“He created a desert and called it peace”

“He created a desert and called it peace” condenses a promise of order built on the suppression of conflict. The phrase appears in the portrait of Benito Mussolini as a leader who claims he can tame violence by imposing his own command: peace is not shown as reconciliation, but as the condition left when opposing forces have been made to disappear.

The promise contained in the image

The surrounding passage builds Mussolini’s authority through a series of contradictions. He is cast as a man of physical strength and violence who will placate violence, and as a figure of confrontation who will end the existence of two opposing fronts. The image of the desert gives that promised resolution its cost: a landscape emptied of the forces that might resist or disrupt him. Calling the result peace makes coercive quiet sound like public safety.

The same portrait presents Mussolini as a commanding performer. He is imagined as a lion tamer entering a cage, cracking a whip, and making the beasts obey. That spectacle turns political conflict into a scene of personal mastery: the crowd is invited to see disorder not as a problem to be negotiated, but as something a singular leader can subdue. The phrase therefore carries both a promise of relief and an implicit warning about what that relief requires.

Crowds made into threats

The book sets this ideal of command against scenes in which socialist crowds are described from the hostile perspective of their opponents. During a procession, women and children march at the front, and the anti-militarist presence unsettles authoritarian men who had supported the war. Shopkeepers and hoteliers shut windows, lower shutters, and bar doors. Their retreat into enclosed rooms makes the threatened future seem to be met not with engagement, but with an attempt to preserve the present by shutting it out.

In another scene, Albino Volpi watches a socialist procession celebrating an electoral victory. The crowd’s red flags, carnations, singing, and praise of Russia are read as signs that it is foreign, degraded, and incapable of forming a disciplined political body. This is a viewpoint presented through the watcher’s contempt, not a neutral description of the demonstrators. Its dehumanizing imagery helps explain the appeal of the phrase’s promised order: once a crowd has been imagined as a threat or a herd, coercive control can be represented as the restoration of peace.

Discipline and alternative forms of order

The workers’ factory occupation offers a pointed contrast to that picture of the crowd. For thirty days, workers keep production going without bank financing, raw materials supplied through the usual channels, or the direction of technicians and engineers. They prohibit drinking during shifts, organize surveillance against theft, and guard machinery and materials. Their discipline is collective and practical, not the obedience of a population subdued by one leader.

That contrast complicates the notion that order can come only from force imposed from above. The workers demonstrate organization and responsibility, but socialist leaders defer the decision to carry the struggle beyond the factories, fearing that the workers will be overwhelmed. Their unrealized revolution leaves the workers’ capacity visible while the political outcome remains unresolved. Against that episode, the desert image can be read as a narrowing of political possibility: it promises an end to conflict, but not the continuation of the workers’ collective experiment.

Authority as public performance

The book repeatedly connects political influence with the management of public appearances. Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, standing on a chair in a trattoria before truckers, printers, and veterans, turns his attack on women’s extravagant dress into a theatrical address. Margherita Sarfatti, the only woman at the table, watches the uproar with a benevolent smile. The scene shows how a male speaker can make his own prescriptions for social conduct into public spectacle, with a woman present largely as its audience.

A separate episode involving Gabriele D’Annunzio also links authority to the press. After his doctor reports that he must rest in absolute silence, D’Annunzio gets out of bed less than a day later and has the newspapers informed that his health has suddenly improved. The timing follows extensive newspaper coverage of Benito Mussolini’s triumph in Naples. This does not explain the phrase directly, but it places its image within a political world where leadership is staged, reported, and contested as well as exercised. In that world, the promise of peace is itself a performance: the decisive question is whether order means shared discipline or the silence produced by command.