Part 3
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._
IV
DOUBTS OF DEMOCRACY. NEW EXPERIMENTS IN GOVERNMENT
Is democracy a failure? Is it going to be retained much as it is in the years to come, or is it to be changed almost out of recognition, or cast aside as a hopelessly bad method in human affairs?
Democracy is a word with a remarkable variety of meanings. Here I am using it in its commonest current sense to express government by legislators and administrators appointed by a popular vote, government based on the assumption that ultimately the “people” is sovereign. It involves a denial of all hereditary or class or professional claims to power and privilege except in so far as the sovereign people consents and permits. Even a king is understood to be king by popular consent and not by any right divine. Democracy’s ceremonial, its feast, its great function, is the election. Thereby power is assigned, and public issues are understood to be decided.
Unless Democracy is thus defined, its meaning will flap away into the wildest contradictions. Leaving out of consideration the very especial and definite meaning it had in the ancient world, it has carried a hundred different sets of implications since the mighty shock of the first French Revolution brought it into free and frequent use. It has stood for human equality against every form of privilege and control, and it has stood for the right of the individual to realize himself to the full against every form of restrictive assumption.
It has stood, therefore, for the extremest socialism and the extremest individualism. And it has stood, with an equal facility, for limitless progress and for a reaction to a peasant life, just as its liberating or its equalitarian side was brought uppermost. Europe has seen social democracy, Christian democracy, even democratic monarchy, shaking hands with every one, and showing baby to all the world. All these paradoxical variants and interpretations I put aside here, and I will not reflect for a moment upon the Democratic Party in the United States. Here I am discussing simply democracy in politics; government and the control of affairs in general by persons elected on a broad or universal franchise.
That sort of democracy is traceable, latent or overlaid, in most parts of Europe throughout history. Switzerland is an old story and democracy muttered close to the surface in seventeenth-century England and Scotland, but it was only with the American and French revolutions of the late eighteenth century that it became widely prevalent and respected. It was the creed of nineteenth-century liberalism everywhere. Throughout that age the great mother of parliaments at Westminster bred for exportation, like an Ostend rabbit, and legislatures and responsible cabinets sprang up all round the globe from Japan to Brazil. Franchise spread like an epidemic, and has now spread until the nuns in the convents of England and the ladies in Turkish harems are voting. The coloured vote in South Africa has become a very grave question indeed. No doubt this comprehensive democratization of mankind has had many beneficial consequences; it has forced the most inattentive to a temporary attention to the world’s affairs, and it has been the symbol of a new self-respect for women and other enfranchised classes, and for many subject races--but to-day the question whether it is really a permanently good way of doing our collective business is being more and more insistently pressed upon us. Is the world going on that way, or is it seeking for fresh and more satisfactory paths of development? Or, to put it concretely: will general elections and municipal elections or any sort of popular elections be of more than the slightest importance in the affairs of A.D. 2027?
There exists a great variety of indictments of political democracy, but the main, most essential one is that it has produced a special and objectionable type of ruler, the politician, with certain very definable characteristics. The primitive theory of electional democracy was that the great, good, and capable men, statesmen, leaders in affairs, would offer, or be persuaded, to stand for the suffrages of their fellow-citizens, and would be chosen and elected for their known gifts and virtues. But the business of getting elected proved to be susceptible to considerable complication, and demanded almost from the outset something more than conspicuous public services and utility to ensure a candidate’s return. No good for Cincinnatus to stay at his plough; he had to exert himself.
The would-be ruler found it incumbent to divert so much of his time from being good and great to the task of getting himself elected, and he had to bind himself in such close party relationship with others engaged upon the same task, that his individual goodness and greatness speedily became a minor consideration. His interest in what was good for his country and mankind has been, and is, entirely subordinate to what will gain and what will lose votes. Independence of mind, magnanimity and greatness of desire are positive disadvantages for him. And so we find in all the great democratic countries that the direction of affairs has passed into the hands of men who are great merely as politicians, and who are otherwise neither remarkably intelligent, creative, nor noble beings.
They are, indeed, in a great number of cases, conspicuously shifty and ambiguous, strategic, and practically ineffective. Let the reader try to name a single man of really first-class moral and intellectual quality in British, French, American, or German politics to-day. With a sort of baffled dismay we look up to these men we have elected to make the world anew for us, and we see leaders who do not lead and representatives who, at best, impress us as acutely humiliating caricatures of the struggling soul of our race. We realize that the real working out of human destiny is going on, so far as it is going on, beside, independently of, or partially hampered by, our ostensible public life.
In America, France, and Great Britain, for example, where democracy has had the longest run, we see that the democratic method has brought about practically the same situation. A number of politicians have secured the confidence and support of the main groups of prosperous people, who do not want the world changed to any great extent. These politicians of the right and centre form so solid, well-alimented, and effective a constellation that they are generally in power, albeit not always in an electional majority. Naturally these politicians of conservation have the support of all the great selling businesses which advertise in the Press and influence the Press. A second group of politicians appeals, with a feebler Press support, to the less comfortable masses. And while property, which demands no changes, can be of one mind politically, projected remedies for social uneasiness are various, and the discontented are a divided force. Leftism seems everywhere in a majority, for this is a very insecure and unsatisfactory world for the larger half of mankind, but nowhere is it in effective control.
Scarcely represented at all are the creative minds that would educate, reorganize, and push towards an ampler life for our race. Their purposes are difficult to understand and easy to misrepresent, and it suits the needs of the politician of the left far better to excite the voter at a disadvantage by wild promises and by stirring up class resentment--a procedure the politician of the right seeks to counter by the exacerbation of international hatred and suspicion and threats of foreign aggression. So he confuses and deflects popular anger. And a political party that represents wealth is not necessarily a party that represents stability. In a world of such swaying and uncertain values as ours to-day, much of our wealth is adventurous wealth and a heavy mass of business and financial operations are speculative operations dependent on insecurity. If the party of the right does not want things changed to any great extent, it may nevertheless find itself dominated by an active section quite eager to see them very considerably rocked about. No political party in any of the democratic countries of our contemporary world is anything but a resultant of current social and economic with traditional forces. No politician produced by the democratic methods stands for any authentic effort to order matters better. The great democratic countries of our globe are entirely without such political leading at the present time.
Now this is in a phase of the world’s affairs when certain matters of tremendous practical importance press for attention and can be handled only through the political machine. The art of war has come to such a pitch that civilization demands the establishment of war-proof relationships between State and State. No such relationships are forthcoming and there are no signs that any politician anywhere is prepared to risk votes by even seeming to impair the national independence, as such relationships must necessarily do.
The financial and economic life of mankind has become world-wide, and it is suffering a vast demoralization by the universal insecurity in monetary standards. There is no evidence anywhere of democracy’s ability to tackle this difficult and urgent problem. The world needs a common money, or--what is a slightly clumsier form of the same thing--moneys firmly established in relation one to another. It can only get a practically common money through the co-operation of governments. No government on this planet displays the intellectual and moral quality to handle the matter magisterially.
Economic life, too, has ceased to be manageable through comparatively small businesses run as individual adventures. Control of staple products, systematic regulated production and distribution in the case of such commodities as coal are urgently needed. These things extend beyond national limits. The welfare of thousands of people in Italy, for example, depends upon the coal production in France and England. Oil, cotton, wheat--the mention of these words now conjures up thoughts of world-wide operations. Democracy seems incapable of producing politicians competent to direct these big affairs. Private business alone is too chaotic and individualistic to direct them. It is powerful enough to deflect and involve democratic rulers and politicians, but it is not united nor powerful enough to achieve efficient administration nor able to free its creative and productive activities from the destructive raids of mere money-making adventurers. Economically we drift upon a rudderless ship.