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David Broder is an American journalist and editor, currently the European Editor of Jacobin. Broder has also written for several other publications, including The Guardian, Dissent Magazine, and New Statesman, with a particular focus on labour movements and the political left. 

In this excerpt from his book Mussolini's Grandchildren: Fascism in Contemporary Italy (Pluto Press, 2023), Broder argues that references to historical fascism in Italy are part of a fight to determine the boundaries of patriotism, of political legitimacy and who gets to define them, rather than a simple honouring of the past.

Even as the far right insists that others must “accept” their dead from World War II as worthy of public commemoration, their historical memory can also become self-referential and intolerant of outside interference. Illustrative was a dispute over a 2017 TV report from Benito Mussolini’s tomb, his final resting place in his Predappio hometown. The crypt remains a major site of neo-fascist pilgrimage, with shops in the town selling fridge magnets, T-shirts and busts celebrating the dictator and even the paramilitaries of the Salò Republic. The shrine-like decoration of the tomb, including an eternal flame, blatantly makes Mussolini an object of veneration rather than historical judgment. 

In the footage shot at the crypt by public broadcaster’s programme Agorà, journalist Serena Bortone claimed that the existence of such a monument to a dictator in a democracy “marks the real difference between us and other European countries”, where such a display would not be allowed. The broadcast also noted the presence of open praise of the regime in the crypt’s guestbook, including calls for Mussolini’s “return”. Yet not everyone was outraged. The tabloidesque daily Libero, which comes from a right-wing but non-fascist tradition, slammed the reporters for “profaning” the grave by entering with filming equipment, and insisted that guestbook comments were “irrelevant” given that there had, “thankfully, been no more Marches on Rome”. Interviewed on the controversy, Alessandra Mussolini insisted that the tomb is a site of familial mourning, and thus deserving of respect across all political sides, comparing this to the criticism she might face if she visited the grave of a victim of her grandfather’s, the murdered socialist Giacomo Matteotti. It would thus seem that discussion of Il Duce is a matter of private grief.

It is surely true that “Marches on Rome'' are unlikely to recur in the present, and that neither Fratelli d’Italia nor smaller and more explicitly fascist and regime-apologist militant organisations plan to restore the dictatorship. As this book [Mussolini's Grandchildren: Fascism in Contemporary Italy] shows, coup plots are far less of a threat today than in postwar decades when neo-fascist military officers bristled at rising Communist strength. Yet this hardly means that symbolic references to historical fascism are part of a merely private honouring of the past. 

To draw a loose analogy with the United States, it is quite possible that someone who flies a Confederate battle flag at a Trump rally does not literally expect to restore chattel slavery or even re-run the Secession. This would hardly lead us to the conclusion that by waving the Southern Cross he is honouring young soldiers who died serving their home states. Rather, the historical reference symbolises a rebellion against the current constitution and its political avatars, aimed at a rollback of civil rights which does not require the intervention of slave owner generals on horseback. Equally, in the Italian case, the relitigation of World War II history is about the present more than the past; it is a fight to determine the boundaries of patriotism, of political legitimacy, and who gets to define them. This is precisely what informs the memory laws and even constitutional changes today proposed by Fratelli d’Italia, which seeks to sideline official antifascism by tarnishing its enemies with the charges of “minimising the crimes of Yugoslav partisans” and “apologism for communist totalitarianism”. As with our Dixie-commemorating Trump supporters, the invasion of present-day politics by references to the past should not be mistaken for its simple recurrence. 
 

Commentators who emphasise Fratelli d’Italia’s political moderation often dismiss evidence of its members using fascist symbolism, claiming this is a trivial residue of its origins: a “nostalgic” reference to the past, with little real bearing on present-day politics. Those who wave the banners of Salò-era paramilitaries, or Roman-salute at neofascist cadres’ funerals, are not forming real militias to crush their opponents. Meloni has sometimes warned militants to cut out their antics with Salò-era banners and SS memorabilia. Fratelli d’Italia’s way of talking about history is much less focused on building up fascist heroes, as on honouring fascist victims. This often takes the form of the claim that “the Italian right” is the victim of a kind of discrimination, comparable even to racism and “hate speech”. As historic MSI figure Giano Accame put it in 2003: “There is only one category of the different that the Left has not only overlooked for over five decades, but even helped marginalise: ex-fascists, now reduced into a sort of psychosis as a persecuted ethno-religious minority. Toward which it even became a habit to proclaim that ‘killing a fascist is no crime’.” Meloni, who grew up politically in the 1990s, habitually diverts discussions about historical fascism into warnings against the dangers of modern-day antifascism. For instance, in her October 2022 speech seeking confidence from the Chamber of Deputies, she referred to the “innocent youths killed with metal tools in the name of antifascism” in postwar decades, a reference to the MSI activist Sergio Ramelli, killed in 1975. The violent danger is not from fascism, but those who claim to be rooting it out.

In this sense, it is clearly not the case that Fratelli d’Italia has gained mainstream status by embracing an antifascist reading of history. Rather, its rhetorical strategy consistently denies that such a thing should be necessary. Telling in this regard was a 2019 interview with party cofounder Ignazio La Russa, upon the thirtieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Explaining how the MSI had become a party of government in the 1990s, La Russa made no mention of efforts to change its culture, and denied that it should thank its ally Silvio Berlusconi for bestowing legitimacy upon it. Rather, it was simply “History itself” that had freed this party from the position to which it was reduced in the antifascist Republic: the end of the Cold War “ended our delegitimisation, unbinding us from the system that had existed since the end of World War II”. In this reading, the collapse of the Eastern Bloc was a final condemnation of communism and all it stood for, including the zombified anti-fascist ideology it used to sustain itself: the continuation of anti-fascism in postwar decades, La Russa insisted, was an artefact of the division of Europe at Yalta, which had only illegitimately outlived the end of Mussolini’s regime. In this same interview, La Russa insisted that his party had reckoned with the past by condemning the regime’s antisemitic Racial Laws, unlike a Left that refused to exorcise its demons. Yet also notable was the fact that he painted Fratelli d’Italia in close continuity with the MSI of the past. In this interview he described the postwar MSI simply as an “anticommunist” force, oppressed by a dominant“party-ocracy”; he has elsewhere claimed it moved on from the Mussolini era in 1970 when it “removed regime symbols from its offices”.

Hence, rather than answer antifascist criticism through a purposeful rejection of fascism and its values, Fratelli d’Italia overcomes this problem by delegitimising antifascism, stained by its association with the Yugoslav Communists, the Soviet Union and postwar leftist violence. This is the spirit in which it insists that public holidays rooted in the Resistance such as Liberation Day and even Republic Day are “factious” occasions which glorify violence against Italian patriots, even as it damns others for not marking the day in memory of Italians killed by Yugoslav Communists. From Rachele Mussolini to Giorgia Meloni, Fratelli d’Italia representatives proudly refuse to celebrate antifascist anniversaries: democracy, they insist, cannot be based on “only one side”. On Liberation Day 2021, Meloni made her annual statement that she would not be marking the anniversary, in this case because the liberation which Italians needed was an end to COVID-19 curfews. The following year, given the opportunity to leave the house, she again promised not to celebrate April 25: she insisted that she would instead defend freedom by preparing her speech for the forthcoming Fratelli d’Italia programmatic conference. She has called for its replacement with celebrations of World War I. La Russa has likewise proposed that this celebration of the Resistance be replaced, albeit indicating the possibility of a commemoration of the “victims of all wars and of the coronavirus”. Such a move to recast Liberation Day in terms unrelated to antifascism is surely an infantile rhetorical trick, at the level of angry social media posts insisting that “the Left are the real fascists”. Yet the angry accusations of progressive “totalitarianism”, are also bound up with a conspiratorial worldview, not only drawn from the Mussolini regime.

This excerpt has been taken from Mussolini's Grandchildren: Fascism in Contemporary Italy by David Broder, published in 2023 by Pluto Press. 

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