Nation Magazine editorial on Mussolini (July 29, 1925)

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

Mussolini’s Fascist State Italy is passing through a period of political 
and social change. Single events, however important in themselves, can 
hardly give the significance of this change or its direction. The 
following summary of the accomplishments of the last parliamentary 
session is reprinted from the London Observer of June 28:

"The parliamentary session has just closed with a series of dramatic 
surprises. Signor Mussolini has given the country plenty to think about 
during the holidays. During the last few sittings of the Chamber three 
important laws were passed in rapid succession, regulating respectively 
the position of the bureaucracy, the activities of the press, and the 
power of the Government to legislate by the use of royal decrees."

Without entering into details, it may be said that the general effect of 
these measures will be to strengthen the position of the executive and 
render it difficult if not impossible, for either Parliament, press, or 
civil servants to offer opposition to, or criticism of, its methods.

Lest the full import of this victory should be lost on the country, the 
Prime Minister closed the Fascist Congress last Monday with one of the 
most remarkable speeches he has ever made. It is an absolutely clear 
statement of his deliberate intention to create a Fascist state, a state 
in which Fascism will not be a part of the nation but the nation itself, 
so that the words Italian and Fascist shall come to be synonymous, just 
as are practically the words Italian and Catholic. As a preliminary, he 
announces that parliamentarism has been conquered. The laws that have 
been passed so far are for the defense of Fascism; those that will be 
put before the country in the autumn will carry on the work in a 
constructive and creative sense.

A REAL FASCIST STATE

That these intentions are the logical outcome of Signor Mussolini’s 
policy for the last three years no one can doubt who has made any 
consecutive study of his acts, which are invariably plain, and of his 
public utterances, which have never been tortuous. The very boldness of 
his conceptions has caused many people to assume that he could not 
possibly mean what he said, and to hope that with time Fascism would 
slough off its most marked characteristics and cool down into a party 
more or less like any other, ready to give and take. They can hardly 
think this any more after his last declarations. He has flung out a 
straight challenge to his adversaries, and, in the absence of any really 
strong, homogeneous opposition, he may possibly go some way toward 
realizing his ideal of a state in which “all the power will be to all 
the Fascists.”

So far as Mussolini is concerned the old Italy, the Italy of Liberals, 
Democrats, and Socialists, has passed away. We are at the dawn of the 
new Italy, which needs new institutions, new laws, and an entirely new 
directive. What is to be the type of the new Italian? He is to have 
“courage, intrepidity, love of risk, a repugnance for pacifism at all 
costs, readiness to dare both in individual and in collective life, and 
a hatred for all that is sedentary. He is to show discipline in work, 
respect for authority, and to feel pride every hour of the day in the 
thought that he is Italian.”

This, as a Roman paper calls it, is the breviary of the perfect Fascist. 
In the new Fascist Government the executive power will practically 
control the destinies of the nation, for it is continuous and omnipresent.

It is the power that finds itself called at any moment to solve vast 
problems, to decree great things, to declare war, to conclude peace. 
This power, which disposes of all the armed forces of the state, which 
controls day by day the complex machinery of state administration, 
cannot take a second place. It cannot be represented by a group of 
puppets who dance according to the caprices of popular assemblies.

A CONSTITUTIONAL INNOVATION

Yet Parliament is not to be abolished; it is even to be strengthened in 
one sense by the introduction of new forces. An organization of national 
syndicates will group the workers and producers of the country together 
in their different categories and classes. In the Italian Chamber of the 
future two-thirds of the deputies will be elected as before by universal 
suffrage, the remaining third will consist of technical representatives 
of the arts, professions, and industrial and agrarian interests of the 
country, elected from among the members of the local syndicates. This 
innovation, which has no precedent, will need the creation of an 
entirely new electoral law. It forms the basis of the constructive 
legislation now in course of preparation by a parliamentary commission 
of eighteen, popularly known as The Solons.

Signor Mussolini openly admits that in his hands Italy’s goal is empire, 
not necessarily territorial, for empire may be political, economic, or 
spiritual. Yet Italians must never forget that their capital is Rome, 
the only city that ever succeeded in founding an empire on the fateful 
shores of the Mediterranean, and that the realization of the Fascist 
dream can only be attained by the formation of a granitic block of 
united national will.

It cannot be denied that these conceptions have a kind of Napoleonic 
grandeur, while no one can doubt Mussolini‘s ardent patriotism and his 
genuine belief in the possibility of leading Italy, through his own 
methods, on the path of happiness and prosperity. Like Napoleon, he has 
impressed himself upon his country with dynamic force at a critical 
moment of her history, and future historians may say of him, as Marmont 
said of his hero, “There was so much future in his mind.” He stands for 
a reaction which, whatever may be its eventual outcome, has certainly 
resulted in the greatly increased vitality of the Italian people. He and 
Fascism together have come through storms which must have broken a 
smaller man and disintegrated a party that had not in itself some very 
vital cohesive dements. As it is, the party stands today before the 
country welded together in that iron discipline which Mussolini wishes 
to impose upon the whole nation.


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