For the Inauguration of Pontinia
By Benito Mussolini
Blackshirts! Comrade peasants and workers!
Today we launch a shout of great pride and joy into the sky of Italy. We inaugurate Pontinia, the third municipality of the redeemed marshes. The new municipality is added to the other 7500 municipalities of the Nation. Next year we will establish Aprilia, in the following year Pomezia. and once we have inaugurated this latter municipality, the war we started in the Pontine Marshes—and which we have tenaciously conducted during these years—can be said to be victoriously accomplished.
We inaugurate Pontinia today , the day of faith, the day in which all the fertile Mothers of Italy place their wedding rings on the Altar of the Fatherland or around the monuments of the Fallen, but also the day of faith of the Italian people in its rights, a day of certain and unfailing faith in the destinies of the Fatherland.
The strength of our will and the organizational and creative capacity of the Blackshirt Revolution can be measured by what we have done in the Pontine Marshes.
During these 14 years of the Regime we have redeemed uncultivated lands in every part of Italy.
I want to tell you that we will not send the flower of our race to distant and barbarous lands unless we are certain that it will be protected by the Tricolor of the Fatherland. I want to say again that the Italian People, a little-known people in the world, in which the old common stereotypes depicted by fake literature still circulate, the Italian People, who reap their nourishment from the soil with daily diligence and labour, this Italian People is capable of resisting a very long siege, especially when it is secure in its clear and tranquil consciousness that truth is on their side, while the wrong is on the side of modern Europe which is dishonoring itself with its recent actions.
The war we are fighting in the land of Africa is a war of civilization and liberation. It is the People's War. The Italian people feel it as their own. It is the war of the poor, of the disinherited, of the proletarians. A front of conservation, selfishness, and hypocrisy has been deployed against us.
We have also committed ourselves to a tough battle against this front. And we will carry it out to the end. A People of forty-four million—not only of inhabitants, but of souls—will not allow themselves to be strangled with impunity, much less mystified.
Certain of this unanimous, profound consensus of the whole Italian people—men, women, children, the whole People alive in its historical and eternal expression—certain of this consent, the Regime will pull right.
It could not and does not want to do otherwise.
It is a trial in which we are all committed, from the first to the last, but it is a trial which tests the virility of the Italian people.
It is a trial, dear comrades, from which we will come out victorious.
It will take some time; but when one is committed to a struggle, comrades, it is not so much time that matters, but victory.
