Gaetano Salvemini Under the Axe of Fascism

Annotation

THE "march on Rome" of October 28th, 1922, marked the advent to power of the Fascist Party in Italy under the leadership of Benito Mussolini. The seizure of the government through a coup d'etat was justified by the claim that Italy had to be rescued from the imminent danger of a Bolshevist revolution. Before the eyes of a world horrified by the tragedy of Russia, Italian Fascism assumed the role of the knightly Saint George who had slain the red dragon of Communism. The legend appealed to the imaginations and soothed the fears of all the good people of Europe and America. It became the sacred myth around which was woven the early Fascist propaganda.In the present book the reader will find hard facts, not vague legal formulae; concrete realities, not abstract doctrines. Its purpose is to provide the English-speaking public with accurate information not about the whole economic, social, and political system of the Fascist dictatorship, but about one single phase of it, i.e. those institutions through which Fascism claims to have solved the problem of the relations between capital and labour.