Page:Gaetano Salvemini and Bruno Roselli - Italy under Fascism (1927).djvu/4

 easily have dispersed these loosely organized groups one by one. The Fascists were in fact allowed to enter Rome unresisted. This was not revolution, as alleged by Fascist propaganda. It was a coup d'état staged as a spontaneous popular rising but in reality carried out by a clique of high military authorities and big war profiteers.

This coup d'etat was directed not against Bolshevism but against the Chamber of Deputies and against the King. From that moment, Italy no longer had free and representative institutions, but a dictatorship. From that moment, Italy no longer had a King but a prisoner of war with the title of King. Fascism is the Bolshevism of the Right just as Bolshevism is the Fascism of the Left.

The Fascist movement, not the badly organized, inefficient movement of 1919 and 1920, but the well organized and efficient movement of the following years, was not Mussolini's creation. The Fascist branches in the various towns were founded in accordance with orders from the military authorities, by retired officers and officers on leave. The big war profiteers subsidized them, and the police and the magistrates took no notice of disturbances started by the Fascisti and intervened only when it was a question of disarming, trying, and sentencing those who attempted to resist.

While the military authorities, the war profiteers, the police, and the magistrates pulled the strings behind the scenes, Mussolini stood in the limelight, arousing the enthusiasm of the younger men by daily articles in his paper, urging ever new offensive movements and boasting that he was the author of all that was taking place.

In Spain, in Greece and Hungary, the military cliques who nowadays control the governments have set up soldiers as their representatives. In Italy, in 1921–22, the military authorities acted more cunningly. None of them dared to set himself up openly as the responsible head of the coup d'état but they found elsewhere a figurehead for their coup d'état. This figurehead was Mussolini. Mussolini is the great propagandist of the combine of high military authorities, big land owners, and big industrialists who conduct affairs behind the scenes, while the Black Shirts form the shock troops of the combine, maintained at the expense of the taxpayer.

Officially, Mussolini is the head of the government, the Home Secretary, the Minister of Foreign Affairs, the Minister of the three fighting services, and the Minister of Labor.

It is impossible for him to deal personally with all the questions which arise from day to day in all these seven offices. Therefore, the problems are studied and the action taken by high military and civil officials, and by representatives of those big industrialists and big land owners who form the real working center of the government.