Sawdust Caesar: The Untold History of Mussolini and Fascism

"Science," the Greek word for knowledge, when appended to the word "political," creates what seems like an oxymoron. For who could claim to know politics? More complicated than any game, most people who play it become addicts and die without understanding what they were addicted to. The rest of us suffer under their malpractice as our "leaders." A truer case of the blind leading the blind could not be found. Plumb the depths of confusion here.

Re: Sawdust Caesar: The Untold History of Mussolini and Fasc

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CHAPTER 29: The Imperialist Road to War

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:

Image

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.
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Re: Sawdust Caesar: The Untold History of Mussolini and Fasc

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CHAPTER 30: Ave Caesar!

WHATEVER THE FINAL OUTCOME MAY BE FOR ITALY, FOR Mussolini the one thing he confesses has worried him most has now been won: he has made his mark in history.

There is, of course, nothing strange nor abnormal in the concern which a leader of men feels about posterity; it is merely part of the problem of immortality which has confused and inspired mankind from its first intelligent beginnings. "I am obsessed with this wild desire — it consumes my whole being," said Mussolini to his Egeria; "I want to make a mark on my era with my Will, like a lion with its claw." It has been made. The dictator may fall gloriously on an African battlefield or pass away peacefully in bed half a century from now, but Clio has already provided ample pages for the Duce's record.

For almost a quarter of a century he has wooed this muse, acting the Hero, posing before men and moviemen, and time and history, eagerly watching for the signs of his immortality. Even in his youthful soap-box speeches he was already conscious of what press and public would say, and as he grew to manhood he worked on his clipping-books with more enthusiasm than a Hollywood star, but always he kept looking ahead, to a place in the future where his name would shine on deathless bronze, when statues would be erected of his likeness side by side with the Napoleons, and better still, the Roman Caesars, and the gods and demi-gods of all recorded time.

At the Lausanne conference a group of diplomats on an upper floor, looking down an elevator shaft, beheld their newest colleague with his back to the operator, making faces and gestures before the rear mirror. The Napoleonic attitudes were unmistakable.

In the history of the world no man has been more photographed. The paintings, sketches, and busts of the Duce surpass in number those of any being to whom deity has not been seriously attributed. A great part of the leader's day is spent reading the press of the whole world, where every item dealing with him and his activities has been marked by subordinates. He reads them with the air of a man seeking something.

Although he never tires of fatalistic remarks about his destiny in the stars, he has retained the peasant superstitions of his childhood. Twenty centuries earlier analogous rulers, dictators, leaders, tyrants, conquerors, strong kings and frightened kings, were sending to the Delphic oracle or looking at blood and entrails, watching the flights of birds and reading signs in thunder and lightning. Mussolini seeks sybilline warnings in the newspapers and the history-books of other revolutions. With the same eagerness with which Lenin, Trotsky, and Stalin watched the Bolshevik revolution take the course of the traditional French Revolution, each acting in his own way to defeat the Brumaires and Thermidores and circumvent the Little Corporals, so Mussolini, warned that history takes an inexorable course, strives to impress his superior will upon it.

Curious, but not surprising to psychologists, is this mingling of the belief in free will, predestination, fatalism, and the commonest Forli superstitions. The village "witch," old Giovanna, taught Mussolini her "magic lore"; he became "an adept in interpreting dreams and omens and telling fortune by cards." [1] He is quoted often saying, "My blood tells me" and "I must listen to my blood," and he once declared proudly, "Que voules-vous? Je ressemble aux animaux, je renifle le temps qui vient, je suis mon instinct, et je ne me trompe jamais" ("What would you? I resemble the animals, I scent the times, I follow my instinct, and I never make a mistake").

The Duce and the age of dictators have already been explained by the scientists. Freud has expressed his belief that nations, like human beings, can suffer a neurosis; Adler believes that people like individuals suffer from inferiority, struggle hard to shake it off and to become superior, and in the case of Italy and Mussolini the world has its best example. More recently Stekel has presented his authority complex to explain the weakness of the masses and the power of the Mussolinis, the "father-substitutes." The millions of inferiorities of the people mass together to become a superiority; the people identify themselves with the leader, partaking of his authority, and the leaders are usually neurotic, suffering from a "compulsion complex." "Dictators in general," continues my colleague, John Gunther, in expounding the Stekel theory, "are a sort of regression to childhood. Love of a leader is a reversion to infantilism." Stekel concludes that "For many generations men fought for democracy, liberty, the right of free assembly and free speech. Thousands of good men have died for these causes. But now one country after another gives up its free institutions, people even vote away their freedom. New dictatorial revolutions . . . are welcomed with relief, not opposed by force. There is a world scramble for authority, for the security of leadership. People everywhere, because their parental sense of authority has disappeared, are looking for a father-substitute, for a strong and beloved parental hand."

Germany in 1933 and Italy in 1922 are the most excellent proofs of the contentions of all three psychologists. Although Italy was known as one of the victor nations in 1918, it was greatly humbled in the peace treaty of 1919 which divided the war spoils among the stronger powers and left little more than a dispute over Fiume in the lap of their colleague. The Italian people, who had for a while come through the shroud of inferiority when Garibaldi and his Red Shirts appeared, were therefore in the psychologically ripe stage to accept the man of promises, the man of violence, the demagogue who defied the oppressors, gratified the national yearning for superiority, and wore a black shirt.

One of the seeming paradoxes of the Italian situation which Italy has not yet discovered, although it could do so easily by reading the officially printed works of the Duce, is that the embodiment of their wish-fulfillment neither loves nor respects the masses who follow him. Time and again Mussolini has quoted Machiavelli's opinion of the common people as "mud" and sneered at public opinion. But the more the Duce shows that he despises his followers, the more they shout their love and loyalty. Unlike the bourgeois gentleman, Lenin, who really loved the world-filling proletariat, the oligarch of Italy, in origin plebeian, almost hates them. "I do not adore this new divinity — the masses," writes the Duce, thereby confirming Stalin's view that even revolutionary leaders at times despise their following and that "an aristocratic attitude of the leaders towards the masses" frequently arises, an attitude which Lenin escaped because his faith in the nobility of the workingman was never shaken.

The greatness of Mussolini can only be measured by the lowness of his worshipers.

He stalks through the world like the one man who wears the mantle of Zarathustra, possesses the mind of Machiavelli, is the inheritor of the power of Caesar, while all the little minds, all the hundreds of millions of unimportant, unthinking, weak, and ineffectual human beings (whom Sinclair Lewis has both immortalized and crucified with a new word) grovel at his feet, proclaiming him the conqueror. Emperor or Galilean? The same hundreds of millions go to their churches on Sundays and proclaim an unarmed Man who was weak and humble, who preached humility and kindness and love and non-resistance. The other six days they arm for war and praise violence. The mob mind can worship both.

In all seriousness Mussolini has been compared by his idolaters with everyone from Jesus Christ to Theodore Roosevelt.

After Farinacci's solemn declaration that Mussolini's only logical successor as Duce could be Jesus, the official Fascist press proclaimed the infallibility of its leader, a political dogma meant also for the eyes of the Pope.

No less a person than an American ambassador [2] wrote that "the Duce is now the greatest figure of his sphere and time. One closes the door when one leaves feeling, as when Roosevelt was left, that one could squeeze something of him out of one's clothes."

Inasmuch as the Duce himself permits painters to draw a lock of hair over the forehead in the Napoleonic manner, busts made very Caesarian, and a large proportion of the millions of photographs show him a la Bonaparte on horseback or assuming other heroic poses, it is obvious he invites comparison with the world-conquerors.

Mussolini would like to uphold the tradition of the "strong, silent man," but his passion for oratory prevents him from complete achievement. But that he should assume, consciously or unconsciously, the traditions of the world-conquerors, Caesar, Alexander, and Napoleon, is quite natural. All men arriving at similar heights, even the catch-penny Central American dictators, have been known to succumb to the role; Mussolini steps into it as an actor into his make-up.

The Caesar pose was most obvious to those who in April, 1926, accompanied the Duce to Tripoli — to that very same colony the annexation of which caused the same Mussolini to attempt an armed uprising two decades earlier. Now he had mobilized more warships for himself than Giolitti had used for the war on Turkey; on the prow of the Cavour he strutted and took attitudes which every motion-picture operator worth his pay recorded deathlessly, or he sat with folded arms looking dreamily across the Mediterranean.

He disembarked, he stepped into Africa like a conqueror. The Tripolitans — at least those who were not at the time in rebellion — the native troops, the Italian army, the civilians and officialdom, made a grand uproar.

An American journalist, overcome with the sense of historic emotion, raised his hand and cried, "Ave Caesar!" To the Duce he said, "It is like the old days when a Roman emperor landed."

Mussolini, delighted, said, "Yes."

Others took up the cry. The sun-baked streets of a small African port in an unimportant African colony echoed with the shout of "Caesar," and that very evening numerous red, white, and green posters with the words "Ave Caesar," followed by Mussolini's speech, published by the Fascist officials, were placarded throughout the colony as the expression of its greeting.

Julius, the divider of Gaul, shines over Mussolini; the Duce looks into those cold pupil-less eyes every day while his press reminds him that he is the pure Roman emperor type in face and will, the true successor to the thrice-crown-refusing political ancestor. Even the textbooks of Italy have been changed so that today all the Caesars are unblemished heroes and the tyranny, corruption, and weaknesses of that ruler "who fell an easy victim to the cheap devices of the lewd Cleopatra" have been eliminated by the censor. To make their own hero greater, the idol of comparison has been cleaned and polished.

In the year of the Tripoli voyage Mussolini ordered that "within five years Rome must be restored to the grandeur of the Caesars"; and within a few months he told an interviewer that "we are in the process of renewing the glory of the Caesars. I have a bust of Julius Caesar always before me." And, although neither glory nor grandeur was completely renewed by 1931, in September of the next year Mussolini ordered the prefect of his native district to change the name of the Fiumicino River to "Rubicon." "Foreign visitors ask me where the Rubicon is, and we cannot show them," explained Caesar's successor; "Let us find our river." But he had already ordered the event. Thus it was shown to the world that a problem which harried historians and geographers had disputed violently from mediaeval times could be settled only through an act of dictatorship.

A year later, at ancient Arminium, where Julius Caesar supposedly harangued the legions for his — or, as it is now called, the first— march on Rome, a statue donated by the successor was unveiled to "the great patron of Fascism, the first Black Shirt," whose "mighty conception which he gave to Rome and the world exists again in the blood of the race," and in Mussolini "the heir to the legacy which he bequeathed to Italy." So the orators. To the podesta of Rimini Mussolini telegraphed: "The statue of Julius Caesar which I have decided to give to your city is similar to the statue in bronze which adorns the Route of Empire [Via dell'Impero, in Rome]. If possible, you will place high on the column the words which Julius Caesar spoke to the militia men of the Thirteenth Legion when, the die having been cast and the Rubicon having been crossed, he decided upon his march on Rome. Every year, on the ides of March, you will take care to beflower the statue of the founder of the Roman Empire."

Four times in his talks with Ludwig the Duce mentioned the man whose bust broods over him: once he confessed that "Jesus was greater"; another time that Shakespeare's play about the hero was "a great school for rulers"; again, "in thrilling tones," "Julius Caesar. The greatest man that ever lived. . . . Yes, I have a tremendous admiration for Caesar. Still ... I myself belong rather to the class of the Bismarcks," and finally, "The assassination of Caesar was a misfortune for mankind. I love Caesar. He was unique in that he combined the will of the warrior with the genius of the sage. At bottom he was a philosopher who saw everything sub specie aeternitatis. It is true he had a passion for fame, but his ambition did not cut him off from humankind."

Finally, in the summer of 1935, addressing several thousand former grenadiers, at the time of the mobilization for the Italo-Ethiopian conflict, he reminded them that "Julius Caesar once dominated the world and that every stone surrounding them should recall the fact." (They were crowded into the ruins of the Temple of Venus.) "Nothing forbids us from believing that what was our destiny yesterday may again become our destiny tomorrow."

From Alexander the Great, who sighed for new lands to conquer, and from the time of every prophet and messiah, men have wanted to rule the whole world or to make the whole world bow to their one idea. The men of power and egotism want to be king of kings and many modern rulers use that title. The Ethiopian is not bashful. Caesar, Kaiser, and Tsar are variations on the theme. The idea of world conquest will probably remain forever, even if it is to be eventually democratized into a sort of figurehead, a man of straw and sawdust, a super-secretary of a future super League of Nations, and appear to this individual only in his serenest daydream of desire.

The last man to seize a large part of the world, Napoleon, called by Wells, an adventurer, a wrecker, a man of egotism and vanity, a personality archaic, hard, capable, unscrupulous, imitative, and neatly vulgar, is still the hero of the mob. Mussolini has at least this much in common with the Corsican: they were both well-whipped children, therefore destined to a rebellious manhood. Bonaparte was whipped by his mother, Mussolini by his father; the one used a birch rod, the other a leather belt.

The mediocrity of the two minds is amazing. The Code Napoleon, which he claimed was a greater monument than his forty victories, was written by other men. The plan of the Corporate State is not Mussolini's. The "totally uncreative imagination" of Napoleon was influenced by Plutarch towards a revival of the Roman Empire; Mussolini in all his words and deeds has shown the influence of the latest book he has been reading, the last strong-minded politician who has been advising him.

Napoleon was not above issuing contradictory and lying statements, as, for example, proclaiming to Italy that he was coming to free it from tyranny while he told his soldiers to loot the country and wrote to Paris he was going to make the newly conquered State pay an indemnity of twenty millions.

When Napoleon faced the Council of Five Hundred he was as frightened as Mussolini the day he stammered about Matteotti and promised to "return to legality." Yet both men prided themselves on physical courage.

The Napoleonic plan by which the First Consul had under him an appointed Council of State, which had under it a legislative body and Tribunate, a Senate, etc., is very much the Mussolinian idea of a "hierarchy ending in a pinhead."

When Napoleon became First Consul the whole world was at his feet, there was peace, and any ruler with a first-rate mind would have done something creative to astound the centuries. (When Mussolini took office, he had the support of all parties, there was peace, and a man whose mind was not warped by egotism and lust for personal power could have given Europe a lead in governing well.) Napoleon, says Wells, could do no more than "strut upon the crest of this great mountain of opportunity like a cockerel on a dunghill. The figure he makes in history is one of almost incredible self-conceit, of vanity, greed, and a grandiose aping of Caesar, Alexander, and Charlemagne which would be purely comic if it were not caked over with human blood." If Bonaparte's aping of Caesar was so ludicrous and so tragic, what can one say of Mussolini's aping of Bonaparte? Perhaps that while he had not a thousandth of Napoleon's success, he has shed but comparatively few drops of human blood.

Both men denounced religion as "opium for the people," Mussolini, actually quoting Marx's phrase, Napoleon in making the famous Concordat saying it was necessary to give the people religion to keep them quiet: "how can you have order in a State without religion?"

Whether either dictator ever felt remorse is debated by historians and chroniclers. It is said that Napoleon, during his fits in St. Helena, regretted his order to murder the Duc d'Enghien and sometimes wept for the dead. Only one person records a sign of regret in Mussolini. "The dead weigh heavily," he once said. On the occasion of the banquet which Italy tendered Ras Taffari, king of Ethiopia, the King and Mussolini found two beautiful envelopes in their napkins. Mussolini opened his and read:

"You are Matteotti's murderer; prepare for the handcuffs."

The King opened his and read:

"Majesty, Matteotti's murderer sits next to you. Give him up to justice."

The King turned pale, but it is reported that Mussolini hid whatever emotions this dramatic reminder provoked under a small laugh. It is also said that Mussolini sometimes has fits of terror and plans to escape from Italy in an airplane or a yacht. But there is no actual evidence that the conqueror regrets anything.

Napoleon betrayed the French Revolution. Future historians may well say that Mussolini betrayed, or at least delayed, the Italian revolution.

Much more appropriate is a comparison between the Duce and Louis Napoleon, who, like his uncle, also betrayed his republic. For the decret-loi of Louis there are the royal decrees which Mussolini forces the King to sign and issues at leisure; there is the same perversion of justice, the liberal magistrates suffering the same fate as the French republicans, expulsion; university professors in the Third Napoleon's time were made to obey the political wind, too, and the press was censored and corrupted. Louis placed government largely in the hands of the omnipotent prefects, and Mussolini appoints sub-dictators called podestas. Hierarchy is similarly established. The pageants, exhibitions, and sports in France preceding Sedan are duplicated in Rome.

Louis Napoleon was vain, empty, trivial. His writings show small culture. He was, like Mussolini, mixed up in liberalism, socialism, and Napoleonism and likewise preached nationalist superpatriotism.

The similarity between the Italian Dux and the last German Rex especially in egotistic oratory, has already been noted.

Of the men who make history today, especially of dictators, one expects great, rich personalities. But Stalin is known for his metallic colorless voice, the absence of flourish, for the tendency to remain inconspicuous, and his inability to sweep an audience with enthusiasm. [3] Like Lenin, he has "a sense of compressed energy, of reserved will power. He is not magnetic." Lenin and Trotsky I saw at the height of their fame; both surprised me because they had nothing of the Communist-Socialist-Radical speaker so well known throughout the world. Lenin reasoned as Socrates once reasoned in the house of Cephalus. The only dictator who answers conventional anticipations is Mussolini, who is magnetic and dynamic, wild, histrionic, who raises and lowers his voice as taught by the best professors of drama, becomes cold, waxes hot, erupts like his own Vesuvius and uses his hands, eyes, shoulders, and breath for the purpose of hypnotizing the mob.

Lenin was the only revolutionary who had a deep sense of humor; his successor, Stalin, makes jokes and laughs over them; frequently they are coarse jokes, and in this Stalin and Mussolini are similar, except that at times Stalin has been able to show a trace of objective humor, while Mussolini has never betrayed it. Intolerance is one of the secrets of Mussolini's success.

In almost every sentence of his speeches, in almost every page of his writings, Mussolini curses his opponents. He is always shouting "scoundrel," "traitor," "egotist" at someone; his enemies are "soft-brained cowards," "swelled frogs," and "a base and pernicious crew"; he never hesitates to call the man who differs from his opinions a liar; with the utmost contempt he speaks of political enemies and those who have fought duels with him as weaklings, cowards; referring to foreign statesmen and journalists who have said he threatens the peace of the world he replies these are the "accusations of fools"; when he can find nothing evil to say of those whom the world honors he calls them "egocentric," he speaks of their "unbridled egotism"; he is always attacking those who "sell themselves for money, for power," whom he despises — and frequently the word "turncoat" comes up and the six four-letter words in Joyce's "Ulysses." [4]

The words of attack most frequently heard are "traitor" and "physical coward" and "egotist"; with them he disposes of all who have met him on the field of honor or who write works on philosophy which fail to include the newest and greatest of all theories, Fascism; everyone who has ideas not in conformity is an egotist and anyone who acts non-conformingly is a traitor, while those who oppose him are cowards.

Need one go to a psychologist for the explanation of such behavior, or is ordinary intelligence sufficient guide? Proust speaks of "that habit of denouncing in other people defects precisely analogous to one's own." "For," he says, "it is always of those defects that people speak, as though it were a way of speaking about oneself, indirectly, which added to the pleasure of absolution that of confession. Besides, it seems that our attention, always attracted by what is characteristic of ourself, notices that more than anything else in other people . . . an unwashed man speaks only of the baths that other people do not take ... a cuckold sees cuckolds everywhere, a light woman light women, a snob snobs." There can be no better explanation.

Again, when Mussolini declares: "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 for the Italian people. I proclaim myself their servant. I feel that all Italians understand and love me; I know that only he is loved who leads without weakness, without deviation, and with disinterestedness and full faith," a student of his character can find it the great self-confession of what he lacks most.

One thing he has is a blazing hatred. "Not," as one of his compatriots says, "the hatred of a social rebel which is but another facet of love, like the hatred of Brutus for Caesar, of Bruno for the Papacy, of Mazzini for the tyrants," or the hatred which inspired Milton and Byron and Shelley sublimely and which has made heroes and martyrs. Mussolini's dominating hatred, which was important to his success, was the drop of poison on the swift arrow of his Will.

Of this man's amazing egotism much has been said. It is the most natural trait in human beings who are failures to shout down the successful man, no matter who he is or what he does. Napoleon and Pericles are equally condemned. No distinction is made between the ego which drives a man to lead the world by developing all that is great and powerful within him, and the ego which leads another man to rise high by destroying others. Mussolini's ego is a compound. Sometimes it exhibits itself in all its naive crudity.

Three days after he had seized the government his old friend, Paolo Orano, a comrade who could call him by his first name, came into Benito's office, saying, jestingly, "I want to see how you are preparing to rule Italy."

"Preparing? I?" replied Mussolini, as Orano afterwards recounted. "Why, I'm already in the middle of it. I am ruling. I'll show you how I rule."

Mussolini pressed a button, summoned a secretary, asked that a telephone call be put through to one of the leaders of the march and of Fascism.

"Hello. I am talking. Mussolini. Be — ni — to Mus — so — li — ni. Listen. You are expecting to receive the field-marshal's baton. Fine. But you are not going to get it just yet. You — are — not — going — to get — it — just — yet. Get yourself a small cane. Good-bye."

"There," he said to Orano. "I'm not here as a tourist, but to give Italy a government and to govern it. That never was before, but is now: a government. I am it. And all, mind you, all Italians shall and will obey. Italians have never obeyed. The Italians must be ruled and shall be ruled."

Mussolini threw his head high, as if to snap it from his neck and shoulders — a movement that Orano saw for the first time in this man, but which was to be immortalized later in a million photographs and many films.

When Piemonte, a newspaper of Turin, printed a questionnaire regarding Mussolini's greatness in history, the dictator telegraphed to the prefect of police: "Call the editor of Piemonte and ask him to stop the referendum. Tell him that Mussolini himself does not know exactly what he is and therefore it is difficult for others to judge him. The referendum can be resumed fifty years hence."

At another time he declared that "I am convinced that I am destined to rule Italy some ten to fifteen years more. My successor is not yet born."

The egotism of the ruler is transmitted to the youth of Italy. The Fascist publication for the universities thus informs the coming generation: "The Italian of tomorrow, and that means the Balilla and the Avanguardisti of today, will be the natural heir of the Fascist mentality, and will not need to discuss these four points:

"1. That Italy deserves to be the biggest and strongest nation in the world.

"2. That Italy will become the biggest and strongest nation in the world.

"3. That the Italian laws are the finest in the world.

"4. That the men who now rule are the best and that we owe them honor and obedience."


Of the noble traits in Mussolini's character none stand out more than his emancipation from the degenerate desire for money, exceedingly rare in persons who are born poor and who, on acquiring riches, frequently remain miserly through the fear of ever being poor again. Mussolini insists six separate times in his autobiography that "money has no lure for me." "I ask nothing for myself, nor for mine; no material goods, no honors, no testimonials." "I have annihilated in myself all self-interest." "In politics I never gained a penny. I detest those who live like parasites, sucking away at the edges of social struggles. I hate men who grow rich in politics." "To me money is detestable; what it may do is sometimes beautiful and sometimes noble."

His enemies say that if all this is true, why did the Fascist official press, boasting of the new income-tax law, congratulate the Duce on paying his the first day — the sum of 200,000 lire, which would indicate an income of 500,000 lire and a capital of 10,000,000. And why, ask enemies, does Mussolini insist so much on his contempt for the lure of money, why does he mention it at least six times in his autobiography?

The truth is that Mussolini does not care for money — for himself. But he does not hesitate to use it as a means to power. The 1914 episode of the French funds for founding a newspaper, and the 1919 episode of the "diversion" of Fiume funds, and the 1920 episode of subventions from the employers, while exposing the ruthlessness of the man, are not, even in the charges of enemies, instances of personal greed. Money means power; more so in Europe than in America. In Europe a man is born in a class, and imprisoned in that class as in a fortress. The peasant begets peasants, the proletarian proletarians, and rare is the case of the youth who breaks the caste lines. The workman's son does not go to college and graduate into the professions, and the rich man's daughter never marries the foreman — a fact that causes a wrong laugh over many an American movie. Brains and talent and even genius are wasted in continental Europe because of class distinction and lack of money. And Socialism flourishes for the same reasons. Mussolini, hating money philosophically, has never hesitated to get it and use it to break himself out of his class prison.

Strangely enough, there is a mental parallel. He suffers from claustrophobia. All his life he has felt himself tied down, hemmed in, suppressed by invisible forces. He hated the confines of the schoolroom. He fled. One of the reasons he escaped military service was the dreadful appearance of the prison-like military barracks of his province, and although he tried to forget the iron bars of frequent visits by reading philosophy and politics, prison cells have left their lines on his character.

He cannot stand locked rooms. In the Chigi Palace every interviewer has remarked the enormous chamber some fifty or sixty feet long, which served him as an office. His spirit requires vast spaces. He loves to fly in an airplane, enjoying the power, the superiority, and the freedom of an unpeopled infinity. He has refused to enter the Blue Grotto of Capri.

In exhibitionism he surpasses all the notable men of our age. Chicherin, the timid intellectual, once appeared in a uniform of the Red Army and did not cut a brave figure. The Kaiser was magnificent in shining breastplates, but Mussolini goes in for Central American splendor. The first time he addressed the Chamber he rigged himself in an operatic gold and spangles which gave the foreign ambassadors their first good laugh under Fascism. Short, stocky, bulgy, myopic, and fairly bald, he poses so well the world believes him heroically tall, with the most magnificent flashing eyes.

His literary judgments are sententious and weak. He is the author of such philosophical gems as "smoking is a distraction" and "the Will to Power is a cardinal point in the philosophy of Nietzsche" and "The hills and the sea give one the feeling of infinity." He has a college freshman's enthusiasm for Nietzsche's "blond beasts" and "the egotism which in men of power does not admit of restrictions"; he is impressed with Nietzsche's quotation from the Arabian sect of Assassins "To see men suffer is good, to make them suffer is better."

Few of Mussolini's admirers have anything to say about his twenty-year record of changing parties and ideals. Sarfatti, for instance, describes her hero as "impulsive and meditative, a realist and an idealist perfervid yet wise, a romantic in his aspirations, but a classic in his handling of public affairs. Mussolini has a groundwork of consistency in him underlying all these seeming incompatibilities." But a more worldly, less fascinated person, Mussolini's Cheka agent, Rossi, goes deeper into his employer's character. "How," asks Rossi, "can certain noble sentiments which Signor Mussolini expresses in his speeches, be reconciled with facts which put such grave moral, political, and penal responsibility upon his shoulders?

"His temperament, unstable by nature, as I am certainly not the only one to know full well, has, together with his mania for Machiavellianism, led him in the last few years into numberless acts of duplicity and changeableness.

"By turns he is cynical and sentimental, impulsive and cautious, irritable and calm, generous and cruel, quick to decide and slow to move, uncompromising and conciliatory.

"All the qualities of heart and mind have in him contradictory aspects, but in his activities as head of the government and of the Fascist Party, the tendencies which predominate are duplicity, superficiality, and improvization."

An explanation of the seeming incompatibilities in Mussolini's character is offered by Adolf Saager: "This is the deeper reason for Mussolini's betrayals: His Unconscious always decides in favor of his hunger for power and his ruler instinct serves the political reaction in the nation; against which his Conscious is always still striving to some union with the Radicals. From that moment when his Unconscious (which is the unfalsified natural power of the man), becomes dominant, his actions gain certainty and continuity, such as would delight an aesthetic observer in the actions of a preying animal.

"This explains Mussolini's periods of trembling and anxiety, because his Conscious and Unconscious are at war.

"Nothing is more ignorant than to understand Mussolini's coat-turnings and contradictions, his 'hypocrisy' and his 'betrayals' as signs of character weakness; these things compose his very character, they are his destiny. This is his organic development."

There remains the question of greatness.

He is, for instance, a great journalist but a tenth-rate litterateur. His eloquence is marvelous — emotionally, not logically. He is a great politician, a great leader of the mob, but he is a demagogue and not a statesman.

He is a genius at assimilating the ideas of other persons and making them his own.

He is totally unscrupulous.

He has never done anything original.

He has a tremendous will but an inferior mind.

If achievement is to be measured by such qualifications as strong, well-conceived ambition; difficult struggle to reach the goal; complete accomplishment of ambition; and importance, human value of the success gained by the man, Mussolini easily passes the first three tests. His ambition has been superhuman, his struggle one of the most noteworthy in our time, and he has accomplished everything his heart desired. But whether there is any great significance to his work, or any human value whatever, cannot so soon be judged.

Mussolini may found an African empire. He may in a small way emulate Julius Caesar. Or he himself may be destroyed by the monstrous State he has created, but he no longer need worry about his place in history. He has made his lion's mark. Even Mr. Wells, who somehow prefers Jesus and Buddha and King Asoka to the Caesars and Napoleons and Wilhelm Seconds, will some day have to give more space to the Fascist phenomenon.

History will say that Mussolini shows the triumph of the superiority complex, the triumph of Nietzschean catch-phrases, the triumph of the adapter of other people's ideas, the triumph of the book-made egotist.

Reactionary dictators are men of no element of greatness, men with no philosophy, no burning humanitarian ideal, nor even an economic program of any value to their nation or to the world. Grand and imposing as they look in their flaming uniforms and shirts in nationalist colors on marching days, they are almost forgotten the hour a change is made. Who now remembers Waldemiras? What country did he rule? What became of Pangalos? How many Bratianus were there and what happened to them? And how ignoble became that same Primo de Rivera who one day before had stood arm in arm with Mussolini, his treaty-friend, his proud disciple? But it is not too fantastic to imagine a time after Mussolini's disappearance, when the commentators will say that after all he was only a renegade Socialist who could never be trusted, a puny, sententious imitator of Lenin, a rather foolish repeater of Kaiser Wilhelm's foolish phrases, a man mentally [5] and physically ill, a megalomaniac who thought he could change the course of economic forces by the use of magnificent phrases taken from Karl Marx, Nietzsche, Hegel, Vilfredo Pareto, and his former colleagues in the Socialist movement — and nevertheless a person worthy of statues. After all, he is the original Duce of Fascismo, and all the others are merely imitators.

All of Mussolini's monuments will be monuments to the strength of a weakling, monuments to the weakness of his opposition, to the cowardice of the masses, but, above all, monuments to an Ego and a Will.

Mussolini has made his mark in history, but history records the marks of warriors, suppressors, and vandals as well as saviors and liberators.

History and monuments will recall Benito Mussolini as a Caesar — not a Julius but perhaps a Caesar Borgia or perhaps a Kaiser Wilhelm. If not a Napoleon Bonaparte, then at least a Louis Napoleon.

Everywhere new statues appear of Benito Mussolini today and more will be erected in his lifetime. The statues of Julius Caesar will probably remain forever in Eternal Rome — but the day will surely come when in all the noble cities of Italy there will arise the statue of Giacomo Matteotti. A free people will then decide if there will be room also for those of our Sawdust Caesar.

_______________

Notes:

1. Sarfatti.

2. The late Richard Washburn Child.

3. Isaac Don Levine, Stalin.

4. All these beautiful phrases are culled from Mussolini's autobiography.

5. In September 1935 the respectable New Statesman and "Nation of London in an editorial suggested "official recognition of what is already common gossip in political circles in Rome — namely, that Il Duce's notorious paranoia is nearing the pitch of certifiable insanity."
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Re: Sawdust Caesar: The Untold History of Mussolini and Fasc

Postby admin » Wed Jan 14, 2015 11:50 pm

APPENDICES

APPENDIX 1


The First and Second Fascist Programs

Original Fascist Program (March 1919)

Fasci italiani di Combattimento

Comitate Centrale

Milano, Via Paolo da Cannobio

Italians!

This is the national program of a movement sanely and integrally Italian: revolutionary because it is antidogmatic and antidemagogic; strongly innovating because it has passed through all prejudicial objections. . . .

For the political problem:

a) Universal suffrage

b) Lowering of electoral age to 18

c) Abolition of the Senate

d) Convocation of a national assembly which is to function three years, to which will be confided the power of establishing the new constitutional regime of the state

e) Formation of technical councils for industry, labor, communications, social hygiene. . . . , elected by Corporations of professions or trades. . . .

For the social problem:

a) The eight hour day legal and compulsory

b) Minimum wage law

c) Participation of the workingmen in the management of industry

d) Proletarian organizations to manage public industries and public services

e) Realization of the rights of the railroad workers

f) Reform of the law of social insurance

For the military problem:

a) Creation of a national militia for defensive purposes

b) Nationalization of war works

c) External policy to valorize the Italian nation in the work of peace.

For the financial problem:

a) Heavy extraordinary tax on capital, progressive, for the purpose of causing a partial expropriation of all wealth.

b) Seizure of all property of the religious associations and suppression of the religious taxes [menses episcopales].

c) Revision of all contracts for war supplies and the seizure of up to 85% of the war profits.

Official Fascist Program Published October 1919

(i) National Assembly, intended as Italian Section of the International Assembly of all Peoples, in order to proceed with the radical transformation of the political and economic basis of society.

(2) Proclamation of the Republic. Decentralization of the executive power. Administrative autonomy of regions and communes through their own legislative bodies. Popular sovereignty exercised by means of universal, equal, and direct popular vote of all citizens of both sexes, with right to the people of initiative, of referendum, and of veto. Reorganization, ex-novo, of the administrative bodies of the State. The function of the State to be limited to the civic and political direction of national life.

(3) Abolition of the Senate and of every artificial and arbitrary limitation of popular sovereignty. Abolition of political police. Establishment of a municipal and national civic guard. Elective magistrates independent of the executive power.

(4) Abolition of all caste-titles, of princes, dukes, marquis, "commendatori," "cavalieri," etc. Only titles of honor, those of talent and of honesty in work.

(5) Abolition of compulsory conscription. General disarmament and veto to all nations forbidding the manufacture of armaments.

(6) Freedom of thought and of conscience, of religion, of association, of press, of propaganda, of individual and collective agitation.

(7) System of education with both cultural and vocational schools open to all.

(8) Maximum care and perfection of the social hygiene system.

(9) Abolition of stock-companies. Suppression of every kind of speculation of Banks and of the Stock Exchange. Creation of a national financial institution with regional sections for the distribution of credit.

(10) Census and reduction of personal wealth. Confiscation of unproductive revenues. Payment of the debt of the old State by the wealthy classes. Suppression of church revenues.

(11) Eight hours' work on a legal basis.

(12) Reorganization of production based on insurance principles and on direct participation of profits by the workers. All landed estates to be given over to the peasants. The management of transportation industries and of public services to be entrusted to syndicates comprised of technical experts and workmen.

(13) Abolition of secret diplomacy.

(14) Open international policy dedicated by the solidarity and independence of peoples in the confederation of states.
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Re: Sawdust Caesar: The Untold History of Mussolini and Fasc

Postby admin » Wed Jan 14, 2015 11:51 pm

APPENDIX 2: Dieu n'existe pas [1]

BY BENITO MUSSOLINI

When we claim that "God does not exist," we mean to deny by this declaration the personal God of theology, the God worshiped in various ways and divers modes by believers the world over, that God who from nothing created the universe, from chaos matter, that God of absurd attributes who is an affront to human reason.

With each new discovery of chemistry, physics, biology, the anthropological sciences, of the practical application of sound principles, dogma collapses. It is a part of that old edifice of religion which crumbles and falls in ruins. The continuous progress of the natural sciences now extending from city to country, disperses the darkness of the Middle Ages, and the multitudes desert the churches where from generation to generation they betook themselves to pray to God — that monstrous product of human ignorance.

Let us examine the nature of God. We force ourselves, therefore, to reason in a vacuum, the God of religions being their own image of their mental vacuum, the proof of the complete absence of any activity in reasoning.

How can the idea of a creator be reconciled with the existence of dwarfed and atrophied organs, with anomalies and monstrosities, with the existence of pain, perpetual and universal, with the struggle and the inequalities among human beings?

Epicurus, the philosopher who lived in following questions:

"Either God wishes to do away with evil in this world and cannot succeed; or he can do away with it and does not wish to; or he cannot and does not wish to; or finally, he wishes to and can. If he wishes to but has not the power, he is not all-powerful. If he has the power to do away with evil and does not wish to, he is not infinitely good. If, as affirm the deists, he can and wants to, tell me, then, why does evil exist on earth, and why does not God make it impossible?"

That which affronts human reason most is the inconceivable fact of the creative power of a God who from nothingness created everything, from chaos the universe. . . .

One would have to be completely without knowledge of physiology, botany, and psychology to claim today the existence of a "soul" independent of the body; on the contrary, one which does not form one of the two distinct aspects of the unique human nature.

Dogma is absurd because it presupposes immobility and the absolute. Nothing in the world is absolute, everything is relative. Nothing is entirely changeless, but there is a continual transformation, a perpetual movement of forces.

Dogma presents to human reason an obstacle to progress because it imposes limitations to the painful but salutary impulses towards the search for truth, because it checks the free expansion of all intellectual energy.

Science is now in the process of destroying religious dogma. The dogma of the divine creation is recognized as absurd.

"Religion is the opium of the people." — Karl Marx.

It being demonstrated that religious dogma presents itself to the human spirit and to rational criticism as "the absolute consecration of the absurd," let us see why moral religion is "immoral."

The evangelists are ridiculous when, instead of studying the Bible as a document of a certain historic interest, they try to credit it with real life and bring to the masses the principles of Christ (who perhaps never existed) as the ethical principles of a morality everlastingly young, permanent, modern, in complete accord with the present age. The Bible and morals called Christian are two cadavers which the evangelists attempt to galvanize into life with, it must be agreed, small enough success.

It is, therefore, clear that religious morality is one of resignation and sacrifice, a morality which may be dear to the weak, to the degenerate, to slaves, but which results in the diminution of reason and human personality. It bends man toward the earth, making him a slave to divinity. It favors the conservation of those primitive sentiments which belong to that period of animal life long left behind, and transforms the "thinking being" into a "passive sheep" who lives in the fear of the universal judgment.

Religious morality shows the original stigmata of authoritarianism precisely because it pretends to be the revelation of divine authority. In order to translate this authoritarianism into action and impose it upon humanity, the priestly caste of revealers has sprung up and with it the most atrocious intolerance.

Certain it is that religion is a psychic disease of the brain, a contraction, a tightening up of the individual who, if he is profoundly religious, appears to us as abnormal.

The history of many saints, beatified by the church, is repugnant. It shows nothing more than a profound aberration of the human spirit in search of ultra-terrestrial chimeras; it is a delirium which can attain the state of spasms of passion and which ends in madness.

Therefore, many of those who today hover over the altars of the Catholic Church are pathological cases, hysterics, deomanes and demonomaniacs.

Even today in the more remote parts of Italy and Spain we can witness similar phenomena. Saint January for the people of Naples, and the Madonna of Lourdes for French bigotry. Are they not analogous aberrations?

If we read the history of religions, we find that it deals with the pathology of the human brain. If today the Middle Ages are retiring into the thick shadows of convents, it is due to triumphant skepticism; and if the epidemic disease of religion no longer appears with the terrible intensity of former times, it is due to the diminution of the political power of the Church which formerly placed on the heads of people its cap of lead.

Religion presents itself to our eyes in another characteristic: the atrophy of reason. The faculty by which man is differentiated from the lower animals is his reasoning power. But the devout believer renounces reason, refuses to explain the things which surround him, the innumerable natural phenomena, because his religious faith is enough for him. The brain loses the habit of thinking; and this religious sottishness hurls mankind back into animalism.

In concluding we say that "religious man" is an abnormality, and that "religion" is the certain cause of epidemic diseases of the mind which require the care of alienists.

Religion has shown itself in the open as the institution whose aim is political power by which to externalize the exploitation and the ignorance of the people.

_______________

Notes:

1. "God Does Not Exist," from "L'Homme et la Divinite" par Mussolini, Benito; Bibliotheque Internationale de propagande rationaliste; Chene-Bourg, Geneve; Juillet, 1904. This is Mussolini's first published work; the translation, such as it is, is my own.
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Re: Sawdust Caesar: The Untold History of Mussolini and Fasc

Postby admin » Wed Jan 14, 2015 11:51 pm

APPENDIX 3:

(Supplement to Chapter V)

Mussolini's French Money


Mussolini's money, or the betrayal of 1914, is an apt illustration of the fact that an ethical or moral problem depends on time as well as geography and circumstances. The heroic deed of one day becomes the treason of the next.

Even now the millions of persons who believe that every means was justifiable in winning the war for the Allies will be unable to see anything but nobility in Mussolini's accepting French funds for establishing a pro-Ally newspaper.

The most interesting fact about the matter is that Mussolini himself was proud of his actions in 1914. Accused of becoming an interventionist for money he wrote in his Popolo d'Italia:

"I am proud of the beauty, of the holiness of my sin and will kneel before no Jesus Christ to beg forgiveness."

In the great year of disillusion, 1919, when Mussolini was attempting to return to the Socialist movement, the press took up the matter of the French funds. On May 3, 1919, the Italia del Popolo wrote: "Mussolini accepted checks from the French government; we have the proofs; we defy him to sue for libel."

In 1919, it must be remembered, Italy was still a free country and men had equality before the law. The Opposition was accusing Mussolini of the lowest crime a man is capable of, betraying his cause and fellow men for money, and the Italia del Popolo had made a national scandal out of the matter. It offered to place its documents before the courts. Mussolini did not sue. In fact he offered no answer.

In November, 1926, Deputy Renaudal said in the French Chamber: "Mussolini established his paper, the Popolo d'Italia, with French money." Asked for details, he published them in the Quotidien of November 9th, mentioning Marcel Cachin as the agent who carried the checks.

In the Chamber of Deputies, M. Paul Faure in 1928 stated that "Jules Guesde, then [1914] member of the cabinet, confided to us that we had a man down below, Mussolini, whom he had sent 100,000 francs to start a paper." Deputy Faure also enlarged upon his charge in the Popolaire, January 9, 1928, adding: "I do not know more precisely who was the material carrier of the money, but Cachin, if it pleases him, could inform his readers in Humanite."

Jules Guesde was an ultra-radical leader in France, sometimes called the founder of the French Socialist movement. In 1914, however, he joined the Premier, Viviani, in upholding the war. Viviani was an ex-Socialist. Cachin was then a Socialist, one of the many who believed in the war and joined in the Sacred Union, the Union Sacre, and opposed the Juares-Rolland group who opposed war, Guesde chose Cachin, therefore, to visit Mussolini, since both were Socialists who had gone over to militarism.

Cachin, however, repented. In fact he went to the extreme Left and became the leader of the Communist movement in France. He has left his past behind; he does not want to be reminded ever of the Union Sacre, and for this reason he never mentions the Mussolini mission.

Before the suppression of the press numerous political writers In Italy explained the "conversion" of Mussolini and were never sued for libel, nor were their books or newspapers suppressed. Massimo Rocca, in Quaderni del Nuovo Paese, wrote:

"Mussolini . . . preached with great violence the absolute neutrality of Italy. . . . Mussolini went to see the Bolognese editor, Filippo Naldi, and promised him to change his views if he could get his own newspaper. This promise obtained, he wrote in Avanti an article on relative neutrality while awaiting intervention. . . . Once his object obtained, Mussolini . . . rushed to Geneva to collect the first funds for the Popolo. . . .

"If the Kaiser had offered him a double sum he would have defended neutrality. . . ." Throughout Europe scores of post-bellum investigators mention the French funds which Mussolini used. Paul Renin (French) says: "The editor-in-chief of the Avanti ... at Geneva met Marcel Cachin . . . who gave him an important sum in the name of the French government to aid a favorable campaign of intervention and to create a daily newspaper for that purpose.

"Completely overjoyed, several weeks later, Marcel Cachin took into his confidence the Chamber [of Deputies] in terms vibrant with patriotism, pure and authentic.

"'Voyez,' he said, 'that which has happened in the Italian section. Voila, Mussolini, who in the Popolo d'Italia, today in its fortieth number, has had a lively success, declaring that revolution is an idea which has found bayonets. We register with joy the happy and concordant symptoms. Everything presages the inevitable intervention of Italy. She will help us finish the war, assuring victory against the militarist reactionaries, the Hapsburgs and the Hohenzollerns.'"

William Elwin (British) says: "Mussolini attempted to explain his support of Italian intervention on the side of the Allies as the direct outcome of his conscience as a Socialist. He was less ready to mention the sums of money received from the agents of the French government in order to launch and maintain the Popolo d'Italia. . . . The amount of money sums received by Mussolini, as always In official bribery, cannot be ascertained exactly, for those concerned will not speak; the fact remains, however, that he cashed 'patriotic checques' from the French government. Incidentally he admits to this in his autobiography. . . ."

L. Kemechey (Hungarian) asks where had Mussolini obtained the money for the Popolo, and answers: "From the French, wrote the Socialists on the first day. Others pretended to know that Lord Northcliffe, the powerful press king, had backed him up. There was not a day on which the Socialist press did not publish constantly fresh details of the bribing of Mussolini and particulars of his treason. He did not bother about them ... it did not matter what they were shouting about; he was done with them. . . ."

De Ambris (Italian), ex-Prime Minister of Fiume: "Certain persons find that Mussolini is guilty because he took the money of the French government to found the Popolo d'Italia. But that is not the crime of Mussolini. If Mussolini had been an interventionist from the beginning ... he could not be blamed. When a man sees his course traced out by his conscience, he may even accept money offered to aid him. The profound immorality consists in changing one's views for a personal advantage."

It is also extremely interesting to note the skill of the lady biographers. Says Mme. Bordeux: "It was insinuated in a few French papers of that time that Marcel Cachin and Charles Dumas had been the intermediaries charged to buy Mussolini for France— but an honest Frenchman considers it rather broadly calumniating the probity of Cochin [sic] who had the reputation for respecting even his adversaries. On the other hand Mussolini is not a man to sell himself; in fact, if there is one man in the world who is not for sale, that man is, was, and always will be Mussolini. . . .

"Admit, then, that France had offered Mussolini help. What would the next move be? She might have offered, and he might have accepted, in order to be able to see the triumph of right and justice. . . ."

And the untiring Sarfatti : "Strange rumors were set afloat. . . . The ex-editor of the Avanti was declared to have accepted money from France. . . . We knew him, of course, to be incapable of taking a sou for himself ; but men afire with a great project and with the sense of an imperative call to fulfill it! — who could say but that in a moment of excitement he might feel justified in availing himself of any means to his hand for the purpose? It was decided to acquaint him with what was being said, for the slanders were calculated to damage seriously both Mussolini himself and the cause dear to us all. What was my surprise when I saw the two tiny rooms furnished with only four tumble-down chairs and a rickety table. . . ."

Signora Sarfatti then completes her complete refutation of the most important charge against Mussolini's probity by a long description of the poverty of the apartment in which the hero lived, and concludes by mentioning an advertising contract for 4,000 lire. "Such," she says, "was the 'capital' available! Quite enough, Mussolini felt."

The irrefutable evidence in l'affaire Mussolini is that compiled by Maitre Torres, the Clarence Darrow of the French bar, and produced in open court in the trial of Bonomini for the murder of the Fascist Buonservizi. Part of it is given in the text. Maitre Torres has published his findings several times, and although the present Italian government has intervened into French journalistic affairs scores of times, it was silent in the most important of all incidents disturbing international relations.

After 1919 the French government withdrew its subsidy of foreign newspapers and Mussolini had to shift for himself. The Popolo now existed on the advertising of the members of the League of Manufacturers, chambers of commerce, members and others who were financing the Fascist movement. It was a legal matter but nevertheless a form of subsidy equaling exactly the purchase of the good will of thousands of newspapers in America by the National Electric Light Association, of which the first ten volumes of the Federal Trade Commission investigation reports contain the evidence.

In addition to the joyful announcement in the official Fascist press that Mussolini paid 200,000 lire income tax, indicating that he had amassed a fortune of ten millions, there is the press account that he was able to give his daughter Edda a dowry of 5,000,000 lire when she married Count Galeazzo Ciano, head of the press and propaganda department of the Fascist government.
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Re: Sawdust Caesar: The Untold History of Mussolini and Fasc

Postby admin » Wed Jan 14, 2015 11:51 pm

APPENDIX 4:

Mussolini and the "Bolshevik Era"


Writings and public speeches by the head of the Fascisti during the labor troubles, strikes, and uprisings of 1919 and 1920. Most of these quotations are from the Popolo d'Italia of June and July 1920:

(Editorial on the strike at Genoa): "We need a firing-squad to execute the sharks who are starving the people" (June 16).

(Uprising in Spezia): "The demonstration is violent but spontaneous, and, moreover, anticipated, against that ignoble race, those who speculate in the blood of a suffering people" (June 16).

(Uprising in Livorno): "The revolt is an absolute necessity to extinguish the voracity of those who starve us."

(Looting of the stores in Bergamo): "At Bergamo they have attacked the men [who raised the price of food] and we cannot do otherwise than approve that which has been done" (June 20).

(Riots at Imola and other towns in the Romagna, five dead): "In the Romagna the people have revolted against the venality of the speculators. ... I recognize, without reticences, the fundamental legitimacy of the popular protest. It is proportionate to the actions of the speculators" (July 4).

Under Mussolini's guidance the central committee of the newly formed Fascist Party passed the resolution, July 5, 1919, proclaiming "our absolute solidarity with the people who have revolted against the speculators, and we applaud the seizures" (i.e., food riots, looting, etc., later called "Bolshevism").

Demonstration by the metal workers of Genoa and railroad men approved by Popolo d'Italia, January 8, 1919.

Strike of Post-office employees, approved by Mussolini January 15.

Strike of street-car men of Genoa, approved January 25.

Uprising of the rural workers of the province of Novara, approved in the Popolo of March 30th.

Strike of the railroad workers on branch lines. Signed editorial by Mussolini: "Convinced that the strikers are in the right, we promise them our disinterested support . . ." May 4, 1919.

The Seizure of the Factories

(i) "I fear no social change, provided that it appears necessary to me. That is why I accept, not only the control of the factories, but also their social-cooperative operation" — Mussolini, speech, "Politeama Rossetti," Trieste, September 20, 1920.

(2) "It is a veritable revolution which we are having in Italy; moreover, it is a phase of the revolution which we began in May, 1915" — Popolo d'Italia, September 28, 1920.
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Re: Sawdust Caesar: The Untold History of Mussolini and Fasc

Postby admin » Wed Jan 14, 2015 11:52 pm

APPENDIX 5:

Text of Pacification Treaty between Fascisti and Labor


For the realization of the return of normal conditions in the relations between the Italian parties and economic organizations, are met today, under the presidency of the honorable attorney Signor Enrico de Nicola, president of the Chamber of Deputies, the representatives of the national council of the Fasci di Combattimento, the Fascist parliamentary group and the General Federation of Labor.

To this congress were also invited the directorate of the Communist parliamentary group, the representatives of the Catholic parliamentary group and the Republican deputies.

The directorate of the Communist parliamentary group declared verbally to the president that the group in conformity with the declarations already published by the Italian Communist Party could not participate in the pourparlers.

The representative of the Catholic parliamentary group, the Honorables De Gasperi and Cingolani replied with thanks for the invitation and the wishes that the conference have a successful termination.

They stated however that doubting if the intervention of parties which do not find themselves in the same line of fighting as the Socialists and Fascists might prejudice in some way the efficacity of the accords to be arrived at, the group preferred to renounce its official adherence. However it engaged itself to collaborate for the realization of the goal so nobly pursued by the president in guarding scrupulously be it in the Chamber or in the country, its attitude of strict legality from which it has never wavered.

In the name of the Republican deputies the Honorables Chiesa, Mazzolani, Conti and Macrelli replied likewise they judged their intervention inopportune; the Republican party desired to remain neutral in the sad battle between factions.

1. First under consideration is the official communique of July 28 last to solve a prejudicial question, a proposal of the Fascist party, which desires the determination of relationship between the Socialist party and the Communist party.

2. The parties engage themselves to do all in their power to prevent all menaces, all reprisals, all punishments, all vengeances, all personal violence.

3. The emblems and ensigns of all parties will be respected.

4. The parties engage themselves reciprocally to respect the economic organizations.

5. All attitudes or all deeds which countervene said engagements are from now on disavowed and deplored by both representatives.

6. All violations of the regulations mentioned in this present act will be submitted to the judgment of a college of arbitration which will determine the responsibility.

7. For this purpose the organizations, political and economic will collaborate in each province for the formation of a college of arbitration composed of two Socialist members and two Fascist members and presided over by a third who will be named by the contending parties, failing which, by the president of the tribunal.

8. All accords signed in the provinces outside of the aforementioned agreement, shall be considered as of no value.

9. The organizations pledge themselves not to oppose by violence the reintegration of those who have been previously shorn of their powers by force.

10. The parties engage themselves reciprocally to restore all objects having a patrimonial value which have been carried away without any justice by the organizations and by private persons.

11. The undersigned representatives address a warm invitation to the press of both parties to align themselves with the accords concluded by them.

Of the preceding compromise, communication is given the public through the agency of the press in the hope that each citizen will understand at last all the gravity of the present hour and comprehend also the value and the force of the words of peace which have been pronounced.

Rome. Cabinet of the President of the Chamber. August 3, 1921.

For the parliamentary Fascist group:

Benito Mussolini, Cesare Maria De Vecchi, Giovanni Giuriati.

For the national council of the Fasci di Combattimento:

Cesare Rossi, Umberto Pasella, Gaetano Polverelli, Nicola Sansanelli.

For the directorate of the Socialist Party:

Giovanni Baccl, Emilio Zannerini.

For the Socialist Parliamentary group:

Elia Musatti, Oddino Morgari.

For the General Federation of Labor:

Gino Baldesi, Alessandro Galli, Ernesto Caporali.

Enrico De Nicola, President of the Chamber of Deputies.
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Re: Sawdust Caesar: The Untold History of Mussolini and Fasc

Postby admin » Wed Jan 14, 2015 11:52 pm

APPENDIX 6:

Fascism: "Reactionary," "Anti-Liberal"


by Benito Mussolini

(The famous pronunciamento against liberty by the Duce in the March, 1923, issue of his magazine, Hierarchy)

Force and Consent

Certain Italian Liberalism, which holds itself to be the one and only depository of true and immortal principles, is uncommonly like that moribund socialism, because it, too, as the latter, thinks it has "scientifically," an indisputable truth, good for all times, places and situations. Here is absurdity. Liberalism is not the last word, nor does it represent the definite formula in the theme of the art of Government. In this difficult and delicate art, which has to work with the most refractory materials and in a state of movement, since it works on living and not on dead things; in this art, there is not the aristotelian unity of time, of place and of action. Mankind has been more or less well governed in a thousand different ways.

Liberalism is the sun and the method of the nineteenth century, which is not stupid, as Daudet thinks, because there are not stupid centuries nor clever centuries, but there are alternate times of cleverness and stupidity in larger or smaller proportions, in every century. It is not said that the liberal method of government, good for the nineteenth century, for a century that is dominated by two essential phenomena like the development of capitalism, and the affirmation of the sentiment of nationality, must necessarily be fitted for the twentieth century, which already promises to have very different characteristics from those which marked the preceding century. Facts are worth more than books; experience more than doctrines.

Now, the greatest experience which has come to us after the World War in a state of motion under our very eyes — is the defeat of liberalism. In Russia and in Italy it has been shown that it is possible to govern outside, above and against the whole of liberalism's idealogy. Both Communism and Fascism are outside the bounds of liberalism.

But after all is said and done, what does this liberalism, for which all the foes of Fascism today more or less obliquely get excited, consist? Does liberalism mean universal suffrage and such like things? Does it mean to have the Chamber always open, in order that it may present that indecent spectacle which made everybody feel sick? Does it mean to leave, in the name of liberty, to a few the liberty to crush the liberty of all ? Does it mean to give a free hand to those who proclaim their hostility against the State and work actively for its destruction? Is this liberalism? Well, if this is liberalism it is a theory and a practice of aberration and of ruin. Liberty is not an end; it is a means. As a means it ought to be controlled and dominated. Here fails this talk of "force."

The liberal gentlemen are asked to tell me if there ever was in history a Government based exclusively on the consent of the people and renouncing the employment of any kind of force. Such a Government has never existed and it never will exist. Consent is as changeable as the sands on the seashore. It cannot always exist. Nor can it ever be entire. No Government has ever existed which has managed to make everybody it governed happy. Whatever solution you happen to give to any problem whatever, you — even were you participants of divine wisdom — must inevitably create a class of malcontents. If so far geometry has not succeeded in squaring the circle, still less have politics managed to do it. Allowing as an axiom that any governmental decision creates discontented people, how are you to prevent this discontent from growing and becoming a danger for the safety of the State? You prevent it by means of force; by surrounding the mass with force; by employing this force without pity when it is necessary to do so. Take away force from any Government whatever — and physical armed force is meant here — and leave only its immortal principles — and that Government will be at the mercy of the first organized group which has made up its mind to beat it.

Now Fascism throws all these anti-vital theories to the scrap heap. When a group or a party is in power it is obliged to fortify itself and to defend itself against all comers. The truth, plain to the eyes of all who are not blinded by dogmatism, is that men are tired, perhaps, of liberty. They have had an orgy of it. Today liberty is no longer the severe and chaste virgin for which generations of the first part of the last century fought and died. For the intrepid youth who, uneasy and alert, face the dawn of new history there are other words which have greater fascination ; these are, order, hierarchy, discipline.

This poor Italian liberalism, which goes in search of a greater liberty, groaning and struggling, is very much behind. It is quite outside all understanding and possibility. They talk of seeds which spring will find. Nonsense! Some seeds die under the coat of winter. Fascism, which did not fear to call itself reactionary when many liberals of today were prone before the triumphant beast, has not today any impediment against declaring itself illiberal and anti-liberal. Fascism does not fall a victim to certain commonplace tricks.

Let it be known then, once and for all, that Fascism knows no idol, worships no faith; it has once passed, and, if needful, will turn to pass again, over the more or less decomposed body of the Goddess of Liberty.

Benito Mussolini
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Re: Sawdust Caesar: The Untold History of Mussolini and Fasc

Postby admin » Wed Jan 14, 2015 11:53 pm

APPENDIX 7:

Resolutions Adopted by the Republican, Socialist, Democratic, and Catholic Parties, Following the Assassination of Matteotti


"To send greetings to the memory of Giacomo Matteotti, who, above party divergences, has become by his tragic destiny the symbol of the aspiration of liberty and civil order, in the service of which he was killed in a cowardly manner.

"The horrible character of this crime, so different from other political crimes because it was the result of a plot born in the protection of the high powers of the State, has shocked the public conscience, revealing the existence of a political mentality which cannot be compatible with the state of civilization of the present century. . . .

"Now, in the light of testimony made by the judicial authorities, forced by the pressure of public opinion despite the opposition of the police authorities, we know of the organization, outside the law, called upon to execute the condemnations against political opponents. This organization (Cheka) is grafted on the very organization of the government and directed by the confidants of the Chief of Government (Mussolini).

"In face with these troubling affairs, the assembly . . . serves the supreme interests of the State, unable to distinguish logically and morally the close or distant responsibility of the government. This responsibility is irremediably proven by the solidarity, paid and maintained, between the collaborators, who today have been demasked as the veritable mandatories of the ignoble crime and the constitutional regulation which makes the President of the Council (Mussolini) responsible before Parliament and before the country for the work of his coadjutators. . . .

"The government promises for the future, the work of normalization. . . . The Opposition cannot believe in the efficacy or the sincerity of this promise. They are contradictory, carried out by a party which maintains the intolerable privilege of defending with arms its place in politics.

"The circumstances of the assassination . . . oblige the Opposition to abstain, for the moment, from all parliamentary participation."
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Re: Sawdust Caesar: The Untold History of Mussolini and Fasc

Postby admin » Wed Jan 14, 2015 11:53 pm

APPENDIX 8: Extracts from Law of December 31, 1925, on the Press

1. Every newspaper or periodical publication shall have a responsible director who . . . must be approved by the Procurator-General attached to the Court of Appeal of the district.

3. The printer and editor must furnish a list of the titles and addresses of all the proprietors.

7. In every town where there is a Court of Appeal there shall be an order of journalists. . . . Those journalists only who are inscribed on the registers of the order may exercise their profession.

Royal Decree of July 15, 1923

2. The Prefect of a province is empowered ... to address a warning to the manager of a newspaper or periodical publication:

(1) if by means of false or tendentious news it impedes the diplomatic action of the Government in its foreign relations, or injures the national credit at home or abroad, or creates unjustifiable alarm in the population, or disturbs public order;

(2) if by means of articles, comments, notes, headlines, or illustrations it incites to crime or excites class hatred or disobedience to the laws and orders of the public authorities, or compromises the discipline of public servants, or favours the interests of foreign states, societies, or individuals to the prejudice of Italian interests, or holds up to opprobrium the King, the Royal Family, the Sovereign Pontiff [the Pope], the religion of the state, or the institutions and organs of the state or friendly Powers. . . .

3. On the advice of the Commission referred to in the preceding Article the Prefect may cancel the recognition of a responsible manager to whom two warnings have been addressed in one year.

4. Newspapers or other periodical literature published in contravention of the preceding dispositions may be sequestrated.

Subsidization of Violence in Foreign Countries

Under a Fascist law "for the compensation of protagonists in Internal civil strife" party members injured in disputes with anti-Fascists were indemnified by the State. To insure the same benefits the Fascisti abroad, notably in France, the United States and South America, the following law, No. 1519, was passed on August 10, 1927, and published in the Gazzetta ufficiale, August 30, 1927:

"That the benefits of the law of 1925 are extended, without limit of time, to citizens who beginning on the 23rd of July, 1919, have, in foreign lands, in time of conflicts or aggressions, received bodily harm, etc. . . . provided that they have acted, calculatedly or spontaneously, in a nationalistic manner."

On the initiative of Minister of Justice Rocco the following decree was published October 27, 1927:

"Condemnations for crimes committed for a nationalistic purpose must not be inscribed on the judicial docket."
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