WE HAVE NOW SEEN MUSSOLINI TRIUMPHANT, IF ONLY temporarily, in his dealings with the Vatican, totally victorious in suppressing opposition parties and press, totally unsuccessful in attempting to create art and culture.
Economically, the evidence is incontrovertible, Fascism has been a failure, and the lowering of the standard of living has been an inevitable result. The Fascist hierarchy, the manufacturers, big-business men, the bureaucracy and army may be better off in Italy than before the war, but the masses of people, workmen and middle class, are decidedly worse off.
Certain Fascist claims have already been disposed of in preceding chapters, notably that "Bolshevism and social disorder have been, abolished," that "Industry and commerce have revived," or that "employment has increased," a claim which was justified in 1925, but which was made in 1927 and 1928, when it was untrue, and which is ridiculous today. But there are still propagandists who claim that "wages and the cost of living have been balanced," and that the budget has been balanced, and many things which official Fascist statistics themselves deny.
The most important of the achievements which Mussolini and philo-Fascists have listed, in addition to those discussed previously, are the following:
The trains run on time.
The marshes have been drained.
Public works.
Restoration of the prestige of Italy.
Rebirth and intensification of Nationalism.
"Order, Discipline, Hierarchy" (The Fascist slogan).
The Authoritarian State.
Celebrating the first decade of Fascism, Mussolini in a public oration recounted all the material achievements. "And furthermore," he continued, "I say that we have accomplished even grander things. Because the Fascist idea has become part of the Italian nation, has become the Italian nation itself, and is destined to live in the generations which follow.
"Ten years of Fascism have created, as I have said, an epoch. The material gains constitute only a part of the work. . . . Fascism is destined to live. Fascism is a living spirit and that spirit will live even after the death of the pioneers who created it.
"The great movements which have survived are those which are animated with spirit. . . . Ten years of power have given to Fascism a spirit which, above the material things which it has constructed, is destined to live like the other great movements of the past. The material realizations are useful for the nation for years. . . . The spirit which created material things will live and will continue even after these things themselves have disappeared.
"Already other nations begin to study us. The people of the entire world demand of us: 'What have you accomplished?* The spirit of Fascism today is penetrating other nations outside our frontiers and will live under other suns. "It is not a matter of the simple functioning of a system nor of mechanical organizations of a government. Fascism regards itself as a living organism, it believes in and develops itself in a measure which the years augment in vibrant vitality. ... In ten years its virility has been infused into the very existence and the life of the Italian people. Fascism has fortified this virility and has given it plenitude of the kind which all nations have which survive, and it has given to all humanity its spirit and its benediction. . . . Ten years have created a living organism, full of ardent life, promising us eternity. Fascism will transmit to posterity its heritage of Power and Will."
Fascism's achievements, according to Mr. Marcosson, "ranged all the way from purging the streets of beggars and the elimination of the once-dreaded Mafia to the stimulation of production, the reorganization of governmental departments, the transfer of public utilities to private ownership, the conversion of the railway deficit to a profit, the checking of currency gambling and the restoration of Italian prestige abroad." According to Mr. Cortesi [1] "whatever opinions anyone may hold concerning spiritual and doctrinal content of Fascism, it is almost universally conceded that from a purely material standpoint Italy has made great strides under the present regime." He then proceeds to sum up the gains under Mussolini:
The technical equipment of the nation has been greatly improved.
"The reclamation work covers an area of about 10,000,000,000 [sic] acres, involving the construction of 830 miles of drainage canals, 700 miles of irrigation canals, 2,000 miles of new roads, 105 rural aqueducts, and 3,500 farmhouses."
Five thousand miles of road resurfaced in 1932; 3,500 miles of new roads built.
Great improvements in State railroads; 350 new miles opened to traffic in ten years; 300 miles under construction.
"Especially important is the new Florence-Bologna line which has cost more than $70,000,000 and will soon be opened to traffic."
The gospel of Fascism, according to Howard R. Marraro of the Italian Department of Columbia University: [2]
The Italian today is much better fed than he was.
The standards of living have improved from 1913 to the present. This improvement is particularly marked during the twelve years of the Fascist regime.
Thanks to the labor legislation of the Fascist regime, there has been no important strike or lockout in Italy since 1926.
The Opera Nasionale Dopolavoro supplies entertainment, education, physical exercise, health, and welfare work.
Increased wheat production.
Hydroelectric power tells another story of progress under the Fascist regime.
Unemployment kept down by public works . . . costing 24,708,509,497.12 lire, or about $2,148,572,000, to August 31, 1932 . . .; road building; land reclamation.
Gold reserve rose from 5,626,300,000 lire on December 31, 1931, to 6,838,500,000 in April 1934.
"Fascism in Italy has thus made genuine progress toward solving a series of fundamental economic problems. . . . The economic and social achievements of Fascism are truly impressive. ... A more prosperous and happy nation."
Least important and most quoted is the argument that the trains run on time. The vast American tourist class, which includes bankers, editors, senators and representatives, mayors and mayoresses, army officers and just plain "folks," returned to its native land, where railroading is an accepted institution but not necessarily a yardstick for patriotism, and roared in unison, "Great is the Duce; the trains now run on time." A poor, simple, naive minority which protested that some abstract and old-fashioned American things such as liberty of the press, freedom of the individual, equal justice, and the spread of culture were being slaughtered by the Corporate State, where an institution known as the O. V. R. A. exercised dictatorial terrorism, was squelched with the complete answer, "But the trains run on time." When the unruly minority timidly suggested that the Authoritarian State was the complete antithesis of the Magna Charta, the Declaration of Independence, and the Rights of Man, millions of tourists would leap up to chant the litany, "The trains run on time." The official press agents and the official philosophers of the Fascist regime explained to the world that the running of trains was the symbol of the restoration of law and order — Order, Discipline, Hierarchy.
No one has bothered to explain that the short period of railroad disorganization occurred just after the war, when Italy, in order to keep the troop and supply trains running, tore up the rails in many parts of the kingdom and was forced to neglect roadbeds and repair work everywhere, and that immediately after the war engaged upon a railroad reconstruction program of five years which resulted in June, 1922, with enough success to make "the trains run on time," a claim of the Liberal regime. (The Liberal regime, thoughtlessly, hired no press agent and no international bankers to publicize itself.)
No one ever denied that there have been disruptions of the Italian railroads due to strikes; everyone seems to have forgotten that not only did Mussolini advocate the ownership and control of the railroad system by the railroad workingmen, but he editorially supported them when they struck.
Do the railroads always run on time under Fascist discipline? An investigation during a fortnight in July, 1930, made despite the fact the press was forbidden to mention railroad accidents and delays, disclosed five cases: the Milan-Chiasso express was derailed at Seregano, two of the crew being injured; two days later the train carrying the Hon. Minister of Justice Rocco was derailed and arrived many hours late; on July 22nd the Rome-Milan Pullman was derailed at Targuinie; on the 26th a locomotive and fourteen coaches fell into the Meduna River near Udine, and there was one other derailment of small importance. It is true that the majority of big expresses, those carrying eyewitnessing tourists, are usually put through on time, but on the smaller lines bad rail and road-bed conditions frequently cause delays.
Wrote M. Vandervelde, noted Belgian Foreign Minister, after a trip to Italy: "The time is no more when Italian trains run on time. We always were kept waiting for more than a quarter of an hour at the level crossings because the trains were never there at the times they should have been passing." [3]
A word must also be said about the great public works. Mussolini has announced the completion of the aqueduct of Pouilles, the Naples-Rome railroad, the Sila hydro-electric works, and many others. Mussolini himself made grand orations at the openings. He did not state, however, that such public works take ten or fifteen years to finish, that ex-Premier Nitti projected the Sila and other works, that the aqueduct was begun in 1915, and that the Naples-Rome railroad was all ready but for the oratory.
And take for another example the famous Florence-Bologna line which Mr. Cortesi lists among Fascist triumphs. I have already mentioned the work in Chapter XX, "graft amounting to 300,000,000 lire in the Florence-Bologna 700,000,000 lire tunnel project," when the ras Baroncini accused "the Grandi gang," and the gang retaliated by hiring a doctor to poison the ras. On April 22, 1934, the Associated Press reported the opening of the world's longest double-track railway tunnel, "a high spot in Premier Mussolini's public-works program," but after paying this homage, revealed the fact that "work was started on the tunnel approximately twenty years ago"—i.e., in 1913, by a Liberal regime.
The case of laud reclamation is a similar story. Mr. Cortesi has reported that it "covers an area of about 10,000,000,000 acres," which is just about two thousand times the area which Mr. Mussolini claims, but this may all be a typographical error or a wish-fulfillment betrayal of the Fascist mentality.
Before the war the government announced that the total of drained marshland was 700,000 hectares, the hectare being 2.47 plus acres; in 1928 the Fascist regime announced that from 1918 to 1927 an additional 527,000 hectares had been put into cultivation by the Nitti, Giolitti, and Mussolini governments, and that work was being done on 568,000 hectares by the Fascist government, leaving some 589,000 hectares for future operations.
In fact, the work on the Roman Campagna began in 1911, when 9,585 hectares around Rome were reclaimed by government subsidy; in 1921 the total was 53,000 hectares and the government passed an act for further increases. The company for the reclamation of the Pontine marshes was formed in 1919 and began operations on a twenty-year project on May 12, 1922. The Piscinara area operations also began in that part of 1922 which the Fascists call "chaos and anarchy" — i.e., a few months before they arrived.
Official statistics for electrification also reveal that the period 1913-14 produced 2,3 thousand million kilowatts and that in 1918 it had been increased to 4 thousand million. From 190S to 1915, according to Fortune's survey, Italy's hydroelectric capacity increased an average of 17 per cent per annum; under Fascism, from 1922 to 1929, it increased 18 per cent per annum, therefore "Fascist policy does not score a triumph." But the triumph — without statistics — is stressed in all emotional ballyhoo for the regime.
On the success side of the ledger must be written militarism. Here something new under the sun has been accomplished and Sparta has been left behind: the Duce has finally militarized the cradles of the country.
From the day of birth until the child is capable of beginning his military training the Italian male will be under government supervision merely of a hygienic nature. But at the age of six he begins his service by joining the pre-Balilla military order. From now on his life belongs to the state. Here is the program as finally completed in November, 1934:
Ages 6 to 8: Sons of the Wolf
Ages 9 to 14: Balilla
Ages 15 to 18: Avanguardisti
Ages 19 to 21: Fascist militia
Ages 22 to 34: Regular army (18 months) service and active reserve
Ages 35 to 55: Reserves.
Fifty years of a man's life under militarization; special training for women in the medical, chemical warfare, and allied fields; mobilization of all citizens from sixteen to seventy in time of war — from babes in arms to a nation in arms — this is the undisputed accomplishment of the statesman who never tires of granting official interviews in which he declares, "Our policy is peace," but who writes for the new encyclopaedia: "Fascism rejects pacifism which implies renunciation of struggle and cowardness in the face of sacrifice. . . . Only war carries all human energies to the height of tension and gives the seal of nobility to peoples who have the courage to confront it." Weighing the fact that Italy cannot feed its present population and the axiom that a superior population imposes itself, the Duce on the 26th of May, 1927, inaugurated the "battle of natality," to bring the Italian people up 60,000,000. Birth control is a crime; bachelors have been taxed and the taxes doubled; exemptions in taxes and special privileges are given large families. As a result there have been "victorious" years in the Duce's baby war. In 1929, however, there was a nation-wide birth strike. Laws were proposed "against deserters from the good battle, to make them so strict that they are unbearable, that they will compel people to marry and have children out of sheer desperation." [4] In 1930 the 1927 mark was reached again. In 1931, however, the rate was 22.4 compared with 1927's 26.9. In 1932 the Duce ordered the idealization of the fat woman, the best breeder of children. But the battle is still on.
To "free the Italian people from the slavery of foreign bread" Mussolini announced the Battaglia del grano, and shortly afterwards his victory. That Italy has increased its wheat production cannot be questioned. But every year, when nature smiles, the crops of the whole world increase and it is only the Fascist press (on instruction from the official bureau) which sings the praise of the divine Duce; in those years, however, when the crops throughout the world are bad, the Fascist press (on instruction) puts the blame on elements over which the Duce still has no control. Thus in 1932, when Italy's wheat yield rose from 67 to 75 million quintals, Fascism rejoiced in. its leader in the battle of the grain. It was an increase of 12 per cent. That same year, however, abundant nature gave neighboring and still republican France an increase of 17, and Spain, which had just shaken off dictatorial tyranny, an increase of 13 million quintals, respectively, 23 and 34 per cent. Of this, no mention in the Fascist press.
Patriotism, Prestige, Order, Discipline, Hierarchy, the Authoritarian State, remain to be considered.
Patriotism and Imperialism have been restored.
Italian prestige has been enhanced.
Order obtains. In the chapter on the Corporate State there have been noted various strikes and uprisings; in the chapter on journalism a revolt in Sardinia has been mentioned, but it must be admitted that nothing that has happened under Fascism has seriously affected the stability of the regime. Wherever men or women have tried to strike or even to speak against the regime, the Fascist militia has made short work of them. The prison islands are full of political and intellectual opponents.
Before the war there was a joke known to all the diplomats of Europe. It was simply this: "Order reigns in Warsaw." It was a reference to the periodical reports made to the Tsar of Russia by his governor in Poland, who, after listing the riots, battles, dead, and wounded, always concluded his optimistic message with the phrase, "Order reigns in Warsaw."
Order, Discipline, Hierarchy seem secure in Italy. On the last-named subject Mr. Percy Winner, one-time Rome correspondent and later foreign editor of the New York Evening Post, wrote: "To be a potential candidate for the Mussolinian toga is as much a political suicide in modern Italy as being a candidate for the Caesarian toga was on occasions in ancient Rome."
Which leaves for consideration the Authoritarian State.
Just when this conception sprang from the brain of the Duce cannot be determined. It was certainly not part of the original Fascist program. In 1920, moreover, Mussolini took the occasion of Nitti's proposal of the ora legale, or daylight-saving time, to write a magnificent exposition of his philosophy of the State:
"The proletariat detests the ora legale because it is wartime hour. I too am against the ora legale because it represents in another form the intervention and the coercion by the State. I do not make it a question of politics, of nationalism or utilitarianism; I take the part of the individual and against the State. Numerous individuals are in potential revolt against the State, not this nor that State, but against the State itself.
"The State, burdened with its enormous bureaucratic machinery, to the point of asphyxiation. The State is supportable so long as it sticks to soldiery and policing; but today the State does everything, it is the banker, the usurer, the shipper, the insurance man, the post-office, the railroads, the impresario, the industrialist, the maestro, the professor, the tobacconist, and many other things, instead of making, as it once did, the policing, the judiciary, and the agency for taxation.
"The State, Moloch with its horrible face, today does everything, sees everything, controls everything, and carries everything towards its ruin; every function of the State is a disaster. Disaster, the art of the State, the school of the State, the post-office of the State, the navigation of the State, the food supply — alas, of the State this litany can be continued into infinity.
"If only mankind had a vague sense of the abyss which awaits them, the number of suicides would increase greatly because it goes towards the complete annihilation of all individuality.
"This, this, is the great malediction which drives the human race back to its uncertain beginnings of history.
"The revolt against the legal hour is the supreme attempt of the individual against the coercion of the State, a ray of hope filtering into the spirit of our desperate individualists.
"Down with the State in all its forms of incarnation. The State of yesterday, of today, of tomorrow, the Bourgeois State and the Socialist State.
"To us who are about to perish as individualists there remains, in the present darkness or in the tenebrous tomorrow but one religion, however absurd but always consoling, Anarchism."
Within a few months Mussolini's entire "philosophy" of the State underwent a change. The State became a "hierarchy which must end in a pin-point," himself; several years of functioning as hierarch led him to the following conclusion:
"The sense of Stateship grows in the conscience of the Italians, who feel that the State alone forms the indispensable guarantee of their unity and independence; that the State alone represents continuity in the future of their race and their history.
"The State is the central idea of our government; it is the political and juridical organization of national societies, and evolves in a series of institutions of various kinds. Our formula is this: Everything in the State, nothing outside the State, nothing against the State.
"The government is the highest expression of the regime. Therefore everything which depends on and descends from government is Fascist. Fascists must be doubly disciplined, as Fascists and as citizens. It is wrong to conceive the grotesque and absurd anachronism that the Fascist State is an authority which it is possible to dispense with, thus falling into the foolish and anarchistic demagogy which we have cauterized with fire and sword.
"The Fascist State is the Fascist government, and the head of the Fascist government is the head of the revolution."
(Or, "l'Etat, c'est moi" [Google translate: "the state is me"] all over again.)
We do know that Mussolini, like Marx before him, studied Hegel, and just as he never hesitated to rewrite the one in the original Fascist manifesto, he helped himself to the older philosopher in his remarkable volte face. Not only the idea, but the wording, is Hegel's:
Mussolini:
The State is a spiritual and moral fact .... incorporates the political, juristic and economic organization.... and such an organization is in its birth and development a manifestation of the spirit.... The State reaches beyond the short span of life of the individual.
Hegel:
The State is in and for itself a moral whole .... and realizes itself consciously. The State is a spirit which arises in the world .... it self-consciously realizes its independent power, in which single individuals are only passing moments.
The announcement of this Hegelian State — which the Pope was later to denounce as Statolatry — came many years after the Fascist regime had already established itself. Behind the announcement stands one fact: in August, 1920, the State was "Moloch with its horrible face . . . the great malediction which drives the human race back to its uncertain beginnings in history"; in September, 1920, Mussolini made his bid to lead a socialistic or communistic army into Rome and was rejected; in 1922 the march was made in the pay of the bankers and industrialists, and in 1921 Mussolini asked the philosophers of Italy to supply a philosophy for Fascism. [5] Hegel was the only man out of the past who fitted the present.
And so we have Mussolini's Authoritarian State, a totalitarian dictatorship, facing the historical truth that every autocracy such as his, from ancient times to that of Napoleon III, has ended in revolution or war, and we have a Duce who sits with a revolver on his desk, intent on outwitting history.
Sometime recently Lloyd George, released from the strictures of political office, said to an Argentine journalist that "it will be on account of the errors and absurdities of its economics that Fascism will reach its dissolution." Mussolini replied by calling Lloyd George "only a second-class little lawyer," but the balance sheet of Fascism shows one thing surely, and that is that Fascist economics have been a record of errors and absurdities. They seem typical of all authoritarian dictatorships. They are or have caused:
Dangerous decline in the standard of living;
Alarming increase in taxation;
Financial excesses relatively beyond those of any modern state, hidden from the public by budget manipulation and secrecy.
Disastrous financial-economic actions, such as stabilization, for purely prestige reasons.
Waste; graft; loss of billions through the necessary multiplied police and espionage and militia systems.
Suppression of parliament, press, public assembly, and other critical or controlling factors.
War preparations which lead to war.
Autocratic dictatorships always begin in enthusiasm and end in corruption or bloodshed. Dictatorships which make use merely of the Hegelian phrases, refusing to consider the "idealistic philosophy" which accompanied them; dictatorships which are imposed from above, refusing to alter the economic system either by bringing the masses of the people into cooperative ownership of the means of production or providing economic security for the majority while guaranteeing the profit system of the ruling class, always face the revenge of social and economic and moral forces which attack the weaknesses of absolutism. Dictators in our own time have disappeared, or have been dismissed quietly, or have been driven out, or into exile, or been assassinated; dictatorships have been dissolved, peacefully altered, or drowned in fraternal blood, and usually for the same reasons:
The financial ruin of the State;
The economic anemia of the nation;
The strangulation of the people by taxation and the public debt burden;
The armament race.
"You can do anything with bayonets except sit on them," said one of Mussolini's great predecessors, Cavour, and the Fascisti celebrating their first decade laughed at the phrase. But Cavour took the long view.
Dictatorships have always proven the most expensive form of government and their few achievements have been overbalanced by their inefficiencies and errors. The democratic State can commit and admit its mistakes. The dictatorship of a class — Russia, for example — can and does admit its mistakes, as, for example, Lenin's announcement of the New Economic Policy which was a refutation of a great part of the Communist program and which the Opposition called a reversal to pure capitalism. But the Authoritarian State dare not err.
To hide its errors the Authoritarian State has absolutely refused to permit;
The approval or disapproval of the people by free election;
The control of finances by the public;
The controlling criticism by the press;
Sharing responsibility by a freely elected parliament.
All of which, cooperating with a dictator would, while weakening the personal ego, the Will, the regime, at least prolong both the man and the system in power and eventually lead to a normal free government without a violent interregnum. An example of the latter type of dictatorship was that of King Alexander of Yugoslavia and his successor. But it is difficult to imagine the magnificent ego, the transcendental will to power, of the Italian Duce bowing for a moment to criticism, control, or indeed any outside influence. This born proletarian, this real man of the people, more than any person living today, represents the socially and economically deaf, dumb, and blind ruling class, programless, unphilosophical, unideological and anti-ideological, but determined at any price including the always logical and ultimate one, imperialistic war, to maintain its supremacy.
We have passed slowly through the centuries of village economy, serfdom, and the feudal overlords; very quickly through the era of industrial and commercial expansion, the era of colonization, the opening of world markets, the exploitation of "inferior" peoples, and we have arrived at the most magnificent smash-up in history in the decade and a half of the World War and the economic debacle of 1929.
The rule of capital, big business, commercial penetration, and colonial expansion has been a time of democracy and social reform. But apparently, as Mussolini himself claims, liberalism is dead and the Goddess of Liberty is a rotten carcass: the ruling class can no longer make their profits and afford to grant democracy and social reforms. The various imperialisms which have divided the world have left no new markets to conquer, no inferior people to make into slaves and serfs to produce wealth and to absorb the production of the superior people.
In this world emergency Fascism arose to perpetuate the system of exploitation of its own people as well as those which it could conquer. The Authoritarian State is also the Helot State, the Serf State, for the vast majority outside the reigning hierarchy. Year by year Italy has been returning to the time of serfdom and the feudal overlords.
The balance sheet of Fascism indicates it plainly. But while it must be admitted that the Authoritarian State is a complete success, it is also becoming apparent that the return to serfdom is a complete solution of the economic problem of Italy or any other State which has or may copy this successful plan. Big business imperialism in Italy has not been able to continue its rate of profit despite the tremendous increase in taxation, the dangerous decrease in wages, the most complete denial of the rights of man in post-bellum history.
Those opponents of Fascism who have always maintained that it presented no new philosophy, no new ideology, but was merely a restatement of a medieval system and that every step taken by Mussolini was a step backwards into a dead civilization, had proof of their view in the official reasons Italy gave to the League of Nations for war in Ethiopia.
The massacre of Ual-Ual was the first excuse given. But it was dropped even before the League's commission absolved both countries of guilt. Then came two new reasons: imperialism, or the necessity of expansion by powerful nations, and Kultur, or the right of a civilized country to take over a barbaric country where slavery still flourished.
Both reasons date from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; it is true they were used by Britain in building her empire, and were advanced by Wilhelm in an attempt to rule the world, but no nation has been hypocritical enough to use them again in our own time. As for slavery in Ethiopia, the League has taken actions, the Emperor of Ethiopia has done his best, considering the fact the country is a loose confederation in which tribal chiefs frequently refuse to listen to Addis Ababa, but the hypocrisy of the whole matter is best shown in the fact that Fascist Italy has herself admitted that slavery in the form of economic servitude still flourishes in her African colony of Libya.
The road to war has been inevitable. Even before John Strachey wrote that "Fascism means war," an Italian writer, Mario Carli, predicted that "Fascism issued from the war and in war it must find its outlet." Fascism means war because imperialism means war, and no one has ever denied that Fascism is imperialistic.
"Imperialism is at the base of the life of every people which desires economic and spiritual expansion," Mussolini once wrote, and again, "We must have the courage to say that Italy cannot remain forever penned up in one sea, even if it is the Adriatic," while in the famous June 5, 1923, speech against Yugoslavia, he said that "all Italians of my generation understand the lack of territory. It is not surprising, therefore, that our spirit is frequently excited as it turns towards imperialistic aspirations. This is an expression of immanent historic reality, because people who are progressing have their rights against people who are declining. These rights are marked with letters of fire in the pages of our destiny."
In justifying his imperialism Mussolini said in a recent speech:
"Invasion of sovereign rights has been in progress for centuries. Where is the nation today which during its history has not invaded the sovereign rights of others? Take the United States! How did you push your frontiers back?"
To Mussolini's credit it must be said that he did not, as other imperialist nations have done, resort to euphemism in announcing his imperialism, although diplomatic hypocrisy cloaked the Ethiopian apologia. Sordid and cold-blooded as a post-bellum world may consider his scheme to take by violence the only remaining unexploited piece of Africa, it must be admitted that the intention to seize and conquer land has been frankly stated for a decade.
Many of the preceding chapters contain the reasons for the Fascist road to war. The glorious period of 1922-25 when the industrialists, manufacturers, large employers, subsidizers of the party, were being repaid, was followed by an economic reaction which proved boom times artificial. After 1925 it became impossible for the "new" system to enrich the few and continue to impoverish the many. One by one Mussolini's promises, which once brought thousands of liberals, radicals, and idealists into his party, were dropped, and instead a program of ruthless taxation which took half the national income was enforced. And no nation could continue to flourish under that condition, even though the standard of living of the masses was reduced dangerously year after year.
Since the depression Fascism has come to a dead stop. All that it has had in the past four or five years is a record of broken promises, an unbearable debt burden, and the dynamic oratory of the Duce. But one cannot live on oratory alone.
We have seen the collapse of every financial and economic factor in Fascist Italy, exports, imports, emigrants' remittances, tourist trade; we have seen the debts grow mountainous, the national debt increase 15,000,000,000 in four years; we know that the international bankers have refused to issue loans, and we know that the tremendous population pressure has increased during the ten years which now mark the Italian depression. Every economist and every intelligent student has been aware of the forces which for a decade have been driving the dictator into either war or collapse; only in the New York Times (September 1, 1935, magazine section, page 2) is the opinion expressed that "Mussolini is the first ruler since Napoleon by his own will, without external provocation or internal propulsion, to lead his people into a campaign of conquest."
The internal propulsion has been progressive for years and now it has become headlong.
Like many a bankrupt business man who takes his last resources and plays them on a number in Monte Carlo, Mussolini, rather than take the other way out of his dilemma, the fulfillment of the social-economic program which he wrote in 1919, must play the game of war.
The prediction of Mussolini's course was made twenty-three centuries before John Strachey. Aristotle, founder of political science, wrote: "The tyrant who, in order to hold his power, suppresses every superiority, does away with good men, forbids education and light, controls every movement of the citizens, and, keeping them under a perpetual servitude, wants them to grow accustomed to baseness and cowardice, has his spies everywhere to listen to what is said in the meetings, and spreads dissension and calumny among the citizens and impoverishes them, is obliged to make war in order to keep his subjects occupied and impose on them permanent need of a chief."
The word "chief" in Italian is "duce."
Many years ago Mussolini wrote that "the proletariat should train for that great historic conflict when it will be able to settle accounts with its adversaries; for the Italian proletariat needs a bath of blood for its force to be renewed." From 1922 on frequently he claimed that Fascism was a real revolution, a bloody revolution, that the blood bath was the sine qua non of a great revolutionary change. Today the paralysis which has invaded Fascism, its finances, economics, culture, and spirit also demand a blood bath, and to forestall it in civil war and at the same time satisfy imperialism, which historically has advanced from one blood bath to another, Italy must take the road to a foreign war. Although black, the Fascist shirts have become very dirty, and must be washed in blood.
_______________
Notes:
1. New York Times, August 12, 1933.
2. Columbia University's president, Nicholas Murray Butler, is generally regarded as the ace of liberalism in America. With equal thunders President Butler wars against Communism and Fascism, while he upholds the best traditions of American democracy. At least so he claims. Despite the fact that convincing proof has been given that Fascism flourishes at Columbia, that the Casa Italiana is a Fascist agency, directed by Fascists or philo-Fascists, spreading propaganda for a policy opposed to the American liberal tradition and in violation of academic freedom, nothing has been done by President Butler to remedy this situation.
3. Le Peuple, Brussels, April 19, 1932.
4. The Fascist leader, Scorza, in Lavoro Fascista, December 31, 1929.
5. Unbelievable as this statement may seem, it is a fact. On August 27, 1921, Mussolini wrote to Michele Bianchi on the occasion of the opening of the school for propaganda and fascist culture: "Ora, il fascismo italiano, pena la morte o, peggio, il suicidio, deve darsi un 'corpo di dottrine' . . . [Google translate: "Now, Italian Fascism, on pain of death, or worse, suicide, must be a 'body of doctrines'"]
"La parola e un po' grossa: ma oo vorrei che nei due mesi . . . si creasse la filosofia del Fascismo italiano. . . ." [Google translate: "The word and a little big, but I would like that in two months ... it would create the philosophy of Italian Fascism."] (Messaggi e proclami. Benito Mussolini, Milan, 1929, pages 38 and 39.) Not only must the philosophy of Fascism be created, but Mussolini wants it in two months' time.