Manifesto of the Anti-Fascist Intellectuals
In substance, that writing is a schoolboy's lesson, in which at every point one notices doctrinal confusions and ill-constructed reasoning; as where the atomism of certain constructions of the political science of the eighteenth century is exchanged for the democratic liberalism of the nineteenth century, that is, the anti-historical and abstract and mathematical democracy, with the supremely historical conception of the free competition and the alternation of the parties in power, whereby, thanks to the opposition, progress is brought about almost by gradation; or where, with easy rhetorical heating, the dutiful submission of individuals to the whole is celebrated, almost as if this were the issue, and not instead the capacity of authoritarian forms to guarantee the most effective moral elevation; or, again, where one is perfidious in the dangerous indiscernment between economic institutions, such as trade unions, and ethical institutions, such as legislative assemblies, and one dreams of the union or rather the mixing of the two orders, which would succeed in their mutual corruption, or at least, in their mutual impediment.
To call a conflict of religion the hatred and rancor that are kindled against a party that denies the members of other parties the character of Italians and insults them as foreigners, and in that very act places itself in the eyes of those as a foreigner and an oppressor, and thus introduces into the life of the Fatherland the feelings and habits that are typical of other conflicts; to ennoble with the name of religion the suspicion and animosity spread everywhere, which have taken away even from the young people of the universities the ancient and trusting brotherhood in common and youthful ideals, and keep them against each other in hostile faces; is something that sounds, to tell the truth, like a very lugubrious joke.
What the new gospel, the new religion, the new faith would consist of, one cannot understand from the words of the verbose manifesto; and, on the other hand, the practical fact, in its silent eloquence, shows to the unprejudiced observer an incoherent and bizarre mixture of appeals to authority and demagogy, of proclaimed reverence for the laws and violations of the laws, of ultramodern concepts and musty old things, of absolutist attitudes and Bolshevik tendencies, of disbelief and courtship of the Catholic Church, of abhorrences of culture and sterile attempts at a culture deprived of its premises, of mystical fawning and cynicism.
We turn our eyes to the images of the men of the Risorgimento, of those who worked, suffered and died for Italy; and we seem to see them offended and troubled in their faces at the words that are uttered and the actions that are carried out by our adversaries, and grave and warning to us because we hold fast to their flag.
Our faith is not an artificial and abstract contrivance or a brain invasion caused by ill-defined or poorly understood theories; but it is the possession of a tradition, become a disposition of feeling, mental or moral conformation.
And perhaps one day, looking serenely at the past, it will be judged that the test we are now enduring, harsh and painful to us, was a stage that Italy had to go through to rejuvenate its national life, to complete its political education, to feel more severely its duties as a civilized people.
