Home » Because we still talk about fascism – Francesco Filippi

Because we still talk about fascism – Francesco Filippi

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Because we still talk about fascism – Francesco Filippi

All words have a story. The words that speak of the past have even two: the one they try to tell and the one that sews them on those who speak them, generation after generation.

Fascism is a term that comes from afar, it crosses many paths of memory in Italy and with its evolution accompanies the relationship that the country has with its memory. Like chewing gum stuck under the soles of shoes, in the last century it has collected and incorporated many meanings. From time to time it has been synonymous with violence, revolution, order, power, degradation, dictatorship, war, death. And also of nostalgia. It found itself welded to prefixes that served to attenuate or weigh down its meaning: so we have spoken and talked about vetero-, post-, para, a-, neo-fascism. And of course anti-fascism.

Over time there has been an effort to contextualize it, since it carries too many accents, too many images and too many misunderstandings to be enclosed in a single enclosure of meaning. There are those who argue that it should be used to define only a certain historical phenomenon that revolves around the political and human parable of its founder, Benito Mussolini, and that therefore everything that happened after 1945, even if perhaps it closely resembles historical fascism , cannot be defined in these terms.

And there are those who, on the contrary, take note of its driving force, capable of surviving Mussolini and the dictatorship, and of filling places and reasons of politics, culture and society with meaning. In short, a timeless word or, if you prefer, eternal.

In any case, beyond the discussions on its use, there is a fact that is the most exceptional for those who come across the study of fascism. Despite the efforts of scholars and scholars to historicize it, that is how to deliver it to the past, this term does not really want to stay in the past.

In fact, there are more and more, and less and less fearful or camouflaged, those who in Italy define themselves as fascists and who do not ask permission to be called that by someone else, appropriating the word, giving it legs and voice, making it alive and current. And, once again, the interventions of various experts to reiterate that defining today’s fascism could be formally incorrect and imprecise.

As in the false legend about the hornet, which according to the laws of physics should not fly but which does not know it flies, Italy is faced with people who according to official historiography could not be called fascists but, since they do not know history, they define themselves the same way.

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And not only do they claim it – without taking into account the rules that make fascism a crime and not an opinion, starting from the XII transitory and final provision of the constitution – but they even take up the behaviors, phrases, rituals and actions of what with a tip of hope one would so much like to define “historical fascism”.

The surname Mussolini has become a brand to be exhibited in political disputes

On 9 October 2021, on the sidelines of a demonstration against the government’s policies on the pandemic, a group of fascists (because they have defined themselves on several occasions) stormed the headquarters of the most important Italian trade union, the CGIL, in a sort of revival of the assaults on the labor chambers that just a century ago were the prerogative of the movement of Benito Mussolini, before the seizure of power.

This is just an example of a revival of themes and techniques that refer to a past that obviously does not pass. While some dates on the Italian civil calendar such as April 25 (day of liberation from Nazi-fascism) and June 2 (Republic Day) often end up at the center of public debate because someone considers them “divisive” – ​​the first because it recalls the defeat of the dictatorship and the second because it celebrates the victory of democracy – there are those who publicly commemorate October 28, the day of the march on Rome, that is, the beginning of the end of the liberal state and freedoms.

End incited, desired and planned by fascism. And they don’t even cause scandal. Still, while on the one hand many are surprised by the lack of attention with which the history of the country is discussed, the surname Mussolini has become a brand to be exhibited in political disputes: there are now several descendants of the duce who present themselves in the elections waving a name that according to them should be a guarantee. Then not everyone manages to intercept enough votes.

However, the fact that in Germany some of Hitler’s descendants have chosen to change their surname to avoid being associated with the führer while in Italy having that of the Duce makes a curriculum, should make us reflect on the pervasiveness of an image and an imaginary that evidently they managed to bypass the rigors of time without any problems.

The more one resorts to improper comparisons with Italy’s totalitarian past, the more one tries, more or less implicitly, to criticize today’s democratic system. From this point of view the word fascism, its diffusion and its contrasting and contrasted meanings, are a kind of thermometer that helps to measure the democratic crisis of the country: if the word fascism is good, it means that the word democracy is very bad.

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Italy’s supposedly positive past under fascism is confronted with the present in a reckless way. The struggle is uneven because, if the distortions of today’s democratic system are there for all to see, the alleged and mostly false merits of fascism are shrouded in the fog of time, between a “my grandfather always told me” and “a I once read that… “. From this struggle is emerging an old and at the same time new – some once again would say timeless or eternal – vision of an increasingly desirable mythic past, with astonishing effects.

Fascism, despite having a bad history, enjoys a good memory

Having established that the word fascism is still very strong and present, we should ask ourselves at the heart of the question, that is to say: what does fascism mean today? What is meant when this term is used, and how does it affect the listener? Some answers can be found in a number of concrete examples.

Fascism is not a bad word today. Or rather, it is not such a bad word as the history of twenty years of dictatorship and violence might suggest. Unlike the equivalent totalitarian regimes born in the first half of the twentieth century in Europe, Italian fascism enjoys a sweetened and often acquittal reading. Despite being the first in chronological order among the great right-wing totalitarian systems produced by the continent and an example for many who followed it, Mussolini’s regime has never been seen, in the Italian and European imagination, as “bad among the bad” .

Thanks to a public opinion that is not very responsible for its own history and an international attention focused on the memory and analysis of the horrors of Hitler’s Nazism, the Italian dictatorship has often slipped into the background in the representation of twentieth-century regimes. In the very first draft, then amended, of the controversial document voted by the European parliament in September 2019 to condemn the totalitarianisms that have oppressed the continent, the word fascism is not even mentioned.

It will then be introduced in a couple of passages in the final text, almost a minor third wheel compared to the two great protagonists of the motion, German Nazism and Stalinist Communism. This means that, in the moment of publicly stigmatizing the horrors of the twentieth century in Europe, the word fascism did not even occur to the authors of the condemnation proposal.

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In short, despite having a bad history, Fascism enjoys a good memory. So good that in Italy those who openly invoke it not only do not go to jail, but also risk making a political career. Beyond the fires used and consumed by the media on the advisability of a return to fascism, a political class increasingly in search of sensationalism continues to use issues related to the dictatorship with ease to carry out a particularly risky operation: the semantic comparison with the democratic present. Analyzing the term fascism, its uses and its diffusion, one can verify the state of health of the word which is the opposite, that is, democracy.

Today the Mussolini regime, despite having a bad history, enjoys a good memory

At the end of the first lockdown in Italy, in spring 2020, a survey showed that more than five out of ten Italians believed that the solution of the country’s problems should be entrusted to a “strong man”. A figure capable of dominating the scene and doing, in solitude, the good of all.

Instead of enjoying the joys of freedom rediscovered after the longest period of restrictions since the end of the Second World War, a substantial portion of the interviewees said they were open to the possibility that the current system of democratic guarantees would be replaced by a single man in command. .

A dictator, yes, but a good one. A contradiction in terms that has allowed, for example, the far right, in the general confusion, to take control of some demonstrations against the government’s health policies with the cry of “No to dictatorship!”.

Fascists against dictatorship: a nice semantic leap, no doubt about it. In reality it is a script already seen. In 1919 the movement led by Mussolini spoke of struggle and revolution. But then, once in power, embody the party of order.

It would seem an eternal return of the themes that the word fascism brings with it, were it not for the sadly enough fact that it is not a return. The word fascism, with its many, contradictory, always problematic meanings, has never gone away.

For a century it has been part, for good but above all for evil, of the social dialectic in Italy: sometimes disguised, sometimes exposed, sometimes muted, sometimes on the proscenium, but always present. Like a sign that invites us to be prudent in dealing with the past or as a spy that signals anomalies and malfunctions of the present. Today dangerously on.

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