The best books about fascist propaganda

Still after 25 years, Falasca Zamponi’s work remains the best treatment of Mussolini’s “aesthetic politics” (the author’s term). She shows how his regime painstakingly constructed a symbolic universe to represent and indeed aggrandize its power, which went well beyond mere propaganda and instead created a cultural dynamic with the Italian public. But she also demonstrates how Mussolini, soon after coming into power in October 1922, “began to create the conditions for the demise of the Fascist Party” which he had formed, “and the growth of his own stardom.”

In her decades of work on Italy’s Fascist era, Marla Stone has shown an especially keen eye for the development of the regime’s policies and ideologies, whether in the sphere of art and culture, or that of political violence and imperialist aggression. Here Stone offers a succinct and penetrating overview of the origins, rise, consolidation, and eventual crash of Fascism in Italy, followed by a translation of some three dozen primary documents—about a third of which were otherwise unavailable in English—to illustrate her narrative. Particularly chilling are the propaganda texts from 1938 on, when Mussolini’s grandiose claims to the legacy of ancient Rome took a back seat to full-blown racial politics, “as Italians were declared ‘Aryans’ and biological anti-Semitism became part of official ideology.”

When Rome started minting coins for export markets in the third century BCE, one of the first emblems it chose was the she-wolf that, according to legend, suckled the twin infants Romulus and Remus on the site of the city not yet founded. In Italy, almost every generation since then has embraced the animal—as the author explains, “a beast that was Roman and mother, ancient and wild, fearsome and protective”—to communicate pretty much whatever message it wanted. Cristina Mazzoni amply illustrates the indeterminacy of the symbol, which Mussolini leveraged in his propaganda to elicit feelings of both patriotic pride and terror, but still found difficult to control. Case in point: just fifteen years after Mussolini’s death, the wolf with twins became the symbol of the 1960 Rome Summer Olympics.

The raised-arm salute is the most distinctive gesture of 20th-century Fascism and Nazism; in the 21st century, it still thoroughly shocks when spotted. Its origin? Though the so-called “Roman salute” has been widely supposed to date back to classical antiquity, Winkler in a meticulous study demonstrates that it is a modern creation, an anachronism that first consistently cropped up in theatrical contexts (stage and early motion pictures) in the 1890s. Though nonsensical from a historical point of view, “it does make political and ideological sense”, argues Winkler, “to all those who see in the Romans a model for power and might and for glorious conquest of others.” More generally, the book is essential reading on the origins and evolution of Mussolini’s theatricality.

“At its core, propaganda is a set of communication strategies designed to sow confusion and uncertainty, discourage critical thinking, and persuade people that reality is what the leader says it is." So writes Ruth Ben-Ghiat, one of the top historians of Italian Fascism and a high-profile media expert on contemporary struggles between democracy and authoritarianism. In this wide-ranging study, Ben-Ghiat details precisely how propaganda—"a system of attention management that works through repetition”—figures as one of the autocrat’s chief “tools of rule,” plucking examples from far beyond Mussolini’s Italy and Hitler’s Germany. There’s an audiobook too!