AN INTERVIEW WITH IGNAZ/0 SILONE
25
an end
o~
fascism. It is even probable that the first result of war
will
he the fascistization of the democratic countries.
But don't you think the military defeat of Hitler
and
Musso–
lini
will inevitably mean the
end
of their regimes?
I think that the establishment of a truly free regime in Italy
or Germany depends entirely on the Italian and German people.
If they cannot free themselves, no one else can free them. Freedom
cannot come as a gift from a foreign army: to pay for liberty, a
people must dig down deep into its own pocket. Obviously, a war
can produce certain favorable conditions for revolution. The same
conditions can also he produced by cholera, earthquake, famine.
But the advocates of liberty have never been the advocates of
cholera nor of earthquakes nor of famine, and they cannot any
more be the advocates of war, even though they stand to profit by
favorable conditions which it may produce. The worst misfortune
which could happen to German socialism-which achieved power
in
1918 under such unfortunate circumstances-would be for it to
regain power after the next military defeat of Germany and as a
natural result of the defeat. Nothing worse could happen to social–
ism than to become synonomous with national defeat.
When you speak of liberty, do you mean
socialist
liberty?
Yes, I think of socialism as an element from now on indis–
pensable to a regime of real freedom-that is to say, of liberties
that are concrete and actual, not formal and "constitutional." Big
business and political liberty have become incompatible. But I do
not see liberty as the necessary, natural and predestined conse–
quence of socialism: I do not consider economics, politics and cul–
ture to be as mechanically interrelated as many Marxists seem to.
Just as we have very different political regimes growing from the
common soil of capitalist production, so too Russia warns us that,
on the base of state socialist production, there can arise a culture
of
cannibals, a culture much inferior to the culture which bour–
seois democracy had created. Socialism rids us of one enemy of
human liberty, but it can also introduce new ones, unknown to past
history. And there is no formula which can protect us from these
