If I advance, follow me;
if I retreat, kill me;
if I die, avenge me!
It is better to live one day as a lion than a hundred years as a sheep!
if I retreat, kill me;
if I die, avenge me!
It is better to live one day as a lion than a hundred years as a sheep!
-- Benito Mussolini
1. -
Like every sound political conception, Fascism is both practice and thought;
action in which a doctrine is immanent, and a doctrine which, arising out of a
given system of historical forces, remains embedded in them and works there
from within. Hence it has a form correlative to the contingencies of place and
time, but it has also a content of thought which raises it to a formula of
truth in the higher level of the history of thought. In the world one does not
act spiritually as a human will dominating other wills without a conception of
the transient and particular reality under which it is necessary to act, and of
the permanent and universal reality in which the first has its being and its
life. In order to know men it is necessary to know man; and in order to know man
it is necessary to know reality and its laws. There is no concept of the State
which is not fundamentally a 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 manifestations as
a party organisation, as a system of education, as a discipline, if it were not
always looked at in the light of its whole way of conceiving in a spiritual
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, and in which he is governed by a natural law that makes
him instinctively live a life of selfish and momentary pleasure. The man of
Fascism is an individual 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 private interests, through death itself,
realises that completely spiritual existence in which his value as a man lies.
3. -
Therefore it is a spiritual conception, itself the result of the general
reaction of modern times against the flabby materialistic positivism of the
nineteenth century. Anti-positivistic, but positive: not sceptical, nor
agnostic, nor pessimistic, nor passively optimistic, as are, in general, the
doctrines (all negative) that put the centre of life outside man, who with his
free will can and must create his own world. Fascism desires an active man, one
engaged in activity with all his energies: it desires a man virilely conscious
of the difficulties that exist in action and ready to face them. It conceives
of life as a struggle, considering that it behoves man to conquer for himself
that life 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. Hence the high value of
culture in all its forms (art, religion, science), and the enormous importance
of education. Hence also the essential value of work with which man conquers
nature and creates the human world (economic, political, moral, intellectual).
4. -
This -- positive conception of life is clearly an ethical conception. It covers
the whole of reality, not merely the human activity which controls it. No
action can be divorced from moral judgement; there is nothing in the world
which can be deprived of the value which belongs to everything in its relation
to moral ends. Life, therefore, as conceived by the Fascist, is serious,
austere, religious: the whole of it is poised in a world supported by the moral
and responsible forces of the spirit. The Fascist disdains the
"comfortable" life.
5. -
Fascism is a religious conception in which man is seen in his immanent
relationship with a superior law and with an objective Will that transcends the
particular individual and raises him to conscious membership of a spiritual
society. Whoever has seen in the religious politics of the Fascist regime
nothing but mere opportunism has not understood that Fascism besides being a
system of government is also, and above all, a system of thought.
6. -
Fascism is an historical conception, in which man is what he is only 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
collaborate. From this follows the great value 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 eighteenth 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 literature of the eighteenth century, and hence it rejects all
teleological theories according to which mankind would reach a definitive
stabilised condition at a certain period in history. This implies putting
oneself outside history and life, which is a continual change and coming to be.
Politically, Fascism wishes to be a realistic doctrine; practically, it aspires
to solve only the problems which arise historically of themselves and that of
themselves find or suggest their own solution. To act among men, as to act in
the natural world, it is necessary to enter into the process of reality and to
master the already operating forces.
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 classical Liberalism, which arose from the necessity of reacting against
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 individual; 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 of that abstract puppet envisaged by
individualistic Liberalism, Fascism is for liberty. And for the only liberty
which can be a real thing, 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, interprets, develops and gives strength to the whole life
of the people.
8. -
Outside the State there can be neither individuals nor 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 unity of classes established in one economic and moral reality in
the State; and analogously it is opposed to class syndicalism. Fascism
recognises the real exigencies for which the socialist and syndicalist movement
arose, but while recognising them wishes to bring them under the control of the
State and give them a purpose within the corporate system of interests
reconciled within the unity of the State.
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 numerically as the sum-total of individuals forming the majority of
a nation. And consequently Fascism is opposed to Democracy, which equates the
nation to the majority, lowering it to the level of that majority; nevertheless
it is the purest form of democracy if the nation is conceived, as it should be,
qualitatively and not quantitatively, as the most powerful idea (most powerful
because most moral, most coherent, most true) which acts within the nation as
the conscience and the will of a few, even of One, which ideal tends to become
active within the conscience and the will of all; that is to say, of all those
who rightly constitute a nation by reason of nature, history or race, and have
set out upon the same line of development and spiritual formation as one
conscience and one sole will. Not a race, nor a geographically determined
region, but as a community historically perpetuating itself, a multitude
unified by a single idea, which is the will to existence and to power:
consciousness of itself, personality.
10. -
This higher personality is truly the nation in so far as it is the State. It is
not the nation that generates the State, as according to the old naturalistic
concept which served as the basis of the political theories of the national
States of the nineteenth century. Rather the nation is created by the State,
which gives to the people, conscious of its own moral unity, a will and
therefore an effective existence. The right of a nation to independence derives
not from a literary and ideal consciousness of its own being, still less from a
more or less unconscious and inert acceptance of a de facto situation,
but from an active consciousness, from a political will in action and ready to
demonstrate its own rights: that is to say, from a state already coming into
being. The State, in fact, as the universal ethical will, is the creator of
right.
11. - The
nation as the State is an ethical reality which 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 abroad, making it known and respected; in other words,
demonstrating the fact of its universality in all the necessary directions of
its development. It is consequently organisation and expansion, at least
virtually. Thus it can be likened to the human will which knows no limits to
its development and realises itself in testing its own limitlessness.
12. - The
Fascist State, the highest and most powerful form of personality, is a force,
but a spiritual force, which takes over all the forms of the moral and
intellectual life of man. It cannot therefore confine itself simply to the
functions of order and supervision as Liberalism desired. It is not simply a
mechanism which limits the sphere of the supposed liberties of the individual.
It is the form, the inner standard and the discipline of the whole person; it
saturates the will as well as the intelligence. Its principle, 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 soul of
the soul.
13. - Fascism, in short, is not only the 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, 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 Lectors' rods, the symbol of unity, of strength and justice.
No comments:
Post a Comment