I wrote this a while ago – maybe even two years – and the world has moved on, but I think there’s enough in it still worth reading to keep it on file.

Fascism European and American

“The point of modernity is to live without illusions while not becoming disillusioned.”

Antonio Gramsci

Fratelli d’Italia (Brothers of Italy), the leading party in the coalition that forms the current government of Italy, is a direct lineal descendant – through the post-war Movimento Sociale Italiano (Italian Social Movement), the Alleanza Nazionale (National Alliance), and Il Popolo della Libertà (People of Freedom) – of Mussolini’s Partito Nazionale Fascista. Its leader, Giorgia Meloni, has belonged to this lineage throughout her career, beginning in the youth wing of the Italian Social Movement, and then of the National Alliance. Alessandra Mussolini, Mussolini’s granddaughter, also began her career in the Italian Social Movement, and then the People of Freedom, later Forza Italia (Forward Italy, Berlusconi’s party). Forza Italia, along with the Lega Nord (Northern League) are the other two members of the current governing coalition.

So it is in no way at all exaggeration or hyperbole to say that Italy today is ruled by a Fascist government.

Many American “conservatives”, including members of Congress, hailed the Fascist victory, and dream of such a victory in the US as almost a Second Coming. Am I wrong about this? I don’t think that even ten years ago leading Republican figures would have welcomed the triumph of a genuine, gold seal, Fascist party. They do now.

I don’t think that today’s American neofascist movement (with deep roots going into and out from  the Republican Party) knows anything about Italian Fascism – how many of them even know the name Benito Mussolini? It’s likely that their celebration of Fratelli d’Italia’s victory was largely generic: the headlines said GREAT REACTIONARY VICTORY and they went with it. But they do know other names, most notably that of Viktor Mihály Orbán, Prime Minister of Hungary, who has become the principal folk hero of American reactionaries and neo-fascists – surpassing even Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin.

The big American super-reactionary organization – what’s its name? who cares – first went groveling off to Hungary to kneel at his feet for their national (um, what nation was that?) conference; then they invited him to Dallas to preside over another conference, groveling before him in their homeland.

I am more afraid of Orbán than I am of Meloni. He is not, strictly speaking, a Fascist, but he is one of the pioneers in a kind of post-fascist “respectable” authoritarianism, that maintains simulacra of the structures of bourgeois democracy. And he can present himself as a national hero without any unfortunate baggage bequeathed to him by forebears, he can legitimately say that he has none – unlike Putin, for example, he was never connected to the Communist regime.

The Italian Fascists, at least in public, seek to erase their links to Mussolini: what else can they do? So they do at least understand the need to reassure the people that they are not going return us all to the horrors that are, though less and less, still within the living memory of Europeans. But the links are there for all to see – even with just five minutes on Wikipedia.

Hungary and Italy exhibit the divide between Eastern and Western European experience, in all their bewilderingly contradictory inter-manifestations. Anti-communism in Eastern Europe gives Christian nationalist authoritarianism a legitimacy that can nonetheless draw on Soviet techniques and personnel, Putin above all. Poor Western European Fascists, especially in their founding nation, have no such luck: Il Duce just isn’t good press.

But do they, even, really want to return to him? At the time of the March on Rome (1922) Italy had still not fully emerged from its early modern collapse – from center to periphery – in the formation of the world’s first economic dynamic of advance and decline. Things are different today. Italy is one of the economic centers of the EU; it ranks high not only by economic measures, but also quality of life, healthcare and education.

It’s quite possible that the Fascists really do want to get away from their inheritance. Maybe they just want a quiet life – like the young people in Sir Walter Scott, desperately trying to escape the crazy old men (fathers, uncles, etc.) hell-bent on getting them all killed. You know, times change, what worked for grandpa may not work so well now … it’s happened to all of us. Still, they have to show us that they’ve changed.

But Europeans, even reactionary ones, do have some kind of memory, some sense of the unimaginable horrors.

American Fascists have no such memory: and this explains why they are so happy to envision their triumph in terms of violence, and, especially, of violence exploding from the 400 million firearms (a very conservative estimate) at large in the USA (pop. 350 million) – they are especially keen on assault rifles, and what they do to the human body, even though these are only a small minority of the whole – an aristocracy of firepower. They do not have even an ancestral memory of the horrors of violence, the horrors of war, the horrors of Fascist/Nazi brutality. Therefore, violence remains a game for them. All the ads for Republican candidates glorifying and inciting violence attest to this: violence, killing people is fun, a video game. And when they are attacked for inciting violence, they say: hey, it was all a joke, the “left” is taking it “out of context” (nota bene: anytime anyone uses the “taken out of context” excuse, go look carefully at the context). But they are fooling, “gaslighting”, themselves, so that they can say that a campaign add obviously targeting Democratic members of Congress for death, is a joke, while at the same time knowing full well that their supporters see it in full earnest – and I can’t see much reason for doubting that they see themselves in their followers: they desire violence. Joke violence does incite real violence – as we have seen over the last few years.

So why bring all this up now? Because:

The Italian (Fascist) government has recently made very strong, and very high level, protests against the suppression and murder, including by execution, by the Iranian government, of protesters demonstrating for women’s rights: Antonio Tajani, the foreign minister, summoned the Iranian ambassador to voice these; and a few days later the prime minister, Giorgia Meloni (see above), made a broad pronouncement, saying that the crackdown on protesters was “unacceptable and intolerable”. Yes, even given Fascism’s complex relation to Christianity, it is certainly easier for Fascists to attack an Islamic Republic. Nonetheless, we need to take these statements seriously.

Above all, Tajani attacked the death penalty as applied to protesters. It’s not entirely clear (from the reports I’ve seen) whether he is denouncing the death penalty as such, or only in these cases. But the death penalty, not only by “conviction” in a court of “law” but by agents of the regime is a necessary element of Fascism … and here is a Fascist government renouncing their most powerful, their most “signature” instrument.

Italy belongs to the European Union, which demands of all its members that they abolish the death penalty (only one of the many reasons why the US is out of the running before it even starts, if ever it wanted to join the EU). So the government of the day, be it never so Fascist, is constrained in its utterances.

Still, that a Fascist government should make such a condemnation of the oppression and killing of protesters (even including the religious element) must be recognized and acknowledged. The Italian government’s statements are among the strongest and most consequential – summoning the Iranian ambassador – of European governments.

What about across the Atlantic?

Passionate, visceral, support for the death penalty is a defining feature of American “conservatism”. It goes along with the claims for gun rights, not merely ownership, but use. More and more, it has become a Second Amendment “right” that a gun owner may shoot and kill anyone they regard as guilty of any crime at all, or as in any way hostile. The death penalty is the primary way to project this lust for death onto the whole order of society.

Is it ridiculous to say that we have more to fear from our home-grown “conservatives” than from European Fascists? Adorno said, long ago: ‘I consider the survival of National Socialism within democracy to be potentially more menacing than the survival of fascistic tendencies against democracy.’ Though the Italian Fascists (not Orbán, maybe, and not Putin certainly) are now within. But our compatriots are far more heavily armed, and with none of the inhibitions that come from an international memory, an international consciousness of the horrors of war: war-like rhetoric is their stock in trade.

Do Italian Fascists still feel the pure and visceral lust for death that is the heart of the movement? — “Viva la Muerte!” was the watchword of the Spanish Legion and its leader, José Millán-Astray, one of the most vicious and brutal elements of the Nationalist/Falangist army, during the Spanish Civil War. — I’m inclined to think not. Unfortunately, this is not the heart of the matter. It’s no good trying to push off this lust onto fascists, nazis, and other right-wing extremists past and present. Fascism and Nazism are products of modern society, that is to say, bourgeois society. Adorno again: “Bourgeois society will choose total destruction, its objective potential, rather than rise to reflections that would threaten its basic stratum.” How can we deny this when “mainstream” politicians can unleash an epidemic of almost unlimited numbers of firearms on American society; can kill possibly hundreds of thousands of their own supporters by telling them to reject obvious and simple public health measures in the worst public health catastrophe since the Black Death; can fight tooth and nail against any significant measures to prevent an ecological catastrophe capable of destroying human civilization?

So, a sobering thought: reactionary extremism, armed and violent, is not an accident, it arises from bourgeois society itself. Can it be defeated within bourgeois society? That is the necessary question.

In the meantime, the descendants of the agents of Fascist horror, and the Fascist cult of death, are taking a stand for life at least in this one instance. Their American fans, if they were paying attention, should denounce them. The rest of us should cheer them, though in a very muted way – and certainly not two cheers, maybe one and three eighths.