Mussolini's Legacy: Yesterday's Propaganda and Today's Fake News

Over 75 years since the fall of fascism, and a hundred since the march to Rome, the documentary investigates the spread of historical lies regarding Fascism and Mussolini, a narrative that Italy, especially its younger generations, is still swayed by. Reoccurring one-liners spreading a thousand times on social media, passed on as a truth echoing a mantra for the many who know little of history. Crowds of people persuaded by the fact that after all “Mussolini also did a lot of good”. The documentary aims at debunking once and for all platitudes concerning Mussolini and Italy’s fascist era and seeks to explore the cause of today’s fake news through the propaganda methods of the years that poisoned the entire world.

“Repeat a lie a hundred, a thousand times and it will become true” explained the ministry of Propaganda of the Third Reich, Joseph Goebbels, to his closest friends, depicting his personal idea of totalitarian information. A formula that today, with the aid of the web and the spread and replication of real and false news, has become a close-to-perfect weapon, or at least one that is difficult to stop.

Hence, we trace back the cause and try to understand how the “consent factory” brought to life by Il Duce and his friends actually worked. A highly structured system of propaganda organized by the Ministry of Popular Culture, aiming at the masses' unconditional support, which quickly hit the opposers and, soon thereafter, Italian Jews. This was an innovative way of doing politics which, with symbols and myths-making, was able to involve the vast majority of the population in the regime's organization, while generating widespread support also among social classes that, until then, had been uninterested or left out.