Freemasonry and Fascist Regime

Civico20news hosts a very interesting speech by the famous historian Prof. Aldo A. Mola, who links the fascist regime with the Masonic Associations. Talking about Freemasonry, even today, is difficult and sometimes embarrassing.

A dive into history to discover that ancient legacies and stupid prejudices still survive in our day.

As the author suggests: In Italy the subject remains a taboo, between subsidized ridicule and alarmed suspicion towards those who deal with it not in apologetic but scientific terms.

https://www.civico20news.it/sito/articolo.php?id=37528

*Translated from Italian

AGAINST MASONRY

THE FIRST ‘FASCISTISSIMA’ LAW (1925)

by Aldo A. Mola

The real emergency is ‘the State in Emergency’

But should laws, ordinances and circulars really be carried out and respected with religious devotion?

If this were the case we would still be in the past, prone to Powers gradually imploded by internal corrosion or overwhelmed because they no longer correspond to the ‘common feeling’, changing in time and places.

This consideration, apparently trivial indeed, is imposed in the face of the deluge of ‘rules’ for four months approved by the government, by the Prime Minister, His Emergency Count, by ministers (such as Dr. Lamorgese and Hon. Hope) and gradually descending through the branches. 

Now INAIL claims to attribute to the employer the possible contagion from Covid-19 of his employee: this on the basis of the presumption that it occurred in the workplace and not, perhaps, elsewhere and for who knows what other promiscuities.

This would constitute a completely abnormal precedent, also because it lacks any scientific basis and reliable ‘evidence’. 

It could be valid for any illness, almost as if a person, succubus to the ‘black man’, gets sick only during the working hours and not when, in his spare time, he goes to do a mess with whoever he wants.

‘The laws are, but who put their hands on them?’ makes Dante Alighieri say by Marco Lombardo in front of the servitude of Italy, prone to the ravenous ‘foreign’ designs and the littleness of his local ‘lords’, almost always worse than the others. 

The question today is not to ‘lay hands’ on the laws, but to pass them through a sieve to separate the flour of the good ones from the bran of the dark ones, cumbersome, senseless and, in short, ‘bad’: several for many years.

These, although recent, must be abrogated quickly before their inapplicability and refusal to bow to their stolid tyranny rise to become total mistrust towards the legislator and a ‘legality’ that has long been in manifest conflict with the cornerstones of the Constitution . 

If the Charter marks a first and a later in the history of Italy and, as such, it is the framework in which its citizens recognize themselves, whatever their opinion on the form of the State, the first to have to respect its ‘principles fundamental ‘must be precisely the legislature, which is and remains the Parliament. 

In fact, ‘the exercise of the legislative function cannot be delegated to the government except with the determination of guiding principles and criteria’ and only ‘for limited time and for defined objects’.

Vittorio Emanuele III 1919, by Atelier Bettini, Roma-Livorno

IMAGE LINKED:  wikimedia Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)

When they discussed and approved articles 76-78 of the Charter, with a unified vision of their concatenation, the constituents were well aware that since August 1917, long before Caporetto, much of northern Italy was declared a ‘war zone’, because it is manifestly infected with revolutionary upheavals, as happened in Turin. 

This measure involved the adoption of martial law, with what descended from it for the control of places and people, and the use of the military penal code, as would have happened on October 28-29, 1922 if Vittorio Emanuele III had not wisely refused to decree the state of siege, since the extra-parliamentary crisis thanks to him was taking the institutional path.

War, riots, and natural disasters are extraordinary cases of necessity and urgency. 

The spread of a disease by its nature is not because when it assumes an epidemic or is declared a pandemic it has overcome the boundaries of urgency and must be faced with vast and lasting measures, the opposite of what has happened in Italy, where for months the improvisation lasts.

Now, one hundred and twenty days after the first late ‘alarm’ launched by your Emergency (at the time unconvinced and never convincing), the return to article 70 of the Constitution is urgent: ‘The legislative function is exercised collectively by the two Chambers’ and by ‘ bodies and entities to which it is conferred by constitutional law’ (the Regions). 

Therefore, the intention ventilated by prof. He plans to extend the state of emergency for another six months, perhaps to the sound of presidential decrees or law decrees on ‘holidays’ of the Chambers or for their evaporation in the exercise of their functions. 

The health emergency, emphasized beyond measure.

Mussolini, architect of the single party regime

Benito Mussolini

IMAGE LINKED:  wikimedia Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)

At the beginning of the ‘single party regime’, i.e. ‘fascism’ as an exercise of power by the ‘head of government’, there was a law approved by the chambers: a passage from which Benito Mussolini did not withdraw, because he liked it or less, for the Albertine Statute (as then for the Constitution of the Republic) they were a source of law.

But the ‘leader of fascism’ (movement? Revolution? Regime? Historians are still divided in this regard, but see at least the Roberto Vivarelli trilogy on the origins of fascism) succeeded in extorting the assent of Parliament using brutal methods to bend it to its designs, in the apparent statutory continuity.

To get there he aimed to isolate the King, to tarparne the clear exercise of the function, to wrap the monarchy in the mists of the mass organizations set up to obscure the pillars of united Italy (the Armed Forces and the judiciary) with the Militia voluntary for national security, with the para-fascist organizations and with the fascistization of those of ancient date, at first neutral but from a certain moment onwards contaminated by the systematic addition of the adjective ‘fascist’.

This was initially accepted or suffered as an ornamental tinsel but gradually became a zest to separate the good citizens from the bad ones, aligned with the regime by the others. 

That process resulted in over three million members of the party (when in 1942 it reached the height of ‘consent’) and about ten million associates in the ‘Dopolavoro’ and the plethora of bodies, institutes and associations duly adorned by the fateful ‘F’. 

So it happened, for example, that to secure a substitute in a school in Saluzzo, the young Cesare Pavese asked for the PNF card while Ada Gobetti, widow of Piero, right neck, remedied the enrollment in the ‘fascist’ association of teachers, which involved advantages in daily life for those who had to reach the high school of Savigliano from Turin.

Placed before the alternative between fascism and the defense of their identity, many associations chose self-dissolution. 

This was the case of the Circolo ‘L Caprìssi of Cuneo, which had hundreds of free associates, of good morals, never prone.

The incipient one-party regime knew that it had to deal not only with the monarchy (in which the Mussolini government was always at least the least: it was confirmed on July 25, 1943) but also with two metastorical [metahistorical] entities: the Catholic Church and Freemasonry. 

With the Holy See, the Duce launched a disputing composition. 

It began with the rescue of the Vatican Banco di Roma in 1923 and landed at the Lateran Pacts on 11 February 1929.

These were by no means ‘Conciliation’, if by this we mean convergence of loving senses, but they marked the boundaries between the State and the Church, between the Kingdom of Italy and the Vatican City State: prelude to tensions, even harsh, as more the regime aimed to go beyond the administration of bodies, aimed at the possession of souls and collided with Catholic Action and FUCI, the Italian Catholic University Federation, nursery of the post-war ruling class, mainly Christian Democrats, as an alternative to the Fascist University Groups (GUF), who counted in their ranks Giorgio Bocca and Leonilde Jotti.

With regard to the other metastoric [metahistoric] entity, Freemasonry, Mussolini aimed at the solution pursued since in 1914 he had the ‘brothers’ expelled from the Italian Socialist Party, in whose revolutionary wing he was militant. 

He was sure that his annihilation would be welcome on the other bank of the Tiber. 

Therefore the genesis and launch of the ‘law against Freemasonry’, which occupied the whole of 1925, deserves more attention than that hitherto devoted to it by historiography, ordinarily reluctant to deal with the Green Sect. 

While at the University of Cuba there have been institutes and professorships of the history of masonry for years and in Costa Rica we do not only deal with pineapples and bananas but also with esotericism, mysteriosophy and Masonism, in Italy the theme remains a taboo,

June 16, 1925: Mussolini’s only defeat …

On May 17, 1925 the newspapers came out in huge numbers. Against all odds, the day before the now famous ‘law against Freemasonry’ had not been approved by the Chamber of Deputies, chaired by Antonio Casertano, originally a socialist, Freemason and finally a fascist. 

It was the only burning parliamentary defeat of Mussolini in the twenty-one years from November 1922 to his dismissal as head of government. 

The Duce was also furious because, confident of his triumph, he had attended the session and had intervened repeatedly in the debate. 

What Happened? Almost at the end of the session, after a series of irrelevant laws, the Chamber approved the admission of women to the elections of municipal and provincial councils: a Pyrrhic victory for the proponents of the female vote,

The law was approved by 212 deputies out of the 242 present; 28 voted against, two abstained. 

Immediately after, the real game of the day opened: the preliminary discussion of the ‘regularization of Associations, Bodies and Institutes and the membership of the same of the employees dependent on the State, the provinces, the municipalities and by entities subject to the law for their protection’. 

Since at the end of the general examination the vote by roll call was cleverly requested before the passage to the discussion of the articles, the Secretary of the Chamber,

Angelo Manaresi, started to vote starting from the deputy Amato Di Fausto, accountant, drawn by lot. 

At the end of the ‘call’, the president noted that the Chamber was not in legal number to deliberate. 

The report does not say how many responded.

Certainly they were even less than the 242 of just before, a number very far from the 535 deputies in office. 

Not to mention the opposition (socialists, republicans, popular, democratic followers of Giovanni Amendola: perched on the so-called ‘Aventino’, a politically sterile hill), the compact absence of liberals and, scandalous for Mussolini, also of many fascists. 

The ‘Green Snake’, as the Freemasonry was called by the Freemasons, had once again sunk its poisoned teeth in the flesh of those who wanted it dead?

A timely comparison between those present and the list of fascist deputies in office and justified absents has never been made. 

Certainly, in favour of the law, prominent Fascists certainly voted for Freemasons, even if they had been ‘sleeping’ for some time, that is, they no longer used to attend the lodges. 

This was the case of Giacomo Acerbo, Undersecretary to the Prime Minister, Italo Balbo and Edmondo Rossoni, all affiliated to the Grand Lodge of Italy, and Alessandro Dudan, Roberto Farinacci and Achille Starace, initiated to the Grand Orient of Italy. Giuseppe Bottai and Araldo Crollalanza, both from the Grand Lodge, voted among the ‘step’ and long-time Freemasons.

The session of 16 May 1925 remained memorable due to the high tenor of the speeches carried out by the historian Gioacchino Volpe, by the paleo-fascist Massimo Rocca, by the clerical Egilberto Martire and above all by Antonio Gramsci, according to whom the masonry had been the party of the bourgeoisie and therefore it would become a wing of fascism which was the expression that arose from the war. 

He voted against the law not out of sympathy for the lodges but because it foreshadowed the one-party regime through the prohibition of opposition parties, including the Communist Party of Italy, depository of the proletariat revolution. 

In his speech, in line with the Third Moscow International, inspired by Lenin and Trotzky, Gramsci implicitly preceded the condemnation of the reformists as social-fascists.

… and his revenge and ‘deep footprint’.

On the 19th, duly put back on line, the Chamber approved the law known by all as ‘against Freemasonry’ even if in its title the ‘dirty word’ did not appear. 

The game moved to the Senate, chaired by Tommaso Tittoni (suspected of Masonic affiliation), where the ‘patres’ in black shirts were a small minority and the liberal-Risorgimento tradition, secular and tolerant, shared by the Crown seemed to prevail. 

How to get to grips with it? Mussolini adopted strong manners. 

Resumed the squad assaults on the lodges, which were looted, while [clever] chameleons removed their archives to make the trace of their affiliation disappear.

The master stroke was to pilot the organization of the attack on Mussolini by the naïve Tito Zaniboni (never Freemason), on November 4th. 

The next day General Luigi Capello, a high dignitary of the Grand Orient, was arrested in Turin for alleged but never proven complicity with Zaniboni. 

A surge of attacks on loggias and crimes followed, while the Minister of the Interior was the national-fascist Luigi Federzoni, who has always been a Freemason. 

The rogue invoked the immediate restoration of the death penalty for anti-fascists.

After three days of debate the Senate approved. 

Benedetto Croce and Francesco Ruffini, distinguished professor of ecclesiastical law, spoke against the law. 

It was the swan song of Italian liberalism. No Freemason senators intervened, like Salvatore Barzilai, in order not to incite the leader. That ‘shyness’ outraged the ‘basic brothers’ who feared ending up driven out of jobs, beaten up, forced into exile.

It was a dark page in the history of Italy. 

Ignoring or pretending not to know, Mussolini continued to surround himself with ‘capable and deserving’ Masons from both the Grand Orient and the Grand Lodge of Italy. 

The freedom of humanistic research remained heavily conditioned. 

The centuries-old Accademia dei Lincei gave way to the Accademia d’Italia. 

With the racial laws of 1938, worse happened. 

The author of Judaism-Bolshevism-plutocracy-Freemasonry came back into vogue , a spret [?spretato – an unfulfilled priest] –  who in 1920 was the first to publish in Italy the protocols of the elderly Wise men of Zion.

But it must be said that even today, with government decrees and those of His Emergency, bars, restaurants, gyms and swimming pools are reopened and the doors of beauty centres are opened, but not those of cultural centres. 

It is the most emblematic sign of the mass distraction inoculated in Italian society by the emergency regime, with effects that only a few omens perceive. 

For others, the overwhelming majority of culture and freedom of spirit mattered little before, little will matter tomorrow.

The brocard [law] (which also applies to others or other extras of the present day) comes down on the Parliament that leaned supine against the Masonic diktat of the ‘Truce’: ‘Coactus voluit, sed voluit’*. 

Its connivance with fascism therefore cannot be considered ‘anything’, even if it was later ‘cancelled’ by the anti-fascist revolt. 

The 1925 law was passed by people aware of their actions and what would result from them. 

It remains an indelible stain in the history of Parliament. Anti-Masonism then cast its eerie shadow over the three quarters of a century that separate today’s Italy from the end of the single party regime. 

Even in this Mussolini has left a ‘profound footprint’, more than is usually admitted.

Aldo A. Mola