This essay originally appeared at NA Confidential on Tuesday, Oct. 25, 2011. Then, the pretext was Moammar Gaddafi’s finale. Today, contemplations on a theme of a dictator’s messy death might have a different source and meaning, but seeing as Facebook currently refuses to allow me to do my job and post a link to an African restaurant in New Albany, deeming it as spam (man versus Zuckerberg machine, with man losing) — nah, that’s got nothing to do with it. Truth be told, I saw Benito Mussolini’s name somewhere and thought of John Scheller, and this took me back a half-century to something I’ll never forget.
Here’s the explanation. As an aside, the National World War II Museum has an excellent account of Mussolini’s end, as well as the photo I’ve shielded on the cover.
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Seeing Is Believing.
“He counted on America to be passive. He counted wrong.”
— Ronald Reagan, following air strikes on Libya in 1986, also sampled in Def Leppard’s “Gods of War.”
For those taking a longer view of history than is customary in our time of super-sized junk food and atrophied attention spans, Moammar Gaddafi’s grisly finale last week was not at all unusual.
In short, we’ve all been here before.
When the armies of Italian fascist dictator Benito Mussolini helped jump-start World War II by invading Ethiopia, the Libyan desert already was a colonial possession of Italy’s, and it was not cleared of Axis troops until 1943, when Gaddafi still was in diapers.
Not long afterward, Mussolini suffered the same fate as the future Libyan despot. He was captured by anti-fascist countrymen, tried very quickly and just as hastily executed along with his mistress and others.
Il DUCE (caps were mandatory) had been rescued once before by the Germans, and his captors were determined to avoid a repeat performance. The corpses were meticulously hanged by the ankles from the overhanging lattice of an Esso gas station in Milano, and as was the case after Gaddafi’s death, photographs of the scene were widely circulated.
In some of the images, American GIs can be seen, milling around like veritable tourists with their Brownies, having arrived just in time for the spectacle.
Apparently one of them was a New Albanian whose name I recall as John Scheller, who was a substitute teacher when I was in junior high school. He would be long forgotten, if not for the contents of his briefcase: photos he had taken himself...Read more
