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Something that always bothered me about the Motte is that while massive cultural/political events are going on in Europe, one needs to dive deep into the roundup thread to find any discussion of it at all. Meanwhile the latest trans-people-in-school or outrageous-nytimes-oped controversy (which nobody will remember in a week) will have 500 comment threads dedicated to extreme nitpicking.
Anyway sorry for the rant. It looks like the far-right (of the quite openly far-right, even post-fascist variety) has just won the Italian elections and will very likely going to provide the prime minister to a cabinet that will include a 85 year old Berlusconi among others. Italy is the 3rd most populous and wealthy country in the EU. It also acts as a perennial threat to the stability of the Brussels-led order and the euro, since an Italian default or currency exit would almost definitely trigger the collapse of the euro with who knows what consequences. The EU looks determined to fight. Meloni herself does not sound like the type of politician who will accept to be crushed as easily as her predecessors. Here is a French interview with a 19 years old activist Meloni. She still sounds like a true believer to me. To get the gist of just how radical (from the EU-norm) she is willing to be with regard to cultural issues, I recommend this speech from 3 years ago (with English subs).
What are your expectations? Are we coming near a grand showdown? How is this going to interact with the looming threat of grid collapse in Europe? Russia sanctions and the European willingness to keep Ukrainian army in the field? NATO expansions? Is her family and God rhetoric just fluff or do you expect some real moves in this regard? When the ECB will have to start increasing interest rates substantially and Italy has to choose between bankruptcy or euro-exit, how will this go under this government?
P.S. Italy was one of the most anal countries with regard to vaccine oppression and corona measures in Europe. Does anyone know what the position of the Fratelli was back then? And how they talk about these things now?
So.......the normal center-right that always gets called "far right, semi-to-full-fascist"?
Call me when the ovens kick on. Until then, the boy called "Nazis" one or two trillion times too many.
I expect that they will govern exactly as competently and moderately as every other Italian government of the last five hundred years.
She's obviously a Nazi. Why else would the AP run a story leading with a photo of her like this? Completely unsubtle and is being carried on all kinds of default news bars.
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Do you think that what people dislike about fascism was Mussolini?
Or was it the world war, genocide, racism etc.?
This seems to be a very non-central fallacy at least in the civilian American market. For politics nerds and Italians, by all means, have the discussion. We're talking about the EU and some of our posters melting down because of an election of a woman they never heard of six days ago. But apparently, she was insufficiently critical of a guy who was pretty popular in Italy long ago?
Mussolini engaged in imperialism against Ethiopia and was generally pretty authoritarian and oppressive himself, even if he wasn't as bad as literally Hitler.
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True all that, and I wish people would be capable of such nuance as telling apart Fascists and National-Socialists, but mostly it doesn't happen, and mostly parties are coded as "far right" are then commonly referred to as "those Nazis" and are treated exactly as they were literally Hitler. So when this coding is applied, it understandably triggers the reaction, and if serious on-merits discussion is expected, it should be accompanied with appropriate explanation about what "far right" means in this particular case. Yet better is to avoid this term altogether and use more specific and meaningful terms.
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I can't speak for tarrou, but I thought from the op there was a decent chance this was a honeypot to declare right wingers here fascist, because that seems to be the point of about half the conversations about Italian politics on the internet. Like when someone makes an op arguing about the holocaust, but with a dash of subtlety to hook those who think holocaust arguing is too obvious by half.
It is both annoying and exhausting to think like that though, so I appreciate you providing a path forward to actual conversations about this, and I wish there was some way I could say all this without distracting back to the mean. Unfortunately all the Italians in my family are even more blackpilled about their national politics than I am, when you bring up Italian politics with them you can practically see them deciding between telling you they don't give a shit and putting a gun in their mouth.
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It is, but much like how "literally" has now come to literally mean "figuratively", "fascist" has now come to mean "anyone a far leftist doesn't like".
Just another turn of the euphemism treadmill, I suppose.
"Literally" has never been used to mean "figuratively." This is a misunderstanding of hyperbole.
I agree with you about "fascist," though.
Read me.
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Is this fundamentally any different from the mainstream glorification of someone like Marx or Guevara in the American Left? It seems pretty universal for groups to harken back to the icons of yesterday, regardless of affiliation; I'm not sure there's too much of interest there beyond a vague nostalgic appeal and a memory of older, more vigorous times.
If there is still any energy left for this sort of discussions I might even write one day about the weird situation with Atatürk and Turkey, as it is the only country in Europe which had a single party dictatorship in the 1930s and somehow managed to never leave behind its figurehead as well as ideology. But that would require an open-mindedness and maturity about the word "fascism" which is unfortunately lacking here so far. Just because lefties use a word as a catch-all slur, it doesn't mean we can just sneer at its use and feel superior.
Ataturk and Turkey sounds like interesting reading---and far enough from my usual American culture-war bubble that it might be possible to think about productively.
As a prequel, I'd love a clear explanation of what meaningful definitions of terms like "fascist" (or "national socialist", or "marxist", or for that matter even the neo-(liberal/conservative)s) might be. Every attempt I've come across in the past has been more oriented towards drawing connections between undesirables. I'd be interested to hear, from a less agenda-driven source, how these terms can be used in a useful manner.
Perhaps there's recommended reading that I've just missed?
For starters, what sort of thing is fascism? A table is a physical object. A family is a set of people. What's fascism? Is it a tribal label? Is it a coherent ideology? A (pseudo-)intellectual heritage, with a set of mandatory heroes and demons? A form of government? An economic system?
And then, is there a relatively mechanistic procedure by which one might decide if an individual, or speech, or policy, or symbol, is "fascist"? (Ditto for all those other terms.) The sense I've always gotten is that this is labeling is driven, in practice, by who the speaker/policymaker considers their heroes, rather than any concrete aspect of the speech or policy. What's the Motte?
I'd say it's a cluster in political-ideology space.
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