CHANGING ITALY.

Hawera Star, Volume XLVI, 2 June 1927, Page 7

CHANGING ITALY.

FASCISM AM) TllK PROBLEAI OF dkmockaoy

Heneatlt an apparently umullled surface tlu; mality of Italian politics is changing swi.tly. Tile change is invisible. The papers do not speak o. ii or remotely uint at it. Ihe casual Uuoigiier gets no inkling ol it. Only in intimate conversation with active members ol the ruling; party does one obtain some contact with the real political situation of Italy in 1927. '1 he crucial point or that situation is the impending rebirth of the party system inside the Fascist party. The Alatteoiti murder affair (192-1) divided Italy into two camps—o. "Fascists” and ••Anti-Fascists.” The distinction still holds good among the ten millions of Italians scattered abroad. Does it in Italy ? There is a small band, the flower of Italian intelligence. which remains firmly, dogmatically ‘‘Anti-Fascist.” Their attitude, determined in the first place by a hatred of violence as a political method and by a passionate attachment to the right of private judgment, is unlikely to change for some years, especially so long as the menace ot ruthless seizure and banishment to an island gaol remains hanging over the head of anyone who murmured against the rule of the Blackshirts. For those whom threats could convert have been converted; those who remain have the stuff of matryrs in them. But leaving those intellectuals aside in the attitude _of vigilant isolation they have chosen, what is the political situation of the great mass of Italians? They are ceasing to think in terms of Fascism and Anti-Fascism. Everybody is. explicitly or implicitly, a Fascist. AY lien the Fascist symbol is plastered over the money in your pocket, the local polite station, the local railway station, the Ministries, the parks, even the churches, you cannot persist in regarding it as a partisan emblem. The Fascist regime is taken for granted in daily life like the Republican regime in France

THE CLASH OF 1922

But this does not mean that the Italian political situation is as stable, as free from perilous surprises, as the French. The Fascist regime, so majestic, -efficient, and sell-satisfied, is beset by an internal problem of fearful gravity. The problem is how Lo restore some measure of free thought in Italy before an explosion occurs. Thereaic, of course, plenty ol clever people here who share Mr. \\ yiidliam Lewis’s view of Fascism as the herald of a new direction in European civilisation characterised hv the renunciation ot the myths of individual liberty and private judgment. A superfical observation of Italy lends colour to these clevernesses. But this superfical view makes the inintial mistake of visualising the post-war political phase in Italy (1919-1922) as the decadence of an age of democratic selt-governinent. wheieas it can far more truthfully he portrayed as the first glimmer of the dawn of such an age. From 1870 to 1910 Italy was ruled by a compromise between the Court anil a small political clique,, which latter was ior ten \oars incarnated in a single individual Giolitti. The war shook the power of the Crown and the clique; great national parties, the Socialist and the C-athoiic-Popular, arose as the expression of a now political self consciousness of the masses, and Fascism, hybrid coalition of - a section of the masses from the old clique, met and destroyed the new parties. But in the process of destroying them it necessarily absorbed them. To-day it has absorbed virtually the whole nation, quickened with a political consciousness. a will to self-government, unknown in the pre-war years, it is idle to suppose that these masses can he kept voiceless and ‘•disciplined” (that is. politically dead) for an indefinite period.

A SIMMERING POT AND A JAMMED LID.

The rebirth of the parties within Fascismo — that is the process upon which our eyes must be fixed in the luming months. True, a new attempt upon .Mussolini’s life, a new scandal oi the dimensions of Matteotti’s murder, might revive the old Fascist versus Anti-Fascist feud from the senile decay which litis set in upon it in the hist live months. .But it the present rai.m continues, and if, in particular, the unsavoury institution of the ((Ooniino" (island Siberias i'or political suspects) is allowed to fall into oblivion, there can be no reasonable doubt that what are at the present moment vague groupings of Fascists will crystallise into groups which will really be parties with programmes to fight for; while the dogmatic enemies of Fascismo will increasingly cease to count. Already we can distinguish some of these groups, which tend, in despite of the mm uniformity imposed from above, to have their own group-coloured press. There are thus the Conservative .Monarchists (Federzoni. llocco, Forges, Davanzati), the Syndicalists (llosson i), the Progressives (Turati. Bottai). the Agrarians (Balbo), and the Industrialists. Even now it conversation with a sincere and serious Fascist will enable you to place him in it few minutes in one of these groups If he belongs to the first or the last he will make no secret of the intense disapproval and suspicion lie feels for the second. The pot is simmeiing. and that is a sign of life. Nothing will persuade the world of the durability of the Fascist, regime contrast of ideas and programmes within (he framework of Kn.scsm. \\ it. bout ti i i the. menace id' an explosion will remain iti the back oi our minds whatever “practical rights” (unaudited) Signor Mussolini may lay before the world.* Meanwhile, however, the lul iemains jammed tightly on the pot. The lid is the rigidlv uniform orthodoxy imposed from on high upon all members of the party, and upon the press. The condition of the press, which has Inst all life and interest and serves rather to corneal and stifle political realities than to communicate and illustrate them, is lamented by every Fascist journalist in Italy. “things cannot go on like this. ’ they decline. The lid must he moved: biff. easy to put on. it lms become abominably hot f:4)in the fumes beneath, and the Duce is ill visible emharassment to know how on earth to remove it without s'-orchiii tr his lingers. But what he himself "said recently of Italy is also true of Italian public opinion in another sense: “It must either expand or explode.”