Mussolini: The Great Actor – Camillo Berneri (1934)

An extract published in ‘War Commentary: For Anarchism’, Mid-August 1943, London, UK, from the book of the same title published in Spain in 1934

“Mussolini is an Italian of the 16th century, a soldier of fortune,” said George Sorel, in January 1912. Fundamentally, he was not deceived. In 1914, on the 6th November, the Avanti recognised the character of its former editor when it wrote:

“We shall soon see in formation an army of gallants who, headed by Benito Mussolini, will march forward valiantly, armed. with the King’s rifles and equipped by bourgeois gold. But the generalissimo has not a happy knack in the choice of his men. He asks his soldiers neither whence they come, not where they are going. He sets them in ranks, lines them up in columns of his Popolo d’ltalia and shows them off to the public.

“The militant bullies of Benito Mussolini must be shown off not so much for the benefit of the public which, however wooden headed, begins to see what is in the wind, but for those who hope to ravish from the socialist party, after the editor of our Avanti, the great mass whom they need for their warlike adventures.”

Mussolini had taken care to create an army of followers and place it at the service of the bourgeoisie. “To obtain an intelligent leader, the reactionaries must always wait for a socialist to go mad,” said the socialist Loebe, president of the Reichstag.

Mussolini has that taint of madness necessary to be a leader, but he has a very much greater force — his uncommon intuition. It has been said that Lenin reproached the Italian socialists with not having engaged him as leader. That is possible. What is certain is that Mussolini would have provided all the presumption, all the indecency, all the falsehood, all the demagogic paraphernalia which was lacking in the man who, in 1919 and in 1920, was hailed as the “Lenin of Italy”, Errico Malatesta.

The Corriere della Sera of the 20th January 1920 wrote:

“The anarchist Malatesta is, for the moment, one of the greatest figures of Italian life. The crowds in the cities flock to meet him, and if they do not take him the keys of the gates, according to the custom of yesterday, it is only because there are no longer either keys or gates.”

Malatesta was not a soldier of fortune. He could not exploit his great personality, being a rationalist, an enemy of fetishism, loving clarity of ideas and having a horror of poses.

Two personal memories will throw light on this figure. We were in Rome, in 1920. A group of Arditi del Popolo [militant anti-fascists], bare-headed and with clubs in their hands, had surrounded him. There was no fear of an attack by fascists, but these people were very pleased to play their part of protector for the old and famous agitator. Malatesta was annoyed. He nudged me: “We must get rid of them. How can we do it?”

It was mid-day. We entered a restaurant. At the door, Malatesta stopped: “Thank you. Goodbye, friends!” But the friends had no wish to go away. All the group entered with us, and occupied the tables beside us. Malatesta shook his head, as if to say to me, “It is useless.”

When our lunch was finished, the Arditi hastened to pay for their meal, and we were surrounded again. But the “Lenin of Italy” had endured enough of this. He proposed that we should go to our newspaper. And this time, the group decided, when we entered the office, to go away. Before going out again, Malatesta gave a look out of the window. “They are no longer there,” he said to me with a satisfied air.

One day when I was at his house, a comrade arrived, one of those young comrades from the country who are so full of naive enthusiasm. During his long journey he had prepared his little speech. He began: “I salute you, old banner of the International!” But he did not go on.

Malatesta, surprised and irritated, pointed out a bench. “Stand on that, you will speak better.”

I can still see the frozen face of that unfortunate neophyte. Such a man could not, in the red years, mount into the saddle. In those days, how many agitators without intelligence, without culture, without courage, had succeeded in becoming powerful leaders! In those years happened things such as had never been seen before. Those who had struggled all their lives for their parties were supplanted by the youngest of new arrivals.

There were anarchistic socialists, bolshevik anarchists. At the end of one discourse which I delivered to a socialist branch at Florence, the secretary proposed the transfer of the whole of the branch, together with its funds, into the Anarchist Union. And I am no orator. I once spent a whole day at Carrara, among young republicans, believing them to be comrades. D’Annunzio sent articles to the anarchist daily paper, and individualists were arrested in Milan for conspiring with the legionaries of Fiume. Members of Catholic syndicates committed sabotage, and the leader of the Futurists, Marinetti, wrote on the walls “Viva Malatesta!”

We lived in a burning atmosphere where the most opposite of contraries mingled together, where the most contradictory of possibilities presented themselves, where all the myths clashed with each other. In such a period, in a country which had just emerged from a crisis so profound as that of the war and nearly two years of ferocious struggles, Mussolini was able to impose himself.

He was young. In 1922 he was twenty years younger than d’Annunzio, forty years younger than Giolitti. At the head of armed gangs, formed for the most part of people who had no desire to return to the work and the humble social positions they had endured before the war, he was the Garibaldi of the counter-revolution, the man of the bourgeoisie. He played under the protection of the government of Giolitti, he had the complicity of the high command of the army, of the magistrates, of the police. He was only the leading actor of a policy of crushing working class forces.

He knew how to stand at the window in 1919, to use blackmail against the bourgeoisie in 1920, to betray the cause of Fiume, to deny the initial programme of the Fascists. He knew how to be “a man of the future”, which may be a difficult role but is always banal. If Mussolini had not existed, the actual history of Italy would not have been the same. But it would not have been much different. There would have been, in his place, De Vecchi, or Grandi, or Balbo. Each of these men has the qualities and the faults necessary for a role similar to that which Mussolini has played. Prestige? Myth? The press would have sufficed to give the one, to create the other.

The whole Italian situation has led up to the dictatorship, has determined the different phases of Fascism. To believe that all that has been the product of the will and the intelligence of one man is infantile.

Mussolini has been and is only an actor in the Italian tragedy. A great actor, it must be recognised. But a country is not a theatre, and the economic decline, the prisons filled with innocents, the islands of deportation, the special tribunal, the police inquisition, the militia, exile: all that demonstrates that to achieve power is more easy than to be a statesman, and that one cannot solve by brute force the problems of the life of a nation.

Mussolini has willed a financial and economic policy which has ruined the country: he has trumpeted the “battle of wheat” and that battle has been a downfall; he has promoted an imperialist drive for breeding like rabbits and the birth rate has fallen; he believed he had crushed opposition, but the anti-fascist struggle persists and continues to give its martyrs and heroes, he thought he could conquer the Church, and the Church protests; he thought he could play the double game of successive alliances and of pacifism for exterior use and of bellicosity for interior use, and today, the whole world sees in Italy a barrel of dry gunpowder.

The play becomes continually more dramatic. What will be the catastrophe?