Know Your Enemy - TEASER: Giorgia Meloni's Neo-Fascism (w/ David Broder)

Sam is joined by David Broder to discuss the recent victory of neo-fascist Giorgia Meloni in Italian general elections. Subscribe on patreon.com/knowyourenemy to hear the rest.

Duration: 3m
Broadcast on: 06 Oct 2022
Audio Format: other

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Sam is joined by David Broder — the Europe editor of Jacobin Magazine and author of First They Took Rome: How the Populist Right Conquered Italy and the forthcoming book, Mussolini's Grandchildren: Fascism in Contemporary Italy — to discuss the recent victory of Giorgia Meloni in Italian general elections. Meloni's Brothers for Italy party descends directly from the neo-fascist parties of post-war Italy.

We discuss the ways in which her victory is continuous and discontinuous with the recent history of right-wing populism in Italy — from Silvio Berlusconi to Matteo Salvini. And David explains how Meloni has incorporated fascist nostalgia and historical revision into a 21st century, identitarian nationalism, which draws heavily on conservative economics, anti-feminist and anti-LGBTQ politics, and "great replacement" nativist conspiracy.

Further reading:

David Broder, "Italy’s drift to the far right began long before the rise of Giorgia Meloni," Guardian, Sept. 2022.

Natasha Lennard, "It's a Girl (Fascist!)," The Intercept, Sept. 2022.

Adam Tooze, "Who is going to vote for Italy's right-wing coalition?," Chartbook, Sept 2022.

Often the discussions about whether, you know, obviously Trump, Bolsonaro, Modi, Le Pen, whether they're fascist, often the discussion kind of runs a ground on this comparison with the 1930s. So political forms change, the ways of doing politics change, what citizens expect from parties and the way they organise the level of violence in society, or that has changed. But there is actually an institutional continuity, like Freté Liedalia is the contributor of the MSI, the post-war Neo-Fascist Party, which was an explicitly fascist party, and it makes no apology for that. Like the way it talks about fascism, when it is accused of being fascist, and Melania did this during the campaign, is to adopt this kind of register of speech, which is like very pedantic in its wording, and which is designed to kind of move on from that past, but without like really kind of critically engaging with it. And Melania gave this statement to international journalists, where she said in several languages, we long ago consigned fascism to history, and we condemned the antisemitic racial laws of 1938. I mean, even apart from the fact that making something a matter of history, of course, doesn't necessarily mean just like forgetting it existed. It's actually precisely designed to separate out the alliance with Adolf Hitler, big mistake. The Holocaust is wrong. With then, some positive elements, the ordinary soldiers who fought for it, many of them were honest, some of them tried to save Jews, some of them were murdered by communists. A real obsession of Freté Liedalia is the claim that Yugoslav partisans carried out a Holocaust-style ethnic cleansing of Italians in the borderlands at the end of World War II, which is insane. But actually, several Italian regions have, under the right-wing party's control, have introduced laws that impose this as like an unchallengeable fact where tonight would be akin to Holocaust denial. So it turns the discussion away from, you know, old Mussolini who wanted to build a new Roman Empire, and it's like great military conquests, to instead tell a story which is like,

Transcription truncated.

Sam is joined by David Broder to discuss the recent victory of neo-fascist Giorgia Meloni in Italian general elections. Subscribe on patreon.com/knowyourenemy to hear the rest.