"The man who is not a husband, father, and soldier is not a man."

I took these photos of the movie "A Special Day," which is playing on The Criterion Channel (in its current tribute to Marcello Mastroianni). Begin around 53:23 to view just this segment, which has Mastroianni's character poking around inside the apartment of Sophia Loren's character and finding her fascism scrapbook. (It's 1938, in Rome.)

"In 1924, the artist Nancy Cox-McCormack recounted her experience sculpting the bust of Benito Mussolini..."

"... in an article for The New York Times Magazine, 'When Mussolini Poses.' While posing, Mussolini was surrounded by opulent gifts, she wrote, including a music box that 'played only the Fascisti marching song.' The verb 'to pose' was first recorded in the mid-14th century. Its earliest definitions, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, include to propose a theory or question, to arrange an object or, like Mussolini, to assume a position for a portrait. When someone poses for a portrait, he or she presents an 'idealized' version of him or herself, 'often as a person of culture, fashion or erudition,' the lexicographer Grant Barrett said. But people 'posing' in life may be pretending to be someone they’re not to impress or deceive others. A character in a film reviewed by The Times in 1943, for example, was 'posing' as a millionaire’s long-lost daughter...."

Writes Sarah Diamond, in "A Pop, Dip and Spin Through the History of ‘Pose’/Though the word 'pose' is associated with voguing, it is less a part of the vocabulary and more a part of the movement" (NYT).

"Trump makes himself the axis on which events in Asia and Europe spin" — spins WaPo.

That's the front-page teaser. Inside, it's "Trump rebrands diplomatic norms as events in Asia, Europe and elsewhere spin on his axis." Speaking of branding, the WaPo brand is out-and-proud hostility to Trump, and that doesn't let up when there's news that might inspire some glimmers of hope that Trump's method might do some good:

President Trump on Friday placed himself at the center of the remarkable summit between the leaders of North and South Korea, taking credit for bold and innovative diplomacy that may open a path to peace where other leaders failed.

That's the paraphrase, and here's the actual quote:

“It’s certainly something that I hope I can do for the world,” Trump said. “This is beyond the United States. This is a world problem, and it’s something that I hope I’m able to do for the world.”

Trump's quote sounds rather modest to me, but WaPo insists that we see it as raging narcissism.

The dramatic turn of events on the Korean Peninsula was the capstone to a week that crystallized the ways Trump has established his foreign policy approach as one that rests largely on the pride he takes in busting the old conventions of diplomatic negotiations and remaking them in his image...

By the way, I'm surprised WaPo accepts the slang "busting" (for "bursting").

“We get a kick every once in a while out of the fact that I’ll be watching people that failed so badly over the last 25 years explaining to me how to make a deal with North Korea,” Trump cracked during a White House news conference Friday with [Angela] Merkel. “ I get a big, big kick out of that.”...

Trump, who is broadly unpopular in Germany, shrugged off a German reporter’s question about his “aggressive tweeting” and blunt diplomatic style.

“I believe that — you know, when I look at the numbers in Germany — and some other countries, they may not like Donald Trump but you have to understand, that means I’m doing a good job because I’m representing the United States,” he said.

I don't see how that's making himself "the axis on which events in Asia and Europe spin." He's saying he representing the United States and not purporting to represent the interests of the whole world. The leaders of other countries must and do represent their own countries, and it's not fair for the United States, uniquely, to subordinate its interests to everyone else's. That's not making himself the central axis.

By the way, "axis" is a terrible word to stick in our head when you're trying to sell the idea of the virtue of Germany — "Europe’s most populous country, and is the longest-serving leader among the major European powers — a mainstay of the kind of cautious consensus politics Trump instinctively rejects"?

Longest-serving, like all the way back to the 1930s and 40s?

In 1936, Benito Mussolini said, “This Berlin-Rome protocol is not a barrier, it is rather an axis around which all European States animated by a desire for peace may collaborate on trouble." That's quoted in "Why We Call the Axis Powers the Axis Powers" (Smithsonian).

The violence of Madeleine Albright's NYT op-ed, "Will We Stop Trump Before It’s Too Late?"

Here's the first sentence:

On April 28, 1945 — 73 years ago — Italians hung the corpse of their former dictator Benito Mussolini upside down next to a gas station in Milan....

"Will We Stop Trump Before It’s Too Late?" has coy deniability. But why on earth would you go straight to dangling the upside down corpse of Benito Mussolini unless you meant to say violence is necessary?

The next 2 sentences also present death as the solution:

Two days later, Adolf Hitler committed suicide in his bunker beneath the streets of war-ravaged Berlin. Fascism, it appeared, was dead.

What's going on?! If you stick with the op-ed for 8 more paragraphs, you'll get to a paragraph that begins: "What is to be done?" (I can't understand why Albright used that phrase, which is the title of a famous pamphlet by Lenin.) Anyway, Albright answers the question with some nonviolent ideas:

First, defend the truth. A free press... is the protector of the American people. Second, we must reinforce the principle that no one, not even the president, is above the law. Third, we should each do our part to energize the democratic process by registering new voters, listening respectfully to those with whom we disagree, knocking on doors for favored candidates... We should also reflect on the definition of greatness. 

Well, that's the opposite of violent. It's utterly bland! It doesn't even follow through on the "Before It’s Too Late" business in the title. There's no sense of urgent time pressure. She probably didn't write the title, so she may be out of the loop about the synergy between the title and the first paragraph. Once you get past that, you've got an op-ed that's too dull to print. It seems like some boilerplate speech of hers. Ridiculous, but actually also appalling, because the invitation to violence is plainly there and ought never to have been published.

"Crying is an excellent way of bringing balance and health to your mind and body. Keep crying."

Tweets Yoko Ono.

Among the responses:

Hear that all you poor people? The multi-millionaire Yoko says that crying because of your poverty and desperation is good for your mind and body.

— The Socialist Party (@OfficialSPGB) March 10, 2018

I think that's satire. Please don't destroy my feeling of hope in this world by having that not be satire. I will cry.

I click through to The Socialist Party/@OfficialSPGB — Socialist Party of Great Britain — and it's got the blue check mark of a "verified account." That means they're dead serious, right?

The Socialist Party of Great Britain has been around since 1904, Wikipedia says, offering this photograph of the they looked at their first conference, in 1905:



"Unlike other left groups, the SPGB did not see fascism as a special threat to the working class. Rather than formulating it as the last refuge of capitalism organising to defend itself against the working class, the party’s writers and speakers tended to view it as a particular type of reform movement. The two specific characteristics identified, though, were that it tended to be a form of national consolidation – unifying fragment nations such as Germany, Italy and Spain – and that it tended to have the mass support of the working class. The party's theory made the working class the politically decisive class: thus if the working class supported fascism then fascism would prevail. Answers to letters in the Socialist Standard in the 1930s repeatedly made this point. Early writers noted what Benito Mussolini was able to do with the power of the state on his side, a part of a vindication of the SPGB's approach of the workers seizing control of the state. The SPGB, hence, declined to join anti-fascist fronts or to make a particular issue of anti-fascism, arguing that the pro-socialist case was the necessary remedy for fascism."

Keep crying! It's an excellent way of bringing balance and health to your mind and body.

"But the two dictators were would-be intellectuals—Adolf Hitler a failed painter inebriated with the music of Wagner, and Mussolini a onetime schoolteacher and novelist."

"Unlike American philistines, they thought literature and the arts were important, and wanted to weaponize them as adjuncts to military conquest.... During World War I German patriotic propaganda vaunted the superiority of Germany’s supposedly rooted, organic, spiritual Kultur over the allegedly effete, shallow, cosmopolitan, materialist, Jewish-influenced 'civilization' of Western Europe.... Hitler invested considerable money and time in the 1930s, and even after World War II began, in an effort to take over Europe’s cultural organizations and turn them into instruments of German power.... Goebbels and Hitler were as obsessed with movies as American adolescents are today with social media. Convinced that cinema was their era’s main engine of cultural influence, they tried to control filmmaking as far as their influence could reach.... The dominance of American films had troubled European filmmakers and intellectuals from the beginning.... Hitler’s efforts to stem the mass appeal of Hollywood films and jazz only made them... more seductive and, in a final irony, prepared for the triumph of American music, jeans, and film in the postwar world by trying to make them taboo...."

From "The Cultural Axis" in The New York Review of Books. The reviewed book is "The Nazi-Fascist New Order for European Culture."

Donald Trump's big Mexican day.

I'm reading the NYT, where the headline is "Donald Trump to Visit Mexico After More Than a Year of Mocking It." Donald Trump has been mocking Mexico? He's been complaining that Mexico has taken advantage of us. That's more mocking us (and by us, I mean our government officials).

Donald J. Trump will visit Mexico on Wednesday for a private meeting with President Enrique Peña Nieto... before quickly flying back for what is billed as a major immigration speech in Arizona.  Mr. Peña Nieto’s office said Tuesday night that the meeting would take place at the presidential palace in Mexico City, and Mr. Trump, on Twitter, said he looked “very much forward” to the visit....

Peña Nieto had invited both Clinton and Trump. Trump is just the one who jumped at the invitation, which was only issued last week.

Politicians in Mexico have largely remained silent on Mr. Trump, though there have been outbursts, including from Mr. Peña Nieto himself. In March, he compared Mr. Trump to Hitler and Mussolini for what he called Mr. Trump’s strident remarks and populism, though he later tried to soften his words without quite taking them back.

I had to look up the old quote. It was:

There have been episodes in human history, unfortunately, where these expressions of this strident rhetoric have only led to very ominous situations in the history of humanity. That’s how Mussolini got in, that’s how Hitler got in — they took advantage of a situation, a problem perhaps, which humanity was going through at the time, after an economic crisis. And I think what (they) put forward ended up at what we know today from history, in global conflagration. We don’t want that happening anywhere in the world. 

I can see why today's reports don't quote it. It's vague and blabby. The later softening was: "Hitler, Mussolini, we all know the result. It was only a call for reflection and for recognition, so that we bear in mind what we have achieved and the great deal still to achieve." Peña Nieto is not a pithy speaker.

Back to the NYT article. It characterizes Trump as taking a "gamble" because his campaign is "struggling":

But for all the risk it poses, it offers an image Mr. Trump relishes: of a wily negotiator willing to do the unexpected — meeting with a perceived enemy — to advance his agenda.

The article takes pains to remind us that a lot of people in Mexico don't like Trump. My favorite line is: "Artisans have fashioned Trump piñatas...." Artisans! Crude effigies are made for people to beat with a stick and we hear of "artisans" — humble, dedicated craftspersons — who don't merely make things, they fashion them.

We will see what Donald Trump can do in the spotlight on the last day of August, when normally no one would be paying attention to much of anything. He's popping down to Mexico, then up to Phoenix to deliver what is presented as his major immigration speech. The #1 thing people seem to be looking to hear in the speech is — I'm quoting The Hill now — "whether he will still stand by his call for a 'deportation force' to remove the 11 million undocumented immigrants":

That hard line helped him steamroll his GOP primary foes, but it is less helpful with a more moderate general election audience.... The Trump campaign has recently focused on his call to immediately deport “criminal illegal immigrants.” But that doesn’t settle what happens to those who haven’t committed other crimes besides violating immigration laws.... [H]e could stand by behind his primary rhetoric and call for the immediate removal of all 11 million undocumented immigrants. 

This should be interesting. I wonder if Trump can honestly say that he never did call for the immediate removal of all 11 million undocumented immigrants. When I research the question now, I only see articles that say that is his plan, but I don't see anything straight from him saying that. Did he allow people to think that's what he meant, while always maintaining the ground to say that he never said it?

Here's the text of his immigration plan, released last August. Under the heading "Defend The Laws And Constitution Of The United States," he speaks of 2 categories of persons that he would immediately return to "their home countries": "criminal aliens" (referring to crimes beyond simply being here illegally) and "Illegal aliens apprehended crossing the border."

"But as I look ahead and think about what may still be relevant in fashion years from now, I think back to eras in style that were defined by freedom."

"I am so happy I was young in the ‘70s and participated in the women’s movement and all it meant. My generation behaved as if it had invented freedom. That was a moment in time, between the discovery of the pill and the arrival of AIDS, when sex was carefree and fun. For design inspiration then, we looked 40 years back, to the 1930s. We loved its furniture and architecture, all minimalist, and the light style of the clothing."

Writes Diane von Furstenberg.

ADDED: Her penultimate paragraph is "Who saw this coming? An icon of the ‘70s: Andy Warhol," which was especially funny to me because as I was reading, I was planning to search for "Diane von Furstenberg" in my copy of "The Andy Warhol Diaries." She's all over the place in there. Sample:

"And finally we arrive at the Italian Charnel House. Mussolini had it built in 1938 to honor the fallen Italian soldiers from the awful war..."

"... (Kobarid was in these years under Italian rule). As if there would be no other war. As if Kobarid was heading toward a peaceful era, where one could look back and reflect on the horror of past aggressions. Mussolini had moved the remains of 7014 known and unknown Italian soldiers who lost their lives in the Soca Front — taking them from local military cemeteries and honoring them here, in this house of corpses. We walk slowly around the edifice, reading the names, understanding the pain that each death caused to those left behind, feeling the irony of this Mussolini gesture and the exclusive pride in the Italian sacrifice, ignoring the pain felt, too, by Slovenian people who lost lives as well, in addition to losing pasture lands, cattle, a livelihood that had been very much centered on the mountains towering over the Soca River."

Much more here, with photographs, from the mountains of Slovenia.

Are your chairs and sofas too 3-dimensional...

... or are your paintings not 3-dimensional enough?

I went to that slideshow after looking at the slideshow that accompanied the NYT article "Making the Best of It at the Milan Furniture Fair," which — unrelated to what I've linked to above — happens to end like this:

Antonio Rossi, a taxi driver here, confirmed that business was slower than usual this year, though he admitted that even so, it was a great improvement over the weeks when the city was not hosting a fashion or design extravaganza. But no trade show, Mr. Rossi insisted, could provide the solution to his country’s economic woes. What Italy really needed, he said, was another leader like Mussolini.

Even though Mussolini was a Fascist?

“Everyone has problems,” he said.

"Thus, the racial laws are the worst fault of Mussolini, who, in so many other aspects, did good."

"It is difficult now to put oneself in the shoes of who was making decisions back then.... Certainly the (Italian) government then, fearing that German power would turn into a general victory, preferred to be allied with Hitler's Germany rather than oppose it."

Berlusconi on Mussolini.

Later he said he "regretted" not conditioning his remarks on the "condemnation of dictatorships."

Liberal fascism.

Last night, I posted a picture of Union Terminal in Cincinnati that made Dead Julius say:

Nice American flag drapped just like a big Nazi flag...

In a train station too... You know who liked trains? Nazis! Therefore...

Althouse is a FASCIST! Q.E.D.  (Meade has too much connection to the earth to be called a fascist... he's just a FASCIST-LOVER!)

That station is amazing. So were the fountain sculptures. I wanna visit the city now. One thing on my to-see-in-Cincinnati list is the sculpture of the great Cincinnatus returning the fasces and returning to the plow... the fasces resembles an Uzi.

The link goes to a photo that I didn't take.

Palladian comes in with:

Cincinnati has a replica of the Capitoline She-wolf in Eden Park, presented to the city by none other than Benito Mussolini himself!

And that link does go to an old blog post of mine — with a photo by... well, that's not by me either. By Meade:



Hey! Look at those teats, Tits! This vindicates Alan Simpson. And Jonah Goldberg.

Photographs of a baby girl dressed up as Hitler, Idi Amin, Mussolini, Mao, Stalin, and Pinochet.

It's the work of Norwegian-Danish artist Nina Maria Kleivan:

Kleivan said she was inspired to begin sewing infant-sized costumes soon after the birth of her daughter, who is now 11 years old. She said complications from her pregnancy had left her and the baby sitting at home. Looking at her daughter, she recalled, she considered that each human life begins as a blank slate, with opportunity to do good or evil....

Her husband was supportive -- until he spotted a tiny swastika armband.

"'I'm aware that you're an artist, but this is wrong,' he told me," Kleivan recalled him saying. "I've pondered that a lot myself: Could I really do this? I agree it's on the verge, especially Hitler, whom I and most others view as the incarnation of evil. He and Stalin were the hardest to do. It hurt."

Yeah, Hitler. That's when you went to far. Or does the problem go back to that time when you were home, postpartum, and gazing at the infant set off ideation about evil.

The baby's name is Faustina — the feminine version of Faust (who sold his soul to the devil).

Romulus, Remus, and Althouse.

Do you understand the inscription?



"Anno X." Get it?

ADDED: Here's the Smithsonian's info on the statue, which is in Eden Park in Cincinnati:

The original image of this ancient Etruscan she-wolf, owned by the Capitoline Museum in Rome, dates from 500 B.C. (The original Etruscan babies were lost long ago and were replaced during the Renaissance period with the present images of Romulus and Remus, which accounts for the difference in sculptural styles.) The she-wolf is the symbol of Rome and is known as the 'Lupa Romana,' or the 'Wolf of Rome,' because she is credited with saving the lives of Romulus and Remus, founders of Rome....

The replica of the Capitoline Museum's wolf was given to the City of Cincinnati by the Premier of Italy, Benito Mussolini, through the local chapter of the Sons of Italy. The "Anno X" in the inscription refers the tenth year of Mussolini's regime. The sculpture was given in recognition of the fact that Cincinnati is the only American city to bear the name of a Roman hero, the Roman general Cincinnatus.

AND: Let's take a closer look at those breasts:

Fascist cars?

Why aren't we more hostile to cars? Are we deluded about what they are doing to us? Jon Garvie is reviewing a couple books. Here's a challenging excerpt:

Nineteenth-century English conservatives detested the car, believing that it would destroy the looks and manners of the countryside. Italian Futurists exalted “the beauty of speed” in the 1920s, hoping that it would usher in a new violent age, shorn of “emasculating tendencies” like democracy. Mussolini and Hitler followed through such ideas, the latter bequeathing the autobahns and the Volkswagen to subsequent road enthusiasts. [Brian] Ladd's explicitly anti-car study ["Autophobia"] questions why machines associated with individual freedom have appealed so greatly to fascists of all stripes (Russian and Chinese central planners were both great admirers of Henry Ford).

Opponents of cars have laboured the same points for more than a century: damage to the environment, social atomization and, of course, a high risk of accident and death. In opposition, the pro-car lobby requires abstract arguments which refuse to address the same set of “facts” and foreground ideology instead. From Hitler to Margaret Thatcher, car advocates have seen them as literal engines of change; vehicles by which to remake society, whether on the basis of individualism or collectivism.