The world of the twentieth century differed
sharply from that of the nineteenth. The twentieth
century was the age of the masses. Those who
governed had the opportunity for the first time to
communicate directly with those they governed.
The mass-circulation newspapers, the radio, the
cinema and, after the Second World War, televi-
sion, created entirely new conditions of govern-
ment. Contemporaries were not slow to recognise
this. Those who ruled could create images of
themselves, of their policies and objectives,
of society and the world around them and so seek
to lead and manipulate the masses. Mass persua-
sion became an essential ingredient of govern-
ment; and the techniques of the art were seriously
studied and consciously applied by elected gov-
ernments and totalitarian regimes alike; the British
prime minister Stanley Baldwin used the radio
effectively during the General Strike of 1926 by
broadcasting to the nation; President Roosevelt
started his famous ‘fireside chats’; and the totali-
tarian leaders, Stalin, Mussolini and Hitler, put on
gigantic displays that could be ‘witnessed’ by mil-
lions through the cinema. Mussolini’s and Hitler’s
raucous speeches became familiar to every Italian
and German; they were amplified by loudspeakers
erected in public places in case anyone turned off
their radio at home. Manipulation, today’s ‘spin’,
became the art of politics.
The privileged felt alarmed and threatened by
this new age that was dawning. In countries with
strong traditions of representative government anddemocratically inspired institutions this new force
of the ‘masses’ was successfully integrated. This is
essentially what happened in Britain and the US in
the 1920s and 1930s and, less convincingly, in
France too. In the Soviet Union the mass of people
were brought into harmony with the rulers by pro-
paganda, appeals to communist idealism and,
where this did not suffice, by force and terror. The
revolution created a new class of privileged and
bound these to the regime. But those who had
possessed social, political and economic privilege in
pre-war Russia lost it. The spectre of revolution
haunted the majority of Western societies where
communist parties only gained the allegiance of a
determined minority. The danger from the
extreme left was generally exaggerated. The weak-
nesses of existing representative forms of govern-
ment to deal with national problems, became
glaringly clear to everyone. The soldiers returning
from the hardships of a long war to the unsettled
conditions of post-war Europe, with its endemic
under-employment as economies readjusted from
war to peace, were disillusioned.
The victors did not experience the rewards of
victory. Neither territorial increases nor repara-
tions could compensate for the immense human
loss and material damage of the war. The defeated
in any case lacked the means to compensate the
victors adequately. Among the defeated powers
the sense of loss now suffered made the sacrifices
of war seem all the more unbearable. Unrequited
nationalism was a powerful destabilising force in(^1) Chapter 14
ITALY AND THE RISE OF FASCISM