No Fascist Groove Thing

Antonio Scurati's Mussolini

I’m currently reading Antonio Scurati’s docu-novel M: Son of the Century. It’s a beast of a book, and longer than it needs to be. But it’s also a spellbinding account of the rise of fascism in Italy between 1919 and 1925, which feels disturbingly relevant to our own fractured political times.

Scurati reminds me of Eric Vuillard, in the way that he imaginatively re-inhabits history and merges fiction and documentary. His book is based on prodigious research, with actual historical quotes buttressing each chapter But Scurati is a creative writer, with a novelist’s ability to transport 21st century readers into a past that many of us have forgotten or never knew existed, or simply took for granted.

It’s not a pleasant sensation to spend more than 700 pages inside fascism’s head, but that’s where Scurati takes you, and for anyone wanting to understand the diseased politics of our own times, it’s worth sticking it out.

As the title suggests, Scurati focuses his attention primarily on Mussolini himself, and depicts the rise of the fascist movement in its early phases from the point of view of the future dictator. Scurati’s Mussolini is a loathsome and repugnant character, a cunning Machiavellian bully surrounded by a cast of equally despicable monstrosities: The priapic war junkie Gabriele D’Annunzio; the vain thug Italo Balbo, and the hysterical Futurist Marinetti are among the psychopaths, killers, and fanatics who make Tommy Robinson and the EDL look like Snow White and the Seven Dwarves.

The Italian political class is fatally unable to deal with what was then a historical novelty - a militarised mass political movement for which, as Scurati explains it ‘politics is a form of civil war against one’s adversaries portrayed as enemies of the nation’. Only the doomed socialist politician Giacomo Matteotti emerges with any integrity from the politicians who succumb all too easily to Mussolini’s appeal.

Scurati shows the factors that enabled that appeal: a bitter post-war ‘victory’ that was not accompanied by any tangible achievements; the vengeful paranoia of the lower-middle classes as living standards collapsed; the collusion between the aristocracy and fascist thuggery in suppressing working class militancy and peasant activism.

As historically-specific as it is, Scurati’s fascist movement shares many of the features we have come to associate with its 21st century variants: the contempt for liberalism; the truth-twisting dishonesty; the primitive machismo and misogyny; the fake-victimhood; its chest-beating nationalist chauvinism; the sadism and violence.

To those who still think that Italian fascism was relatively mild in comparison with Nazism, Scurati’s unsparing account of the reign of terror imposed by the squadristi ‘extermination groups’ in the Italian countryside is a necessary corrective. These were years when truckloads of fascist ‘extermination squads’ went out at night to murder, torture and humiliate peasant league activists, socialists; when schoolteachers were shot dead in front of their kids, and even MPs could be picked up in the street and beaten up, and in the case of Matteotti, brazenly murdered.

The Black Shirts, like the Freikorps and the Nazis, emerged from the brutalising experience of trench warfare and industrialised mass killing. Their cadres were already steeped in blood even before they waged ‘war’ in the streets against the leftists and liberals they regarded as traitors.

21st century pre-fascism, if I can call it that, has different sources: sitting room sofas, pubs, thinktanks, person shooter games, whackjob podcasts, alt-right websites, Twitter, and YouTube conspiracy videos, MAGA rallies and the occasional gun club. It doesn’t have any equivalent to the mass violence of the squadristi - yet.

The January 6th rioters, the Proud Boys, the Charlottesville Nazis, and the anti-Black Lives Matter mobilisations are perhaps the nearest thing we have to the squadristi, but that shouldn’t be room for complacency. It’s easy to laugh when infantile poseurs like Liz Truss talk of using ‘bigger bazookas’ against the left, but as insolently stupid as she is, she knows there is an audience for talk like this that is more serious than she is.

Like its twentieth century predecessors, it’s an audience steeped in paranoia, hatred, and faux-victimhood, that dreams of purges, deportations, detention camps, civil wars, and a reckoning with the ‘libs’, the ‘communists’, the ‘cultural Marxists’ and the wokeist elites.

Like Mussolini’s fasci, they’re tough guys, or they think they are - real men who never bend the knee, and despise the ‘feminazis’ who make men ‘soft’. They gather in herds -digital or in the flesh - and think and behave like cultists, projecting their toxic political aspirations onto freakish monstrosities and political fakirs like Milei, Trump, or Abascal.

Like Mussolini’s fascists, these are movements that use the instruments of liberal democracy to destroy democracy and bend its institutions to their will. Descendants of a tradition that concocted fake Jewish conspiracies as a justification for murder and genocide, they now cheerlead the Israeli Sparta for murdering Palestinians who they regard only as ‘Muslim terrorists’ and condemn those who protest these killings as ‘hate mobs.’

Even in a world where communism is virtually non-existent in comparison with 1919, these ‘populists’ see communists and ‘cultural Marxists’ everywhere, and sinister ‘elite’ conspiracies everywhere. Take the response to Trump’s sordid court case last week. Found guilty by a jury on all 34 counts, the Trump-creature immediately declared himself the victim of a witch-hunt and proclaimed America to be a fascist state.

His entire party, accompanied by the usual media outlets, swung in right behind him, to the point when anyone could be forgiven for thinking that Trump really is Mother Theresa or Jesus. There is, at present, not the slightest indication that Republican voters will be swayed by the verdict. Over here, Nigel Haw Haw, Russell Brand, and the blonde custard man who used to be our ‘prime minister’ all described the verdict as a ‘hit-job’, because these are men who can smell the fascist stench and hope to benefit from it.

They know that if Trump-Jesus wins, his administration will be an administration bent on vengeance and retribution; that he will intimidate and seek to silence any institutions that refuse to bow to him. They know that Trump has promised to ‘crush’ pro-Palestinian demonstrators, and use the National Guard to deport 11-15 million immigrants he regards as criminal ‘invaders.’

They know, but they don’t care, and the terrible tragedy of our times is that too many other people don’t care either.

Telemeloni

Antonio Scurati does, and M: Son of the Century is an urgent warning to the present, from a country governed by a party that derives directly from the fascist tradition, and which has developed a fondness for strategic lawsuits against public participation (SLAPPs) to shut down criticisms.

Roberto Saviano was recently fined 1000 euros for calling Meloni and Matteo Salvini ‘bastards’ over their condemnation of NGO-run ships carrying out search-and-rescue in the Mediterranean. In April a university professor was accused of defamation by one of Meloni’s ministers because she accused him of sounding like a ‘Gauleiter’ when he alluded to the ‘white replacement’ theory. That case was thrown out last month, but it probably won’t be the last.

On April 25 Antonio Scurati recorded a monologue for the RAI tv network on the anniversary of Italy’s Liberation Day, in which he described fascism as ‘an irredeemable phenomenon of systematic political violence characterized by murder and massacres’ and accused the ‘post-fascist ruling group’ of rewriting history rather than repudiating its neo-fascist past.

Scurati’s indictment left no room for ambiguity:

After having avoided the topic during the electoral campaign, Italian Prime Minister, Giorgia Meloni , when forced to address it on the occasion of historical anniversaries, obstinately stuck to the ideological line of her neo-fascist culture of origin: she distanced herself from the indefensible brutalities perpetrated by the regime (the persecution of the Jews) without ever repudiating the fascist experience as a whole. She blamed the massacres carried out with the collaboration of Italian fascists on the Nazis alone. And finally, she ignored the fundamental role of the Resistance in the rebirth of Italy.

Scurati also criticized Meloni for not using the word ‘anti-fascism’ in her own Liberation Day address, and insisted that until this word was ‘pronounced by those who govern us, the spectre of fascism will continue to haunt the house of Italian democracy.’

Brave words, but Italians never heard them, because RAI didn’t broadcast Scurati’s monologue that night, or any night. It was taken off air, and that is one reason why the RAI broadcasting service is known to its critics as ‘telemeloni’. But Scurati is right: anti-fascism should be our watchword too. There is no magic cure to the disease that western democracies are suffering from, but these movements cannot be defeated by ‘centrist’ parties that ape their nationalist positions, engage in performative demonstrations of liberal toughness on immigration and ‘welfare scroungers’ - or by authoritarian purges to cover up collusion in the Gaza massacres.

Nor can they be defeated by the left alone. We need broad progressive alliances and movements, nationally and internationally, that can reach as far as possible across the spectrum, to combat the anti-democratic forces that are vying for power across the world. Few people will be reminded that this is not happening.

In America, the Biden government is drifting with shocking complacency towards defeat, draining vital votes and support because of its abject complicity in the Gaza massacres, and putting up a leader who has long since passed his sell-by date. In the European Union, Ursula von der Leyen has spent the last year trying in vain to cultivate a political alliance with Georgia Meloni. In Spain, the supposedly mainstream conservative party has colluded with Vox fascists in presenting Sanchez as a traitor and in the vicious character-assassination of his wife. In France, Marine Le Pen’s National Rally is poised to make huge gains in European elections and possibly French elections too.

And here in the UK, the Labour Party continues to marginalize and humiliate the left as it seeks to win from the centre - seemingly unaware that the centre is no longer what it used to be. It’s all very well getting banner headlines in the Sun promising to cut net migration, announcing that a Labour government may also ‘offshore’ asylum seekers, or promising to ‘work with whoever is elected president.’

But if Trump wins, the UK will find itself adrift - caught between a European Union that it has cut itself off from - dominated potentially, by the far right, and a fascistic Trump administration whose only interest in the UK will be what it can get for itself. It will face potential challenges, not from a chastened Conservative Party that has returned to ‘normal’, but from a radicalized party emboldened by a Trump victory.

In these circumstances, a Labour government will have to decide what side it is actually on, and show leadership, vision and principle in the face of this global anti-democratic authoritarian onslaught. Scurati’s brave book is a painful reminder of what can happen when democracies fail to do that. I would recommend that Labour politicians read it over the summer holidays, following what I hope will be a Tory wipe-out.

But I suspect that such a recommendation would fall on deaf ears.