Page:Gaetano Salvemini and Bruno Roselli - Italy under Fascism (1927).djvu/11

 Bay? We have disheartening memories of liberty—I mean of the sad prostitution of the ideal of liberty, of the miserable way in which liberty was first proclaimed by demagogues and then mismanaged and mishandled. It is only de facto liberty, not the de jure liberty of theorists, that I am willing to compare with the present virtual dictatorship; the firm illiberality of today with the political chaos of those sad days, wicked post-bellum days, which I deprecate as much as the speaker who has preceded me. I am so glad that I can for one thing agree with him in saying that what was curbed in Italy, what was knocked out in Italy by the coming of Fascism was not Bolshevism. Granting that the average person does not know what Bolshevism really is and therefore can ascribe to Bolshevism all sorts of irregularities and all sorts of wickedness, I prefer to be precise and to free both Bolshevism and Socialism from the accusation of having reduced Italy to the plight in which Mussolini found her, to the chaotic state from which he rescued her. It was anarchy, not only weakness of government but total lack of it in fact—sheer anarchy indulged in by a frenzied majority and withstood by a spineless minority, that took hold of Italy in those sad post-bellum years, 1919, 1920 and to a certain extent 1921 as well. Mark my word-anarchy is not synonymous with violence, although it often produces it. Anarchy existed before Mussolini's march on Rome—not after. Violence existed before that event, and it continued long after—too long after.

There is no use mincing words, or fearing that a certain group of over-sensitive Italians may object or call me to task tomorrow because I say that the Italian people have a certain leaning towards violence which does exist in the history of Italy and which no patriotism of mine would ever enable me to rule out of the history of my country. I am not referring to highway brigandage, now long past, nor to street shooting leading to financial loot, a sport in which America is an easy winner. It is a kind of inability to repress your own feelings, a lack of self-control, a willingness to defend your ideas until death and to impose them forcibly upon others, which unfortunately existed in Italy in the past and exists now; which can be explained historically, which can be explained racially, which can be explained climatically. But explain it as you will, it exists in Italy, and I shall not certainly take a large part of the thirty minutes placed at m disposal by the courtesy of the chairman to add to the descriptions of Fascista violence a report of the equally lamentable violence which preceded the days of the Fascist régime—with nothing to show on the credit side!

It is as easy to keep on with retaliation between nations as between individuals. The Matteotti murder on the one hand, the Empoli massacres on the other; and so on ad infinitum. I move that we leave to the tabloids that double list of murders and turn to governmental conditions before and under Mussolini. Mussolini found a thorough distintegration