Suchergebnisse

"What modern authoritarian leaders have in common (and how they can be stopped). Ours is the age of authoritarian rulers: self-proclaimed saviors of the nation who evade accountability while robbing their people of resources and corroding or destroying democracy. Their mutual-admiration club also draws on models from the past. Vladimir Putin rehabilitates Soviet tyrant Joseph Stalin, Donald Trump praises Libyan despot Muammar Gaddafi, Jair Bolsonaro admires Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, and Recep Tayyip Erdogan invokes Adolf Hitler as the model of an efficient leader. Ruth Ben-Ghiat covers a century of authoritarianism to explain why strongman rulers in Africa, Europe, and Latin America, drawing from a common playbook of machismo, propaganda, violence, and corruption, have found popular support even as they bring ruin to their countries. The fruit of decades of research, Strongmen gives readers insight into how such rulers think, who and what they depend on, and how they can be opposed"--

Ours is the age of the strongman. Russia, India, Turkey and America are ruled by men who, as they have risen to the top, have reshaped their countries around them, creating cults of personality which earn the loyalty of millions. And as they do so, they draw on a playbook of behaviour established by figures such as Benito Mussolini, Muammar Gaddafi and Adolf Hitler. Here, political historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat draws on analysis of everything from gender and sexuality to diplomatic strategy to explain who these political figures are - and how they manipulate our own history, fears and desires in search of power at any cost.

The Imperial Moment in Fascist Cinema This essay looks at how Italian feature and non-fiction cinema on imperial themes engaged with themes of temporality as it asserted Fascism's right to occupy Ethiopia (1936) and, during World War II, Greece as well. For the Fascists, cinema was a means of displaying the colonies as theatres of Italian modernity, rebuking rhetorics of Italian «backwardness». As I argue, the movies made between 1936 and 1943 reflect the belief of many film professionals and Fascist officials that the scale of the Ethiopian invasion, and the stories it generated, could not be adequately communicated by traditional means of representation; only the movie camera could adequately capture the dense and mobile Fascist present. I analyse Roberto Rossellini's 1942 aviation drama, Un pilota ritorna / A Pilot Returns, as the apex of this form of temporal and cinematographic thinking, but also as a film that presaged the undoing of Fascism's empire and its cult of Italian modernity.

RésuméCet article examine le cinéma italien dans les années de transition du fascisme à la démocratie. Le cinéma offre une source privilégiée pour comprendre les expérience de perte, de crise et de privation qui ne trouvaient pas de place dans les récits traditionnels de la reconstruction de l'Italie. Les films néoréalistes en particulier cherchaient à exprimer la conscience diffuse de vivre un moment de transition. À travers une analyse du film d'Alberto Lattuada,Il bandito(1946), cet article montre que ce film, ainsi que d'autres réalisations du néoréalisme, composent une historiographie alternative de cette transition. Le pouvoir des films néoréalistes réside moins dans la reconstruction d'une réalité historique documentée que dans leur capacité à transmettre des ensemble d'émotions et de perceptions qui témoignent de la difficulté à se débarrasser de l'héritage du fascisme et de la guerre.

Reviews Mirella Serri's I redenti (The Redeemed [2005]), which documents the experience of Italian intellectuals during & after the Fascist regime. While bulk of the text is devoted to Fascist-era writings, eg, in Giuseppe Bottai's review Primato, it is asserted that Serri's ultimate goal is to reconstruct the immediate postwar years during which time Fascist activities were elided from memory. Serri holds the Italian Communist Party (PCI) responsible for advancing a historiographical model that essentially sees Fascism as a rehearsal for anti-Fascism. The book is said to have two merits: (1) Much space is devoted to Italian anti-Semitism. (2) The weight of evidence & the tenacity of the argument makes it difficult to deny the complicity of intellectuals in the Fascist regime. Attention then turns to some of the text's conceptual problems. D. Edelman