of fifteen centuries are being
revived by Fascist Italy.

I am fully aware that the value of Fascism, as an intellectual
movement, baffles the minds of many of its followers and supporters
and is denied outright by its enemies. There is no malice in this
denial, as I see it, but rather an incapacity to comprehend. The
liberal-democratic-socialistic ideology has so completely and for so
long a time dominated Italian culture that in the minds of the
majority of people trained by it, it has assumed the value of an
absolute truth, almost the authority of a natural law. Every faculty
of self-criticism is suppressed in the minds and this suppression
entails an incapacity for understanding that time alone can change. It
will be advisable therefore to rely mainly upon the new generations
and in general upon persons whose culture is not already fixed. This
difficulty to comprehend on the part of those who have been thoroughly
grounded by a different preparation in the political and social
sciences explains in part why Fascism has not been wholly successful
with the intellectual classes and with mature minds, and why on the
other hand it has been very successful with young people, with women,
in rural districts, and among men of action unencumbered by a fixed
and set social and political education. Fascism moreover, as a
cultural movement, is just now taking its first steps. As in the case
with all great movements, action regularly outstrips thought. It was
thus at the time of the Protestant Reformation and of the
individualistic reaction of the XVII and XVIII centuries. The English
revolution occurred when the doctrines of natural law were coming into
being and the theoretical development of the liberal and democratic
theories followed the French Revolution.

At this point it will not be very difficult to assign a fitting place
in history to this great trend of thought which is called Fascism and
which, in spite of the initial difficulties, already gives clear
indication of the magnitude of its developments.

The liberal-democratic speculation both in its origin and in the
manner of its development appears to be essentially a non-Italian
formation. Its connection with the Middle Ages already shows it to be
foreign to the Latin mind, the mediaeval disintegration being the
result of the triumph of Germanic individualism over the political
mentality of the Romans. The barbarians, boring from within and
hacking from without, pu