dictator of Italy from 1922 to 1945
Benito Amilcare Andrea Mussolini (29 July 1883 – 28 April 1945) was an Italian politician and journalist who founded and led the National Fascist Party. He was Prime Minister of Italy from the March on Rome in 1922 until his deposition in 1943, and "Duce" of Italian Fascism from the establishment of the Italian Fasces of Combat in 1919 until his execution in 1945 by Italian partisans. As dictator of Italy and principal founder of fascism, Mussolini inspired and supported the international spread of fascist movements during the inter-war period.
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For this I have been and am a socialist. The accusation of inconsistency has no foundation. My conduct has always been straight in the sense of looking at the substance of things and not to the form. I adapted socialisticamente to reality. As the evolution of society belied many of the prophecies of Marx, the true socialism folded from possible to probable. The only feasible socialism socialisticamente is corporatism, confluence, balance and justice interests compared to the collective interest.
...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 twentieth 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.
To-morrow, Fascists and communists, both persecuted by the police, may arrive at an agreement, sinking their differences until the time comes to share the spoils. I realise that though there are no political affinities between us, there are plenty of intellectual affinities. Like them, we believe in the necessity for a centralised and unitary state, imposing an iron discipline on everyone, but with the difference that they reach this conclusion through the idea of class, we through the idea of the nation.
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When, in the now distant March of 1919, I summoned a meeting at Milan through the columns of the Popolo d'Italia of the surviving members of the Interventionist Party who had themselves been in action, and who had followed me since the creation of the Fascist Revolutionary Party (which took place in January of 1915).
The new society cannot get out of the involucrum of the old society, except by smashing it to pieces; two conceptions, two classes, two worlds will contend for primacy, and only force will compel the weaker to disappear. For this reason, we socialists of the first school, Marxist and catastrophic, if you wish, explain to ourselves the partial violence of to-day and the violence of to-morrow… Do not call us prophets of massacre if we present the possibility that the socialist revolution will have insurrectional episodes. It is puerile to think that such a radical displacement of interests, such a profound transformation of habits can be accomplished without violent conflicts.
Yet the Fascist State is unique, and an original creation. It is not reactionary, but revolutionary, in that it anticipates the solution of the universal political problems which elsewhere have to be settled in the political field by the rivalry of parties, the excessive power of the Parliamentary regime and the irresponsibility of political assemblies.