Byline: Il Duce

Near my old house in southern Tuscany, I remember the tombstone of "Giuseppe Papone, buon cristiano e ardente fascista." I don't know whether Papone's ardent fascism led him to join the squadristi, the armed bands that frightened fascism's opponents into silence; but he was buried when being a good Christian and ardent fascist were not shameful in Italy, a time Italians prefer to forget. Silvio Berlusconi may have taken the right back into power in the last elections, but his is a capitalist right, a corporatist right, a management school right, not Il Duce's all-powerful right.

Mussolini, whose working-class father named him for the hero of Mexican socialism, Benito Juarez, began on the left. He edited the socialist newspaper Avanti!, using his media powers of persuasion much as Berlusconi does. Silvio called his party Forza, Italia! They share a predilection for the exclamation mark. Mussolini's Avanti! mobilized what he called the "masses" and, once in power, he controlled the state media as well. Berlusconi uses the masses, his consumers, to make money, and has seized state television and radio as well.

Anyway, it is time for Rupert Murdoch to give Berlusconi his own television show on his Sky satellite and Fox television networks. Silvio not only lectures with the best of them, he's got a hell of a singing voice?as any of us who once took Italian cruise liners in the Med can attest. Why should Murdoch provide Silvio a platform in America and the world? Well, it's a way into Berlusconi's Fininvest media, finance and property empire. A few years ago, Rupert got Tony Blair to sound out Berlusconi. Silvio did not respond as cordially as, say, Bill Clinton did to Ehud Barak's plea for another billionaire, Marc Rich. No matter. Berlusconi, like Mussolini, is nothing if not vain, and a tv show in America could do the trick.

How do I know? William Randolph Hearst, the big daddy of media moguldom, pulled the same trick with Mussolini. Hearst, although company history does not boast of it, employed the Italian dictator as a columnist in the 1920s and 1930s. Rupert could do as much for Silvio. As Hearst won access for his reporters in Italy, Rupert could penetrate the Italian media scene.

I read about Mussolini's columns in Jimmy Breslin's Damon Runyon biography a few years ago and bought the archive from the University of Texas. They are priceless. "The state that can prohibit the sale and manufacture of harmful drugs has also the right to prohibit the sale of facial powders and paints," Mussolini wrote in Hearst's Sunday American on Oct. 9, 1927. "It has the right to dictate to its women to put on sufficient garb to protect them against the elements, as well as to protect public morals." Elsewhere Mussolini noted the similarities between his economic program and FDR's New Deal: "The atmosphere in which the whole doctrinal and practical system moves is certainly similar to Fascism, but it would be exaggeration to say more."

On Sept. 18, 1932, The New York Times scored a coup by publishing a long Mussolini column assailing democracy. "The individual, in the Fascist State, is not annulled, but rather multiplied, just as in a regiment a soldier is not diminished but multiplied by each one of his comrades. The Fascist State organizes the nation, but leaves sufficient margin to the individual; it has limited useless or harmful liberties, but has preserved the essential ones." To his credit, Mussolini said that although he did not drink, the prohibition on alcohol would not work in Italy.

Debate in those days ranged further left and right than it does in today's capitalist consensus. "The time has now come to show that there is no such thing as personal liberty," Mussolini's column for Jan. 10, 1926, thunders. He joined those words to action, abolishing the right to strike that had been enshrined in Italian law around 1900.

As much as I disagree with him, I would have to say Mussolini made a strong appeal to my own lefty instincts a week later: "One of the greatest enemies of the New Italy today, menacing the domestic life of the nation, is the idle rich. The Fascismo, in its new classification of the nation into syndicalist unions, will treat them as tramps...they will be treated as foreigners, and will not have the right to Italian citizenship. They will not be allowed to vote." In the event, Mussolini harmed the rich, idle or otherwise, far less than he did the labor unions.

You have to hand it to the old boy for chutzpah. I loved his "Why I Am Closing up Italian Cabarets and Dance Halls" of January 1927. "Why I Intend to Put Adulterers into Prison," Nov. 12 1927, must have made interesting reading for his mistress, Clara Petacci. The Taliban would approve his proclamation that he would "no longer let women teach in the schools of Italy." He warned that Europe's falling birthrate was "leading the white race to disaster." And he levied a "bachelor tax" to force Italian boys out of their mothers' houses and into marriage?something Berlusconi might consider today, given that most don't leave the nest until they are nearly 30.

Mussolini told the people of Naples in 1922: "The myth is a faith, a passion. It is not necessary for it to be a reality. It is a reality in the sense that it is a stimulus, is a hope, is faith, is courage." Mussolini's regime lasted two decades, what Italians call the Ventennio. Lawrence Rainey wrote in the London Review of Books on Jan. 1 1998: "However inchoately, Mussolini was one of the first to formulate a theory of politics in the age of mass media." His heirs, whether in Berlusconi's Forza, Italia! or Tony Blair's new Labor Party, have not added much beyond a slick veneer.

Anyway, I guess if Rupe gives Silvio American air time, he can't call the show Big Brother. Maybe Avanti!