Benito Mussolini

“ Fascism, furthermore, does not march against the police, but against a political class both cowardly and imbecile, which in four long years has not been able to give a Government to the Nation. Those who form the productive class must know that Fascism wants to impose nothing more than order and discipline upon the Nation and to help to raise the strength which will renew progress and prosperity. The people who work in the fields and in the factories, those who work in the railroads or in offices, have nothing to fear from the Fascist Government. ”

“ I will never subject the marvellous Italian people, which for [269] four years has worked with ascetic discipline, and is ready for other and harder sacrifices, to the moral shame and economic catastrophe of the bankruptcy of the lira.
The Fascist régime will resist with all its strength the attempts to suffocate Italy being made by inimical financial forces. We will squash them as soon as they are identified at home. The lira, which is the sign of our economic life, the symbol of our long sacrifices and of our tenacious work, will be defended and it will be firmly defended—and at any cost! ”

“ I faced the necessity of creating a political organization typically Fascist, one which would be outside and above the various old political mechanisms dominating and misruling our national life. Every day I needed clear answers to questions arising—I needed a body of reference. In all my complex work as chief of the government, I could not forget that I was also chief of the party that for three years had fought in the squares and streets of Italy—not merely to gain power, but above all to meet the supreme task and the supreme necessity of infusing a new spirit into the nation. ”

“ They are the latest to fall in the Great War, and it is not in vain! The Italian tricolored banner hails them, Italian earth covers them. Their graves are a shrine. There all factions and divisions are obliterated. The dead of Carnaro bear witness that Fiume and Italy are one, the same flesh, the same soul. The opaque ink of the diplomats will never undo what has been sealed by blood forever.
Hail then to the Ronchi Legion, to the Duce—the leader, D’Annunzio—to his living who return and to his dead who never will. ”

“ Every time that I have wanted to cauterize difficult situations in Italian political life, every time that I have wanted to give a sincere, frank and loyal moral rectitude to the personnel in politics, I have always had against me our Masonry! But that organization, which in other times was very powerful, has been beaten by me. Against me it did not and cannot win. Italians won this battle for me. They found the cure for this leprosy.
To-day in Italy we breathe the open air; life is exposed to the light of day. ”

“ For I am a man of government and of party. I endlessly admire those who make out of creative work a law of life, those who win with the ability of their genius and not with the intrigue of their eloquence. I am for those who seek to make technic perfect in order to dominate the elements and give to men more sure footings for the future.
I do not respect—I even hate—those men that leech a tenth of the riches produced by others.
The American nation is a creative nation, sane, with straight-lined ideas. ”

“ If Fascism has been a criminal association, if all the violence has been the result of a determined historical, political, moral delinquency, the responsibility for this is on me, because I have created it with my propaganda from the time of our intervention in the War to this moment.
In these last days not only the Fascists but many citizens ask themselves: Is there a Government? Have these men dignity as men? Have they dignity also as a Government? I have wanted to reach this determined extreme point. My experience of the life of these six months is rich. I have tried the Fascist Party. ”

“ Now there stirred, in that old chamber, so used to mean and petty political intrigues, a breath of new life; there was present a heroic sense of the new soul of Italy, a sense of a living aspiration for greatness.
All these things irritated the Socialists. In their hearts they had hated the war, had debased our victory. The old parliamentary world could not adjust itself to this magnificent gathering of youth. The congenital cowardliness of Montecitorio, the seat of parliament, would certainly refuse homage to the bravery symbolized by these golden medals! ”

“ We know the sad history of moral questions in Italy.
But after all, Sirs, what butterflies are we looking for under the arch of Titus? Well, I declare here before this assembly, before all the Italian people, that I assume, I alone, the political, moral, historical responsibility for everything that has happened. If sentences, more or less maimed, are enough to hang a man, out with the noose! If Fascism has only been castor oil or a club, and not a proud passion of the best Italian youth, the blame is on me! ”

“ Any analysis and weighing of Mussolini’s greatness must include recognition that he has made popular throughout a race of people, and perhaps for others, a standard of obligation of the individual not only exacting but one which in the end will be accepted voluntarily. Not only is it accepted voluntarily but with an almost spiritual ecstasy which has held up miraculously in Italy during years, when all the so-called liberals in the world were hovering over it like vultures, croaking that if it were not dead it was about to die.
It is difficult to lead men at all. ”

“ I was fully aware that a new spirit, one of new austerity and dignity, imposed by me to govern every large and small action of my ministry, might create the impression that I wanted to fight to a finish old international political tradition, organization, and existing alliances and the status quo.
What an error! To inaugurate a firm stand does not mean to revolutionize the course of international dealings. To demand a better appraisal of Italy, in accordance with a correct audit of our possibilities as a powerful and prolific nation, was only to re-establish our rightful position. ”

“ The creation of the Fascist state and the passing of the hungry moments from sunrise to the deep profundity of night with its promise of another dawn eager for new labors, cannot be picked apart. I am lock-stitched into this fabric. It and myself are woven into one. Other men may find romance in the fluttering of the leaves on a bough; as for me, whatever I might have been, destiny and my own self have made me one whose eyes, ears, whose every sense, every thought, whose entire time, entire energy must be directed at the trunk of the tree of public life. ”

“ Air and light, strength and energy, shine and vibrate in the infinite sky of Italy! The loftiest civic and national vision to-day leads this people to its goal, this people which is living in its great new springtime. It animates my long labors. I am forty-five and I feel the vigor of my work and my thought. I have annihilated in myself all self-interest: I, like the most devoted of citizens, place upon myself and on every beat of my heart, service to the Italian people. ”

“ You must not be surprised if I make a political declaration of definite importance. It is not the first time that I have addressed to the people directly, without any official apparatus, my convictions and my decisions. I must always be trusted, but especially when I am speaking to the people, looking into its eyes and listening to the beating of its heart. I am speaking to you, but in this moment I am speaking to all Italians and my voice for obvious reasons will certainly have an echo behind the Alps, and overseas. Let me tell you that I will defend the Italian lira to the last gasp! ”

“ I considered the formulation of a new Italian method of government as one of the principal duties of Fascism. It was to be created by the vigor of labor, through a well-tested process of selection, without the risky creation of too many improvised military leaders. It was the Party’s right to offer me men of our own régime to assume positions of responsibility. In that sense the Party was side by side with the government in the ruling of the new régime. It had to abandon the programme of violent struggle and yet preserve intact its character of proud political intransigentism. ”

“ He who looks back over his shoulder toward those who lag and those who lie is a waster; it is because I cannot write my life—my daily life, my active life, my thinking life and even my own peculiar, emotional life—without recording the steps I have taken to renew Italy and find a new place for her in the general march of civilization, that I call up one after another the recollection of my recent battles over measures which submerge men, over policies which bury, under their simplicity and weight, everything else I might have lived. ”

“ WAR AND ITS EFFECT UPON A MAN I WRITE of war and my experience in and with war. I write of popular misconceptions as to war. I write of my convictions as to war. And I write of war from two points of view—the politics of the world and the reality of the trenches, where I have been and have learned the torture of pain.
It is impossible for me to show my development and feelings from war without showing how my nation entered war, felt war and accepted war. My psychology was the Italian psychology. ”

“ The Nitti government, with its continuous note of pessimism, was doing no better than to describe our situation as near to bankruptcy, economic as well as political! Nitti himself, his newspapers and his acolytes, tried to make the Italian people believe that the Versailles Treaty was for us the best result obtainable. A sense of humiliation had crawled over our whole peninsula, but many there were who did not want to resign themselves to accept the tragic facts. No one knows better than I that many meditated, in sullen silence, most desperate actions. ”

“ I knew that if they could they would have ignobly used the corpse of the Socialist deputy as an anti-Fascist symbol and flag. But their ghoulish politics passed the bounds of my imagination. Besides these speculators, there were those on the timid and flabby fringes of Fascism. They let themselves be led astray by the political atmosphere. They did not perceive that an episode is not the stuff of which history should be made. In the name of a sentimental morality, they were willing to kill a great moral and political probity and knife the welfare of an entire nation. ”

“ In the midst of general hardships and of cowardice, of grumbling of impotents, of the vaporings of dull critics, I, almost alone, had the courage to write that the state’s employees, if they were right in view of the feebleness of the government, were wrong, in any case, toward the nation. To inflict upon a people the mortification of an ill-advised strike, to trample upon the rights of the whole, meant to lead men from modern civil life back again to tribal conflict. ”