The Century of Italy

Of Antonio Pannullo
Now who knows how many they will tell Salvini: “Many enemies, so much honor!”. Deputy Prime Minister Salvini writes it, are Facebook, by posting a press article reporting news of the various attacks on the Minister of the Interior, in the past few days, from the Catholic sectors to those of the left. In reality Mussolini's motto was not "many enemies", but “many enemies”, however, that is the meaning.
And it is also not the first time that Salvini has used this phrase, and then it is a sentence of simple common sense: the leader of the League used it at least one other time, in February 2015, referring to the criticism of him by do-gooders who underlined that there were Italians in poverty while the State paid for hotels for illegal immigrants. The phrase, being sure to be effective, it has been used by many people, and is erroneously attributed to Julius Caesar, like many other mottos of the Duce. But it's not even his. This beautiful phrase was almost certainly invented by a man who had many enemies in his life: the German leader Georg von Frundsberg (1473-1528), obviously unknown in Italy. He was a general of the Holy Roman Empire of the German nation who fought for the House of Habsburg, and in particular for Emperor Maximilian I. Georg spent his whole life fighting almost continuously for the Habsburgs, especially in Italy. It seems that right in Vicenza, fighting against the Venetians in the Battle of La Motta, Venetians who were in overwhelming numbers, the leader told his servant that he had pointed out the disproportion: “many enemies of von Frundsberg, much honour!”. It was the 1513.
Today there is a statue in his honor at the Military Museum in Vienna, commissioned by Franz Joseph, and during the Second World War a Waffen SS division was allowed to bear the title Frundsberg. The German leader has been forgotten, but the phrase remained, just as the phrases invented by the Arditi during the Great War remained and were used, mottos taken up by Mussolini and relaunched for their validity and for the message they conveyed. Among these, “He who stops is lost”, “Better one day as a lion than a hundred years as a sheep”, etc. In short, the sentences, the mottos, the slogans one would say today, they rarely belong to the person who made them famous, but the merit of Mussolini and other leaders is certainly that of having valorized those concepts that touch the emotional chords of man and which are ultimately eternal values. Returning to Salvini, we are ready to bet that the storm over his use of certain expressions will continue. But we also bet that Salvini, to stay in the metaphor, "don't worry".
P.S: this was also a motto of the Arditi of the Great War...
Source: http://www.secoloditalia.it/2018/07/salvini-cita-lui-molti-nemici-molto-onore-ma-la-frase-non-e-del-duce/ Read More