by Enzo Marzo
Please read the pamphlet by Ettore Maggi without prejudice and only to satisfy a thirst for knowledge. There are researches and news that have had very little diffusion in our country. Sorry, nation. And the reasons are obvious. You will deplete the complexity of the war in Ukraine in a few reasons. On the contrary, an epochal event, which is costing the sacrifice of millions of people and devastating cities and countryside and which puts the geopolitical destinies of the whole world at stake, has in the background reasons ideological very deep.
Putin is not just a paranoid autocrat, and underestimating his motives is self-defeating.
We have already had Hitler’s experience, and we paid dearly for it. As early as the mid-1920s, the father of Nazism had put his goals, his methods, all his racism and aversion to the “liberal” world on paper. Afterwards he did nothing but execute his script step by step up to excesses that the civilized world could not even imagine. Yet it was all written.
Today we are again faced with a similar problem. Putin is just the new example of how undervalued the political category emphasized by Hannah Arendt is: the totalitarianism. In the 1900s we saw two above all, Nazism and Communism. And we also met them as allies in 1939 with the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact (Putin makes us smile when on May 9, in full Victory Parade, he reproaches the West for having “forgotten who defeated Nazism”, when he flies over those with his imperialism lit the WWII fuse). Putin openly declares what his plan is. And not from now. European politicians are guilty of not realizing it, if not now. Perhaps. Putin’s imperialist project can be read clearly in the appendix to Maggi’s pamphlet. It is written in his hand. And the proven proof is in the aggression against Ukraine, in the patriarch of Moscow’s eagerness to return to the Middle Ages Kirill, who likes to play the part of Goebbels in the tragedy. And finally in Dugin’s Eurasian paranoia. But there is little to laugh about. As there was nothing to laugh about Hitler and Stalin.
Maggi’s little treatise speaks above all of this: of the conjunction of the two totalitarianisms of the extreme right and the extreme left, mortal opponents but basically so similar. The flag of the first party founded by Dugin is a terrifying swastika drawn with a hammer and sickle on a Nazi red background. After all, Dugin turns Arendt’s intuition upside down. It brings together the same hatred of the two despotisms for democracy, for reason, for the individual, for the tradition of free thought which form the ideal basis of European history of the last few centuries, and founds a “complex” totalitarianism which binds together a thought Obviously reactionary and an unhistorical neo-imperialism spiced with godly superstition.
Remarkable is the accuracy with which Maggi has followed from the very beginning the construction by turbulent neo-fascists of this red-brown “ideology” of which there are traces even in Roman ’68 (we recall the Nazi-Maoists of the Faculty of Law in Rome, while future black terrorists practiced in the neighboring university sports center) which finally finds its consecration in the pages of this ideologue who, as he himself proudly states, fuel the endless ambitions of a small KGB agent who wants to become Tsar[i]. And restore Stalin.
On the other hand Marxist Leninist and Piccist, intellectually but not only, there were spies of the same sign. Just pick up the collection of “Contropiano” or re-read the highly reactionary pages of Pasolini (not surprisingly loved by young missini) in the weekly “Tempo”.
Today’s red-brownism finds its origin and continuum from this ircocervo of incunabula. Never Forget the Appeal to the Brothers in Black Shirts by Get off and of the leading group of the PCd’I who took refuge in Paris, who, among other things, made the “fascist program of 1919 his own, which is a program of peace, freedom, defense of the workers’ interests”. It was 1936. It was already the appetizer prepared by Stalin to arrive at the Pact with Hitler.
Certainly the Soviet empire has melted, the Wall has been beaten, the European communist parties have lost their raison d’être and their name. It was thought it was all over, but he forgot that nostalgia dies hard. As happened for the socialists who, due to Craxi’s regret, became for decades Berlusconi allies of the far right. So it is enough that Mother Russia wants to re-found her empire and a group of Stalinists of yesteryear becomes Olgettina and burns with the desire to kiss Putin’s friend on the mouth.
The current “wartime pacifism,” which is very different from true pacifism, simply is red-brown which unites Forza nuova and Canfora, Alemanno and Santoro. Our own Putinians do not want peace, but simply peace disarmament of Ukraine and therefore its surrender. Much less hypocritical are the Vittorio Feltri who already in the first week of Russian aggression claimed that the only way out for Kiev was to surrender. Instead, Putin’s red-brown pacifists, terrified of a possible Ukrainian counter-offensive, howl at the moon without having the courage to directly address their appeals to the Tsar, who would be the logical recipient of the request for a “ceasefire”, but who continues to repeat that it will not stop the aggression before having achieved all the objectives proclaimed from the beginning.
A minor chapter belongs to the non-red-brown Putinians, who entered this tragic game not out of adherence to a perverse thought but out of nostalgia for a youthful anti-Americanism or out of sudden opportunism very cynical and very dorothean political-electoral or for minor interests such as careerism, the desire to always be on stage or to shamelessly continue the negotiations at the Hotel Metropol in Moscow. There will be ways to get back to it.
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