Benito Mussolini 4

 

Soon, however, he changed his mind about intervention. Swayed by Karl Marx’s aphorism that social revolution usually follows war and persuaded that "the defeat of France would be a deathblow to liberty in Europe," he began writing articles and making speeches as violently in favor of war as those in which he previously condemned it. He resigned from Avanti! and was expelled from the Socialist Party. Financed by the French government and Italian industrialists, both of whom favor war against Austria, he assumed the editorship of People of ItalY, in which he unequivocally stated his new philosophy: "From today onward we are all Italians and nothing but Italians." "Now that steel has met steel, one single cry comes from our hearts Viva l’Italia! [Long live Italy!]" It was the birth cry of fascism. Mussolini went to fight in the war. Wounded while serving with the Bersaglieri (a corps of sharpshooters), he returned home a convinced antisocialist and a man with a sense of destiny. As early as February 1918, he advocated the emergence of a dictator "a man who is ruthless and energetic enough to make a clean sweep" to confront the economic and political crisis then gripping Italy. Three months later, in a widely reported speech in Bologna, he hinted that he himself might prove to be such a man. The following year, the nucleus of a party prepared to support his ambitious idea was formed in Milan. In an office in Piazza San Sepolcro, about 200 assorted republicans, anarchists, syndicalists, discontented socialists, restless revolutionaries, and discharged soldiers met to discuss the establishment of a new force in Italian politics. Mussolini called this force the fasci di combattimento, groups of fighters bound together by ties as close as those that secured the fasces of the lictors the symbols of ancient Roman authority. So fascism was created, and its symbol was devised.