(Published in Gerarchia, October 10, 1940)
By Roberto Pavese
If human life is measured in decades, then history—or rather that period of history which expresses a civilization—has the millennium as its unit of measurement. It follows also that what is contingent and periodic in history—such as the rhythm of development and decline, of life and death of civilizations—is considered, due to its centuries-long duration in the face of the brief tour of human life, a stable and genuine expression of a specific historical era.
Thus gold, despite being the dream and hope of men since time immemorial, is nevertheless a sign of the degeneration of civilizations, and yet it is still considered by most as a typical and necessary element of civilization itself.
If we examine the evolution of the cult of gold through history we will be able to draw many lessons. The cult of the "Golden Calf" was particularly popular in that kingdom of Israel from which, through the Old Testament, one would like to trace the history of humanity. On the other hand, if—even after the death of Moses—Christ saw it necessary to come to redeem the world created by Hebrew civilization, it is a sign that this civilization was now essentially oriented towards evil and that it represented, with all its characteristics and symbols, a degeneration and not a development.
History—written history—being, after all, the history of gold, is the history of a long degeneration. If we want to go back to before this decline, to assess its primitive development, that is to say back to the heroic phase of history, we must, in fact, venture into prehistory, into legend, when vile metal—Satan's instrument—did not yet gain control over the soul of man.
I have had the opportunity to point out elsewhere how history, being critical and discursive, being a process that is reflective and not immediate, theoretical and not practical, is written when it is no longer occurring, when the creative current has already began to stagnate. The truly constructive periods of the world and of civilizations are irretrievable, atheoretical, instinctive, guided by faith and not by reason; therefore prehistoric, mythical and transcendent compared to the critical and subsequent phase.
To assess the extent and assign limits to the historical process that is about to open up through our Revolution—which those who are accustomed to the unit of measurement of other recent revolutions, such as the French Revolution, really too modestly predicted the duration of only a century—, it must be borne in mind that, assuming that all the history we know (always more or less characterized by the cult of gold) represents a decline, it is precisely from this day forward that the true development of history begins. A development that begins with the slaughter of the Golden Calf and the starvation of King Midas; that is to say, it will be implemented through the substitution of the currency of gold with the currency of labour, and the siege of the old bourgeois economy by the new labour economy, until the old one finally capitulates. It is to be expected that the experiment of hunger, in the midst of mountains of gold, will provoke in the stubborn worshipers of vile metal a healthy awakening and a prompt abjuration of their economic and political beliefs.
It is appropriate to say that the Christian era truly begins with the "March on Rome". The 1,920 years which preceded it are the introduction of the book of that history—of that true history—which is being made today and which one day will be written, when there is finally a period of rest, hopefully in the very distant future.
With regard to the concept of social justice, what Fascism did—and still more what it sets out to do—corresponds exactly to the spirit and letter of the Christian gospel. The contempt of wealth, of luxury, of comfort, a sense of human solidarity, undeterred even in the face of the enemy, the mystical attitude of renunciation and sacrifice in front of the Idea, which are characteristics of the Fascist conception of life, are also exquisitely Christian beliefs. Between Fascism and Christianity there can be no conflict, because they have the same moral goals.
When adequately assessing the immense scope of the Fascist Idea, in its aim of social and political justice through the overcoming of the myth of gold, and therefore of capital and wealth, one cannot but begin to realize the immeasurable obstacle that gold and wealth—with all the business that is connected to it—have always represented for the implementation of true justice in the world. It can be said that gold, as a medium of exchange, was invented specifically to create and perpetuate the state of injustice and oppression in the world. So let us try to look at things a little more closely.
There was a period of the British Empire that we could call heroic—if one can use the term 'heroism' in reference to predatory animals—when that nation of pirates and filibusters fought without the use of intermediaries; and there was a time when, after obtaining a wealth of goods and precious metals from the barter of slaves—the fruit of their extra-continental raids—, the English realized that there was no need to work for a living at all, because one could live very well and get rich through the work of others. The Jews and thieves in general are of the same opinion: except that the former, being more clever, know how to maneuver on the margins of the law by acting in grand style and, through gold, shielding themselves from the law, while the latter, who work by the minute and without too much malice, are as a rule punished with the full rigor of the law.
But as the heroic age passed to the bourgeois age, from the age of direct battle to the age of mercenaries, the strength of the arm had to be progressively replaced with the cunning of the mind, especially when the profitable trade of slaves inevitably came to an end; it had to be remedied by inventing a more or less elegant trick to otherwise bend individuals and peoples to their own will, giving them freedom to enjoy what was only a more refined form of slavery, with chains of gold rather than iron.
After getting their hands on all the gold and wealth in the world, the trick of living off their dupes was soon established: the gold standard became the basis for exchange, without which labour alone would not even be sufficient to earn bread. "If we"—so said the old slave traders—"place our gold between labour and bread, through the domination or monopoly of trade, then by blackmailing labour and production we can change the old iron chain of the convict into a gold chain. One way or another the world will always be our servant."
Hence the more or less elegant taxation of the sweat of peoples, one-tenth, which often became a sharecrop and worse, between master and colonist. For the British Empire the distinction between colonies and sovereign nations was more geographical than substantial: the difference lay only in the method of domination; that docility that was obtained in the colonies—when necessary—through the iron of mercenaries, for the "free" Nations was instead obtained through the gold of Jewish-Masonic corruption, through the intrigues and blackmail of high finance.
That in the days of corsairs and in places that did not yet know liberty and international law, when values and lands belonged to the first arrival; when caravans and stagecoaches were at the mercy of robbers, and human rights and social groups were guaranteed only by the payment of bounties to criminal organizations; that in such historical situations certain systems of rapacity and violence could exist successfully is also conceivable to a certain extent, especially when those who suffered the oppression were inferior races, or simple, ignorant and servile peoples. But that in the middle of the twentieth century, after one hundred and fifty years of adoration of the fetish of liberty and the exaltation of human rights; after Rousseau, Proudhon and Marx, that we have long been able to passively accept—indeed consciously support with economic mimicry—the tyrannical domination that medieval and anti-European England by force of inertia has continued to exert over Europe and the world, this is a certain sign of the irremediable decadence of the modern world, which, under the democratic label, has now been reduced to the same subjugation of the colonized peoples. Just look at France, the cradle of democracy.
Who was the first to clearly break away from such a disgraceful decadence? Who was aware of the historical monstrosity of a colossal organism that survived only on the ignorance and cowardice of peoples and on the logical inconsistency of an Empire which, now reduced to men without leadership capabilities and without brains, badly maintained its prestige only with a simulacrum of surviving power? Who was the first to throw off the heavy—albeit invisible—chains that the Masonic institutions kept the so-called sovereign Nations shackled to? Mussolini. Who was the first to cause the decrepit facade of British prestige to stagger, openly challenging the old world coalesced against us at the time of the sanctions? Mussolini. Mussolini understood it and willed it. Prior to him, it was either not understood or was not willed hard enough: at times one can be intelligent, but still be weak, indecisive and decadent.
What is the deus ex machina of British hegemony? The ability to evade spirits and wills, to corrupt the best men of various peoples with gold.
While the more or less barbaric peoples of the colonies were domesticated, tamed, enervated by alcohol and by their opium generously provided by Albion, towards the peoples of the so-called free and sovereign Nations they acted more refined with the drugs of a culture made ad hoc in the distilleries of the Masonic lodges — which was, in effect, a culture of pathogenic bacilli for society and for the State — to be served up to the intellectuals, and more easily subjugate them to the plutocratic wagon, i.e. to bourgeoisize them. A bourgeois is a fool who, dazzled by the mirror of a wealth that is always promised and never bestowed, pulls the ruler's wagon with willing resignation. A similar method was used towards the "evolved and conscious" working classes, dazzling them with the mirror of the "sun of the future". And these same methods can be seen in the most recent, deadly trick: England's "selfless protection" of neutral States and minor powers in general.
The European woman has her small share of responsibility in the easy success of similar crude tricks. It is through her that the small practical psychology of these professional mystifiers has leveraged the development of their oblique machinations. If woman, from Eve onward, easily yields to the enticements of Satan, man on the other hand is completely disarmed in the face of a woman's flattery. If Satan instills in the female heart a love of luxury and wealth, man goes out of his way—even at the cost of miserably compromising his own conscience—to satisfy the whims and vanity of the woman he loves.
Due to this congenital weakness of the European woman—and not only—in the face of bourgeois suggestion, the implementation of the imperial demo-plutocratic plan of world domination has been made easier, through that progressive deviation of the citizens, so that within a few generations the heir of the civis romanus has been reduced to the miserable role of the bourgeois man.
The modern woman who from adolescence confides to her friends her own life plan: to enter marriage not for love, but more so to find her desired type, in view of the possibility of "taming" her man without effort and making him as docile and inoffensive as a dog on a leash; the modern woman, I repeat, was the most precious ally of British imperialism. Because of this bourgeois spirit that penetrates her to the bones, the modern woman belonged by right to Freemasonry: she constituted that petty Masonry, no less widespread than that of the lodges, and has plagued the atmosphere of history, bringing men to moral asphyxia. It is not for nothing that Marshal Pétain pointed to hedonism—the intensification of which has done much to bring about the well-known frivolity and vanity of French women—as the main cause of the ruin of France.
Fortunately for us, this civic indignity of the modern woman did not manifest itself among all European peoples with the same level of gravity. It is certain that the places where God is more heavily punishing with war today, are precisely those same countries where the conduct of women has been less exemplary. However, even in Italy there are certain social strata in which woman's conscience needs to be severely corrected. The anti-bourgeois campaign, which will be one of the main objectives of the Regime in the post-war period, will have to have as its first objective the adaptation of women's conscience to the pressing needs of our imperial policy, since it is precisely here that the true familial root of the bourgeois spirit is found.
Not for nothing was gold called Satan's instrument. All that there is of vice and baseness in the world—idleness, vanity, rapacity, speculation, exploitation, usury, corruption, injustice, cruelty, luxury, lust—is the work of gold. A natural enemy of law and order, gold subverts everything, poisons everything, peoples and consciences: ...it creates the shameless opulence of an oligarchy of delinquents, who through gold and through the stupid adoration and hope of the world for what is the root of all its evils, have always found the weapon of defense and offense, of immunity and exploitation. We must create an economic system where speculation is both morally illicit and materially impossible. We must create an extremely rarefied economic atmosphere for all those various parasites of labour and intelligence—from the stock market player, to the commodity and labour broker, to the shareholder of anonymous companies, to the smoke seller, to the profiteers and loan sharks of all kinds—who do nothing but Englishly and Judaically suck production and anemize consumption.
Once gold has been abolished and the currency reduced to the simplest and most primordial function of exchange between production and consumption, labour will be automatically protected and immunized from the pitfall of that exploitation: with a very simple surgical procedure we can heal and moralize the whole economic system. Abolishing gold and the currency attached to gold means tearing the iron of trade from the rapacious hands of businessmen of all types; it means making the atmosphere unbearable for the rats of that pestiferous sewer known as high international finance, which for this reason would be forced to scatter, like bugs from a fumigated house.
We must give an impression of greater seriousness to life and severity of conduct; the woman must be guided by all suitable means to have a contempt for wealth, luxury, jewels, all that is superficial frill and tinsel; teach her to look more at substance rather than appearance; educate her in a superior sense of personal dignity that makes her shun as offensive the idea that one must evaluate her based on the elegance of her clothes and the weight of her jewels. It is time that certain exhibitionism of wealth, certain delusions such as collecting wild junk simply because it shines and sparkles, is considered for what it really is: a clear sign of inferiority, not only moral, but also mental. Moral, because it reveals pride and malice, in the desire to humiliate others, to arouse the envy of others; mental, because such a person does not understand how stupid it is to believe that human and social value is something like that of a mannequin or a jewelry box.
We must create and consolidate a social atmosphere in which wealth—and especially the ostentation of it—is no longer viewed with envy, but with contempt; an atmosphere in which the fundamental postulate of the new economy becomes the concept that property is legitimate only on the condition of being a means and not an end in itself: property that degenerates into wealth is profoundly immoral and despicable, because, being the result of an impairment . . .
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