Is fascism the invention and weapon of Mussolini, or is Mussolini the
creature of Fascism? Is Fascism something that would die if he died, or
is it something that would have played its part in the world if that
eminently theatrical figure had never been born?
No doubt that under its present name and as an organization Fascism
from its very beginning has been most intimately associated with
Mussolini. But though it has kept its name and its leader, it has
changed its nature very completely since its appearance seven years
ago. Beginning as something of a novelty, it has abandoned every novel
pretension it ever made. This reality that has now taken on the name
and organization of Fascism was fully vocal in Italy before the war,
and its spiritual father is d’Annunzio. It was active and armed for the
Fiume raid, while Mussolini was still encouraging crowds to loot shops
and preaching “the railways for the railwaymen” and the land for the
peasants.
This spirit in Italy, which Mussolini did not create but which he
has studied, adopted, and used to clamber to his present fantastic
position of Italian tyrant, had already found literary expression in
the “Futurist” poetry of Marinetti as early as 1912 and 1913. I can
remember that rich voice in London at some dinner of the Poetry Society
long before the war, reciting, shouting, the intimations of a new
violence, of an Italy that would stand no nonsense, that adjured the
past and claimed the future, that exulted in the thought and tumult of
war, that was aristocratic, intolerant, proud, pitiless, and, above
all, “Futurist.”
In those days Mussolini was just the sort of fellow the present-time
Fascist would spend a happy evening in waylaying and beating to death.
He was a pacificist, a Socialist of the extreme left, and he had made
himself conspicuous by leading an agrarian revolt, the Red Week, in
Romagna.
Even in 1919 Mussolini had not found the real soul and substance of
his party, and the youthful violence of Italy had still to discover
its organizer and god. The early Fascist programme read over again
now, seven years later, is almost incredibly contradictory of all that
Fascism now proclaims; it was republican, pacificist, it demanded the
abolition of titles, freedom of the Press, freedom of association,
freedom of propaganda, a census of wealth, confiscation of unproductive
capital, suppression of banks and stock exchanges, grants of land to
peasant soviets, and so forth. It was in fact a new organization of
Socialist extremists outside the trade-union and peasant classes. But
its strength lay not in its ideas, but in the ability with which it was
organized.
It set about its work from the beginning with a melodramatic
picturesqueness that seized upon adolescent imaginations; it was
aggressive, adventurous, quarrelsome, and implacable after the heart of
youth. It was, in a word, a great lark. But it put the rampant Italian
Futurists into a uniform and taught them a Roman salute. It developed
a feud with the Socialists and Populist Party. It grasped an immense
opportunity at the municipal elections of 1920, when it supported, and
in return had the connivance of, the Giolitti Ministry. It supplied
convenient bands of young roughs to intimidate electors. It got arms
in some secret but effective fashion, and a properly instructed police
dealt with it in a spirit of friendly laxity. And when next year it had
become an actual party represented in the Chamber, it turned against
its foster-father Giolitti, which served that venerable statesman right.
The early programme had dropped out of sight by that time; it would
be forgotten altogether were it not for the obstinate memories of
antagonists like Sturzo and Nitti--and Mussolini was feeling his way
steadily towards the poses and professions that would most fully
satisfy the cravings of the more energetic and adventurous sections of
Italian youth. He has emerged at last in a rôle that d’Annunzio could
have written for him fifteen years ago, the rôle of the unscrupulous,
magnificent Saviour and re-Maker of a Hairy Heroic Italy.
As late as 1919 he had still been flirting with extreme Socialistic
ideas; it was only with the fall of Giolitti that he moved definitely
over to patriotism, nationalism, religious orthodoxy, and conservatism.
I would not charge him with a cunning and calculated self-seeking
in this change of front. He seems to have been guided by the quick
instinct of the born actor and demagogue for what would “take,” rather
than by any intelligible reasoning, to throw himself and all his
resources into the forms demanded by romantic reaction.
The forces of romantic reaction had been incapable of producing an
organization, but they were prepared for melodramatic devotion;
they had no great leader except an elderly poet of literary habits,
unhappily lacking in hair and a little exhausted by aviation and Fiume,
and they cried out for a hero in the full vigour of life. The Fascist
organization, with the very little modification needed to scrap all the
original principles, gave them the first, and Mussolini was only too
ready to take his cue and come forward into the limelight as the second.
One need only study a few of the innumerable photographs of Mussolini
with which the world is now bespattered to realize that he is a
resultant and no original. That round, forcible-feeble face is the
popular actor’s face in perfection. It stares, usually out of some
pseudo-heroic costume, under a helmet for choice, with eyes devoid of
thought or intelligence and an expression of vacuous challenge. “Well,
what have you got against me? I deny it.”
It is the face of a man monstrously vain and--at the mere first rustle
of a hiss--afraid. Not physically afraid, not afraid of the assassin
who lurks in the shadows, but afraid, in deadly fear of that truth
which walks by day. The murders and outrages against opponents and
critics that lie like a trail of blood upon his record are the natural
concomitants of leadership by a man too afraid of self-realization to
endure the face of an antagonist. Away with them! Nitti, Amendola,
Forni, Misuri, Matteotti, Salvemini, Sturzo, Turati! Away with all
these men who watch and criticize and wait! What are they waiting for?
Not one of these names of men robbed, beaten, exiled, or foully done to
death, which is not the name of a better man than this posturing figure
which holds the stage in Italy. And the supreme sin of each one of them
has been the quack-destroying comment, the chill and penetrating eye.
In truth Mussolini has made nothing in Italy. He is a product of Italy.
A morbid product. Italians ask: “What should we have done without
Mussolini?” and the answer is: “You would have got another.” What is
now drilled and disciplined as Fascism existed before him and will
go on after him. If he were to die, Fascism would not have the least
difficulty in finding among the rich resources of Italy a successor as
dramatic and rhetorical: its difficulty would be that it would probably
find too many successors.
What then is this reality of Fascism, which inflates this strange
being and allows him for a little while to do so much violence as the
tyrant of Italy? What complex of forces sustains him?
One power of Fascism is that it is the first entrance of an organized
brotherhood upon the drama of Italian politics.
It is only apparently a one-man tyranny. There is considerable
reason to suppose that organized brotherhoods, maintaining a certain
uniformity of thought and action over large areas and exacting a
quasi-religious devotion within their membership, are going to play an
increasingly important part in human affairs. Secret societies there
have always been in Italy, but Fascism is not a secret society; it is
an association with open and declared aims. It discusses its activities
in big meetings and regulates them through a Press. The Communist Party
which dominates Russia and the Kuomintang which is rescuing China from
anarchy and foreign dominion, are other such associations, broader and
more completely modern in spirit but structurally akin. Their ideals
and those of the Fascists are in the flattest contrast, and their
procedure is freer from furtive violence, but they have much the same
material form. The contents of the vehicle differ, but the form of the
vehicle is similar.
And while in the Communist Party we find Marxist theories struggling
with practical reality and in the Kuomintang the conception of
consolidating and developing a modernized but essentially Chinese
Civilization, in the Fascist vehicle there seems to be the ideology
of a young and essentially ill-educated Italian, romantic, impatient,
and, at bottom, conventional, wanting altogether in any such freshness
or vigour of outlook as distinguishes the Kuomintang and Communist
visions. Fascism as compared with these movements presents a mentality
which cannot conceive new things, but which wants old things and itself
made glorious. The Italian Futurism it succeeds was never more than a
projected return to primitive violence. It is a modern method without a
modern idea.
This Fascist mind demands workers who work with pride and passion
and accept what is given to them cheerfully; soldiers eager for the
prospect of death; priests who are saints without question, and
teachers who teach but one lesson: Italy. It can face no doubts nor
qualifications. It sees taking thought in the light of treason,
discussion as weakness, and the plainest warnings of danger as
antagonism to be beaten into silence and altogether overcome. So
long as Mussolini sings its song it will lavish upon him a medieval
loyalty. Should he by some miracle be smitten with intelligence and
self-criticism, it would sweep him away. Its honesty, as a movement in
general and disregarding the manifest cynicism and commercialism of
some of its older leaders, is indisputable. Mussolini before the camera
man as hero is the caricature portrait of Young Italy before the world
as hero.
Now, how comes it that Italy has produced this sort of youthful mind
in sufficient abundance to fill the ranks of Fascism and make it for
a time at least a great and powerful machine? Why has Italy bred her
own servitude and degradation? To answer that question completely
would demand a long and intimately critical study of the development
of Italian secondary and higher education, and of the quality and
supply of reading matter to the inquiring adolescent during the past
half-century. I do not even know if it is a case of bad schools or of
insufficient schools, of inaccessibility of education, of religious or
anti-religious tests for the teachers, of aloofness or cheapness of
quality in the universities, of a pervasion of teaching by propaganda
or a defective distribution of books. But bad education there has
surely been, and Italy reaps the consequences to-day. The Italian
intelligence is naturally one of the best in Europe, but in some way
or in several ways it must have been underfed, under-exercised, and
misdirected for this supply of generous, foolish, violent young men
of the middle classes to exist. This mentality could not be possible
without a wide ignorance of general history and world geography,
without the want of any soundly scientific teaching to balance the
judgment and of any effective training in discussion, fair play,
and open-mindedness to steady behaviour. It is the mentality of the
emotional, imaginative, intellectually undertrained hobbledehoy.
For the most tragic thing of all, to my mind, in this Italian
situation is the good there is in these Fascists. There is something
brave and well-meaning about them. They love something, even if it
is a phantom Italy, that never was and never can be; they can follow
a leader with devotion even if he is a self-deceiving charlatan.
They will work. Even their outrages have the excuse of a certain
indignation, albeit stupid sometimes to the pitch of extreme cruelty.
Mixed up with this goodness there is no doubt much sheer evil, a
puerile malignity and the blood-lust of excited beasts, as when so
hideously they beat to death and out of recognition the poor child who
may or may not have fired an ineffective pistol at their dictator. But
the goodness is there.
Yet I do not see that the alloy of generosity and courage in Fascism is
likely to save Italy from some very evil consequences of its rule.
The deadliest thing about Fascism is its systematic and ingenious and
complete destruction of all criticism and critical opposition. It is
leaving no alternative Government in the land. It is destroying all
hopes of recovery. The King may some day be disinterred, the Vatican
may become audible again, the Populist Party of Catholic Socialism
hangs on; but it is hard to imagine any of these three vestiges of the
earlier state of affairs recovering enough vitality to reconstruct
anew an exhausted Italy. Fascism is holding up the whole apparatus of
education in Italy, killing or driving out of the country every capable
thinker, clearing out the last nests of independent expression in the
universities. Meanwhile its militant gestures alarm and estrange every
foreign Power with which it is in contact. Now through the Tyrol it
insults the Germans to the limits of endurance; now it threatens France
monstrously and recklessly; now comes the turn of the Turk or the
Yugo-Slav.
Yet no European country is less capable of carrying on a modern war
than Italy; she has neither the coal, steel, nor chemical industries
necessary, and equally is she incapable of developing a modern
industrialism without external resources. Her population increases
unchecked; no birth-control propaganda may exist within her boundaries.
So beneath all the blare and bluster of this apparently renascent
Italy there accumulates a congestion of under-educated and what will
soon be underfed millions. British and other foreign capital may for
a time bring in fuel and raw material to sweat the virtues of this
accumulation of cheap low-grade labour. We may hear for a time quite
a lot about the industrial expansion of Italy. We may be invited to
invest in Italian “industrials.” But one may doubt whether the more
intelligent workers of Western and Central Europe will consent to have
the standards of European life lowered by Italian cheap labour without
a considerable and probably an effective protest.
So it seems to me that the horoscope of Italy reads something after
this fashion: this romantic, magnificent, patriotic Fascist Party, so
exalted and devoted in its professions, will continue to grip the land,
but of necessity it must become more and more the servant of foreign
and domestic capital, and more and more must it sell itself to reduce
its dear and beloved Italy to a congested country of sweated workers
and terrorized peasants, until at last the peninsula will be plainly
the industrial slum of Europe. I do not see any forces in Italy capable
of arresting the drive to degradation and catastrophe that the Fascist
movement, for all its swagger, has set going. Italy is now the Sick
Land of Europe, a fever patient, flushed with a hectic resemblance to
health, and still capable of convulsive but not of sustained violence.
She declines. She has fallen out of the general circle of European
development; she is no longer a factor in progressive civilization. In
the attempts to consolidate European affairs that will be going on in
the next decade, Italy will be watched rather than consulted. She has
murdered or exiled all her Europeans.
Many things may happen ultimately to this sick and sweated Italy, so
deeply injured and weakened by her own misguided youth. Her present
flushed cheeks and bright eyes and high temperature will presently
cease to deceive even herself. She may blunder into a disastrous war,
or she may develop sufficient social misery to produce a chaotic social
revolution. Or one of these things may follow the other. And either war
or revolution may spread its effects wide and far. In that way Italy
becomes a danger to all humanity. But as a conscious participant she
ceases to be great and significant in the world drama. She is now, for
other countries, merely Mussolini. She may presently be his distracted
relict.
But Italy is something more than a huge river valley and a mountainous
peninsula under a Fascist tyrant. Italian intelligence and energy are
now scattered throughout the earth. Who can measure the science and
stimulation we in the rest of the world may not owe presently to the
fine minds, the liberal spirits, who have been driven out of Italy by
the Fascists’ loaded cane? How many men must there be to-day, once
pious sons of Italy, who are now learning to be servants of mankind!
_9 February, 1927._