Italians are not sheep. Emanuele Cremaschi/Getty Images
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On a warm night in January, Romans staged a revival of their fascist past. At an event in the southern suburb of Acca Larentia, commemorating three fascist youths killed in 1978, hundreds of men in dark shirts were photographed doing a Nazi salute. The incident was immediately condemned by liberals. Elly Schlein, an opposition leader, said it reminded her of 1924, the year Mussolini tightened his grip on power. But the prime minister herself stayed quiet — as well she might. As recently as 2021, Giorgia Meloni actually praised the victims of the 1978 killings, calling their deaths “a tragedy where no culprit has ever been found” and “a wound that has never healed”.
To understand Meloni’s ambivalence, and indeed the brazenness of the new blackshirts, you must do more than understand the turmoil of the Years of Lead in the Seventies and Eighties, or even the bloody legacy of the Second World War. Rather, you must instead grasp an idea: Italiani brava gente; Italians are good folk. It is one of the founding principles of the modern nation, expressed in books, films and even street signs, and is now burrowed deep into the popular consciousness. And there it still lingers, excusing the crimes of the past, and justifying the politics of the present.
It has its origins in the 19th century: even then Italian politicians saw themselves as different from their European rivals. Not for them the gore-soaked victories of the French in Algeria or the Germans in Namibia. In 1885, the country’s foreign minister justified its conquests in East Africa by claiming that Italy couldn’t remain on the sidelines “in the battle between civilisation and barbarism”. Encouraged, perhaps, by the cultural glories of earlier centuries, or else by a national reputation for conviviality, these ideas soon trickled downstream. In one 1902 story, for instance, the popular adventure writer Emilio Salgari introduced his readers to a character freed from pirates by Italian sailors. “Me love Italians,” the “Little Moor” stammers in pidgin. “Italians good people.” The truth, it hardly needs saying, was rather less simple. Italy may have been late to the colonisation game, but they got stuck in by the late-19th century, and in much the manner of their European rivals. In 1911, for example, their troops butchered at least 1,000 people in Libya, revenge for an earlier massacre during the Italo-Turkish War. They may have gifted the world Boccaccio and Brunelleschi — but Italians could be vicious.
Even so, a sense of national mildness endured through the foundational experience of modern Italy: fascism. He may have proclaimed that it’s better to live one day as a lion than 100 years as a sheep, but in practice Benito Mussolini saw his compatriots as rather less ferocious. “The Italian race is a race of sheep,” he admitted on the eve of Italy’s entry into the Second World War. “Eighteen years aren’t enough to transform it: you need 180 years, or maybe 180 centuries.” This self-conscious moderation is reflected elsewhere, particularly if you examine fascist propaganda. After Italy’s invasion of Abyssinia in 1935, one cartoon shows a group of baby-soldiers light-heartedly singing. Elsewhere, cartoonists gently mocked the infatuation of the conquerors with local girls. The Ethiopians themselves were drawn as crude racist stereotypes — but it’s hard to imagine Goebbels tolerating similar banter in the General Government.
But the best explanation for the persistence of Italiani brava gente is the way Italians could compare themselves to Nazi Germany. As the Holocaust became the axial moral crime of Western civilisation, it helped that Italian fascism was not intrinsically antisemitic. Through the Twenties, some enthusiastic fascists were themselves Jews, while Mussolini dismissed Hitler’s obsessions as late as 1932. And while his regime eventually aligned itself with Nazi racial theories, the Duce never organised industrial slaughter on the scale of Treblinka or Auschwitz. Until Italy’s surrender in 1943, Italian officers generally refused to back the genocidal instincts of their allies — at least when it came to Jews. This was especially notable in Yugoslavia. In the portion of the country occupied by Italy, Jews found a refuge from Nazi and Ustashe destruction, and could apparently even celebrate Yom Kippur.
None of this washes away the fields of blood undoubtedly spilt by Mussolini’s regime. Spurred by anti-Slavic bigotry, and irredentist claims in Slovenia and Dalmatia, the Italians deported some 18% of Ljubljana’s population to concentration camps. At one site, on the Croatian island of Rab, the death rate may have been worse than Buchenwald. Italian behaviour in Abyssinia was just as dreadful, with the use of mustard gas the most infamous crime among many. Nor were Italians free from blame when it came to the Holocaust: at least 200 Roman Jews were denounced or arrested by their gentile neighbours.
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SubscribeFar right politics is the natural reaction to progressive authoritarianism. Tear down family, alienate Europeans by blaming them for every wrong, and shame males for generations. You get movements which are going to toss progressives on the ash heap of history.
Therefore any possible far-Right culpability is removed because, in this rhetorical sleight of hand, “THEY started it”.
A eternal alibi, or get-out-of-hell-free card, placating the rump of your conscience.
Will you be erecting any more straw men, because Arthur said none of the words you’re putting in his mouth. The “far right,” whatever that is, is not culpable for the excesses of the left; it’s just a reaction to them. A little self-awareness goes a long way.
Please. Back at ya. That’s just an empty assertion that’s made a comeback–and acquired a few new strawmen–in recent years.
Of course extreme Reactionary movements are some form of reaction to perceived enemies of the society, church, or state. But not therefore warranted or proportionate.
Get back to me when you are ready to see or perhaps admit that–to the limited extent such terms have stable meaning–the far-right very much does exist, a does the far-left (which you’re already able to acknowledge, and like to emphasize, a lot).
Both camps are dangerous and vile and I refuse to align myself with one or the other in some head-and-heartsick culture war. Denounce ALL extremism and political violence.
There is no right or left. It’s all up or down. Our would-be masters are using propaganda, mob rule, and the entire machinery of state to fence us in. I believe they will ultimately fail, but unfortunately, there’s not much we can do for now except ride it out. The West as we know it no longer exists. Very soon it will be every man for himself.
A Hobbesian nightmare on Earth huh?
Sounds like an apocalyptic article of faith that may connect to the fevered prophesies found in Revelations.
I guess all extreme measures are on the table if a culture you’re disgusted with can be pronounced dead while it still has a (somewhat faint) pulse. Are you simply holding your breath until the Rapture at this point?
*Unless I hear a less doomsaying, less nihilist-adjacent word from you: I will take your non-response to be a de facto “pretty much”. I really hope that my peremptory challenge is much farther from the mark than I fear it is.
Keep your feet on the Earth, sir, the one God made and loves.
Actually it only seems “far-right” by comparison. In reality the reaction is a self-protective normal.
In a reactionary, ideologically-captured worldview like the one you express at UnHerd, everything you do, or could do, comes pre-justified, or is done in the interest of self-protection. I don’t know who or how you are IRL, but please careful you don’t violate your own better conscience for the sake of The Cause or father-land.
This is better directed at those who claim that Jews are evil colonizers.
Ok, sure. But it also fits in response to the totality of comments made by the above commenter with a Jewish surname (or screenname).
Nevertheless, I overdid it there and in several other places on this comment board. I am soul-deep sick of the now commonplace “political right is moral right: QED” type of view expressed above. I went into oppositional polemical mode, which is both a rhetorical and “social” misstep.
I read a novel years ago about the relationship between two PoWs held by Italians during the war.
Obviously it was fiction but it presented a particularly unsettling picture of the behaviour of the Italian guards and soldiers; a mixture of laziness, mindless viciousness, boredom, childish nonsense, lack of organisation and any sense of purpose or structure.
It struck me at the time that I’d have preferred the Germans any day.
“a mixture of laziness, mindless viciousness, boredom, childish nonsense, lack of organisation and any sense of purpose or structure”
That could easily be a description of the bulk of prison guards anywhere at any time, really.
A man I knew was a prisoner of war of both the Italians and Germans. He said the Italians were mean and petty, the Germans fairer and more reasonable. It’s only personal experience, of course.
This was my late fathers experience as a POW as well, though through the G8 protests and the anti-globalisation movement in the early 2000’s, I came to know many young italians(and some olderones) and liked them.
Of course concentration camp victims, would say the Nazis.
IDK. Kind of a meandering essay. If hundreds of young Italians were recently doing the Nazi salute, I want to know more about it. The author didn’t bother linking any photos or news accounts. The history of Italian behavior in WWIi doesn’t have much bearing on politics today IMO.
Agreed. Came across like the first draft of an undergraduate’s history essay: “credible draft but thesis should be more clear, claims more concise”. Admit I’m influenced by the author’s photo on that.
Andrea, like all Marxist friends in my youth, you seem determined, to invert the words of the Bing Crosby classic, to “accentuate the negative, eliminate the positive … spread joy to the minimum.” And in a phrase, to live in chronic discontent.
It may seem brave and noble, but is it perhaps a rather subversive path to personal moral ascendancy, trashing the very people who love you along the way?
I’ve just moved to Italy, and I assure you that from an outsider’s point of view, moderation is part of the culture. But by focusing not on real culture, but superficial political ideology, which you believe to be deeper, you merely trash that more profound reality in the cause of making a personal reputation. Like Mussolini minus roots.
Yes. This kind of snotty stereotyping really belongs in the Guardian. You expect a bit more nuance in Unherd.
Yes, he never asks: “Why Fas*ism?” People all over the world suddenly found themselves clinging to that word and what it represents. Was it an action on their part, or a reaction? And if a reaction, to what? The answer is this young man’s cherished Marxism.
Michael, absolute Bingo! German socialist extremism in the 1920s -> directly to fascism. Hitler documented in Mein Kampf his path to power. He learned his propaganda tactics from the left – and he might have added, from Madison Avenue and the German army in WWI, though the former came into greater play later – and inverted their corrosive self-contempt. You can’t build anything good by demonising your own people, nor of course by overreacting with mad dreams of dominance. Nothing wrong with honesty, but it’s never measured realistically against the alternatives, which are axiomatically imagined to be better, when they most surely aren’t. Creative moderation is always key.
But not in the comments on this category of article, political content not quality or style-wise. Not anymore. Not when Illiberal Nationalists who say they “believe in free speech” are mentioned.
“Those who do not honor the correct type of free speech should be silenced” —Demagogues From Time Immemorial (Left, Right, and Center)
She is young to judge by the picture and therefore badly educated.
I think it’s a bloke !
Thank you, i’d read the article when it first came out but hadn’t bothered to post a comment, that’s how worthless it is. My sentiments are summarised here aptly.
Why should Meloni not say that the murder of 3 young men was ‘a tragedy where no culprit has ever been found” and “a wound that has never healed”.?
Because it’s important to taint anyone who opposes the onward march of open borders globalism in this way.
Or, in Mirror-Image World, to support or at least minimize excess and menace–when it comes from one’s nationalist friends around the globe.
Because such bloody events have occurred many times over the decades, but she chose to emphasize and dramatize this supposed “national wound”, thus allying herself with f a s c i s t revivalists, but with barely-plausible deniability.
Perhaps you can next ask, ever so incredulously, what’s wrong with hundreds lining up in wargame formation to do the “Romano-Deutsch” salute, in honor of the same 1978 victims. After all, they have never been, and could never be, a bad as You-Know-Who–from whom the salute actually comes.
I suppose you’d like to see the Italian flag of green, white and red include a black stripe and red triangle ?
I hate extremism on the Left and Right. Perhaps that’s where we most differ?
That’s not really coming through here AJ
I can tell it’s not with many. I admit my reactions are inflected with dismay and bitter irony this morning. In my daily life here in Silicon Valley, I have occasion to oppose Left-wing extremism all the time, and often take the bait. At the NYT too.
Here’s a comment I made on a Judith Butler interview at the so-called Gray Lady yesterday:
shadowlark
san josé March 24
@Elliot In the broadest sense, wearing clothes in public even when it’s warm is socially “prescribed” or “constructed”. So is the use of complex and abstract language. Like gendered behavior, it is not therefore without SOME biological basis or influence of human nature: for most; statistically speaking; with frequent divergence and major overlap.
I don’t think the correct response to historical mistreatment of gender nonconformity is to pathologize conformity. Let’s continue to question and challenge norms, absolutely. We should be able to do that without instantly concluding that all our social norms and standards are, at best, an arbitrary sham.
Let the pendulum swing back toward true equalitarianism that neither privileges traditional OR non-traditional gender expression. Not compulsory heterosexuality, not queer superiority. My perspective may be unpopular on this comment board, but I don’t think it deserves to be reduced to a label like “Protestant, capitalist, retrograde”
I self-identify as none of the above.
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UnHerd has always been a bit to the right of my overall sociopolitics. But over the last 16 months, this website has been more and more of a way-Right safe space echo chamber where dissent is too often shouted down. (I know many Conservatives feel the same way about the MSM). I’m not claiming censorship or mob-rule just noting that real conversation across–or outside of–our ever-more-starkly drawn cultural fault lines has become pretty rare here (with numerous heartening exceptions). Elsewhere in the chatterati too.
I am a centrist contrarian, a non-joiner with altruistic leanings, sort of an extreme moderate. I do not like back-slapping mutual-congratulations societies or rah-rah partisanship. I’ll let this comment board be now.
She has her OWN FACE imprinted on her smartphone case. as she takes a selfie. Not even an attempt at disguising her narcissism. Ooof! These are the times we live in.
Even feigned humility is so 20th century.
They could sell trading cards called the Illiberal Nationalist All-Stars, and sell them to quite a few on this comment board.
First series features: Orban, Erdogan, Modi, Putin, Meloni, Duterte, Marcos Jr., and DJT. Collect ’em all!
Trump would use his as a screensaver and carry the card in his wallet.
This cultural moment comes pre-satirized for your protection.
Horrifying to think that things have gone so far downhill that politicians are narcissists.
Italy certainly has a complicated and mixed history through WWII.
They didn’t actually fight as poorly as the mainstream history suggests – just very unevenly (like the French in 1940 – some very good, some verey poor).
And there certainly was some resistance – the famous cyclist Gino Bartali helpd a lot of Italian Jews escape to Switzerland.
The modern far-left ever more desperate to find some, any, evidence of a far right.
No hysteria or reductio ad Stalinum on the Right though. I must be a delusional, far-Left ideologue to even imagine such a thing. Yeah?
Extremist libertarian capitalists don’t exist in any meaningful numbers. Far left ideologies that embarrass the left and thus get slandered as “far right” are a dime a dozen though. Read some quotes by Hitler and observe how resolutely left wing he was. The idea his movement was “far right” cannot survive contact with the historical evidence: it was nearly identical to the USSR.
Idiotic article, and said by somebody who’s Italian, is living in Italy at the moment, is a historian by profession and has always been left-leaning though now “politically homeless” like many readers of Unherd. Italy has a long history of violent extremism at both ends of the political spectrum. We don’t impute the Red Brigades’ crimes to the Left, and by the same token we should not impute Far Right’s crimes to the Right. Presenting Giorgia Meloni as a neo-fascist by implication is nonsensical. Fascists do not accept the rules of democracy. She does, and so do the parties in her coalition. So do the millions of Italians who voted for those parties.
What is the difference between a ‘neo-fascist’ and a ‘fascist’? That is a genuine question if anyone knows please do tell. I certainly get the impression that Italian politics has always had, and continues to have, a strong fascistic/authoritarian element, both ‘right’ and ‘left’, perhaps because the Italian character, if there is such a thing, creates such a chaotic political climate that a strong leader, rising above democratic processes, is perceived as the best solution. Fascists indeed ‘do not accept the rules of democracy’, but in a democratic system they need to use those rules to get into a position powerful enough to subvert them.
“ hundreds of men in dark shirts were photographed doing a Nazi salute.” In a country of 55M odd. Hundreds! Give me a break. The better article would have been ridiculing this small pathetic gathering of small pathetic men.
How many neo-fascist salutes per million citizens does it to take to impress you?
That’s a long way to go in an attempt to create a caricature of a person the author either dislikes or has been told by others to dislike. There is no shortage of current-day black and brown shirts. We see them on college campuses, we see them toppling statues and defacing artwork, we see them marching in support of a terror organization, and we hear them blaming everything and everyone for racism and colonialism.
It must be awful to some that the supply of racists and fascists and assorted other ists and phones is not keeping up with the demand, leaving the left to engage in projection. Meloni ran on god, country, and family, the un-holy trinity as far as the left is concerned. Her rise and that of others who are routinely painted as ‘right-wing’ and/or ‘extremist’ has quite a bit to do with the creeping authoritarianism being engineered on the left, the sort that threatens farmers, that wants to dictate fuel and heating sources, and the kind that has imported millions hostile to native cultures. Perhaps a look in the mirror would be helpful.
“For her part, Hannah Arendt claimed that just 10% of Italian Jews died in the Holocaust. We now know the figure was closer to 20%.”
Here is the red herring and Meloni gets it. The genocide of Jews who have religious, cultural and historical ties to Christian Europe, is a REGRET WRIT LARGE, a crime against humanity that Europeans enabled, and a shame still borne by the children and grandchildren of Nazis and their compatriots.
The repulsion of Islam and the “human garbage” it brings with it is a different movement entirely. The murder and persecution of Jews was an active genocide the likes of which humanity still hasn’t seen, even in Gaza, Cambodia or Darfur. Today’s “right wing” leaders are completely different from fascists of the 20th Century and any comparison is simply wrongheaded propaganda. Today’s conservative leaning and populist leaders are the result of a resistance movement against the importation of Islam and the “human garbage” it brings. The reason I put “human garbage” in quotations is because this is how Imam Tawhidi labels many Islamic migrants into Europe. He is hated by Islamists and the Muslim Brotherhood but here is one of his quotes:
“Muslims who are fighting for Palestine are absolutely confused,” he said. “Palestine is Jewish land.” Tawhidi went on to call political Islam “a disease,” and accused America’s first two Muslim women in Congress, Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib, of “bringing a Hamas agenda to the U.S. Congress.”
https://theintercept.com/2019/06/25/mohamad-tawhidi-far-right/
You put that inhumane term in quotes but still used it three times. The language is eerily reminiscent of the “vermin” and “cockroach” talk used by Nazis and Hutus during their respective “ethnic-cleansing” campaigns.
I admit I found the article you linked to, with a clip of Tawhidi speaking, intriguing in its way. Charismatic and likable guy, at first glance.
You seem convinced that today’s Western Nationalists raise no real echoes of the pogroms of the early 20th century, let alone the worst horrors of all, under the Nazis. Why are you so re-assured?
I don’t see that movements that begin by de-humanizing entire large groups tend to confine themselves to hating and “cleansing themselves” of that group alone.
A strange mix of politics in Italy. Mention of CasaPound reminds me of a grainy video available on youtube.
A young man, back to camera, is declaiming, in Italian, a poem. His audience an elderly gentleman with a thick Mosaic beard.
The poem,,’what thou lovest best shall not be reft from thee…’
The old man… Ezra Pound, of course.
The young acolyte… Pier Paolo Pasolini.
Figure that one out!
Come on Andrea,
Italian fascism has grown old and become toothless.
The fascist salute is not meant for a “duce” nor is it the “Hitlergruss”. It is an anxious and neurotic salute to the past in a shrinking Italian demography.
If you think that Italians were not so “brava gente” , so do any nation involved in the second world war, even the Swiss. The problem with Italy is that it changed alliance in 1943, so history was blurred. The more so when it became the US aircraft carrier in the Mediterranean.
Where are the hordes of fanatic young males in their twenties full of testosterone eager to conquer the world? Not in Italy any more.
Maybe South of it?
Have an Italian friend from Bari.Her family say that Mussolini did more to help the poor than any Italian govt since. They support Meloni and hope she will help the have nots in Italy.
And “at least he made the trains run on time!”.
There was brutal repression and about half a million Italians died during WWII, most of them surely on the poorer side as these thing go.
Mining for upside in one of history’s worst demagogues is a misguided expedition, and doesn’t provide good rhetorical support for Meloni, whom I estimate to be much saner and much less extreme than Il Duce.
In a Roman suburb “hundreds of men in dark shirts were photographed doing a Nazi salute”. So how did the author ascertain that the salute was Nazi? I rather suspect that it was actually il saluto romana.
The post war ‘democratic’ victory involved the slaughter of perhaps 30000 men and women summarily executed by leftists in the 2 years after fighting had stopped. Not worth a mention by the author though. After all, only the left are virtuous and only the right are violent. Apparently
The author is an American New Yorker of Egyptian extraction. Did you really think they would be right wing?
So bitter, about everything. What kind of culture produces that?
Every country has done a lot of bad things in its history. So what? Here’s the author’s ridiculous line of reasoning as I see it. First most of the Italian Fascists from eighty years ago were very bad people, and they willingly aided the cause of people even worse. Second, Georgia Meloni is also a fascist because she said she sympathized with murder victims who were fascists. So, because fascism is bad and Georgia Meloni is a fascist, then all her policies are also bad and also fascist. Therefore, restricting immigration is bad and fascist. That’s the only message I could glean from this wandering exercise in whataboutery.
This scab shows every promise of being picked by the left for the next hundred years or so. The author, by the way, misused “axial.”