The ways of
expressing freedom of thought, expression and information in the course of
history with reference to national
facts
Adria – Italy
(point of view of fascism supporters)
According
to the writer Mario A. Pei concepts of freedom are not fixed and permanent:
they are changeable; they are not absolute, but relative. Complete liberty may
be well defined as anarchy. If I did not care for the personality of any person
in the audience, I should be at liberty to shoot that person. All freedom is
relative; it is based on the system of checks and balances exerted by the state
upon the individual. The struggle for rank and privilege is invariably between
the individual and the state, and it is most interesting to note that any form
of government whatever fascist, communist, or democratic, it is invariably the
state that holds the whip hand over the individual.
For
example fascism is definitely and absolutely opposed to the doctrines of liberalism, both in the political and the
economic sphere.
Fascism denies that numbers, as such, can be the determining
factor
in human society; it denies the right of
numbers to govern by means of
periodical consultations; it asserts the irremediable and fertile and
beneficent inequality of men who cannot be
leveled by any such mechanical and extrinsic device as universal suffrage. Democratic regimes may be described as those under which the people are, from
time to time, deluded into the belief
that they exercise sovereignty, while
all the time real sovereignty resides in and is exercised by other and sometimes irresponsible and secret
forces.
The
keystone of the Fascist doctrine is its conception of the State, of its
essence, its functions, and its aims. For Fascism
the State is absolute, individuals and groups relative.
The Fascist State organizes the nation, but it leaves the individual adequate elbowroom. It has
curtailed useless or harmful liberties while
preserving those which are essential according to it. In such matters the individual cannot be the judge, but the State only.
“We were the first to state, in
the face of demo liberal individualism, that the individual exists only in so
far as he is within the State and subjected
to the requirements of the state and that, as civilization assumes
aspects which grow more and more complicated, individual freedom becomes more
and more restricted. (Mussolini to the General staff Conference of Fascism, in Discorsi del 1929,
Milano, Alpes, 1930, p. 280).
“ …it is impossible to conceive any individual
existing
outside the State unless he be a savage whose
home is in the solitude
of his sandy desert.” (Speech before the Senate, May 12, 1928, in Discorsi
del 1928, Milano, Alpes, 1929, p.
109).
“ Freedom is not a right, it is a duty.
It is not
a gift, it is a conquest; it is not equality, it is a privilege….
There is a
freedom in times of peace which is not the
freedom of times of war.
There is a
freedom in times of prosperity which is not a freedom to
be allowed in times of poverty.
(Fifth anniversary of the foundation of
the Fasci di Contbattimento, March
24, 1924, in La
nuova politica dell'Italia, vol. III,
Milano, Alpes, 1925, p. 30).
“We are,
in other words, a state which controls all forces
acting in nature.
We
control political forces, we control moral forces
we control economic forces, therefore we are a full-blown Corporative state.
We stand for a new principle in the world, we
stand
for sheer, categorical, definitive antithesis to
the world of democracy,
plutocracy,
free-masonry, to the world which still abides by the fundamental principles laid down in 1789.”
(Speech before the new National Directory of the Party, April 7, 1926, in
Discorsi
del
1926,
Milano, Alpes, 1927,
p. 120).
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