"The [Italian Fascist] regime had created an imaginary Spartan country, in which all men had to make believe they were heroic soldiers, all women Roman matrons, all children Balilla (the Genoa street urchin who started a revolt against the Austrian garrison in 1746 by throwing one stone). This was done by means of slogans, flags, stirring speeches from balconies, military music, mass meetings, parades, dashing uniforms, medals, es, and constant distortions of reality. The Italians woke up too late from their artificial dream, those still alive, that is, hungry, desperate, discredited, the object of derision, cornuti e mazziati, or "cuckolded and beaten up," governed as in the past by contemptuous foreigners in a country of smoking ruins and decaying corpses, in which most things detachable had been stolen and women raped."
Quote Details
Added by wikiquote-import-bot
Unverified quote
0 likes
Original Language: English
Available Languages (1)
Sources
Luigi Barzini, in The Europeans (1983), p. 172
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Fascism
Revision History
No revisions have been submitted for this quote.
Categories
Related Quotes
"Unity, in Fascist terms, means uniformity; freedom of conscience means insubordination; co-ordination means coercion."
"In all the countries where fascism became victorious, we had, before the growth of fascism and its victory, a wave of…"
"Thus, the historical circumstance of the half century preceding the Second World War gave rise to the essence of fasc…"
"Fascism presented itself not only as an alternative, but also as the heir to socialism."
"The peoples of Yugoslavia do not want Fascism. They do not want a totalitarian regime, they do not want to become sla…"
"Stalinism and fascism, in spite of a deep difference in social foundations, are symmetrical phenomena. In many of the…"
"The similarities of the economics of the New Deal to the economics of Mussolini's corporative state or Hitler's total…"
"There isn't any difference in totalitarian states. I don't care what you call them, Nazi, Communist or Fascist..."
"[Fascist ideology was] a variety of socialism which, while rejecting Marxism, remained revolutionary. This form of so…"
"The last resource of the bourgeoisie is fascism, which replaces social and historical criteria with biological and zo…"