Every year, around this time, Mussolini calendars appear in newspaper kiosks up and down Italy, offering a year’s supply of photos of the fascist leader.
They are often tucked away with the specialist magazines, but according to the manager of one firm that prints them, they are much in demand.
“We are selling more than we did 10 years ago,” said Renato Circi, the head of Rome printer Gamma 3000. “I didn’t think it was still a phenomenon, but young people are now buying them too.”...
Among his adherents today are the masked, neo-fascist youths who mounted raids on Rome schools this autumn to protest against education cuts, lobbing smoke bombs in corridors and yelling “Viva Il Duce”.The Raw Story
Il Duce is back: New reverence for fascist dictator Benito Mussolini spreads across Italy
Tom Kington | The Guardian
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ReplyDeleteI hope no one thinks fascist type policies are the sole preserve of the political right. The Guardian (a left of centre newspaper) has a distinct aversion to free speech.
ReplyDeleteAlso there is also a law in the UK (and this is scarcely believable) making it illegal to insult anyone (Section 5 of the Public Order Act). See:
http://reformsection5.org.uk/2012/10/rowan-atkinson-rs5-video-goes-viral/
And the proportion of left of centre politicians who want Section 5 retained is twice as high as the equivalent proportion of right of centre politicians.
Now why would politicians want the right to arrest people for a trifling and “near impossible to define” offence? Well it gives politicians and the authorities the right to arbitrary arrest, doesn’t it? The right to arbitrary arrest is exactly what Mussolini, Saddam Hussein, Pol Pot and every dictator wants.
Being obsessed by History ("bunk" as the yankee, more realistic Ford once aptly defined) Europeans are always fantazising over possible re-runs of their terrible past.
ReplyDeleteThey forget that the epoch when Europe was at the center of world events is gone, never to return. The continent has been declining in relative terms for decades - economically, demographically, militarily - and the answer of the European elites to that is the EU experiment. A shrewd, neoliberal project designed to concentrate wealth at the top while preventing the risk of popular revolt by scaring the electorates into submission via permanently low growth, massive unemployment and the migration of power from the sovereigns to unaccountable Federal-type bodies.
Contrary to what the Guardian may say, the Political system of Italy is now safely controlled by the Eurocratic center in Brussels and Frankfurt. They even fire Prime Ministers as soon as they start to behave in unpredictable mode towards the Interests of the eurocrats. There ain't going to be any Mussolini-type replays - the guy is about as much relevant for today as Julius Caesar. Well-meaning English media should relax. Italy is simply a poster child of the neoliberal experiment in Europe.
History doesn't repeat but it does rhyme, to paraphrase Mark Twain. This is a disturbing influence, even though it is still relatively minor. But if the neoliberal program continues, it will grow. Hitler and Mussolini did not come out of nowhere. The issues were already pretty far in running their course when they took over. Moreover, when Hitler and Mussolini took charge the situation did improve over what the people had been experiencing. It took awhile for fascism to play out. So I am not "worried" about this yet but I am concerned.
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