Der Fuehrer - Hitler's Rise to Power (1944) - Heiden

FIRST TRIUMPH 355bued with the same healthy principles by which Mussolini in the lasteight years has renewed Italy. And I see no need for Great Britain andFrance to maintain an unfriendly attitude toward the efforts of theNational Socialists in the field of foreign affairs. Their complaint thatGermany, alone among the Great Powers, is disarmed, has just grounds.In Part Five of the Versailles Pact, the Allies obligate themselves togradual disarmament. The disarmament of Germany was intended onlyas a prelude to a general renunciation of military power. While theGerman armed forces have been limited to a hundred thousand men anda few ships for coastal defense, Germany's neighbors have steadily increasedtheir armaments. To subject a solid mass of more than seventymillion patriotic and extremely able men and women in the real centerof Europe to such a lasting sense of bitter injustice, is like opening thegascock in a sealed room. Sooner or later there must be an explosion. Intheir own interests the Allied Powers should open the tightly sealedwindows behind which German rancor is gathering. . . .On October 23 of the same year, Mussolini addressed the assembledleadership of the Fascist Party in the Palazzo Venezia in Rome. Hereferred to the statement once attributed to him that fascism was not an'article of export.' Such words, he declared, were 'too banal' for him;they betrayed the style of the commercial press and were therefore notby him: 'La frase que il fascismo non e merce d'esportazione, non e mia'though this very phrase may be found in Volume VI of his collectedwritings and speeches. Well, at any rate, he would now correct it.Today, he declared, fascism was 'the order of the day in all countries'; indetail, to be sure, it was Italian, but in its ideas, doctrine, realization, itwas universal; it could, therefore, be foreseen that in the future allEurope would solve the problem of the modern state in a fascist sense; itwould be a Europe with institutions inspired by the theory and practiceof fascism; it would be 'una Europa fascista.'