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Sunday, January 23, 2005
Doctrines of Fascism
Political thinking was very important to Benito Mussolini. This is significant because many fascist leaders in Europe and elsewhere were rather long on practice and activism but short on theory. As one of the founders of the Fascist school of thought, and because his political vision is never dealt with without vitriol, TBR has decided to present a translation of some of Mussolini’s basic political ideas, without commentary. Due to space limitations, some of his less essential ideas have been edited out. We would like to thank translator Joseph Spinelli of Brooklyn, New York, for his efforts.
1 Like every sound political notion, fascism is both practice and thought; action in which a doctrine is imminent, and a doctrine which, arising out of a given system of historical forces, remains embedded in them and works there from within…. There is no concept of life; philosophy or intuition, a system of ideas which develops logically or is gathered up into a vision or into a faith, but which is always, at least virtually, an organic conception of the world.
2 Thus fascism could not be understood in many of its practical incarnations as a party organization, as a system of education, as a discipline, if it were not always looked at in the light of its whole way of thinking about life, a spiritualized way. The world seen through fascism is not this material world which appears on the surface, in which man is an individual separated from all others and standing by himself…. The man of fascism is a person who is nation and fatherland, which is a moral law, binding together individuals and the generations into a tradition and a mission, suppressing the instinct for a life enclosed within the brief round of pleasure in order to restore within duty a higher life free from the limits of time and space; a life in which the individual, through the denial of himself, through the sacrifice of his own personal interests, through death itself, realizes a completely spiritual life in which his value as a man lies.
3 Therefore it is a spiritualized idea and notion, itself the result of the general reaction of modern times against the content-less materialistic positivism of the 19th century…. Fascism desires an active man, one engaged in battle with all his energies; it desires a man conscious of the difficulties that exist in action and ready to face them. It conceives of life as a struggle, considering that it is appropriate for man to conquer for himself that truly worthy of him, creating first of all in himself the instrument (physical, moral, intellectual) in order to construct it. Thus for the single individual, thus for the nation, thus for humanity….
4 This positive conception of life is clearly a moral conception. It covers the whole of activity, not merely the human activity that controls it. No action can be divorced from moral judgment; there is nothing in the world that can be deprived of the value that belongs to all things in its relation to moral ends. Life, therefore, as conceived by the fascist, is serious, austere and religious – the whole of it is poised in a world supported by the moral and responsible forces of the spirit. The fascist disdains the bourgeois life.
5 Fascism is a spiritual conception in which man is seen in his immediate relation with a superior law and with an objective will that transcends the particular individual and raises him to conscious membership in a spiritual society. Whoever has seen in the religious politics of the fascist regime nothing but mere amorality has not understood that fascism besides being a system of government is also, and above all, a system of mental activity.
6 Fascism is a historical notion, in which a man is what he is in so far as he works with the spiritual process in which he finds himself, in the family or social group, in the nation and in the history in which all nations come together. From this follows the great values of tradition, in memories, in language, in customs, in the standards of social life. Outside history, man is nothing. Consequently, fascism is opposed to all the individualistic abstractions of a materialistic nature like those of the 18th century; and it is opposed to all Jacobin utopias and innovations. It does not consider that “happiness” is possible upon Earth, as it appeared to be in the desire of the economic theorizing of the 18th century, and hence it rejects all theological theories according to which mankind would reach a definitive stabilized condition at a certain period in history.
7 Against individualism, the fascist conception is for the state; and it is for the individual in so far as he coincides with the state, which is the conscience and universal will of man in his historical existence. It is opposed to classic liberalism, which came into being from the necessity of reaching absolutism, and which brought its historical purpose to an end when the state was transformed into the conscience and will of the people. Liberalism denied the state in the interests of the particular naked individual as fascism reaffirms the state as the true reality of the individual. And if liberty is to be the attribute of the real man, and not that abstract puppet envisaged by individualistic liberalism, fascism is for corporate liberty. And for the liberty which can be true liberty, the liberty of the state and of the individual within the state. Therefore, for the fascist, everything is in the state, and nothing human or spiritual exists, much less has value, outside the state. In this sense, fascism is totalitarian, and the fascist state, the synthesis and unity of all values, realizes, makes manifest and gives strength to the whole life of the people.
8 Outside the state there can be neither individuals or groups (political parties, associations, syndicates, classes). Therefore fascism is opposed to socialism, which confines the movement of history within the class struggle and ignores the organic unity of classes established in one economic and moral reality in the state; and similarly it is opposed to class syndicalism….
9 Individuals form classes according to the similarity of their interests; they form syndicates according to differentiated economic activities within these interests; but they form first, and above all, the state, which is not to be thought of quantitatively as the sum total of individuals forming the greater part of the nation. And consequently fascism is opposed to democracy, which equates the nation to the majority, lowering it to the level of that majority….
10 It is not the nation that generates the state, as according to the old materialistic concept which served as the basis of the political theories of the national states of the 19th century. Rather the nation is created by the state, which gives to the people, conscious of its own moral unity, a will and therefore a real and moral existence.
11 The nation as the state is a moral reality that exists and lives in, so far as it develops. To arrest its development is to kill it. Therefore the state is not only the authority which governs and gives the form of laws and the value of spiritual life to the wills of individuals, but it is also a power that makes its will felt internationally, making it known and respected, in other words, manifesting the reality of its universality in all the necessary directions of its development. It is consequently organization, mobilization and expansion. Thus it can be likened to the human will, which knows no limits to its development and realizes itself in testing its own lack of boundaries.
12 The fascist system, the highest and most powerful form of personality, is a force, but a spiritual force, which takes over all forms of the moral and intellectual life of man…. It is the form, the inner standard and the discipline of the whole person; it saturates the will as well as the intelligence. Its will, the central inspiration of the human personality living in the civil community, pierces into the depths and makes its home in the heart of the man of action as well as of the thinker, of the artist as well as of the scientist: it is the actual life of the soul.
13 Fascism, in short, is not the only giver of laws and the founder of institutions, but the educator and promoter of spiritual life. It wants to remake, not the forms of human life, but its content – man, character and faith. And to this end it requires discipline and authority that can enter into the spirits of men and there govern unopposed. Its sign, therefore, is the lictors’ rods, the symbol of unity, of strength and justice.
On Political and Cultural Topics
1 Fascism was not given out to be the wet nurse of a doctrine elaborated beforehand around a table: it was born of the need for action; it was not a faction, but in its first two years it was a movement against all parties. The name that I gave to the organization defined its personhood. Nevertheless, whoever rereads, in the now crumpled pages of the time, the account of the now constituent assembly of the Fasci Italiani di Combattimento will not find dogma, but a series of conjectures, of anticipations, of arguments, which when freed from the inevitable vein of contingency, were destined later, after a few years, to develop into a series of attitudes which made of fascism a truly ethnical political doctrine able to face all others, both past and present.
2 Fascism is today clearly defined not only as a system of laws but also as a doctrine. And I mean by this that fascism today, self-critical as well as critical of other movements, has an unequivocal point of view of its own, a criteria, and hence an aim in the face of all the material and intellectual issues which oppress the people of the world.
3 Above all, fascism, in so far as it considers and observes the future and the development of humanity quite apart from the political issues of the moment, believes neither in the possibility nor in the usefulness of perpetual peace. It thus repudiates the doctrine of pacifism – born of a renunciation of the struggle and an act of cowardice in the face of sacrifice. War alone brings up to their highest tension all human life forces and puts the stamp of aristocracy upon the peoples who have the courage to deal with it. All other trials are mere shadows, which never really put a man in front of himself in the alternative of life and death….
4 After socialism, fascism attacks the whole complex of “democratic” ideologies and rejects them both in their theoretical assumptions and in their applications and practical incarnations. Fascism denies that the majority, through the mere fact of being a greater number than the rest of the population, can rule human social lives; fascism denies that this majority can rule by means of a regular retallying of the votes; it affirms the irremediable, natural and positive inequality of men, who cannot be leveled by such a mechanical and extrinsic fact as “universal suffrage.”
5 The theory of fascist authority has nothing to do with the police state. A party that governs a nation in a totalitarian way is a new fact in history. References and comparisons are not possible. Fascism takes over from the ruins of liberal and democratic doctrines those features which still have a living value. It preserves those that can be called the established facts of history; it rejects everything else, that is to say the idea of a doctrine which holds good for all times and all nations. If it is admitted that the 19th century has been the century of Marx and Mill, it does not mean that the 20th must also be the century of these moral frauds. Political doctrines pass; people remain. It is to be expected that this century may be that of authority, a century of the “Right,” a fascist century. If the 19th century was the century of the individual it may be expected that this one may be the century of “collectivism” and therefore the century of the state…. The doctrine itself, therefore, must be, not words, but an act of life. Hence, the pragmatic veins in fascism, its will to power, its will to be, its attitude in the face of the fact of “violence” and of its own courage.
6 In the fascist state the individual is not suppressed, but rather multiplied, just as in a regiment a soldier is not weakened but multiplied by the number of his comrades. The fascist state organizes the nation, but it leaves sufficient scope to individuals; it has limited useless or harmful liberties and has preserved those that are essential. It cannot be the individual that decides in this matter, but only the state.
7 The fascist state does not remain indifferent to the fact of religion in general and to that particular positive religion which is Italian Catholicism. The state has no theology but it has an ethic…. The fascist state does not create a “God” of its own, as Robespierre once, at the height of the convention’s foolishness, wished to do, nor does it vainly seek, like bolshevism, to expel religion from the minds of men. 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.
8 The fascist state is a will to power and to government. In it the tradition of Rome is an idea that has force. In the doctrine of fascism, empire is not only a territorial, military or mercantile expression, but also spiritual and moral. Once can think of an empire, that is to say a nation that directly or indirectly leads other nations, without needing to conquer a single square kilometer of territory. For fascism the tendency to empire, that is to say, to the expansion of nations, is a manifestation of vitality; its opposite, staying at home, is a sign of decadence; peoples who rise or re-rise are imperialist, people who die are renunciatory. Fascism is the doctrine that is most fitted to represent the aims, the states of mind, of a people, like the Italian people, rising again after many centuries of abandonment in slavery to foreigners…. If every age has its own doctrine, it is apparent form a thousand signs that the doctrine of the present age is fascism. That it is a doctrine of life is shown by the fact that it has resuscitated a faith. That this faith has conquered minds is proved by the fact that fascism has had its dead and its martyrs.
Editor's comment: This article is not all inclusive of Mussolini's thoughts on fascism, or political and cultural issues of the time. It is interesting to see just what was going thru the Duce's mind, as this came directly from the translated Italian version which was done specifically for The Barnes Review
With all the claptrap circulating about fascism in America, we can now see what the original was by Mussolini's own words, and everyone here now has this priveleged look back in time.
Be mindful, that fascism American-style has its own character that is not like that of the original, nor like National Socialism in Germany. There are a few key points to note, and, even I, had a few surprises myself. And it is useful to see just where the similarities may lie in comparison to out current political dilemma.
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