Politics & Power Quote by Benito Mussolini

Strip away the bombast and Mussolini is doing something chillingly modern: selling war as “realism” and peace as a naive fantasy. The line stages fascism as a clear-eyed philosophy that has supposedly outgrown “political considerations of the moment,” as if it’s speaking from a higher altitude than mere policy. That move is the trick. By claiming to “consider and observe the future,” the regime dresses appetite as foresight, turning militarism into a kind of historical duty.

The phrase “neither in the possibility nor the utility of perpetual peace” is calibrated propaganda. “Possibility” implies peace is unattainable because human nature or history won’t allow it; “utility” implies peace is undesirable even if you could get it. Together they don’t just reject pacifism, they pathologize it. Peace becomes weakness, stagnation, decadence. War becomes the engine of “development,” the furnace that produces national vitality. It’s a moral inversion: aggression recast as stewardship of humanity’s future.

Context matters: Mussolini is theorizing fascism in the interwar years, when the trauma of World War I collided with fear of socialism, economic crisis, and a widespread belief that liberal institutions were brittle. Fascism offers itself as the antidote to that fragility, and this sentence is an ideological permission slip for permanent mobilization. If perpetual peace is impossible and useless, then conquest, repression, and sacrifice aren’t unfortunate necessities; they’re proof of seriousness. The subtext is a regime asking to be judged not by its violence, but by its “historical” ambitions - and preemptively ridiculing anyone who demands a quieter, more humane future.