CamilloBrillo

I laughed hard too, but I think this Mussolini admiration by the elders thing needs a better explanation.

I live in Italy. Small province in North Tuscany. I miei nonni are 84 and 85 and both lived under Mussolini when they were young.

The reason these old people love him is simple: they saw him boost a sort of little revolution everywhere. New buildings, new roads, new industrial jobs in places so depressed you could hardly do something that wasn't cultivating your little piece of land.

In exchange he imposed strict control, no freedom of speech, heavy militarization of many aspects of life (the Saturday marches and "adunate" to listen all together the speech of the Duce) , strong autarchism and so on.

Many people (and by that I mean almost everyone) didn't have any dream to become something different from what they already were, no aspiration to leave the family and become something different. Family was so important you couldn't even picture yourself apart from it, unless your condition was so dire you have to go away (anyway, even if you emigrated your duty was to send something to the family back in Italy).

Take our little province (pop. ~200k today, ~170k in the 30s). Here's what was built under the Duce in the span of 15 years:

• new central post office with clock tower. Still the central post office today.
• many new roads to link the towns of the area and complete renewal and expansion of the Via Aurelia
• big tower and building by the sea for the sons of the workers of FIAT so they could come here in the summer for at leat a couple of weeks. Still used today the same way, but not only for the sons of industrial workers
• big big big industrial area where some 40 heavy industries settled and gave work to some 20.000 people. This has been a major improvement in a place where, as I said, people were just cultivating their land. Many people, coming from the most forward looking families, thanks to the new incomes brought by the industries, were able to make their sons and daughters study until the end of elementari and medie (think of first and second grade), so they could become skilled workers. They studied in schools that Mussolini's programs built anew or restored.
• bonification of a vast area of unhealthy swamps by the sea that suddenly began suited for new expansion
• new housing projects for the growing population
• many other things I should check in local history books I don't have at hand

So, you see what young people back then were seeing back then. That's why they thought of Mussolini as a Civilization-like demi-God. Propaganda had a great influence over them, of course. Dissent existed, but who dissented was beaten up by the Squadristi. Who dissented a little bit too much and in a public way sometimes just disappeared.

People knew they were under a regime. They knew they were not totally free. But what's the point of being totally free when it means being free of getting almost nothing from your little piece of land? On the other hand you had control, strict organization of the daily life (but also strict police service against common crime) in change for new jobs, new unexpected wealth. Nothing we would be able to accept by today standards, more than enough for those harsh times.

And then came the Manifesto della razza, the racial manifesto, le leggi razziali, the race laws, who declared that the jews were no more italian citizens and ignited their subsequent deportation, plus many more awful things.

More than 15 years of regime and Mussolini never give a damn about those kind of things. He never gave a damn about religion in general even though he signed the Patti Lateranensi, or the Lateran Pacts, that declared the freedom of the Holy See and its sovereignity over Vatican City -- they where then included in the Italian Constitution, after WWII.

It was 1938, Mussolini was already doing shitty things you can expect from a dictator all on his own, but this was something different, something at a completely new level. That was the prize Mussolini had to pay to his new ally, Adolf Hitler. Hitler was a sincere admirator, even a devotee, of Mussolini. Unfortunately the pupil often gets better than the master at what he does and what Hitler was doing we all knew. Mussolini couldn't do but to follow.

At this point you may ask what the people, those people who saw such growth and new jobs and all of that were thinking of this new Mussolini attitude. Well, they thought nothing. They were not used to dissent, they were no good analysts of their time (who really is, apart from some rare illuminated beings, after all?) and they just carried on, without worrying too much about the Jews that were closing their shops or fleeing abroad if they could.

The things escalated quickly, and the rest, you know, is well known history.

I read many people here saying that history is written by the victorious as an explanation for this Mussolini devotion by the elders of Italian descent. That is true, but it is not the reason why these elder people still see Mussolini as a Padre della Patria (father of the Country). The reason is that they grew surrounded by a strong and prideful narrative, a narrative that left an indelible mark in their mind. A narrative that was actually missing a lot of pieces, that grew and thrived in a time were freedom of thought and freedom of speech were not so important, since getting the bread on the table at noon sometimes was an insurmountable feat.

They knew the war, they knew the hasher times brought by the wicked decision to form the Rome-Berlin Axis. Those memories are so painful, so full of horror (my nonna tells me of the corpses they were used to find on the roads in 1943/1944 as something they quickly become accustomed to) and death of beloved ones, they sort of claimed a place on their on in their minds.

And then came democracy, freedom, a newer and greater wealth. With that came the freedom for everyone to do what they actually want, even left the family, even let your hair grow down to their feet in a time of much looser social restrictions.

It was democracy, with all its byproducts in a country were corruption, corporativism, political patronage are something written in the people's DNA. All the scandals, the stealing by the politics, the surging of crimes that you weren't aware back then not because the crime level was lower but just because the media were actually NOT reporting them, wouldn't have been tolerated under the much stricter times of the Duce, in their view.

Here's how they became old: with a big dam in their memories. That's the horror of the WWII, dividing the peaceful, idyllic time of their youth and the latter, complicated, wealthier but more psychologically conflictual time of their adulthood, full of social problems that the Old-Good-Strong-Mussolini wouldn't have made possibile.

Sources - I'm Italian. Lots of school projects about our elders' memories. History courses. First hand family tales dei miei nonni.

Note to Grammar Nazis. I'm not a native English speaker. Please forgive my lexical weirdness(es) and any grammar error I wasn't able to catch preventively

Mandatory Vulgarized TL;DR : Even if Mussolini was a crazy fuck that did many shitty things, elder people of Italian origin always remember the guy as someone who built a lot of things and ignited a good period of wealth, even if he completely fucked things up by kissing Hitler's ass and bringing the horror and destruction of war into our country. Those same elders fail to account him for that because WWII is a sort of blank spot in their memories that separates their idealized youth from the much complicated times of their adulthood, with all those hippies, that free love thing, those pesky commies, women and black people rallying around like they were actually entitled to the rights they were claiming and a level of crime they felt like much higher because the media were suddenly free to report everything.

Edit: typos. Edit 2: Fixed population numbers. The previous numbers were off by a 10k and they indicated the population of my town, not the province.

I'm curious about battery life of the Ubuntu Edge. How do you plan to make the battery last at least a full work day with such specifics? How long will the battery last when using the phone to drive a monitor?

Thanks

Edit: typos, damn autocarrot!

1. Thanks!

2. Well, not exactly.

Railroads are a stereotypical example of italian-style bad management of a public resource. Ferrovie Dello Stato is the government-owned company that controls our railroads since 1905. After WWII until today it's always been both an employer for tens of thousands of people (77.000 as of today) and a black hole sucking in public loan after public loan. Overpaid top executives that were able to oversee yearly loss after yearly loss are just the tip of an iceberg made of decades-long mismanagement that constantly resulted in a pretty bad service. Delays, trains overbooked or chock-full of people are the least you can expect when you take a train in Italy today. If you go first class in the North of the country, or you take the newest high speed Rome-Milan trains you can expect a much better service, but be ready to pay a steep extra.

Under Mussolini the railroad system was indeed improved and extended in a big way. Trains weren't that cheap but the service was good. The trains arriving on time were just another important sign of order and rectitude the propaganda could easily brag about.

So, "Mussolini made the trains run on time" became a good metaphor for that propagandistic mechanism –– something you could easily take as a common example to quickly prove the better efficiency (which was true but made much better by the propaganda) of "those wonder years".

That's why after WWII it became the quip you were referring to: something you could quickly use to wittily counter the claims of the nostalgic one, more than an ironic statement about the chronic disservices of the italian railroads.

For it has a very fine, almost sarcastic connotation, a better translation for our "...e i treni arrivavano in orario" would be "yeah, of course, and trains we're running on time!".

I understand it's not easy to explain such linguistic nuances (Italian really is a language of many hues). Here's a dialogue that can explain it a litte bit better:

Old man, reading the news of a murder on the local newspaper: "Yikes, when HE was around such things never happened. Everything was much quieter, we worked hard, maybe we weren't that free but we were a lot more secure than today! Si stava meglio quando si stava peggio! ¹"

Witty young man in reply: "Yeah granpa, of course, and trains were running on time, too!"

Note: ¹ : Si stava meglio quando si stava peggio means we were doing better when things were worse. Harsher but simpler old times seen as better than wealthier but much more complicated current times. "Old times good times", if you want, but with the clear meaning that old times, even if seen as better after all, were no golden age.

I guess you're good at explaining row reduction to solve systems of linear aquations

I vigorously applaud the use of the neologism "downboted", whether was it intentional or not.