Book Review: Bankers and Bolsheviks: International Finance and the Russian Revolution by Hassan Malik

Abstract

instance to what was meant by ‘proselytism’. Both his and Tacchi-Venturi’s argumentative strategy was to claim that what threatened Catholicism also threatened Fascism. The Jesuit and the Pope, however, were frustrated at Mussolini’s personal refusal to take the alleged Protestant threat seriously. Not only was Il Duce, like many Fascists, a veteran anti-clerical, he would also have been aware of the adverse diplomatic consequences of the persecution of Protestants. A suggestive section of Madigan’s book is that on Villa San Sebastiano in the Fucino Basin (Abruzzi). An enquiry concluded that, in this community, accusations of the bishop’s failure to combat Methodism, and indeed the mercurial fortunes of Methodism themselves, stemmed from the animosity of certain families towards the aforementioned prelate. Were similar factors at play elsewhere? The Protestant ‘threat’ was inflated and so too were claims about the success of counter-measures. Protestants remained a small but resistant minority. Observers might blame the inadequacy of local clergy, whether through indolence, ignorance or poverty, or, yet again, they might lament the lack of cooperation by the Fascist authorities. The alliance between Fascism and the Catholic Church was an opportunistic one between rival totalitarianisms, but it was one cemented, as Madigan shows, by certain shared obsessions. Catholic spokesmen had a long history of depicting ideologies condemned by the Catholic Church, including Protestantism, as alien to Italian tradition and values. Now, Fascist ideologues shared with them a hostility to ‘materialistic’ Anglo-Saxon culture and fear of Italo-American missionaries as agents of US imperialism. Madigan states, however, that, contrary to the traditional picture: ‘one truth revealed by the anti-Protestant campaign is how little unified the Fascist government was about eliminating the Protestant threat’. One might suggest, further, that the irregularity of cooperation between the State authorities and the ecclesiastical ones was partly an outcome of the complexities of the regime more broadly as a coalition of ‘authentic’ Fascists, who were radicals of a sort, and conservatives.