Fascist Rulers

"Fascism was not the protector of any one class, but a supreme regulator of the relations between all citizens of a state."

"My labor had not been easy nor light; our Masonry had spun a most intricate net of anti-religious activity; it dominated the currents of thought; it exercised its influence over publishing houses, over teaching, over the administration of justice and even over certain dominant sections of the armed forces. To give an idea of how far things had gone, this significant example is sufficient. When, in parliament, I delivered my first speech of November 16, 1922, after the Fascist revolution, I concluded by invoking the assistance of God in my difficult task. Well, this sentence of mine seemed to be out of place! In the Italian parliament, a field of action for Italian Masonry, the name of God had been banned for a long time. Not even the Popular party — the so-called Catholic party — had ever thought of speaking of God. In Italy, a political man did not even turn his thoughts to the Divinity. And, even if he had ever thought of doing so, political opportunism and cowardice would have deterred him, particularly in a legislative assembly. It remained for me to make this bold innovation! And in an intense period of revolution! What is the truth! It is that a faith openly professed is a sign of strength. I have seen the religious spirit bloom again; churches once more are crowded, the ministers of God are themselves invested with new respect. Fascism has done and is doing its duty."

"The dangerous persons for the socialist movement are not the intellectuals, but those who are not convinced of socialism. And all those who call themselves socialists without knowing why they are socialists."

"Fascism denies that numbers, as such, can direct human society. It denies that numbers can govern by means of periodical consultations: It asserts the unavoidable fruitful and beneficent inequality of men who cannot be leveled by any such mechanical and extrinsic device as universal suffrage."

"I want to make my own life a masterpiece."

"Standing by me and helping my work as newspaper man were the Fascisti. They were composed of revolutionary spirits who believed in intervention. They were youths—the students of the universities, the socialist syndicalists—destroying faith in Karl Marx by their ideals."

"For Fascism, the growth of Empire, that is to say the expansion of the nation, is an essential manifestation of vitality, and its opposite a sign of decadence. Peoples which are rising, or rising again after a period of decadence, are always imperialist; any renunciation is a sign of decay and of death. Fascism is the doctrine best adapted to represent the tendencies and the aspirations of a people, like the people of Italy, who are rising again after many centuries of abasement and foreign servitude. But Empire demands discipline, the coordination of all forces and a deeply felt sense of duty and sacrifice."

"Fascism conceives of the State as an absolute, in comparison with which all individuals or groups are relative, only to be conceived in their relation to the State."

"If the 19th was the century of the individual (liberalism means individualism), you may consider that this is the "collective" century, and therefore the century of the state."

"I have no love for the Jews, but they have great influence everywhere. It is better to leave them alone. Hitler's antisemitism has already brought him more enemies than is necessary."

"Inside every anarchist is a failed dictator."

"The appeal to the decisiveness and masculine sobriety of the nation’s youth, with which Roosevelt here calls his readers to battle, is reminiscent of the ways and means by which Fascism awakened the Italian people."

"The question is often asked in America and in Europe just how much ‘Fascism’ the American President’s program contains. Reminiscent of Fascism is the principle that the state no longer leaves the economy to its own devices, having recognized that the welfare of the economy is identical with the welfare of the people. Without question, the mood accompanying this sea change resembles that of Fascism. More than that cannot be said at the moment."

"Comrade Tassinari was right in stating that for a revolution to be great, for it to make a deep impression on the life of the people and on history, it must be a social revolution."

"To-day we can affirm that the capitalistic method of production is out of date. So is the doctrine of laissez-faire, the theoretical basis of capitalism… To-day we are taking a new and decisive step in the path of revolution. A revolution, in order to be great, must be a social revolution."

"Italy is not a capitalist country according to the meaning now conventionally assigned to that term."

"At a given moment the worker, the tiller of the soil, must be able to say to himself and to his family: "If I am really better off today it is due to the institutions that the Fascist Revolution has created.""

"Three-fourths of the Italian economy, industrial and agricultural, is in the hands of the state. And if I dare to introduce to Italy state capitalism or state socialism, which is the reverse side of the medal, I will have the necessary subjective and objective conditions to do it."

"I don't like the look of him."

"The Truth Apparent, apparent to everyone's eyes who are not blinded by dogmatism, is that men are perhaps weary of liberty. They have a surfeit of it. Liberty is no longer the virgin, chaste and severe, to be fought for … we have buried the putrid corpse of liberty … the Italian people are a race of sheep."

"The order of the day is this: Within a few decades all peasants and farm workers must possess large, healthful houses, in which the rural generations can live through the centuries, in which the race will find a secure foundation. Only thus is it possible to combat the poisons of urbanism, only thus is it possible to bring back to the villages and fields the deluded peasants who have followed the urban mirage of money wages and easy diversions."

"Thirty centuries of history allow us to look with supreme pity on certain doctrines which are preached beyond the Alps by the descendants of those who were illiterate when Rome had Caesar, Virgil and Augustus."

"I am not a collector of deserts!"

"It is no longer economy aiming at individual profit, but economy concerned with collective interest."

"Fascism establishes the real equality of individuals before the nation… the object of the regime in the economic field is to ensure higher social justice for the whole of the Italian people… What does social justice mean? It means work guaranteed, fair wages, decent homes, it means the possibility of continuous evolution and improvement. Nor is this enough. It means that the workers must enter more and more intimately into the productive process and share its necessary discipline… As the past century was the century of capitalist power, the twentieth century is the century of power and glory of labour."

"Against individualism, the Fascist conception is for the State; and it is for the individual in so far as he coincides with the State . . . . It is opposed to classical Liberalism . . . . Liberalism denied the State in the interests of the particular individual; Fascism reaffirms the State as the true reality of the individual."

"Speeches made to the people are essential to the arousing of enthusiasm for a war."

"I admire Lassalle. He was a man of first-class intelligence and endowed with far more imagination than Marx. That was why his vision of the days to come was far less catastrophic than that of Marx."

"...It was therefore not sufficient to create—as some have said superficially—an anti-altar to the altar of socialism. It was necessary to imagine a wholly new political conception, adequate to the living reality of the twentieth century, overcoming at the same time the ideological worship of liberalism, the limited horizons of various spent and exhausted democracies, and finally the violently Utopian spirit of Bolshevism."

"The new society cannot get out of the involucrum of the old society, except by smashing it to pieces; two conceptions, two classes, two worlds will contend for primacy, and only force will compel the weaker to disappear. For this reason, we socialists of the first school, Marxist and catastrophic, if you wish, explain to ourselves the partial violence of to-day and the violence of to-morrow… Do not call us prophets of massacre if we present the possibility that the socialist revolution will have insurrectional episodes. It is puerile to think that such a radical displacement of interests, such a profound transformation of habits can be accomplished without violent conflicts."

"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."

"There is a great deal of Prussianism in German Socialism. My impression has been that that explains why German Socialists are so disciplined."

"The Fascist State directs and controls the entrepreneurs, whether it be in our fisheries or in our heavy industry in the Val d'Aosta. There the State actually owns the mines and carries on transport, for the railways are state property. So are many of the factories… We term it state intervention… If anything fails to work properly, the State intervenes. The capitalists will go on doing what they are told, down to the very end. They have no option and cannot put up any fight. Capital is not God; it is only a means to an end."

"Let us have a dagger between our teeth, a bomb in our hands and an infinite scorn in our hearts."

"As long as 1911, when I was still a member of the Socialist Party, I wrote that the Gordian knot of Trent could be cut only by the sword. At the same date I declared that war is usually the prelude to revolution. It was therefore easy for me, when the Great War broke out, to predict the Russian and the German revolutions."

"Here in Italy Socialism was a unifying factor. All Italian historians have recognized this. The Socialists of Italy were advocates of one idea and of one nation. From 1892, when they cut adrift from the anarchists at the Congress of Genoa, down till 1911, they battled for on behalf of a united Italy.”"

"Fascism entirely agrees with Mr. Maynard Keynes, despite the latter's prominent position as a Liberal. In fact, Mr. Keynes' excellent little book, The End of Laissez-Faire (1926) might, so far as it goes, serve as a useful introduction to fascist economics. There is scarcely anything to object to in it and there is much to applaud."

"It is blood which moves the wheels of history."

"National pride has no need of the delirium of race. Anti-Semitism does not exist in Italy… Whenever things go awry in Germany, the Jews are blamed for it."

"Race! It is a feeling, not a reality: ninety-five percent, at least, is a feeling. Nothing will ever make me believe that biologically pure races can be shown to exist today. Amusingly enough, not one of those who have proclaimed the "nobility" of the Teutonic race was himself a Teuton."

"State intervention in economic production arises only when private initiative is lacking or insufficient, or when the political interests of the State are involved. This intervention may take the form of control, assistance or direct management."

"A revolutionist is born, not made."

"I never felt that there was any conflict between my military duties and my Socialism. Why should not a good soldier be also a fighter in the class war?"

"God does not exist—religion in science is an absurdity, in practice an immorality and in men a disease."

"Do not believe, even for a moment, that by stripping me of my membership card you do the same to my Socialist beliefs, nor that you would restrain me of continuing to work in favor of Socialism and of the Revolution."

"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."

"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."

"Marx was the greatest of all theorists of socialism."

"It was inevitable that I should become a Socialist ultra, a Blanquist, indeed a communist. I carried about a medallion with Marx’s head on it in my pocket. I think I regarded it as a sort of talisman… [Marx] had a profound critical intelligence and was in some sense even a prophet."

"The Fascist accepts life and loves it, knowing nothing of and despising suicide; he rather conceives of life as duty and struggle and conquest, life which should be high and full, lived for oneself, but above all for others — those who are at hand and those who are far distant, contemporaries, and those who will come after."