facism

• Benito Mussolini: 'The Doctrine of Fascism (1932)'
• Fascism


  Action and thought; doctrine arising from a given system of historical forces
• Conception of the State

  Fundamentally a conception of life: philosophy, intuition, system of ideas, or concentrated in a vision or a faith
• Fascism

  • Sees the world not only in superficial, material aspects but also the nation and the country; individuals and generations bound together by a moral law, with common traditions and a mission
• Fascist conception of life

  Serious, austere, and religious; all its manifestations are poised in a world sustained by moral forces and subject to spiritual responsibilities
• Fascist conception of history

  Man is man only by virtue of the spiritual process to which he contributes as a member of the family, the social group, the nation, and in function of history to which all nations bring their contribution
• Fascism

  Opposed to individualistic abstractions based on 18th century materialism and Jacobinistic utopias and innovations
• Fascist conception of the State

  All-embracing; outside of it no human or spiritual values can exist, much less have value
• Fascism

  Opposed to Socialism and trade unionism as a class weapon, but recognizes their real needs and gives them due weight in the guild or corporative system
• Fascist democracy


  Not equating a nation to the majority, but the purest form if the nation is considered from the point of view of quality rather than quantity, as an idea, the mightiest because the most ethical, the most coherent, the truest
• Nation


  Not a race or geographically defined region, but a people, historically perpetuating itself; a multitude unified by an idea and imbued with the will to live, the will to power, self-consciousness, personality
• State


  Creates the nation, conferring volition and therefore real life on a people made aware of their moral unity
• Fascist State


  Not only Authority which governs and confers legal form and spiritual value on individual wills, but also Power which makes its will felt and respected beyond its own frontiers
• Fascist State


  An inwardly accepted standard and rule of conduct, a discipline of the whole person; it permeates the will no less than the intellect
• Fascism

  Not only a law-giver and a founder of institutions, but an educator and a promoter of spiritual life
• Fascism was not born of a previously drafted doctrine, but of the need for action
• Fascism was not a party but, in the first two years, an anti-party and a movement
• Fascism was not the nursling of a doctrine previously drafted at a desk; it was born of the need of action, and was action; it was not a party but, in the first two years, an anti-party and a movement
• The name 'Italian Fasci di combattimento' fixed the character of the organization
• The meeting at which the Italian Fasci di combattimento were founded did not have a doctrine but a series of pointers, forecasts, hints which were to develop into doctrinal positions
• Mussolini: 'We must go towards the people.... We wish the working classes to accustom themselves to the responsibilities of management so that they may realize that it is no easy matter to run a business... We will fight both technical and spiritual rear-guardism.... Now that the succession of the regime is open we must not be fainthearted. We must rush forward; if the present regime is to be superseded we must take its place. The right of succession is ours, for we urged the country to enter the war and we led it to victory... The existing forms of political representation cannot satisfy us; we want direst representation of the several interests.... It may be objected that this program implies a return to the guilds (corporazioni). No matter!'
• The word 'guild' (corporazione) was pronounced from the very first day at Piazza San Sepolcro, which was to express one of the basic legislative and social creations of the Fascist regime
• In the years preceding the March on Rome, the need for action forbade delay and careful doctrinal elaborations, but the doctrinal foundations were laid while the battle was still raging
• During those years, Fascist thought armed, refined itself, and proceeded ahead with its organization
• The lack of a formal system was used by disingenuous adversaries as an argument for proclaiming Fascism incapable of elaborating a doctrine at the very time when that doctrine was being formulated
• Fascism


  A regime and a doctrine that has studied and judged all the problems affecting the material and intellectual interests of the world from its own special standpoint and is ready to deal with them by its own policies
• Fascism


  • Does not believe in the possibility or utility of perpetual peace
  • Discards pacifism as a cloak for cowardly supine renunciation in contradistinction to self-sacrifice
  • Believes war alone keys up all human energies to their maximum tension and sets the seal of nobility on those peoples who have the courage to face it
  • Rejects internationalistic or League superstructures which crumble to the ground whenever the heart of nations is deeply stirred
  • Accepts and loves life, rejects and despises suicide as cowardly
• Fascist conception of life

  Life means duty, elevation, conquest; life must be lofty and full, it must be lived for oneself but above all for others, both near bye and far off, present and future
• Fascism denies the doctrine of historic materialism which would explain the history of mankind in terms of the class struggle and by changes in the processes and instruments of production, to the exclusion of all else
• Fascism denies the immutable and irreparable character of the class struggle which is the natural outcome of the economic conception of history
• Fascism rejects the economic interpretation of felicity as something to be secured socialistically, almost automatically, at a given stage of economic evolution
• Fascism denies the equation: well-being = happiness, which sees in men mere animals, content when they can feed and fatten, thus reducing them to a vegetative existence
• Fascism denies that numbers, as such, can be the determining factor in human society; it denies the right of numbers to govern by means of periodical consultations; it asserts the irremediable and fertile and beneficent inequality of men who cannot be leveled by any such mechanical and extrinsic device as universal suffrage
• Fascism has outgrown the dilemma: monarchy v. republic, over which democratic regimes too long dallied
• Fascism is definitely and absolutely opposed to the doctrines of liberalism, both in the political and the economic sphere
• Liberalism really flourished for fifteen years only, from 1830 to 1848, and its decline began immediately after that year
• Germany attained her national unity outside liberalism and in opposition to liberalism, a doctrine which seems foreign to the German temperament, essentially monarchical, whereas liberalism is the historic and logical anteroom to anarchy
• In the upbuilding of Italian unity liberalism played a very minor part when compared to the contribution made by Mazzini and Garibaldi who were not liberals
• The religion of liberalism was completely unknown to so highly civilized a people as the Germans but for one parenthesis which has been described as the "ridiculous parliament of Frankfort" which lasted just one season
• The three stages in the making of German unity were the three wars of 1864, 1866, and 1870, led by such "liberals" as Moltke and Bismarck