,
8 tweets,
2 min read
Read on Twitter
This is pretty outrageous: Antonio Tajani, president of the European Parliament, praising Mussolini for "building roads, bridges, buildings." politi.co/2J9BY5u 
This is a much-heard refrain about authoritarians, even among their opponents sometimes, that dictators - even though they are brutal - "get things done" on infrastructure. It's often not true, however, and even if it were, no bridge is worth mass murder.
The classic example is with Mussolini himself and the phrase, "at least he kept the trains running on time." Actually, he didn't: independent.co.uk/voices/rear-wi…
But you also see it with apologists for the horrors of the Belgian Congo - the "but we built schools and hospitals" crowd you can still hear in Belgium today. At independence in 1960, after decades of colonial rule, the country of 60 million had just 16 university graduates.
And of course, there are apologists for Stalin - inside today's Russia & abroad - who say the county's rapid industrialisation under the dictator somehow justifies the millions who died. Of course, they never think what development might have been like under a democracy.
And don't forget the apologists for Hitler - and those who say they just want "to be fair" - who claim he invented the autobahn. Fact check: it predates the Nazis' rise to power & credit should go to Adenauer. dw.com/en/the-myth-of…
All these regimes loved to take credit for infrastructure & spin that as proof of their "efficient" rule that "gets things done". And even though they are all long gone, their propaganda lives on. People still believe their lies today, even sensible people who should know better.
Final word: democracies also build bridges and roads and high-speed rail and super colliders and hospitals and schools and on and on and on. And they somehow manage to do it without murdering millions of people. I'll stick with that, thanks.
