So, there's a book out on the tendence apocalyptique in US politics. Those folks got around:
...missionaries Ralph and Edith Norton meet with Mussolini in the early 1930s to interview him for the Sunday School Times. Like a lot of fundamentalists of that era, the missionary couple believed Mussolini was a strong candidate for the Antichrist—the dictatorial leader who would resurrect the Roman Empire. As the Nortons quizzed Mussolini about his political intentions and explained the basics of biblical prophecy, Il Duce became fascinated. “Is that really described in the Bible?” he asked. “By the time the Nortons were through with him,” Sutton writes, “Mussolini apparently believed—and maybe even hoped—that he was the long-awaited world dictator prophesied in the book of Daniel.”
There's also a cracking story about Bush raving to Chirac about Gog and Magog in order to get him to join in the Iraq war. Always worth being reminded of how crazy the atmosphere was in those days.
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