By David Swanson, World BEYOND War, July 27, 2026

The film Fiume o Morte! opens with people in the Croatian town of Rijeka being asked a question on the street: “Who was Gabriele D’Annunzio?” It gives me great pleasure to report that many of them had not the foggiest idea.

Over 100 years ago, Rijeka (at the time called Fiume in Italian) in the everlasting idiocy of the Treaty of Versailles was not properly included in any country after World War I. D’Annunzio, a famous Italian poet, novelist, partier, despiser of morality, and all-around buffoonish narcissist with an oversized fascination with violence, drove down the coast in 1919 with truckloads of eager young pseudo-warriors to proclaim himself dictator of Fiume and name his kingdom the Regency of Carnaro.

D’Annunzio was a friend, collaborator, and rival of Benito Mussolini, who would borrow for fascist Italy (and in many cases pass along to Nazi Germany) from the Regency of Carnaro: the one-armed salute, various chants and songs, the balcony speeches, public religious-state rituals, black-shirted thugs, nights of racist violence and ethnic cleansing, and the formalized corporate state of, by, and for the oligarchs. D’Annunzio was the John the Baptist of fascism, and now virtually nobody knows who the hell he was. And you can make a film juxtaposing old footage of his hijinks with people today reenacting it, and arrive at the conclusion that the guy was a record-setting world-class imbecile, good for a warning and a laugh.

So here’s what I’m hoping for the world in the year 2130 or so. First of all, there will have been no complete climate or ecosystemic or nuclear apocalypse. Life will be going on. And it will be possible to ask random people on the street: “Who was Donald Trump? ” and those people will have not the slightest clue.

Then one will show those people film of Trump and his threats and his proclamations, his ballroom, his reflecting pool, his takeover of Venezuela, his Secretary of Sickness playing with snakes, his plans for Greenland and the Strait of Hormuz, his Secretary of War working out with his legionnaires, his appropriating of trophies and awards, his dancing and speechifying, his bluster and his lies and his renaming everything in sight for himself (just like D’Annunzio, whose name is now gone from all those things in Rijeka).

Then one will recruit enlightened people of 2130 to reenact the idiocies. And the world will laugh an enormous laugh, sigh a great sigh of relief, and declare “Holy shit, I never knew that happened and I’m glad it ended!”

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