Democracy

Shortly before the opening of Parliament, Benito was interviewed at the Palazzo Chigi, Italian Foreign Office.

Asked his interviewer: "You know you are accused of being antidemocratic? How do you propose to rebut this accusation? What do you consider the principal weaknesses of the democratic system? And how do you think they can be cured?"

Replied Benito, his eyes rolling with fury: "This is a point which I want you to understand. I have never asked myself that question be cause a universal conception of democracy does not exist. There exist and have existed, States which glorify themselves with the title democratic, but every one of them -- Athens, Venice, Britain, the United States -- have, in their history, novelties so absolutely distinct that nothing has ever seemed to me so grotesque as an attempt to reduce them to a common measure.

"To create a type of democracy, historically speaking, there can be no such thing as democratic or antidemocratic. I have been against all the phenomenon of a parliamentary democracy which has corrupted and weakened the Italian state and threatened its very life, less violently but not less fatally, than any Socialist scheme of revolution. I am against the return to these systems, to their vices and corruptions, and if they obstinately call themselves democracy, then I am against that democracy.

"This is the precise sense in which I have several times declared my self to be antidemocratic, but noth ing is further from my spirit or from the spirit of Fascismo than the doctrinaire anti-democratic dreams of reaction."