The return of Fascism

The spectre of Fascism is growing across Europe at present. It is predicted that the parties of the Far Right will have much greater representation in the new European Parliament than they do at present. Italy is a case in point. In Friday's Independent there was a fascinating account of how the successor party to Mussolini's Fascists is now merging with the main Forza Italia party of Berlusconi. They are claiming that they have renounced Fascism but all the signs are that Fascism has entered the bloodstream of the Italian body politic. At the last general election, for instance, for the first time since 1945 there were no Socialist or Communist deputies in the Italian parliament, only Centrists and the parties of the Right who combined under Berlusconi's coalition. Since then we have seen the first Fascist Mayor of Rome and increasing attacks on migrants, Roma and others deemed 'undesirable' by the new regime.

The Independent makes the point that Italy never went through a process of de-Nazification (or in Italy's case de-Fascistification) in the same way as Germany. Watching a film some years ago about the Italian campaign in Libya, where the Italians dive bombed Berber villages and opened mass concentration camps in the desert, during the 1930s, I discovered that criticising the Italian military or its leaders was still a crime in Italy. Thus none of the people involved in these war crimes had ever been tried but had been honoured by the post-Fascist Republic after the end of World War II. The Independent quotes from Christopher Duggan, the British author of Force of Destiny, an acclaimed history of modern Italy:

"As a result very senior figures in the army, the police and the judiciary remained unpurged. Take the figure of Gaetano Azzariti, one of the first presidents, post-war, of Italy's Constitutional Court, yet under Mussolini he had been the president of the court which had the job of enforcing the the race laws. The failure of the Allies to put pressure on Italy also reflects a perception that still exists: that the Fascist revival is not to be taken seriously because Italy is 'lightweight'. Whereas if the same thing happened in Germany or Austria, you'd get really worried."

The widespread defiance of the anti-Fascist Constitution can be seen in the profusion of parties deriving inspiration from Mussolini; in the thousands who pour into Predapio, Mussolini's birthplace, to celebrate his march on Rome on 20 October every year; in shops and on market stalls doing a lively trade in busts of Il Duce and other Fascist mementoes of every sort.
Far more alarming, Duggan says, is what is happening out of the spotlight to the national temper, where the steady erosion and discrediting of state institutions is playing into the hands of a dictatorial elite, just as it did in the 1920s.

"What is so disturbing is not just the systematic rehabilitation of Fascism but the erosion of every aspect of the state, for example justice, with the result that people have the urge to throw themselves into the arms of the one man who they believe can sort things out.
"You create very personalised relations with the leader, so that in Mussolini's case, he received 2,000 letters a day from people pleading with him to help. If the state doesn't work, you trust in one man to pick up the phone and sort things out. This is how liberalism disappeared in the 1920s, with the steady discrediting of parliament so that in the end there was no need for Mussolini to abolish it, he merely ignored it. Something very similar is happening in Italy today."

These are very concerning and serious developments in a major European state, whose MEPs will quite probably be drawn from some of these elements. Alessandra Mussolini, the Duce's granddaughter is already an MEP. All of this makes it imperative that as many people across Europe vote for progressive parties and for the Greens in particular to stop the onward march of the Far Right. With the European Parliament due to gain even more powers under the Lisbon Treaty, it is essential that the progressive blocks are well represented there, especially when an increasing amout of legislation is coming from the EU.

The normalisation of Fascism must never be permitted, either here or in the European Union.