While we’re waiting to find out what’s going to happen in Brazil, the world’s media is still struggling to explain what just happened in Italy.
Here’s Australia’s establishment voice, The Sydney Morning Herald, giving us some certainty: “The Fascisti represent the best elements in Italy.” There’s nothing to worry about as “not a single organic institution will be challenged or a single function of the state abrogated”.
At least, that was the Herald on November 1 1922, (courtesy of Trove), reporting last century’s first coming of fascism. But it could just as well be today’s complacently conservative media reporting Italy’s latest election.
Here’s Greg Sheridan in The Australian: “Meloni’s program is a perfectly legitimate centre-right amalgam.” In British broadsheet The Telegraph, Allison Pearson wrote: “When I listen to the new Italian prime minister speak, I hear mainstream conservative values that millions of people share.”
Meanwhile, in Sydney’s Daily Telegraph, James Morrow explained those values: “Her politics is … a rebuke to an establishment liberalism that has lost its way since the end of the Cold War and now demands high migration, low emissions, and fealty to woke ‘men can have babies’ gender ideology.”
It’s a step back in time: the SMH’s 1922 “special correspondent” similarly situated the politics of the incoming Mussolini in the conservative mainstream: “Government must be decentralised, finance reformed, education extended, Italy’s foreign influence more decisively felt, and mealy-mouthed internationalism and class war purged forever.”
Ah, “mealy-mouthed internationalism and class war” — the “woke” of a century ago.
For news consumers, it’s disconcerting: a global media with a business model dependent on catastrophising events into “NEWS!” is now “nothing to see here” over the political re-emergence of a defining event of the 20th century.
Here’s the sensible centre, eager to stress the (very real) constraints on Italy’s freedom of movement means the European institutions have it under control. And here’s the conservative opinionistas savouring Meloni’s victory as a win for what they understand as “mainstream conservatism”. Meanwhile, on the left, there’s an it’s-doomed-to-fail smugness with a it’s-not-blackshirt-enough-to-be-fascism nit-picking.
There’s a wilful media blindness that refuses to link the rise of fascism in politics with widespread abuse and violence in society at large and an ahistorical reluctance to grasp that, like all movements, fascism evolved — in its semiotics at least — from that militaristic moment of post-war 1922. It’s been reshaped by the big movements it professes to despise: modernism, post-modernism and even a certain type of feminism.
Meloni is a very modern ethno-nationalist of a particularly nasty stripe, a supporter of the Great Replacement conspiracy theory. Her rhetorical identifiers — woman, family, Christian, Italian — celebrated at face value by conservative writers are a winking symbolism, empowering abuse and violence.
Amid growing diversity, “Italian” is a contested space. As we know in Australia, sport clarifies racism: one of the best footballers of the past decade, Mario Balotelli — born in Italy to Ghanaian parents — has became a particular target for abuse by racist “ultra” fans. He might have played for his country 34 times, but, for them, “he’ll never be fully Italian”. Balotelli now plays in Switzerland.
The 1922 Herald did it better, recognising (even applauding) the violence against the “other” powering the first rise: “The Fascisti cleared the Communists out of the factories, harried them onto the streets, repaid murder by murder and smashed and burned their clubs and newspapers.”
Now, as UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Michelle Bachelet told the Italian Senate earlier this year, the targets for hate are “Italians and non-nationals of many origins” including “women, Muslims, people with disabilities, Jews, LGBTI people and migrants”.
We saw under Trump (and expect to see this week in Brazil) how violence against the “other” increases when the far-right takes office and empowers its supporters. We see too that it’s most dangerous not on the way in, but when it risks going out of office.
To be fair to the 1922 Herald, they were relying — as all Australian papers then did — on a feed out of Fleet Street, in this case the Daily Chronicle. And to be fair to the Chronicle, it had a later life, beginning in the 1930s, as the staunchly anti-fascist News Chronicle (with its correspondent Arthur Koestler captured and jailed by Francoist forces in the Spanish Civil War). It was a 1950s opponent of Britain’s Suez occupation before it sadly ended up absorbed into that most Tory of tabloids, the Daily Mail, in 1960.
A hundred years ago, fascism was just another movement in a far-off country of which even the educated backbench of the Herald would have understood little.
What’s the excuse now?
I accept the argument that spraying the word ‘fascist’ around at every right-winger with whom you disagree is inaccurate, but I think that it’s high time the rest of us started pushing back on that ‘centre-right’ label. What Sheridan and his fellow travellers term ‘centre-right’ is more reasonably referred to as far-right. Tony Abbot and Scott Morrison were PMs ‘governing’ for the far right. (The likes of Cory Bernardi or Amanda Stoker for that matter would easily fit into the category of extremist right-wing.)
There is rarely ever anything central about the people the right wing commentariat refer to as ‘centre right’. Not when those people most commonly referred to this way have spent decades trying to tear down their nations’ governments. Centre-right is a euphemism intended to recast raving anti-state pro-feudalists as somehow normal. They’re not and hopefully never will be.
Spot on. What the media in Australia are trying to sell is a move to US definitions of left and right. The reality in the USA seems to be that there is no real left in existence – except some very small fringe groups. What people anywhere else in the world would call centrist or maybe centre-left are called extreme left in the USA.
Perhaps the end point of all this is the far-right being able to claim to be in the centre.
Italian Politics is a strange beast with no “major” parties, so Government is normally formed by a Coalition of multiple parties that come to an agreement to Govern together. Italian Governments also have a history of not going the distance due to disagreements within the various parties that join together to form a Government.
Meloni only received 26% of the overall Vote, but that was enough for her to win, as her competitors all received less.
Now, not trying to defend her, she will have an extremely hard time if she tries to push through extreme Fascist type laws, because she needs the support of the other parties in the coalition that are not as far Right as she is.
The excuse is convenience.
It’s funny when we look back on fascism throughout history, one question that keeps being asked is “how did they miss the warning signs?” For example, at one point the Nazi party were a nothing party with a tiny following, yet managed to take hold of Germany democratically. Looking at how the language of proto-fascist movements gel with everyday moral language offers a big clue as to how fascism begins to resonate.
The problem, of course, is that the everyday moral language also is used by less odious people with far more benign agendas. When I read this: “When I listen to the new Italian prime minister speak, I hear mainstream conservative values that millions of people share.” I fully agree with that. Very few fascists are going to come in goosestepping while wearing swastikas, and the ones that do tend operate on the fringes for a reason. But the ones that can tap into the more mainstream discontents, they’re the ones we need to watch out for.
It creates the problem that those who sincerely and legitimately argue for those everyday moral positions can be unfairly branded as fascists, and also the problem that when those everyday moral positions are abandoned that groups who espouse them will attract people who want to save them. I think what we’ve witnessed with the Trumpification of the American right and what we’ll witness in liberal democracy after liberal democracy is a rise of populism centred on how modernity has split from everyday morality. We’ll see more centre-right pundits soft-pedal fascism because those proto-fascists say the right things and offer a solution to the perceived problems of the liberalisation of society.
They “…were a nothing party…” until they were banned by the Weimar government in the early 1920s.
The ideas fomented might have been countered had they not been forced underground to ferment and metastasize.
Ten years later they were in government, the largest party but not a majority.
Meloni’s 2019 speech was removed from boobtoob (where so many silly millies seem to find what pass for ideas) – the reason given by that medium was that the heresy of her statement “I am Italian, a woman and a mother”‘s ‘violated community standards’.
Free speech must apply to all or it is not free.
As Assange said “Information needs to be free” – pity about those who insist on it.
This is the problem we’re in at the moment: a clash of fantasies against reality. The apparent trouble with the “everyday morality” of many is that it justifies exclusion or oppression of those members of society that their morality casts as “others”.
People spend too much energy worrying about what other people might be thinking, who their friends are, and what they’re doing together. It’s really none of their business.
? How many media owners are social members of that fascist’s club?