"Clear and Loud"

The Fascisti of Bologna were to hold their annual Congress. Benito, Premier of all Italy, commissioned one Deputy Arpinati to salute the Bologna Fascisti for him.

In a letter to Signer Arpinati, Benito excoriated the Opposition and told his proxy to speak "clear and loud." The instructions were not simple:

In these days we are assisting at a kind of babel, a confusion of tongues, the whole hullabaloo being dominated by that long word "normalization," whose consistent ambiguity I have already clearly denounced. According to the Opposition we should become good Liberals and continue the traditions of the risorgimento for which the Liberals alone claim credit, while as a matter of fact some of its chief figures were Republicans, like Mazzini and Garibaldi, or Federalists, like Cattaneo, or even Socialists, like Pisacane.

Nobody has yet explained in intelligible fashion what normalization means. I will repeat myself, even at the risk, of boring others as much as we are already bored by this subject. If by normalization it is meant that we must go before the Italian people without assuming the mask of false pastors, this we have done and will continue to do. If it is meant that we must punish anyone who breaks our laws, this we are doing and will continue to do. If it is meant that we must repress illegalities, I reply that illegalities are being and will be repressed despite the persistent moral illegalities which the Opposition is daily perpetrating against Fascism. If it is meant that we must govern in the interests of all Italians and not the interests of only one party, this has always been the fundamental hinge of my actions as Premier. What does the Opposition want? Nobody cares to say it openly, but the secret hope is to place Fascism at the mercy of Parliamentarianism, and to return to what were some of the darkest days of our history.

The Opposition asks, for instance, that I resign as head of the Fascist Party, which is "preposterous." If facts are facts and not illusions, it would appear that in Republican France the head of the State is also the head of the radical Socialist Party; that in superdemocratic England MacDonald is head of the State and also head of the Labor Party, so much so that he did not hesitate to attend a Parliamentary and anti-Fascist meeting in the Houses of Parliament. I have never reached such extremes, and the Grand Council of Fascism has never--I repeat, never--discussed concrete problems of Government, especially when foreign Powers were concerned. Even on this point the delectable Opposition, which poses as our mentor, should be so enchantingly good as to speak with sufficient clearness to be comprehensible by average Italians.

Advice and demands are showered upon us. We are surrounded by pedagogues and mentors. Every one has a dilemma on whose horns he wishes to impale us. They all forget that Fascism fought in 1919, 1920 and 1921, leaving some thousands of glorious dead, some ot them hardly more than boys, on its way and dared to carry out the Revolution in 1922 without first asking anyone's leave. My dear pedagogues, please confer the inestimable boon on us of reserving at least part of your sermons for those gentlemen who militate in the Opposition camp because the pacification which we sincerely want cannot be obtained by exercise of one-sided and therefore useless patience on our part.

Dear Arpinati, if memory does not lead me into error, the City of Bologna alone has given 46 dead to our cause. Let us remind all those who are forgetful of them. Let us evoke them all. one by one, those unforgettable comrades of ours. Has so much blood been shed in vain? Fascist Bologna cries out to me its passionate, fiery "No." Long live Fascismo!