Benito Mussolini

“ I have always had a vision of life which was altruistic. I have groped in the dark of theories, but I groped not to relieve myself, but to bring something to others. I have fought, but not for my advantage, indirect or immediate. I have aimed for the supreme advantages of my nation. I desired finally that Fascism should rule Italy for her glory and her good fortune. ”

“ Within six years this man, with a professional opposition which first barked like Pomeranians at his heels and then ran away to bark abroad, has made the label good, has filled the bottle, has turned concept into reality.
It is quite possible for those who oppose the concept to say that the reality of the new spirit of Italy and its extent of full acceptance by the people may exist in the mind of Mussolini, but does not spring out of the people themselves but it is quite untrue as all know who really know. ”

“ Love and songs bloomed. A revival of youth, filled with Italian boldness, swamped by its virile male beauty the unrestrained rages of the irresponsibles, painted out the fear of the Socialists, obliterated the ambiguity of the Liberals. The poesy of battle, the voices of an awakening race were multiplying, in those years of revival, the energies of our nation.
Our dead were innumerable. Italy’s imps, the red dabblers, our organization of so-called Freemasons who were steeped in political intrigue, already were seeing the danger, menacing to them, of the coming of Fascism. ”

“ One man! Thy life and thy death is worth infinitely more than the whole Italian socialism! And you files on parade—innumerable heroes that wanted the war, knowing how to want war; who went to war knowing what was war; who went to death knowing what it meant to go to death—you, Decio Raggi, Filippo Corridoni, Cesare Battisti, Luigi Lori, Venezian, Sauro, Rismondi, Cantucci—you thousands and thousands of others that form the superb constellation of Italian heroism—don’t you feel that the pack of jackals is trying to rummage your bones? ”

“ 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. ”

“ He believes in accomplishment, in achievement, and has no patience with men who will not act. In his large, protruding eyes there is bitter determination and much iron. He built up the Socialist party and then abandoned it. He followed with the building of the Fasci. He will now build an iron government.
Mussolini, unlike many of the party leaders in Italy, cannot be credited with firm political convictions. He is continuously in a state of political change. Even to-day the public opinion of the country is hopelessly divided on what Mussolini actually believes and desires. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ It binds the Fascisti legions; a sacred and intangible bond keeps close the faithful of the Littorio. It is the sacred bond of our dead. They are hundreds. Youths. Mature men. Not a party in Italy, nor any movement in recent Italian history can be compared to Fascism. Not one ideal has been like the Fascist—consecrated by the blood of so many young souls. ”

“ 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! ”

“ I had to refine and improve Fascism. I had to divide and floor the enemies. I saw the vision that I must in every respect work to improve and to give tone to all the manners and customs of Italian political life.
It was also imperative not to neglect the ten millions of Italians emigrated beyond the frontiers. We had to give faith again to the zones on our borders. We had to assist in bringing modern improvements and stimuli to the life of the southern regions, and to get in touch with all the men of the healthy and strong provinces, wherever they were. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Their just rights will be protected. We will even be generous with unarmed adversaries.
“Fascism draws its sword to cut the multiple Gordian knots which tie and burden Italian life. We call God and the spirit of our five hundred thousand dead to witness that only one impulse sends us on, that only one passion burns within us—the impulse and the passion to contribute to the safety and greatness of our Country.
“Fascisti of all Italy!
“Stretch forth like Romans your spirits and your sinews! We must win. We will.
“Long live Italy! Long live Fascism!
“The Quadrumvirate.” ”

“ This galaxy of political elements, more despicable than riffraff, these inert, wasteful, hopeless forces which in the past had massacred every liberty and had trampled in every imaginable way on our morals, our peace, our efficiency, and our order, could not have done a more illogical, a more unjust, a more offensive and provocative act toward Fascism and the Italian people. ”

“ To have seen in someone like Benito Mussolini the figure of a “Man of Destiny”, to have felt obliged to understand the racial theories of Adolf Hitler as anything other than the self-evident products of a diseased mind, to have seriously entertained the reinterpretation of human experience through dogmas that had given birth to the Soviet Union of Josef Stalin—so wilful an abandonment of reason on the part of a considerable segment of the intellectual leadership of society demands an accounting to posterity. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 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. ”

“ In our land a leading class was neither present nor living. The Liberal party had abdicated everything to the Socialists. There was no solid, modern, national unity.
Ignorance was still astride the workmen and peasant masses. It was useless to attempt to blaze a trail by fine words, by sermons from chairs. It was necessary to give timely, genial recognition to chivalrous violence. The only straight road was to beat the violent forces of evil on the very ground they had chosen.
With us were elements who knew what war meant. From them was born the organization of Italian Bundles of Fight. ”

“ There are neither vexations nor violence, but there is exaltation of what is good and exaltation of the virtue of heroism. In every class, among all citizens, nothing is done against the state, nothing is done outside the state.
Many have finally opened their eyes to this serene and severe truth; the Italians feel themselves of one fraternity in a great work of justice. The sense of duty, the necessity of action, the manner of civil life mark now an intense reawakening. The old parties are forever dead. In Fascism politics is fused into a living moral reality ”

“ Among them was the best type of Italian young manhood, who by disciplined methodical action, full of impetus, as were the actors, met and destroyed the social-communist spiders which in the web of foolishness and ignorance were exterminating every life germ of the Italian people. Wherever there popped up a vexation, a ransom, a case of blackmail, an extortion, a disorder, a reprisal—there would gather the Fascist squads of action. The black shirt—symbol of hardihood—was our uniform of war.
The Liberal-Democratic government quite naturally put difficulties in the way of the Fascist movement. ”

“ 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. ”

“ He had linked his name with the Adriatic situation, humiliating for our nation. This former minister, an amateur in everything that concerned any perplexity of foreign policy, showed himself so vain that he could not sense the delicacy of his position in Paris. While in Italy events of historic character were maturing, homesickness for lost power made him a bad servant of his own country. He even went to the point of trying to create difficulties for the Fascist government in the French capital. Already political groups there were unfavorable to if not envious of, any new solidarity in Italy. ”

“ Mussolini has superstitious faith in himself. He has said it. Not a faith in himself to make a personal gain. An assassin’s bullet might wipe him out and leave his family in poverty. That would be that. His faith is in [xvi] a kind of destiny which will allow him, before the last chapter, to finish the building of this new state, this new machine—“the machine which will run and has a soul.”
The first time I ever saw him he came to my residence sometime before the march on Rome and I asked him what would be his programme for Italy. His answer was immediate: “Work and discipline.” ”

“ It is one thing to administer a state. The one who does this well is called statesman. It is quite another thing to make a state. Mussolini has made a state. That is super-statesmanship.
I knew him before the world at large, outside of Italy, had ever heard of him; I knew him before and after the moment he leaped into the saddle and in the days when he, almost single-handed, was clearing away chaos’ own junk pile from Italy.
[xii] But no man knows Mussolini. An Italian newspaper offered a prize for the best essay showing insight into the mystery of the man. ”

“ 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! ”