Sue Prideaux writes:

Actor, stage manager, orator and self-publicist, Mussolini allowed his ideology to remain vague while spending more than half of his time curating his image. Italy was a newspaper with Mussolini writing the front page every day. He knew that a picture of him taking flying lessons was worth any number of carefully argued editorials. After his first propaganda radio broadcast in 1925, 40,000 free radios were distributed to elementary schools between 1933 and 1938. By the onset of the Second World War, subsidised sets numbered 800,000 and loudspeakers had been installed in town squares. His message was inescapable.

The dictator must establish omnipresence. “Like a god, he observes you from every angle,” wrote a French journalist. There was no escaping the godlike gaze even in the bathroom, where Mussolini’s image was moulded into bars of soap. The lights were kept burning all night in his office. The legend of his all-seeing eyes was intensified by Goth-style eye make-up in posters, newsreels and the publicity shots included with his “personal” replies to 1,887,112 individual petitions. Mussolini considered himself the greatest actor in Italy. His performances were rehearsed endlessly in front of the camera. He was jealous of Greta Garbo.

Hitler too spent hours watching himself in the projection room. He too kept the lights on all night in his office and sold radios below production price. He deployed portable pillar radios to blare out the party message at rallies but otherwise didn’t develop much that was new in terms of saturation propaganda techniques. Like Mussolini, he overstated troop numbers, bussed in crowds, faked news, doctored photographs and inflated supporter numbers. Like Mussolini, he flooded the country with his image. Even after Stalingrad, when everything including paper was rationed and the people starving, four tonnes of paper a month were earmarked for his official photographer, pictures of the Führer being considered “strategically vital”. [Continue reading…]