vzx:

polyaletheia:

vzx:

kontextmaschine: Gaddafi was the most d'Annunzian figure since d'Annunzio

ppl giving themselves effortpost prompts in my mentions smh

Do it! I want to hear more about d’Annunzio. I first heard about him in PLW’s TAZ (or something) back in the day.

bloodandhedonism: d'Annunzio seems more like kontext’s specialty, tell him to do more effortposts on him

well, @kontextmaschine, the verdict is in

I’ll get to it.

Here’s an appetizer - the thing that really got me into him, after a few sideways wikipedia references like what - I went to the library and got Michael Ledeen’s 1977 English-language biography of him, The First Duce.

Michael Ledeen! The… oh shit, I’m old aren’t I*, he was big as a neocon in the runup to the Second Iraq War and was all “Ba’athism is Fascism!” (not wrong!) but how does he know Fascism ‘cuz he was this guy who in the ‘70s was rediscovering the potential of ~tru~ fascism in Rome

back when that might have made a comeback!, people forget fascism had a mini-boom in the ‘70s-80s, not just punks and skinheads and Aryan Nations and Strategy of Tension and The Turner Diaries but Judge Dredd and Mount Perelin and Chile and all the British comics you look back like “woah, buddy, why is your communist ass getting all burnt on Reagan and Thatcher, they’re the heroes doncha know”

and looking back on that and getting more information and reading The Perch and some other biographies that were allusively but unhelpfully about period literary trends you really realize Ledeen was trying to rehabilitate the guy, in the mid-70s he was on a project to build up this story about a whimsical celebrity counter-imperial anti-Hitler sex-positive military prophet protofascist pirate

and he wasn’t wrong!

* what did you think this was going to be? tell me in my asks!