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ZorbaTHut  1yr ago (text post)   35361 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 26, 2022

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In this particular context, it seems accurate, as the party has a fairly direct lineage (via mergers and renamings, the AN and MSI) to Mussolini's. At one point their antecessors renounced the term (and explicitly a subset of the ideology of) fascism, hence post-.

Here is a random dictionary entry describing a somewhat symmetrical case as "post-communist".

And Democrats in the US have a direct, unbroken and not renamed lineage to the party of slaveholders, Jim Crow and internment camps for foreigners.

What's your point?

The US seems like a clear outlier case of political lineage to me, where the parties shifted all over the spectrum to capture the maximum number of votes rather than by the minimum required to stay within the Overton window. Both Meloni's political ancestors and the Linke did something close enough to the latter (see especially what your sibling post pointed out).

Meloni and her party have both long rejected the mantle of fascism. Corbyn says he's a socialist, I take him at his word. Meloni says she isn't a fascist, I take her at her word. Neither term means much anymore.

I don't know why it's so hard for you to accept semantically that someone who glorifies, and is part of a party that glorifies, Mussolini and his party - the inventors and namesakes for fascism in its original incarnation - can be described as post-fascist.

I think it's more an objection to the intentional smuggling of the word "fascist" into a description that is otherwise vague. "Post-fascist" could mean anything: rejecting fascism, re-inventing fascism, whatever. The goal of calling them "post-fascist" is, presumably, for the prefix to be mentally filed away as decorative.

Beyond the "lineage", it's probably worth pointing out the intellectual and philosophical foundations of the leadership. Both of Die Linke's chairs openly and explicitly praise Karl Marx, and Meloni's pretty clearly and publicly a Mussolini fangirl.

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