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We and the fascists: (25) fascist

WE AND T HE FASCIST S: (25) FASCIST (LEuropeo December 26, 1974, Massimo Fini interviews Pier Paolo Pasolini, subsequently published in the volume Scritti corsari) ABST RACT: A collection of documents on the radicals libertarian antif ascism: to recognize f ascism means to understand what it has been and above all what it can be. Apparent antif ascism too of ten hides a complicity with those who represented the true continuity with f ascism, the reprise of laws and methods typical of that regime. ( WE AND T HE FASCIST S, T he radicals libertarian antif ascism, edited by Valter Vecellio, pref ace by Giuseppe Rippa - Quaderni Radicali/1, November 1980) T here is today an archeological kind of anti-Fascism which serves as a good pretext f or obtaining a license f or true anti-Fascism. It is an easy kind of anti-Fascism whose target is an archaic Fascism that no longer exists and never will exist again. Let us take as a point of departure Naldinis recent f ilm Fascist. Well then, this f ilm which has posed the problem of the relationship between a leader and a mob has demonstrated that both the leader Mussolini, and that mob are nothing but two archeological f igures. A leader such as he would be absolutely inconceivable today, not just because of the f utility and irrationality of what he says, but because he would simply not f ind any credibility or sphere of action in the modern world. Television would be enough to negate him, to destroy him politically. T he techniques of that leader were ef f ective f rom a platf orm, in an assembly, f aced with a sea of people. It would absolutely not work on a screen. T his is not simply a superf icial, purely technical observation: it is a symbol of the total change in our way of being and communicating with each other. And the same f or the crowd, f or that sea of people. It is enough to lay eyes on those f aces f or a moment to realise that the crowd there no longer exists, that it is dead and buried, that it is ancestral. T his is enough to make us understand that this kind of Fascism cannot come back again. T hat is why a good part of todays anti-Fascism, or what is called anti-Fascism, is either ingenuous, or stupid, or a pretext in bad f aith. Why f ight or pretend to f ight a buried corpse, an archeological remain that cannot scare anyone? In short, it is an anti-Fascism that is entirely convenient and restf ul. I believe deeply that the true Fascism is what the sociologists have much too good-naturedly called the consumer society. T his def inition seems innocuous, purely indicative. Yet the truth is other. If one observes reality well, and if above all one knows how to read the objects, the landscape, the urbanistic structures, and even more, men, one sees that the results of this caref ree consumer society are the results of a dictatorship, real and true Fascism. In Naldinis f ilm we have seen pictures of young men in unif orm With a dif f erence, however. In those days when the young men took of f their unif orms and set out f or home, f or their villages and f ields, they again became Italians of f if ty or a hundred years earlier, bef ore Fascism. Fascism, in reality had made f ools, lackeys of them, and it may have also partly convinced them, but it had not seriously touched their true nature, the depth of their souls, their way of being. T his new Fascism on the other hand has prof oundly changed young people, has touched their inner nature, given them other f eelings, other ways of thinking and living, other cultural models. T hey have not been superf icially denatured as in Mussolinis time when it was a kind of pose, but they have been truly denatured, their souls have been stolen and transf ormed. Which means that this consumer society is a dictatorial society. In short, if the word Fascism ref ers to an overbearing exercise of power, then in the consumer society Fascism has been completely achieved.

T he neo-Fascists have played a marginal role. T hat is why I have said that to reduce anti-Fascism to a struggle against those people is a swindle. For me the problem is much more complex, but also very clear. T he real Fascism, I have said and repeat, is the consumer society, and the Christian Democrats have become, without realising it themselves, todays authentic Fascists. In these circumstances the of f icial Fascists are nothing but the continuation of archeological Fascism, and as such are not to be taken seriously. From this point of view Almirante, (*) although he may have tried to bring himself up to date, is just as ridiculous as Mussolini. What is a more real danger today are the young Fascists f rom the neo-Nazi f ringe who today only count on a f ew thousand f anatics but who tomorrow could become an army. In my opinion Italy is going through a period analogous to what happened in Germany at the dawn of Nazism. In Italy too one sees the levelling and the abandonment of the old, traditional *) Giorgio Almirante, the Secretary of the neo-Fascist MSI (Movimento Sociale Italiano). peasant values, regional and characteristic, which was the humus on which Nazi Germany grew. T here is an enormous mass of people who f ind themselves in a state of f lux, in a state where values are imponderable, but which has not yet acquired the new ones generated by industrialisation. T he people is becoming lower middle class, but is not yet either the one or the other. For me the nucleus of the Nazi army was just this hybrid mass, this was the human material which in Germany produced the Nazis. And it is this very risk that Italy is running. With regard to the f all of Fascism, f irst of all there is a contingent psychological f act. T he victory and the enthusiasm f or it, the renewal of hope, the sense of f reedom regained and of a whole way of being new had made people better af ter the liberation. Yes, better, purely and simply. But then there is the other more real f act: the Fascism of that time, experienced by the people who were anti-Fascist and who had gone through twenty years of war and the Resistance, was all things told a better Fascism than todays kind. Twenty years of that old Fascism did not, I think, ever create as many victims as todays Fascism has done. Horrible things like the massacres of Milan, Brescia and Bologna (*) had never happened in those *) All terrorist bomb attacks on the civilian population. twenty years. T here was the Matteotti (*) killing, true, and there were other victims on both sides, but the aggressive arrogance, the violence, the nastiness, the inhumanity, the glacial coldness of the crimes committed f rom December 12, 1969 onwards had never been seen in Italy. T hat is why there is more hatred in the air, more scandal, less capacity f or f orgiveness Only that this hatred - sometimes in good f aith and other times in perf ectly bad f aith - is directed at the wrong target, at the archeological Fascists rather than at the real power holders. Lets take the Fascist lead. I have an idea, perhaps a bit novelistic but I believe it is correct, of the way things work. T he plot is this: the men in power, and I could perhaps even name names without f ear of being very wrong - in any case, several of the men who have been governing us f or thirty years - f irst were in charge of the strategy of tension against the Communists. T hen, once the worries about subversion in 68 and of an immediate danger f rom the Communists were over, the same identical persons put into action the anti-Fascist strategy of tension. T he terrorist attacks were thus all perpetrated by the same people. First they perpetrated the Piazza Fontana massacre and accused lef t-wing extremists, then they perpetrated the Brescia and Bologna massacres and blamed the Fascists in the *) Giacomo Matteotti, an anti-Fascist Socialist leader kidnapped and killed by Fascist squads in 1924.

hasty and desperate attempt to reconstruct that virginal anti-Fascism that they so badly needed af ter the ref erendum and the ref erendum campaign to continue controlling the power situation as if nothing had happened. With regard to the episodes on intolerance that you have recalled, I would not call them intolerance exactly. Or at least it is not intolerance typical of the consumer society. In reality they are cases of ideological terrorism. Unf ortunately the lef t are presently living in an atmosphere of terrorism that began in 68 and continues until today. I would not say that a lef tist prof essor who, corrupted by a certain lef tist chauvinism wont give a diploma to a rightist student, is intolerant. I think he is terrif ied. Or a terrorist. But this kind of ideological terrorism has only a f ormal relationship to Fascism. Both the one and the other are terrorists, it is true. But beneath the schemata of these sometimes identical f orms, one must recognise prof oundly dif f erent realities. Otherwise one will inevitably champion the theory of the opposing extremisms or Stalinism equals Fascism. But I have called these episodes of terrorism and not intolerance because, according to me, true intolerance is that of the consumer society, of permissiveness conceded f rom above, desired by those above, which is the truest, worst, most insidious, the coldest and most ruthless f orm of intolerance. Because it is intolerance masquerading as tolerance, because it is not real, because it can be revoked whenever the power holders f eel the need. Because it is the true Fascism f rom which then comes the Fascism of manners: useless, hypocritical and basically welcome to the regime.