these towns are very friendly places.  Each of them has a lower part built along the river and if you kept to the main road and didn't stop, park and venture across the necessary bridge, you'd see a town built choc-a-bloc upon the hillside, but unless you already knew the local architecture, you wouldn't expect such a labyrinthine series of alleys, some leading into pitch blackness, other upwards towards the light, others covered by white-washed groin vaults with doors leading into houses, shoppes and bars.  There are fountains and piazze, of course, usually before the church and city hall, which are, as in France, often on the same plaza and more often than not, include a café.  This area was rather touristy, not in a tacky way at all, so maybe that explains why there seem to be far more cafés in an Italian village than in a French village of approximately the same size.  Aucamville has about 1000 residents and there is only one café.   Isolabona, where our campground is to be found, has 716 residents and at least two cafés, in addition to a restaurant.  The people seemed much more sociable than in our village; on our last night we strolled through town and the cafés were bustling with old men playing cards, teenagers looking on, some small families.  On the stoops and benches sat groups of women, young and old, chatting, peaceful and animated, in the deepening dusk, a fountain echoing softly off the walls, a small electric candle glowing in an iron mesh-covered niche with flowers, ex-votos and a statue of the virgin.  But in these towns, it didn't seem likely that people had yards and who wants to stay inside all the time?

This is an interesting theory, come to think of it; the characteristics of the people, the everyday sociability, the nightly ritual of coming together to gossip and joke, to talk, etc. is in these towns determined by the urban design.  I'd hesitate to use the word planning, the towns feel more organic than planned, but no one's the worse off for it.  In Dolceacqua, a larger village but more or less the same urban pattern, I'd marveled that the buildings and balconies are connected and reinforced (recall that we're on a rather steep small mountain) with numerous small "bridges".  Perhaps they are flying buttresses in this case, I'm not sure if the term here is accurate, but the effect is the same, each building is connected at several point to the one above it, so that what would in a flat city be an alley, open to the sky, is here part alley, part tunnel.  The effect is a kind of perpetual dusk, gloomy but without the negative sense of the word; they're rather lively places, but not prone to echoes and an abrasive hurdy-gurdy of sound.  Thus, pleasant places to chat, where you can raise your voice and not pollute the atmosphere.  The women chatting were grouped around the piazza and the roads/alleys leading up to it, relatively open spaces, where you get out of the gloom and as the sun sets, see some stars.  Farther from the church, the stoops were empty and the only sounds we heard were tin-can sounds of someone's radio playing some kind of mellow soccer game, the sound of cutlery and dishes being shifted, a mewling cat.

In these parts of town, one can often catch a whiff of the old sewers.  Nothing overpowering or rancid, but not exactly pleasant either.  Centuries of humidity and cloaca leave their traces, impregnate the cut stones.  There’s no disguising it.  This is what leads a lot of Americans to call these old towns “dirty” but they’re actually pretty clean.  We’re talking about places whose origins lie in the Bronze Age, if not earlier.  Give Sacramento a few more years, especially after their water is in such short-supply they’ll have to flush it all away with grey water.  Then it’ll really merit the moniker “Excremento”.

I had the opportunity to see an old amphitheater, the top of which must have made for a structure of considerable height.  Not these days, as the top now sits a few meters below street level.  When one digs a new basement or parking garage in a city like Ventimiglia, the shovel isn’t removing gravel, but cut stones and brick.  One doesn’t dig into the earth, but through the stratified remains of millennia.  In Cortona, Tuscany, my last (three-month) home in Italy, the city walls were layered like a cake:  topped by Renaissance construction, built upon medieval brick, in turn Roman and finally, when the earth was low enough to permit it, Etruscan foundations.  I swear, one day I came across a stone so ancient it would destroy a medium’s mind like the Russian villainess in the Crystal Skull film and there, in faded Enochian letters were the words “Adam + Eve 4ever” scratched crudely within a rough-hewn heart.  (Full disclosure:  I’m lying).

I also made an impulsive stop in Dolceacqua to visit the municipal cemetery which was much like the French style, with a mix of small above-ground tombs and quite grand mausoleums.  Two or three especially caught my eye because they showed that in this small and rather obscure town the Egyptian revival had made an impact on local funerary architecture.  One had a pyramid, another featured obelisks and a third had ornaments on the corners of the roof inspired by Egyptian models, such as those previously discussed on LoS with regard to Toulouse’s Terre Cabade Cemetery and the parish church at Ondes.  You can see these on the pyramid-roofed mausoleum as well.  I still don't know what this element is called, so if anyone out there has an idea....Also, being a fool, I neglected to note the dates.   If we compare with the examples in Ondes, Terre Cabade and Lisbon, I'd wager they date to the first half of the 19th century, probably sometime between 1830 and 1850.  The Egyptian revival was especially strong in Italy, or at least early.  In France it was kicked off in earnest after Napoleon's colonialist adventures in Egypt, whereas the Italians had been erecting obelisks since the days of the Roman Empire.  An obelisk was transferred to Rome by Caligula in 37 CE and placed in its current location in 1586; Bernini later designed St. Peter's Square so that the obelisk stood at it's center.  Bernini also put an obelisk at the center of his design for the Piazza Navona; it sits atop the Fontana dei Quattro Fiumi (1651).  Both obelisks evoke the axis mundi; Eden was said to lie at the center of four great rivers, at the very center of the world, hence the quattro fiumi, or "four rivers".

I came across another LoSian topic in Isolabona inside a church dedicated to Nostra Signora delle Grazie, in the form of a statue of Santa Lucia, the Sicilian saint whose eyes were plucked out.  She is depicted gore-free with closed eyes, holding the orbs on a plate in front her.  Seeing her there, so serene, made me think of how I grimace and groan at the slightest of aches.  Of course, no one who's had their eyes plucked out could be so calm, but it was rather humbling nonetheless.  The Gid and I have discussed Lucia in connection with Saint Agatha, another Sicilian saint, a virgin martyr, who, having dedicated herself to Christ, was brutally murdered for refusing the advances of a pagan suitor.  Agatha, however, had her breasts shorn off.  Gid first started an investigation into the link between the imagery of breasts and eyes in this little post, coming across a section of a book entitled Before the Milk of the Word: Eye Nipples by N. Hilton.  This is a fascinating essay and instead of summarizing it here, I encourage you to read it.  I was also intrigued to see a boat hanging from the ceiling of the nave;  I can only imagine that the name of this sanctuary, "Our Lady of Thanks" refers (in part) to the answered prayers of those who had husbands, sons or fathers set out to sea; Isolabona, is, after all, only minutes from the Mediterranean.  I've seen this in Spain (Tossa del Mar) and in such land-locked places as Rocamadour (with several model boats suspended from the ceiling) and Montaigut, in the form of a votive painting.

Tossa, Rocamadour and Montaigut all have what can be called Black Virgins and I'd hoped to see two more exemplars on our return trip.  I missed the one at St. Paul because I'd been expecting to stay nearby in Tourettes-sur-Loup, making it possible to pop out during our stay and have a look.  but alas!  Our real destinations was Tourettes, an hour away.  We didn't turn back.  Another watches over the cemetery at the town of St. Jean-Cap- Ferrat (I Googled it and it's about four humans tall!) but somehow, concentrating on a map perhaps, we blew right past it.  This town is between Nice and Monaco, you could almost smell the money in the air.  The French Riviera may be fabled and storied but you know, it is damn beautiful.  The town of Menton, between Monaco and the Italian border is, coming at it from the east, particularly impressive.  The Virgin at St. Jean also has an association with Cocteau, who wrote "There is a mysterious youth in the oldest stones of St. Jean."  So, if you're ever out that way....

Dolceacqua also featured a shrine to Mary where she was placed in a grotto.  This may be a reference to Lourdes, or could be a native tradition.  Mary associated with a cave also appears in Spain, at Covadonga (from Cueva Doña, I believe), which is also, like Lourdes noted for its healing waters.

Our two nights in Provence were spent drinking and chatting and really......a lot of drinking.  In the daytime, it was hours by the pool.  No mysteries, history, culture or anything worth reporting from an LoS standpoint.  But have no fear.  I'm off to Morocco in a month and I can already feel something Burroughsian and Gysinian in the wind....

Coming soon:  Photo-essay of my collection of Argentine folks saints (all four of 'em!) and an interview with original Discordian Hope Springs.