DJ Duk

July 05, 2004

Mussolini

First off, this definition should be unnecessary. Everybody knows who Mussolini is. Except Bailey. It’s always Bailey.

So Bailey, Benito Mussolini was the Fascist dictator of Italy prior to and during WWII (that's World War Two Bailey, try to keep up). The best way to think of Mussolini is as one of the Three Stooges. If Hitler was the in-charge, aggressive and powerful Moe, and the surprisingly strong, somewhat goofy looking Curly was Tojo and Japan, then that leaves Larry as Benito (No Bailey, there is no WWII equivalent of Shemp, and if there was it certainly wouldn't be a duplicitous Slavic general).

Like Larry, Italy was the largely overlooked member of the three. Larry was the big haired Stooge who played the violin. The violin is not and has never been funny. Clearly Larry is the weak link in that comedy chain. Mussolini is the chubby dictator who made the trains run on time and invaded Ethiopia. Except the trains never really did run on time and "invaded" is a strong word to use for wandering into an area nobody else wanted and watching as the native inhabitants failed to discover fire before starving to death.

For several years in the 1940's if you said "Soft Underbelly" Americans and Brits thought "Italy." (If you said "tache faible" French people got defensive.)

Mussolini was eventually killed by the Italian people who were more upset about that train thing than they let on initially.

The thought of Mussolini as one of the Three Stooges is not a wholly DJ Duk original. Frank Capra (Every time a bell rings yada yada) worked as a filmmaker for the US Army during World War II and made several propaganda videos referring to Mussolini almost exclusively as "Hitler's Stooge."

Posted by DjDuk at July 5, 2004 03:57 AM