FASCIST VANDALISM.

Grey River Argus, 30 November 1927, Page 8

FASCIST VANDALISM.

A Forceful Criticism. L Fillippo Turati, the eighty-two year old veteran of Italian Socialism, has now in exile in Paris, begun anew to rebuild the oncc-powerful Italian Labour movement. The following forceful critism of Fascism is part of an impassioned address he delivered in Brussels at the unveiling of a monument to Giacomo Matteotti. the martyred Italian Socialist secretary: Fascism,in order to seize power, to slake the thirst for riches has had to pass over a whole cemetery. It has gained the summit over a pyramid of corpses. It has trampled on the dignity of all Italians. It has refuted its opponents by the bludgeon, raised to the honour of sanctity. It has perpetrated crime as an institution of government. It has defiled everything it has touched. It has destroyed everything there was of beauty and grandeur in its own country. The results of the workers’ efforts during half a century of heroic struggles, has been razed to the ground by Fascism’s robber chiefs, and on the devastated soil has been sown the seed of despair, so that nothing can come to life on it. It has dishonoured the monarchy which abdicates its rights, it has defiled the Church while pretending to honour it by making use of it against the faith of Christ; it has abolished the Constitution, suppressed the right of suffrage, enslaved and violated justice, shackled thought. It has reinstalled the Neros and the Caligulas, it has made an honour of deportation by administrative measure like the former Czars of Moscow; it has revived banishment by decree on the part of the chiefs; it has hurled citizens against citizens disorganised families, imposed lying hypocrisy and servility on 40 million inhabitants. It has made a Warsaw of every town and parish, a cell of every house; a great asylum of the whole peninsula; it governs by j spying and by terror throughout the country, where it is a crime to murmur wjhere every citizen (fears his neighbour and where friends are are afraid to greet one another in the street. ( No foreign domination has ever been more foreign than this native brigand system which calls it— < self national; no army of occupation I during time of war has been more cynically ferocious than this horde of mercenaries, subjecting in the name of the country the disarmed country to an armed faction. No Attila recorded by history has equalled Fascist vandalism. Victims by the Thousands. It has done more and worse. Of Italy, which called itself the country cf justice, of Italy a poor country, impoverished still further by a war of four years and by the vile speculations of war, but yet a country with an ancient civilization; a country which nevertheless, under the pressure of an enthusiastic and strong proletariat, animated by Socialist propaganda, was preparing to become in real truth in regard to imperialism, a factor for peace and solidarity in the future United States or Europe—of this country it has made for the requirements of its domestic;, polities and its civil war, through the fatality which compels all tyrannies to keep alert the war spirit of its hirelings against the people they have enslaved, exploited and made use of every possibility, the diversion of an external war which could at any given moment prolong its abominable domination to the detriment of the nation—of this country it has created a permanent peril to the peace of Europe, a standing menace of international upheavals; in spitting its apache cynicism on the most noble ideal of brotherhood, in defying and fooling the League of Nations —the seed and promise of arbitration —-in exalting only the right of the mailed fist, the right of the armed fist, the right so to say of the stronger, that is of the most violent, of the better armed and those most devoid of humane scruples; in exhausting the nation by the expense of the police and military preparation, in seizing the industries of peace to make them wholly engines of destruction and death; in making it an honour to have “trampled on the rotting corpse of liberty”—which means: to have deprived the working-class of all power, the working-class whose organisation and conscience are almost the only effective guarantee against the bloody conflicts which capitalist rivalries wage among it. In this work of destruction and pillage, in this flood of terror which is bound to continue growing in order to avoid reprisals, for it knows that a single minute of relaxation would be the ruin of the regime and disaster for the executioners; in this work victims can be counted by thousands. The assassins, assured of immunity or taking advantage of the farce of a onesided amnesty, are decorated, exalted, carried to the altars, while those who have dared to attempt to defend themselves are dragged to the dungeons. These victims have been cut down not only in the Socialist eamp, although Socialism has had the greatest honour —and with reason —of being the favoured target, have been ravaged by Fascism in all camps; everywhere where a just conscience resisted they can be round. And everywhere, above the crowd of victims there is one, the most representative, there is one name which embodies all the others. Ask the liberal conservatives, ask those you will call the "doctrinaires,” they will reply with one name, the former Minister for the Colonies, Amendola. Ask the believers, the pious souls, they will quote to you the name of Don Mizoni, the good priest of Veuiee. All the parties are in mourning, all classes can name their martyr. Martyrdom Personified. Comrades, it is just at the time when the storm makes the most victim r, when the hurricane of barbarity ravages the social forest, it is just then that the heart of man is too small, and is not big enough to weep for all the sacrifices one by one, and must therefore embody them, personify them in one alone; in one whom events or ■ personal valour have placed highest,

who is more alive. This injustice is fatal. Thus it was that the oppressed of Galilee took one name only: that of Jesus of Nazareth of whom history makes a prophet and legend a God. It is then that a holy war assumes the name of a maid of Orleans, that a Crusade is personified in Godefroid de Bouillon. It is the "unknown soldier,” it is the host of the massacred which assumes one name and one face. The name and the face of Giacomo Matteotti are thus the name and the face of a people, of a whole civilisation, ravaged and destroyed. And it is not just by chance, it is not without a deep significance that the exaltation of the Italian martyr is taking place abroad. It is that Fascism—while it has assumed in Italy, for reasons which could be easily analysed—a countenance and a style particularly criminal, is not an Italian phenomenon. It is, while appearing under various forms, openly or merely latent, the characteristic phenomenon of this hour of history in all capitalist nations; the insurrection of capitalism believing itself at bay which to establish or consolidate its rule, must suppress legality and democracy, to Which insurrection the plutocracy (I do not say all the bourgeoisie, nor the intellectual bourgeoisie) is capable of resorting when it fears that the rise of the working class in the legal sphere can deprive it of its privileges. Ah unfortunate are those peoples who while yet enjoying sacred liberty, will not perceive the perils which threaten them, who will not know how to undertake in time those measures necessary to defend themselves, who will not profit from the example which our unhappy country has given them. We are, comrades, at a turning-point in history, when there can no longer exist a Belgian socialism, a French or German, American or English, etc., nor even an individual democracy of any isolated country; there can be, and must be, only a world Socialism, a universal democracy, for the stake of the battle—in Europe as in America, or in the vast Asia which is awakening—is the liberty of the whole world, is the civilisation of the whole universe which imperialism, jingoism and reaction are simultaneously threatening. That is why the International of the workers is no longer a simple ideal of human solidarity, which one can indifferently further or delay; henceforth it is imposed by the necessity of life. If it exists, if it gains strength, then civilisation is saved. If it founders, if it fades, if it is divided, even if it remains what it has been hitherto, wavering, without power, academic, then humanity is deserting its post in the battle, is slipping back into slavery and barbarism.