In the entry on ‘Fascism’ published in 1932 in the Enciclopedia Italiana, Benito Mussolini made a prediction. There were, he claimed, good reasons to think that the twentieth century would be a century of ‘authority’, the ‘right’: a fascist century (un secolo fascista). However, after 1945 the many attempts by fascists to perpetuate the dreams of the 1930s have come to naught. Whatever impact they have had at a local level, and however profound the delusion that fascists form a world-wide community of like-minded ultranationalists and racists revolutionaries on the brink of ‘breaking through’, as a factor in the shaping of the modern world, their fascism is clearly a spent force. But history is a kaleidoscope of perspectives that dynamically shift as major new developments force us to rewrite the narrative we impose on it. What if we take Mussolini’s secolo to mean not the twentieth century, but the ‘hundred years since the foundation of Fascism’? Then the story we are telling ourselves changes radically.

中文翻译：

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墨索里尼预言了一个法西斯世纪：他错了多少？

在 1932 年出版的《意大利百科全书》上的“法西斯主义”条目中，贝尼托·墨索里尼做出了预测。他声称，有充分的理由认为二十世纪将是一个“权威”、“权利”的世纪：一个法西斯世纪（un secolo fascista）。然而，在 1945 年之后，法西斯主义者为延续 1930 年代的梦想而进行的许多尝试都化为泡影。无论他们在地方层面产生了怎样的影响，也不管法西斯主义者形成了一个由志同道合的极端民族主义者和种族主义革命者组成的世界性社区，处于“突破”的边缘，这是塑造现代世界的一个因素。 ，他们的法西斯主义显然是一种消耗力量。但历史是一个万花筒，随着重大的新发展迫使我们重写我们强加给它的叙述，这些观点会动态变化。如果我们把墨索里尼的 secolo 不是指 20 世纪，而是指“自法西斯主义创立以来的一百年”呢？然后我们告诉自己的故事发生了根本性的变化。