Foreign Ministers

"No one knows better than I with forty years' political experience that policy--particularly a revolutionary policy--has its tactical requirements. I recognised the Soviets in 1924. In 1934, I signed with them a treaty of commerce and friendship. I, therefore, understood that, especially as Ribbentrop's forecast about the non-intervention of Britain and France has not come off, you are obliged to avoid the second front [with Russia]. You have had to pay for this in that Russia has, without striking a blow, been the great profiteer of the war in Poland and the Baltic. But I, who was born a revolutionary and have not modified my revolutionary mentality, tell you that you cannot permanently sacrifice the principles of your revolution to the tactical requirements of a given moment... I have also the definite duty to add that a further step in the relations with Moscow would have catastrophic repercussions in Italy, where the unanimity of anti-Bolshevik feeling is absolute, granite-hard, and unbreakable. Permit me to think that this will not happen. The solution of your Lebensraum is in Russia, and nowhere else... The day when we shall have demolished Bolshevism we shall have kept faith with both our revolutions. Then it will be the turn of the great democracies, who will not be able to survive the cancer which gnaws them..."

"World Jewry has been, for sixteen years, despite our policy, an irreconcilable enemy of Fascism. In Italy our policy has led, in the Semitic elements, to what can today be called a true rush to board the ship."

"With regard to domestic policy, the current burning issue is the racial question. Also in this field we will adopt the necessary solutions. Those who believe that we have obediently imitated anyone, or worse, acted on suggestions, are poor fools toward whom we do not know if we should direct our contempt or our pity. The racial problem did not suddenly burst out of nowhere, as those who are accustomed to brusque awakenings think — since they are used to long armchair naps. It is in relation to imperial conquest; because history teaches us that empires are conquered by arms but are held by prestige. And for prestige it is necessary to have a clear, severe racial consciousness, that establishes not only the differences, but also very clear superiorities."

"This is the epitaph I want on my tomb: "Here lies one of the most intelligent animals who ever appeared on the face of the Earth.""

"I declare that henceforth capital and labor shall have equal rights and duties as brothers in the fascist family."

"We do not argue with those who disagree with us, we destroy them."

"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."

"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."

"The struggle against the religious absurdity is more than ever a necessity today."

"Militarism! Here is the monstrous leech that is incessantly sucking the blood of the people and its best energy! Here is the target for our attacks! We must put an end to barbarism, proclaim that the army is now a highly organized school of crime and that it exists solely to protect bourgeois capital and profits. We must not be deterred from proclaiming ourselves international socialists. We recognize no borders and no flags, we hate all steel, every institution that exist to kill men, waste energy, strangle the advance of the workers."

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

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

"Religion is a species of mental disease. It has always had a pathological reaction on mankind."

"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.”"

"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."

"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?"

"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."

"Above all, Fascism, in so far as it considers and observes the future and the development of humanity quite apart from political considerations of the moment, believes neither in the possibility nor the utility of perpetual peace. It thus repudiates the doctrine of Pacifism — born of a renunciation of struggle and an act of cowardice in the face of sacrifice. War alone brings up to its highest tension all human energy and puts the stamp of nobility upon the people who have the courage to meet it. All other trials are substitutes, which never really put a man in front of himself in the alternative of life and death."

"Yet the Fascist State is unique, and an original creation. It is not reactionary, but revolutionary, in that it anticipates the solution of the universal political problems which elsewhere have to be settled in the political field by the rivalry of parties, the excessive power of the Parliamentary regime and the irresponsibility of political assemblies."

"When, in the now distant March of 1919, I summoned a meeting at Milan through the columns of the Popolo d'Italia of the surviving members of the Interventionist Party who had themselves been in action, and who had followed me since the creation of the Fascist Revolutionary Party (which took place in January of 1915)."

"A unanimous, universally-accepted theory of Socialism did not exist after 1905, when the revisionist movement began in Germany under the leadership of Bernstein, which under pressure of the tendencies of the time, a Left Revolutionary movement also appeared, which though never getting further than talk in Italy, in Russian Socialistic circles laid the foundations of Bolshevism."

"The Fascist State has never tried to create its own God, as at one moment Robespierre and the wildest extremists of the Convention tried to do; nor does it vainly seek to obliterate religion from the hearts of men as does Bolshevism: Fascism respects the God of the ascetics, of the saints, of the heroes, and also God as seen and prayed to by the simple and primitive heart of the people."

"I am proud to be your friend, your brother, your leader. ... The Government looks on the peasants, in war and in peace, as the fundamental forces on which the country relies for its success. ... As between the city and the village, I am for the village. ... The time for a prevalently urban policy has passed. ... The people who abandon the land are condemned to decadence. ... I have willed that agriculture take first place in the Italian economy."

"Giovanni De Martino is the most important exponent of Italian art, the pride of Italy."

"I had the courage to transform the eight-hours day into a law of the State. Do not despise this victory; do not undervalue it. I have approved all the social and pacifist Conventions of Washington… No exceptional laws were pasted, and the regulation of the Press is not an exceptional law."

"To make a revolution it is not necessary to play the great drama of the area. We have left many dead on the roads to Rome and naturally anybody who deludes himself is a fool. We have the power and we shall hold it. We shall defend it against anybody! The revolution lies in this firm determination to hold power!"

"Social Democracy seems to have a very ambiguous position. First of all one wonders why it is called Social Democracy. A democracy is already necessarily social; we think, however that this Social Democracy is a kind of Trojan horse which holds within it an army against whom we shall always be at war."

"Not only this, but we affirm, and on the strength of recent Socialist literature, which you ought not to repudiate, that the real history of capitalism is beginning now, because capitalism is not only a system of oppression, but a selection of that which is of most worth, a co-ordination of hierarchies, a more strongly developed sense of individual responsibility. So true is this that Lenin, after having instituted the building councils, abolished them and put in dictators; so true is it that, after having nationalised commerce, he reintroduced the regime of liberty; and as you who have been in Russia well know, after having suppressed—even physically—the bourgeoisie, to-day he summons it back, because without capitalism and its technical system of production, Russia could never rise again."

"Our position is different as regards the Socialist Party. In the first place we are careful to make a distinction between party Socialism and the Socialism of Labour."

"I recognize the fact that the sacrifices made by the Italian Jews during the war were considerable and generous, but now it is a question of examining certain political positions and of indicating what line the government might eventually adopt… This is in the interest of the Jews, who, having fled from the pogroms of Ukraine and Poland, must not meet Arab pogroms in Palestine; moreover, it is advisable that the Western nations should refrain from creating a painful legal position for the Jews, since to-morrow those same Jews, becoming citizen-subjects of those States, might immediately form foreign colonies within them."

"We play upon every cord of the lyre, from violence to religion, from art to politics. We are politicians and we are warriors. We are syndicalists and we also fight battles in the streets and the squares. That is Fascismo as it was conceived at Milan…"

"Foolish and reactionary and Conservative contraband practices must not be carried on under the Fascista flag… We are the first to recognize that a State law should grant the eight-hour day, and that there should be social legislation corresponding to the exigencies of the new times."

"But after all, my dear friends, does Bolshevism exist in Russia? It does not any longer. There are no longer councils of the factories, but dictators of the factories; no longer eight hours of work, but twelve; no longer equal salaries, but thirty-five different categories, not according to need, but according to merit. There is not in Russia even that liberty which there is in Italy. Is there a dictatorship of the proletariat? No! Is there a dictatorship of the Socialists? No! There is a dictatorship of a few intelligent men, not workmen, who belong to a section of the Socialist Party, and their dictatorship is opposed by all other sections. This dictatorship of a few men is what is called Bolshevism. Now we do not want this in Italy."

"Our destiny cannot become universal unless it is transplanted to the pagan ground of Rome. By means of Paganism Rome found her form and found the means of upholding herself in the world."

"We are syndicalists, because we think that by means of the mass it may be possible to determine an economic readjustment…"

"The Electoral Reform will pass. The scrutiny of lists and proportional representation will pass. That will determine, for obvious reasons, the great coalitions—the Socialist-Leninist, the Clerical-Popular, and, lastly ours, which might be called the ‘Alliance for the Constituent,’ the Republican Alliance or the group of the ‘interveners’ of the Left."

"I am a revolutionary and a reactionary. Really, life is always like this. I am afraid of the revolution which destroys and does not create. I fear going to extremes, the policy of madness, at the bottom of which may lie the destruction of this our fragile mechanical civilization, robbed of its solid moral basis, and the coming of a terrible race of dominators who would reintroduce discipline into the world and re-establish the necessary hierarchies with the cracking of whips and machine-guns."

"I could understand a strike which had as its object the setting up of the Soviet in Italy, but I do not understand or admit this one, which is without aim, object or justification. It must and will fail, because the leaders themselves are in the cul de sac of this dilemma: either tragedy, because the State at this moment has its repressive machinery in full working order; or comedy, in the event of a revolt on the part of the workmen already outlined, and due to their being tired of serving a Socialist Party mostly composed of middle-class elements."

"I must tell you that the government over which I have the honour of presiding never has had, never can and never will have the intentions of following a so-called anti-labour policy. On the contrary, I want to praise the working classes, who do not put obstacles in the way of the Government, who work, and who have practically abolished strikes. They have redeemed themselves, because they no longer believe in the Asiatic Utopia which came from Russia; they believe in themselves, in their work; they believe in the possibility, which for me is a certainty, of a prosperous Italian nation."

"How does it come about that we are said to be sold to the middle class, capitalism and the Government? But already our enemies dare no longer continue this accusation, so false and ridiculous it is."

"We do not intend to oppose the movement of the working classes, only to unmask the work of mystification which is carried on by a horde of middle-class, lower-middle-class and pseudo-middle-class men, who think that they have become the saviours of humanity by the mere fact of being possessed of a card of membership. ‘We are not against the proletariat, but against the Socialist Party in as far as it continues to be anti-Italian.’ The Socialist Party continued, after the victory, to abuse the war, to fight against those who had been in favour of intervention, threatening reprisals and excommunication."

"I think that within five or six months’ time there will be quite a few Socialists who will recognize that I am the only Socialist that there has been in Italy for the last five years; and I am not being paradoxical, even if I add that the Socialist Party on the whole is detestable."

"All other parties and associations argue on a basis of dogma and from the standpoint of definite preconceptions and infallible ideals. We, being an anti-party, have no preconceptions. We are not like the Socialists, who always think that the working masses are in the right, and we are not like the Conservatives, who think that they are always in the wrong… First, we have kept in mind the general interests of the nation, particularly as regards the recent strikes. Secondly, we have considered the subject of production, because if we kill production, if to-day we render sterile the fount of economic activity, to-morrow there will be universal poverty."

"No nation can become greater in which there are enormous masses condemned to the conditions of life of prehistoric humanity."

"As Italy discovered America, so America and the rest of the New World must discover Italy, not only in the great towns, pulsating with life and humming with industry, but also in the country, where the humble labourers wait with quiet resignation for the dawn of a victorious and just peace to appear on the horizon."

"We are one with the United States. This is Internationalism, the real, true and lasting Internationalism, even if it has not got the formulas, dogmas and chrism of Socialism made official. It is in the trenches, where soldiers of different nationalities have crossed six thousand leagues of ocean to come and die in Europe."

"Karl Marx, too, was a jingoist. In 1855 he wrote that Germany would have been obligated to declare war against Russia; and in 1870 he said of the French: ‘They must be defeated! They will never be sufficiently beaten.’ And when in 1871 the Socialists of France, with Latin ingenuousness, after declaring the Republic, sent a passionate appeal to the Germans for peace, Karl Marx said: ‘These imbeciles of Frenchmen claim that for their rag of a republic we should renounce all the advantages of this war.’ One does not deny one’s country. It is possible to remain a Socialist and be in favour of certain wars."