By Benito Mussolini
The battle that has raged south of Rome for eight months, with its ups and downs and legendary heroism, had its epilogue yesterday. The multicolored troops under the command of Anglo-American generals entered the city.
July 25, September 8 and June 4—these are the painful stages of the Passion of our Fatherland: the infamous ambush perpetrated against a Regime that had given Italy dignity and power; the ignominious capitulation and flight of a cowardly king and a renegade marshal; and the invasion of the capital by the Australian, Canadian, New Zealander, Senegalese and Moroccan hordes. Three dates, three events that will define the life and destiny of our Country.
The news of the occupation of Rome by the new barbarians wounds our pride as Italians. The Duce said: "The fall of Rome does not weaken our energies and much less our will to achieve rescue conditions."
We do not intend to weep over this new calamity that has struck Italy, as we do not want to diminish its scope.
Among the feelings that are brewing within us in these moments, indignation is the strongest of all. And words of bitter loathing rise from our breasts to curse those who sold away the honor and independence of the Fatherland in exchange for Jewish gold, those who stained Italy with unequaled disgrace, a shame for which they will be forced to answer to the Italian people and to history.
The mere thought that black troops are now encamped between the Colosseum and the Piazza del Popolo haunts our spirit and gives us a suffering that becomes more dreadful by the hour. The Negroes are passing under arches and over roads that were built to exalt the new and ancient glories of Rome.
We do not care whether the little king—who preferred to surrender himself to the enemy rather than share discomfort and danger with his people—will eventually decide to recite the last act of a tragicomedy in which he cynically plays with the destiny of his people and his Country. We are not interested in predicting the developments of the miserable uproar staged from Naples to Bari by the multifaceted parties who compete for the whip of the invader with a fury worthy of a better cause. No, all of that is too wretched to urge our curiosity.
Instead, it is the outrage happening in Rome—a city sacred to history and to world civilization—that burns us like a hot iron. It is the insult done to our dead that torments us and gives us no respite, the nameless offense done to all of our fallen who died in Africa and in Spain, to all the Italian soldiers who fought against the armies of the plutocracies and Bolshevism, to the glorious maimed and heroic wounded of all wars, to the countless victims of the devastating bombings unleashed by those sky bandits. It is the slap in the face given to Catholic Rome, the capital of universal Christianity, by the same bastard and criminal men who destroyed the Basilica of San Lorenzo, the same men who unearthed the graves of Verano, bombed churches, hospitals, cemeteries and artworks throughout the peninsula: that is what makes us tremble and rise up.
We will never give credence to the manifestations of joy that enemy propaganda, as usual, tries to make us believe, because we are convinced that the true Romans have too much dignity and pride not to hate those who persecuted them unabated since July 19, 1943 through an incessant succession of fierce bombings and ruthless machine-gunning, which had the sole objective of starving the population and reducing it to misery and despair.
No. The Romans could not have forgotten the sad days of September, when the unworthy sovereign abandoned them to the mercy of an ignobly betrayed [German] army, which wanted to be generous out of respect for Mussolini, but which would have had every right to carry out inexorable reprisals in revenge.
The Romans, those worthy of this name, remember what Mussolini willed and made of Rome during the Fascist period. They know that while the Duce once again made Rome the seat of an empire, today the ex-king hands Rome over to black troops.
The Romans know that had it not been for the betrayal, Rome would have never fallen into the hands of the enemy, because Italy would still have its Army, its Navy and its Air Force, which would have been deployed alongside the intrepid German divisions, and which would have never tolerated nor allowed Vittorio Emanuele to appear on that same balcony of the ex-royal palace from which, alongside Pietro Badoglio, he greeted the crowd after the declaration of war against England on June 10, 1940.
The Romans and all Italians know that the return of the ex-sovereign to Rome under the protection of Anglo-American bayonets—met with contempt and ridicule by the whole civilized world—precedes the arrival of Moscow's agents, who upon the ruins accumulated through treason will seek to build the foundations for the Bolshevization of Occupied Italy, thus adding persecution, deportation and terror to the destructions already carried out by indiscriminate bombings.
The Italians have no delusions about the gravity of what is coming and are aware of what Rome represents in the world and therefore of what they have lost. But they will not allow themselves to be overcome by discouragement and will heed the supreme warning of the Duce, who exhorts them to look to the future with a will to resist and to rediscover that adversity makes you more determined and difficulty makes you stronger.
In these eight months the Italian people have been strengthened by struggle and reconstruction. From these unfavorable events Fascism has drawn new motives and new forces to conquer new goals, which demonstrates the original and perennial vitality of the Mussolinian revolution.
The Italian Social Republic has laid the foundations of its political and organizational structure. In the workshops the workers are intensively working, remaining deaf to the vain appeals of the saboteurs in pay of the enemy, listening instead to the solemn voice of the Fatherland. In the fields the rural masses have provided yet another proof of their healthy and strong industriousness. May 10 marked the resounding failure of the subversive maneuver conducted by the anti-national forces subservient to Jewish-Masonic interests.
The Duce's provision granting stragglers the opportunity to resume their jobs and fight for the Republic has caused tens of thousands of Italians to return to national activity—Italians who had been dispersed and disoriented by Badoglio's treason. Day by day the Republican Army reconstitutes its ranks with energy, spirit, weapons and completely new methods. The Italian divisions that are completing their rigorous training in Germany are impatiently eager to defend the sacred soil of the Fatherland and to push back the hated enemy forever.
Therefore, towards Rome today we must project only our efforts, our faith, our eagerness for resurrection.
Faced with the desperate will for recovery that inflames us, today we have a very high goal: to redeem Rome, and—in the name of Rome—to redeem Italy. Rome has always been the precious source of every rebirth of our Fatherland.
The Italians who have not lost their sense of honor, the Italians who do not intend to remain submerged under the weight of shame, the Italians who do not resign themselves and instead want to rebel against fortune will finally be united in hatred and revenge against the enemy, and united in love for Rome and Italy. Garibaldi's cry of "Rome or death!" has now become the watchword, the supreme commandment of true Italians.
