The Faces Of Tyranny
A “Doctrine of it’s Own”
By GA Borgese
excerpt from
Goliath: The March Of Fascism: The Faces of Tyranny
written September 1937
1938; New York; The Viking Press
“...In other words it is the despot, and the despot alone, who is the Holy.”
read here and return:
“The writer of this book, while refusing the Fascist oath which he as a university professor was supposed to take and which would have made him a convert to the above doctrine, addressed Mussolini with a circumstantiated letter in which he tried to call the addressee’s attention to the inescapable issues of his doctrine. If the One of Fascism is not the anointed of the lord nor the chosen of the people, if neither Dante nor Mazzini, if neither legitimacy nor revolution, accounts for him, who then is he? If the social system on which his omnipotence reposes is neither the church nor the plebiscite nor the lineage of dynastic or aristocratic blood which Fascism ignores, what is that system unless it be the daggers of the Praetorian Guard, which are no system at all? In the last analysis the One of Fascism is nobody else but the One or Unique of Stirner’s anarchism, with a State which is his property. True, the State is holy, as unbridled individualism is unholy; and nowhere else is man human but in his service to the community of men; but that State alone would be holy which should embrace all mankind in its ideal purpose; the state of Dante or Mazzini. The Fascist state, this Moloch, soldering its subject masses into the unanimity of forced labor and forced consent only to overthrow beyond its borders international law and order by means of ruthless strife, the only alternative of which is racial or individual tyranny, such a state cannot possibly claim any sacrosanctity. Far from being the converse of rugged individualism, it is its final expression, in its most devastating form.
“Such, in slightly different sentences, was the substance of this writer’s letter. It did not make of the Duce a convert.
“Another high light in Mussolini’s Fascist Manifesto was the theory of war and peace. It was strictly correlated with the foregoing conclusions about individual and state, and culminated in the feeling that peace is nothing but a relaxation or interlude, war being, and happily so, the permanent destination of man. ‘First of all, Fascism, as regards the future in general and the development of mankind, and apart from any consideration of current politics, does not believe either in the possibility or in the benefit of perpetual peace. It therefore rejects pacifism which hides a renunciation of fight, a cowardice before sacrifice. War alone carries to the maximum of tension all human energies and stamps with a seal of nobility the peoples which have the virtue of facing it. All other tests are substitutes which never put man in front of himself, in the alternative of life and death. Hence, any doctrine issuing from the preconceived postulate of peace is extraneous to Fascism; and likewise extraneous to the spirit of Fascism are all internationalistic and societary structures [whereby the League of Nations was originally meant], even though accepted on account of whatever use they may have in particular political situations. Such structures, can be scattered to the winds when sentimental, ideal, and practical elements arouse to storm the hearts of the people.’ [Mussolini]
“It is a well-known ability of viciousness to mimic the appearances of virtue and truth; else, should evil look as ugly as it is, its power upon humans would be small. This favourite guile of the fiend has been long since adumbrated in the allegory introducing Satan as a handsome angel, nay, the handsomest in all the celestial array. Accordingly, the first section in Mussolini’s dissertation smuggled the anarchy and tyranny of the one as a remedy against the disintegrating individualism of the many; while the latter section disguises lust for carnage and sadistic glory as heroism, nay, as the only possible redemption from cowardice and selfishness.
“It should have come out for the readers and for the author as well that it is not the amount which decides the quality of human energy. Such phrases as ‘the maximum of tension’ or ‘the storm in the people’s hearts’ are liquor spilt from a cheap romantic cask. It used to be intoxicating; it now is lees and sourness. Were the amount or violence of explosive energy the measure for human conduct, the fury of the arsonist should seem better than the architect’s endurance and the rapist should be above the saint. Granting that the presence, assumed or actual, of a collective devotion in the background of military virtues establishes a difference between warring bravery and criminal amok, it remains none the less clear that the same reasons which seem to justify mass slaughter in battles are apt to glorify not only mass terror in revolutions but ritual cannibalism and human sacrifices. In the same way the dialectics working in behalf of passive discipline and the totalitarian state would prove equally convincing if applied to slave labor and mass prostitution… It may be true that no life is really human which has never confronted the test of peril and courage; but, apart from the statement of the poet saying, ‘I was a man, therefore a fighter too,’ and from the opportunities awaiting us unaware around the corner, an ideal Republic might well decree that no boy or girl should obtain the insignia of adult age without having visited a cage of wild beasts or piloted and airplane under ceiling zero. No imperative reason deprives of alternatives the doctrine contending the game of killing fellow-men is the exclusive test of human gallantry; even supposing there is real gallantry in the wretched lad who, enlisted under compulsory conscription, leaps upon the foe, with the real purpose of fleeing forward to grasp in the enemy trench the spare chances of life which he would miss altogether if he turned his back to the ‘enemy’, thereupon to face a firing squad of his own brothers.
“As for the lesson of history, displaying evidence that war must break out whenever the elements of passion arouse to storm the hearts of the peoples, or in other words that war is eternal and holy, history has no lesson to give. History does not even know… whether Cain was even our common progenitor, whether warfare is an instinct inborn to the nature of man or the perversion of a devious stock [but history does point strongly at the last]. The only lesson of history is that if nature made us wicked and foolish, it is the calling of man and his obstinate purpose through the ages to master nature, not to fawn on it, to fight against death, not to reap its harvest. Kant, midway between realism and an unyielding hope, wrote that ‘Utopias are sweet dreams, but to strive relentlessly toward them is the duty of the citizen and the statesman as well.’”
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Giuseppe Antonio Borgese (George) was a newspaper editor and columnist, literary critic, and professor of Germanic literature and philosophy in Italy during the rise of Benito Mussolini. An outspoken critic of Fascism, when he refused to take the Fascist oath, which was required, he fled to the United States to teach literature at the Universities of Chicago and California. He was friends with Robert Maynard Hutchins. In the US he married the youngest daughter of author Thomas Mann, Elizabeth.