The Rule Has a Timer

The Beach Ball

In an Italian state archive there is a report filed by a political informant stationed in a crowd in central Rome in May 1943. His job was to record what people were saying near the Palazzo Venezia, the building with the balcony, the stage set of the regime, the place where Mussolini had declared an empire and a hundred crowds had roared his name on cue. What the informant recorded instead was this: someone in the crowd had inflated a condom, and the crowd was batting it around like a beach ball, whacking it up toward the window of the dictator's office.

The historian Joshua Arthurs found that report and told the story last week at the Stratford Festival, at the first session of a five-part CBC Ideas series on how authoritarian regimes rise and fall. His point was about the cult of personality: by May 1943 it had broken, and the crowd that once performed devotion in that square was now performing something closer to contempt. Two months later the Grand Council voted Mussolini out and the King had him arrested.

Here is the detail that should stop you. The regime that fell to laughter in 1943 could have been stopped by ordinary police in 1922. The panel at Stratford put the number of marchers who "seized" Rome at roughly nine thousand men, and described them as wet, hungry, and demoralized, camped outside the city in the October rain. The March on Rome was not a conquest. It was a bluff. The state had every instrument it needed to call it, and the prime minister asked the King to sign a decree of martial law that would have dispersed the columns before breakfast. The King declined, and instead invited Mussolini, who had prudently remained in Milan near the Swiss border, to come and form a government. He arrived by sleeping car.

Between the bluff nobody called and the beach ball in the piazza lie twenty-one years: a police state, a war of choice that killed hundreds of thousands of Italians, the deportation of Italian Jews, and a civil war that ended with the dictator's body hung upside down at a Milan service station. Every one of those costs was paid because resistance came late. That gap, between what it costs to stop an authoritarian project early and what it costs to remove one late, is the subject of this essay. It is also, I want to argue, the key to reading the most radical papal document of our lifetime, and to answering a question Canadians have started asking in earnest: what are we actually permitted to do in our own defense?

The Window

The Stratford panel, hosted by Nahlah Ayed with Arthurs, the Franco-era historian Aitana Guia, and Robert Ventresca, a historian of the Catholic Church under fascism, kept returning to a single idea: fascism did not seize power in Italy so much as it was handed power, in stages, by elites who believed they were using it.

The stages have a familiar shape, the one Robert Paxton mapped in The Anatomy of Fascism. First a movement forms in the wreckage of a postwar economy, presenting itself as the answer to socialism, liberalism, and a nationalism that felt cheated by victory. Then it roots itself in society, and here the rooting was violent: the squadristi burned union halls and beat organizers, and landowners and industrialists found the violence useful, so long as it was aimed at the left. Then comes the co-optation, the moment traditional conservatives conclude they can hire the movement, contain it, and ride it to a majority. The March on Rome worked not because it was strong but because the men who could have stopped it had already half-decided they preferred Mussolini to the alternative they feared more.

Even after that, the window stayed open. This is the part of the story the panel insisted on, and it is the part worth carrying home. In June 1924 fascist thugs abducted and murdered Giacomo Matteotti, the socialist deputy who had stood up in parliament weeks earlier to itemize the fraud and violence behind the fascist election victory. The outcry was enormous. The regime wobbled. For months Mussolini was, by several accounts including his own later admissions, genuinely vulnerable. If his coalition partners, the establishment liberals and conservatives and the institutions behind them, had pulled their support, the experiment likely ends there.

Instead, the opposition walked out of parliament in protest, a gesture known as the Aventine secession, which was principled, nonviolent, and fatal, because a boycott with no strategy behind it simply left the chamber to the fascists. And the conservatives, offered a choice between a criminal government and the phantom of a left resurgence, fell back in line. In January 1925 Mussolini stood up in the chamber and dared Italy to indict him, taking personal responsibility for the climate in which the murder happened. Nobody moved. One of the Stratford panelists called that speech the moment dictatorship actually begins, and added a sentence that hangs over everything else: if people had pulled the plug then, we would be having a different conversation.

Note what resistance would have required in 1922 or 1924. Not partisans in the mountains. Not a single act of violence. It would have required a King signing a decree, deputies staying in their seats, conservative politicians accepting short-term risk, newspapers refusing to normalize, and ordinary institutions doing their ordinary jobs against a movement that was still, structurally, a bluff. The price of stopping fascism early was civic courage. The price of stopping it late was Piazzale Loreto.

The Pope's Clause

Two months before the Stratford panel convened, Pope Leo XIV published Magnifica Humanitas, the encyclical I wrote about in Disarm the Machine. Its most quoted sentence retires sixteen centuries of moral theology: the just war framework, "which has all too often been used to justify any kind of war, is now outdated." Less quoted is the clause the sentence is built around. The retirement of just war comes "without prejudice to the right to self-defense in the strictest sense."

When the encyclical dropped, most commentary read that clause as a diplomatic hedge, a bone thrown to Ukraine's defenders or to NATO chanceries. I think it repays a more literal reading, and the Italian story shows why.

The Church knows exactly what it looks like when self-defense is deferred too long, because the Church was one of the institutions that deferred it. Ventresca, who sat on the Stratford panel, has spent his career on precisely this history. In 1929 the Vatican signed the Lateran Pacts with Mussolini, resolving the sixty-year standoff between Church and Italian state, and Pius XI, whatever his later regrets and protests, lent the regime a legitimacy it could not have manufactured on its own. The Church did not create fascism, and individual Catholics filled the ranks of the eventual resistance. But as an institution it made the same wager the King made, and the liberal establishment made, and the industrialists made: that the movement could be accommodated, moderated, and outlasted. Every institution that made that wager lost it, and the people they were responsible for paid the difference.

So when a Pope writes that just war is finished but self-defense "in the strictest sense" survives, the Italian reading of that clause is not about tanks. It is about timing. Just war theory always asked its questions at the last possible moment, at the border, at the mobilization order, when the choices left are war or submission. Leo's framework, taken seriously, moves the moral action earlier. If you may defend yourself in the strictest sense, and if late defense means partisan war and civil bloodshed while early defense means signatures, strikes, and staying in your parliamentary seat, then the duty implied by the right is to act inside the window, when defense and nonviolence are still the same thing.

There is a rule. The rule has a timer.

What the Data Says About the Timer

This is where the theology meets the spreadsheet. Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan's research on twentieth-century resistance movements, which anchored the civil resistance plan I published for the Canadian context, found that nonviolent campaigns succeeded roughly twice as often as violent ones, and that no movement that mobilized 3.5 percent of the population in sustained participation failed to force change. The finding is often quoted as a vindication of pacifism. It is really a finding about timing, because the mechanism behind it is participation, and participation is a function of how consolidated the regime is.

Nonviolent movements win by being enormous, and they get enormous because the barrier to entry is low: grandmothers, civil servants, and shopkeepers can join a strike or a boycott in ways they will never join a militia. Mass participation then works on the regime's pillars of support, the police who hesitate, the workers who stay home, the officials who slow-walk, until the regime discovers it cannot govern. Every one of those mechanisms depends on there still being institutions to defect, media to carry the story, and a repression apparatus not yet built for total surveillance. That is what "unconsolidated" means. Italy in 1922 was saturated with that kind of leverage. Italy in 1935 had none of it. The leverage did not disappear because Italians grew cowardly; it disappeared because a consolidated single-party state is designed, methodically and by name, to dismantle exactly those mechanisms. The panel's fourth stage, the exercise of power, is precisely the stage in which the regime uniforms the civil service, absorbs the press, occupies public space, and puts a radio in every kitchen so that no one can fail to be reminded who is the only option.

Read Chenoweth through the Italian case and the moral arithmetic of pacifism inverts. Waiting is not the peaceful option. Waiting is the violent option, deferred. The Italians who finally defended themselves in the strictest sense, the partisans of 1943 to 1945, were not morally worse than the deputies of 1924. They were simply left with worse choices, because the cheap, legal, bloodless forms of self-defense had been spent by men who mistook accommodation for prudence. If Leo XIV's clause means anything for a citizen rather than a state, it means this: the strictest sense of self-defense is the earliest one.

Stage Two

Near the end of the Stratford session, a student asked the question everyone in Lazaridis Hall was already thinking: what stage are we at, watching the United States? One panelist answered carefully but did answer: stage two, the rooting of these forces in society and institutions, with consolidation not yet complete. The same panelist warned against reading the present through a 1930s stencil, because twenty-first-century authoritarian populism does not need blackshirts or a march; it has courts, primaries, procurement, and platforms. The costume changes. The stages, and the timer, do not.

For Canadians the temptation is to treat this as spectator analysis, something happening one border south. Our own record should cure the complacency. Everything Mussolini did between 1922 and 1926 was procedurally dressed as law, and Westminster systems like ours are held together less by structural safeguards than by norms, which is to say by the willingness of people in power not to do what the rules technically allow. We have watched governments of three provinces reach for the notwithstanding clause to switch off Charter rights preemptively, and the ceiling on that instrument is convention, not text. We have watched prorogation used twice in living memory to shelter a government from Parliament at politically convenient moments. We concentrate more unchecked power in a Prime Minister's Office than almost any peer democracy. None of this is fascism, and saying so cheapens the word. All of it is infrastructure, sitting in place, waiting for someone with fewer scruples, and the Italian lesson is that the moment to care about infrastructure is while its abusers remain hypothetical.

The panel's final lesson was its most uncomfortable, and it lands differently in Canada than the panelists may have intended. Asked who has the power to contain an authoritarian movement, the answer was not the street, and not the left. It was the conventional conservative party. Fascism consolidated in Italy when conservatives decided a strongman was preferable to their opponents; it would have died in the crib the moment they decided otherwise. The panelist said he would love to see an American Republican Party recommitted to democratic institutions. The Canadian translation is a standing question for our own conservative movement, which is nowhere near the American condition but is subject to the same continental pressures, the same media economics, and the same electoral temptations. The single most important authoritarianism-prevention mechanism in this country is a Conservative Party that would rather lose an election than break the machinery, and the second most important is a governing party that never gives it the excuse the Italian conservatives thought they had. Matteotti's murderers were not stopped by the socialists. They could only have been stopped by the men who considered themselves the party of order.

Elbows Up, Early

Canada spent the last eighteen months rediscovering the language of self-defense. Annexation rhetoric and tariff coercion from Washington turned "elbows up" from a hockey idiom into a national posture, and I have already published a detailed plan for what organized civilian resistance would look like if the worst arrived. This essay is the companion argument, and the Stratford series is the occasion for it: the plan only works if the timer argument is understood first.

Because the honest reading of Mussolini's Italy is not that Italians lacked courage. It is that courage arrived on schedule, and the schedule was set by everyone who declined to act earlier. The informant in the Piazza Venezia crowd in May 1943 was watching a population that had finally stopped believing the spectacle, which was the panel's parting instruction to us: do not believe the facade, because the March on Rome succeeded only because enough people did. But May 1943 was twenty years too late for disbelief to be cheap. Disbelief in 1924 would have cost a coalition its comfort. Disbelief in 1943 cost a civil war.

Pope Leo retired just war theory because the wars it was built to judge no longer exist, and because the machines now entangled in them cannot carry moral weight. He kept one thing: the right to defend yourself, in the strictest sense. Mussolini's Italy teaches us to read that clause with a clock in hand. The strictest sense of self-defense is not the most violent form. It is the earliest form, the one exercised while your parliament still sits, your press still prints, your courts still rule, and the men at the gates of your institutions are still nine thousand cold, wet opportunists waiting to see whether anyone believes them. There is a rule for defending yourself. The rule has a timer, and the timer is running while everything still looks normal.