4

The Last War on Earth, the Second War to End War, when at last it could be envisaged as a whole, was a huge, ill–managed tangle of conflicts which began informally and did not so much end as peter out. It is difficult to imagine how it could have followed any other course. It was incoherent from start to finish. The name it still carries, "The Ideological War", was first devised for it by that interesting, rhetorical, quasi–intellectual, the Italian Dictator, Benito Mussolini. He too in his time, with his bright phases and his long, heavy interludes, was something of a minor Holy Terror, an opera–tenor Rud.

Already people are beginning to forget Mussolini's role in the restatement of human life. He is following Napoleon into oblivion as a mere energetic personality of no fundamental importance at all. The tendency when he is mentioned is to belittle him. But he was by no means a fool. His fustian was absurd and inconsistent but it was not contemptible. He was a man relatively intelligent among contemporary "strong men"; he had had early experiences of discussion and editorship, and his mind, like that of his Corsican precursor, ran habitually to obvious and often very attractive headlines. He was mentally excitable and as his temperature rose his headlines flushed. He wanted to figure as a Great Man in history, and he was quite unable to foresee the unromantic turn that history was taking.

He realised that for any effective victory in warfare there must be two sides and not more than two sides, but he failed to grasp the further fact that warfare may end without effective victory. He got his antagonisms wrong. The stresses and confusions of the world were more and more manifestly the outcome of the struggle of all the diverse forces making for a common–sense world state, against the obsolescent political, economic, religious and educational institutions, endlessly varied in origin and character, that obstructed them. But he thought the nationalist forms of history were permanent. The primary reality of the age was a world–wide conflict of pressures, parallel all over the world, for which the new order had still to find its definite formulae. To this his own obsessions blinded him completely.

Benito Mussolini, with a surfeit of bad history decaying in his imagination, could not see the plain realities before him. Like most of his generation he dramatised human affairs in incurably geographical patches, and like most of the masterful men of his time his belief in his power to mould the life about him carried him beyond sanity. From the beginning his was an ill–balanced temperament; he would be blatant at one moment, and weeping at another. He beat at the knees of Mother Reality like an unteachable child. He wanted war and conquest, triumph over definable enemies, fierce alliances, and unforgettable antagonisms. He wanted glory. He died, as his last words testify, completely unaware of the fact that the rational treatment of human affairs does not admit of that bilaterality which the traditions of warfare require. "Do we win?" he said.

He persuaded himself and he persuaded great multitudes of people that two great systems of ideas faced each other in the world, "Leftism" and "Rightism", and that he and his associated Dictators embodied the latter. He did contrive finally to impose the illusion of a definitive World War upon great masses of people.