Available at Abebooks and for free on Archive.org
Length of book: 354 pages
To this day I thank difficulties. They were more numerous than the nice, happy incidents. But the latter gave nothing.
(26)
The difficulties of life have hardened my spirit.
They have taught me how to live.
When one looks past the slime and excremental content of the lies spread about Mussolini, one starts to see an entirely different portrait of the man and, by extension, the Italy he ruled. It is the “Old Italy” one gets an impressive glimpse into when reading this book, one filled with problems but filled even more with promise. The reading of this book becomes bittersweet when both the fate of his regime and the sorry state of modern Italy are recalled. Yet, the inspiring words and lessons the man conveys cannot help to inspire all men of good will, Italian or stranieri.
Mussolini himself forcefully conveys the events of his life not in a mere personal matter, but often in relation to the political and social climate of his nation. This is a trend that starts at the very beginning of the book and becomes more pronounced as one reaches “En Route”, the last chapter written by Mussolini himself in the 1939 edition of the book, the one I possess and am reviewing. After this final chapter, there are four more chapters written in the third person. The chapters are useful supplements that assist the reader in understanding the direction in which Italy was going after Mussolini penned My Autobiography in 1928, so they are not without value. In fact, the information in those final chapters is well worth preserving, and so I recommend finding a 1939 edition if it is possible. Additionally, it is noteworthy that, as is explained in the Foreward, this book is not a translation of the original Italian text. Rather, it was dictated by Mussolini to Richard Washburn Child, the editor of this book.
Mussolini the Man
The poetry of my life has become the poetry of construction. The romance of my existence has become the romance of measures, policies and the future of a State. These, to me, are redolent with drama.
(225)
As Mussolini recounts his battle for Italy’s entry into the Great War as the founder of the nascent Il Popolo d’Italia to his battle against the forces of Freemasonry and Socialism as Prime Minister, one cannot help but be drawn into his narrative. So vivid are his words, his descriptions, his sense of the time in which he lived and the politics of his nation.
But in the midst of these things, he tells us many things about himself. Among his sayings, I found this one to be the most inspiring:
I pity those who lose time, money and sometimes all of life itself in the frenzy of games.
….In every hour of my life it is the spiritual element which leads on. Money has no lure for me. The only things for which I aim are those which identify themselves with the greatest objects of life and civilization, with the highest interests and the real and deep aspirations of my Country. I am sure of my strength and my faith; for that reason, I do not indulge in any concession or compromise.
(192)
Quite a different portrait when compared to the foolish and disgusting lies we are fed today!
Mussolini was no dim-witted “anti-intellectual”. Among his hobbies he describes having spent many hours in the company of “the great poets, as Dante…the most supreme philosophers, as Plato” (192). He was also incredibly diligent, as one of the later chapters not written from his perspective describes:
Mussolini’s hours of business were twelve, fourteen a day. Sometimes he would come home late at night and lie down on his bed, without undressing.
(290)
He was not a lover of violence. Quoting one of his speeches reproduced in this work, we find these words:
I have always said, and now those who always followed me in these five years of hard struggle can remember it, that violence to be worth while in settling anything must be surgical, intelligent, and chivalrous.
(211)
Furthermore, numerous times throughout this autobiography he writes of the considerable restraint he practiced in leading his movement, even to the point of ordering the arrest of over-zealous black shirts who disturbed the peace.
He was not a warmonger as a journalist; his advocacy for Italy’s entry in World War I was predicated not on a desire for bloodshed, rather a desire to see France defended against Germany after the “tragic rape of Belgium” and to bring the “unredeemed lands” held by Austria-Hungary into the fold of his nation (49-50). He believed so much so in the war effort that he wished to enlist as a volunteer as soon as Italy entered the conflict in 1915, but was made “disconsolate” at being turned away and having to wait to be conscripted (52). Furthermore, his belief in the War did not make him inconsiderate of those who had lost their lives on account of it; rather, quite the opposite:
I had been the most tenacious believer in the War. I had fought with all my warm soul of Italian and soldier. I lived the joy of victory. I even lived in the midst of the unrest of after-War. But in every event, happy or sad, I have always had as a touch-stone, as a lighthouse, as a source of every advice and of deep wisdom, the memory of the dead. They are from every region and every walk of life, even those who were under foreign yoke or emigrated to other countries. They gave their blood and were willing to offer the supreme sacrifice for the Mother Country. Until the time when a Nation has the right of sitting with its proud head among other nations the surest sign of its strength, the highest title of its nobility, the vital food needed to reach greatness, will always be given by those who shed their blood and laid down their lives for their immortal Country.
(64)
Neither was he a warmonger as a statesman. Before listing various treaties and explaining his views on foreign policy in the chapter titled “New Paths”, Mussolini remarks:
It amuses me to be called an anti-pacifist in light of our record of treaty making for peace and for smooth international dealing.
(232)
Though this information testifies in his favor, it does not mean that the man was without fault personally or politically. However, when one honestly examines from sources untainted by the standard institutional narrative, such as this book, one sees more good than bad.
Mussolini on Socialism
Mussolini’s treatment of Socialism in particular is far more illustrative than any mere theoretical text aimed against the errors of that pernicious ideology.
Here is a lengthy but worthy example of one especially memorable incident Mussolini mentions that occurred in the chaotic year of 1920:
During one of the many evenings when Milan was at the mercy of these scoundrels [Socialists], I found myself surrounded and isolated in a cafe of Piazza del Duomo, the central hub of the Lombardian metropolis. While I was sipping a drink waiting for Michele Bianchi, a hundred Socialists and loafers hemmed in the cafe and began hurling a series of insults of abuses and insults. I had been recognized. Perhaps they had in mind, in their collective wrath, to give me a beating in order to place on my person the vengeance they had long since had in mind. The crowd, gathering in numbers, became more and more menacing, and so the owner of the cafe, and female cashier, hastened to pull down the shutters. She invited me, according to the fashion of these disorderly times, to go out because I was endangering their interests. I did not wait for a second invitation. I am used to facing the rabble without fear. The more there are of them the more a man can move toward them with a sure courage which, to some, may appear as an affectation. I cannot say there was any reluctance on my part to face these cowards. I looked at the leaders and said, “What do you want of me? To strike me? Well, start. Then be thereafter on guard. For any insult of yours, any blow, you will pay dearly.” I remember the picture of that wolf pack. They were silent. They looked furtively at each other. The nearest withdrew and then suddenly fear, which is as contagious as courage in any crowd of people, spread among the group. They backed away; they dispersed and only at a distance flung their last insults.
(105-106)
This kind of intimidation was “…typical of a usual occurrence in the life of a Fascista” (106), because much like in our own time, the post-WWI government of Italy was headed by spineless Liberal cowards. Of the situation, Mussolini himself writes that “…the Liberal Party had abdicated everything to the Socialists” (119), yet as he illustrates in another place, the Socialists were abdicated to because their ideology “…was victorious only through cowardice…” and “…because of the general uneasiness in the population” (88). The battle between Girodin and Jacobin, Menshevik and Bolshevik played itself out then, as it still does today.
Though, it can be argued that there is an important distinction to be made, in that the Italian Liberal establishment of that time was unlike the modern Italian Liberal establishment of our time, and certainly unlike the Liberal establishment in other countries. Stooges of the World Economic Forum like Justin Trudeau and Rishi Sunak are a different breed from Giovanni Giolitti and Francesco Nitti, but they are different in the same way that an earlier stage of cancer is evidently less lethal than a later stage.
It was the cowardice of Liberals that allowed the Socialist mob to push around the civil authorities and to bring about acts of violence against those who opposed their attempt to dominate Italian public life. Mussolini’s fascists stood against these fiends and won, primarily because God was on their side and because they had the courage to act even against the material odds.
Likewise, a useful lesson can be drawn from Mussolini’s courageous example; when confronted by the ideological descendants of the “wolf pack” he faced on the streets of Milan, show strength and do not back down from confrontation.
Much has been said and written of what Mussolini meant by “Fascism”, but very few have had the intellectual honesty to investigate and faithfully relate what the man said and wrote. There are a number of fools who attempt to rehabilitate the Red Scourge with Fascism, and one of the surface level claims they utilize lies in the word “revolution”. Mussolini often described the Fascist state as “revolutionary” and the March on Rome as a “revolution”. Is not “revolution” a favored word of the Revolution, so these fools argue, necessarily a dead giveaway to the crypto-Marxist nature of Fascism?
This already fragile argument collapses in the face of this straightforward explanation given by the Duce himself:
[I]t [the Fascist revolution] had no antecedent in history. It was different from any other revolution also in its capacity to re-enter, with deliberate will, legal established traditions and forms.
(179)
Furthermore, there are other statements throughout the book that do well to explain the differences between Fascism and Socialism, such as this example of Mussolini articulating the formulation of the ideology:
It was therefore not sufficient to create—as some have said superficially—an anti-altar to the altar of Socialism—it was necessary to imagine a wholly new political conception, adequate to the living reality of the 20th century—overcoming at the same time the ideological worship of liberalism, the limited horizons of various spent and exhausted democracies, and finally the violently Utopian spirit of Bolshevism.
(74)
And considering that one of the major aims of the Communist Manifesto is the abolition of all rights of inheritance, let us examine what Mussolini relates of his thought on the issue:
It was made clear that I would never approve subjecting inheritance to a taxation which had assumed a Socialistic character of expropriation. Interference with succession strikes a blow at the institution of the family.
(242)
The economic philosophy and policies of Fascism are further proofs that this ideology was inherently anti-Marxist. The corporative system is given ample explanation in the later chapters of the book, and is well worth studying. But in summary, the major distinction between the two systems in the economic sphere is that while Fascism promoted class cooperation, Socialism promotes class warfare. In particular, the Carta del Lavaro (Charter of Labor), the “fundamental document describing the relations between workers and employers in the Fascist State” (287) is given ample coverage in the chapter First Fruits of Fascism. Within that chapter, one finds these impressive words:
The Obsservatore Romano, organ of the Vatican, compared the Carta to the encyclical Rerum Novarum, issued in 1894, and seconded with no reservations the ideas which inspired it.
(289)
Here then is official proof from the Church that Corporatism was inspired by its social teaching.
Thus, Fascism was a truly counter-revolutionary movement rather than one derived from the atrocious Revolution of 1789. Its aim was not destruction and division, but rather restoration and rehabilitation.
Next: My Autobiography (Part II)