u/Suboutai asked a question three days ago "Did Hitler have plans to eventually turn on Imperial Japan, just as he did to The Soviet Union?" to which u/ted5298 provided a very insightful and interesting answer. Well worth the read!

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Edit: I just noticed that this is the Saturday showcase, I though this was the post where we can post the best answers to questions of the week. I hope I can leave this up and then post it again when the "Sunday Digest" gets posted. There are also couple of other answers that are worth mentioning aswell.

Week 76

 

The last week of December 1919 – yes, we are jumping ahead a bit here – Alceste De Ambris, the last of the Italian revolutionary syndicalists, left the large industrial center of Milan for the small port town of Fiume. He had been invited, with a brief but cordial message, by the renown poet, interventionist and war veteran Gabriele D'Annunzio, who had taken control of the city three months before and needed a “less moderate” adviser to replace maj. Giovanni Giuriati (at the time the main proponent of the establishment of a modus vivendi agreement with the Italian Government) as Cabinet Chief.

De Ambris must have left almost immediately upon receiving the invitation, since his appointment was announced on January 10^th 1920 with a brief note from the Command of the Italian Army of Fiume of Italy (Fiume d'Italia, as the Legionnaires had renamed it), written and signed by the Commander himself, Gabriele D'Annunzio:

[…] The cooperation of this great comrade of ours, who has given so many displays of political sagacity, as well as of virile dignity and powerful discipline, is a remarkable acquisition for the cause of the heroic city where today the noblest facets of the new life find their manifestation.

A new life, growing from an irresistible generating force: no longer the myth of general strike, nor the great European war with its immense destructive and creative powers, but the Vate, the poet of the “radiant days of May” and of the “mutilated Victory” - this was the spark destined at last to ignite the revolutionary transformation which the Italian syndicalist had been seeking out persistently for almost two decades. Or so De Ambris must have hoped, as he explained almost three years later (D'Annunzio e il Proletariato in L'Internazionale, December 3^rd 1922), commenting the series of “speculations, inquiries and researches into D'Annunzio's mind”:

[…] I believe it is possible to come to whatever degree of certainty seems to be needed so urgently, even without demanding from D'Annunzio a geometric definition of his mind, which is a thing repugnant to that very mind. What we have a right to seek for is the direction which D'Annunzio's thought consistently keeps and develop along […]

But what is the direction of D'Annunzio's thought in so far as the social and political field, which is the one more relevant for the working people, is concerned? We must note first that any attempt to fit D'Annunzio into this one party or that one school […] would be tantamount to forcing an eagle into a coop of chickens. D'Annunzio is an exceptional character and therefore can't be a partisan of any doctrine whatsoever. He obeys to his own intimate coherence which goes beyond the rules of common logic, by harmonizing together apparently contrasting elements, in a synthesis which often escapes our understanding of average men.

For this reason one must understand him under the guidance of faith, rather than under that of cold reason. […]

As for the “Fiume enterprise” and its purpose and character:

The deepest and most true significance of this attempt has been lost on almost everyone: on those who saw and exalted it as the conquest of some square kilometers of land and of a port town of some importance, and on those who thought it had to be disparaged as the extreme and most dangerous convulsion of frenzied imperialism.

Those who understood D'Annunzio and his efforts were those few youngs, pure, naive, whose soul had been opened by the war to unrequited sacrifice, to heroism for the cause of a pure Idea. They weren't driven by ice-cold reason but by a new spontaneous intuition, ardent and trustful. They did not attempt to analyze D'Annunzio, and even less to project on him their thoughts or to bind him to their own interests: they instinctively felt that He was the true spirit of their heritage and followed him with absolute confidence and purity of heart.

 

De Ambris – despite their contrasts which had resulted in his marginalization within the “regency government” of September 1920 and the fact that the conclusion of their practical collaboration had coincided with the eventual failure of the “Fiume adventure” as well as of any related project of social renovation – had remained loyal to D'Annunzio, to the man and perhaps more to the idea of him. But it is fair to say that D'Annunzio was first and foremost, in his various different manifestations and incarnations, the idea of D'Annunzio; a character, much larger than life, inspired by a constant desire for the exceptional, the extraordinary, pushed by the need to occupy the center of a scene that he was constantly redrawing for himself – on the stage, ideas and themes of political renovation, of nation and war, became literary and artistic fascinations. As a political subject, on the ground of concrete political action, D'Annunzio was completely inadequate, and his aspirations, his desires both restless, ever-changing and vague. As a character, with the great masses no longer just looking at the stage but ready to walk it and clamoring from the pit, he was the one whose performance could still command their attention.

For these reasons, already a few weeks before his departure from the small town of Ronchi – a mile or so across the Isonzo river – on September 11^th 1919, the various forces involved with the expedition had begun projecting onto it – and onto D'Anunnzio himself – their own political ends and ideological contents. The man who had been called for the great speech of the Italian interventionism, from the sacred reef of Quarto – the starting point of Garibaldi's one thousand expedition – on May 5^th 1915; the man who had fought the war – arguably in his own artistic fashion, playing the many roles of aviator, submariner, assault commander, captain of the navy - the man who had sung the Italian Victory and promised to defend it. What better man to lead the “true” forces of the nation, in the time of need, with the Italian allies betraying the sacrifices of the people and the political world crushed under the weight of their own abject failure to turn the Italian victory into something concrete, tangible and true.

On one hand the nationalists, the great shipbuilding and arms manufactures, fractions of the military, of the Navy, which encouraged the movement, attempted to control it, or kept an eye on its developments – whether it could give cause for an expansion of the Italian occupation of Dalmatia, or to make it permanent, or prompt the fall of the recently formed “defeatist” Ministry of the reviled Francesco Saverio Nitti and the affirmation of an authoritarian solution of some sort. In the middle, holding together the state apparatus, the Italian governments: Nitti and then Giolitti, forced to maneuver around the obstacles in their attempts to come to a settlement with both the Allies and the Yugoslavs, while the internal situation threatened to deteriorate even further. On the other hand, those like De Ambris, who sought for a transformation of the movement into a “democratic”, revolutionary and republican direction, turning the energies of the nation – that the nationalists wanted to push outwards, to solve the internal crisis with an external expansion – inwards, towards its core. Orbiting in between these two poles, a variety of different, individual, particular groups: relics of the interventionist front, strong and weak, finding a composite semblance of restored unity in the more or less genuine anger for the allied betrayal and commitment to the fate of the Italian population of the eastern Adriatic coast. People, newspapers, leagues, fasci and associations – individuals, and behind them all, the vast background of a whole country, shaking away the legitimate suspicion that the whole affair could be little more than a distraction from greater and more urgent matters.