Of Marcello Veneziani

Source: Marcello Veneziani
Now that the election campaign has ended, instead of having to do the servant's calculations on the vote, we prefer to draw a different balance and ask ourselves if there was a battle over values, a conflict over ideal themes, historians and politicians.
There was no clash between progressives and conservatives, between right and left, between political cultures, between liberal ideas and social or even socialist ideas. Every reference to the Catholic vote has disappeared.
The only clash was over fascism and anti-fascism. To resume the catchphrase of the electoral campaign, the Republic he entrusted the anti-fascist obsession to the psychoanalyst Massimo Recalcati, summed up in a title that seems written by the school of fascist mysticism: “The immortal desire of fascism”.
An apparently apologetic title, which seems to have been written by someone obsessed with fascism as a category of spirit and perennial value. In reality Recalcati - as his surname suggests - followed the pattern of eternal fascism, set by the ideologist Umberto Eco; a theme that in Stalin's time was called "the eternal lurking reaction".
Immortal fascism as an alibi for immoral anti-fascism.
But let's take it seriously, this time, and let's stay on the cultural level. So, to begin with, Recalcati quotes Pasolini who denounced the "new fascism". But Pasolini was not referring to historical fascism at all, what he defined as "new fascism" was consumerist power that had nothing to do with true fascism.
In a famous open letter to Moravia, on the contrary, the poet accused instrumental use, false and misleading of anti-fascism, “weapon of distraction that the ruling class uses to constrain dissent” and “press us to fight a non-existent enemy”.
And elsewhere he added: “Nothing worse than the fascism of anti-fascists”. So, the Pasolini quote was totally out of place, it indicated the opposite of their mantra.
For Recalcati, immortal fascism è “rinuncia al pensiero critico, massificazione, irreggimentazione, soppressione sacrificale del singolare” che potrebbe essere un’ottima descrizione dell’eterno comunismo.
And not only that: si potrebbe facilmente descrivere “l’immortale desiderio” del comunismo nell’invidia egualitaria, nell’odio per ogni differenza, non solo di classe ma anche di identità, of thought, di capacità; l’abolizione della realtà e degli uomini imperfetti di oggi nell’utopia sanguinaria del mondo migliore che verrà.
Non si capisce perché il fascismo debba essere eterno e il comunismo no; a meno che si reputi il fascismo un fatto naturale e soprannaturale.
Recalcati rincara la dose e oltre al canonico richiamo a W.Reich e alla sua psicologia di massa del fascismo, finds in Freud the “clairvoyant” description of the immortal and indecent desire for fascism.
Freud shouldn't have thought this way when he sent books with apologetic dedications to Mussolini and trusted in fascism as a barrier to Nazism invading his Austria. Here is Freud's handwritten dedication: «To Benito Mussolini, with the devoted greeting of an elderly man who recognizes the hero of civilization in the holder of power".

Understand, Calm down, what Freud thought of the founder of fascism? Hero of civilization…
For Recalcati the eternal desire for fascism it is in infatuation with the boss, in the love of war, in mass paranoid hatred for the adversary, in aggression, in the “headless incandescence” (!). It would still be easy and childish to reverse the observation on communism and on all totalitarianisms in general, starting from the French Revolution which by decapitating with the guillotine made "headless incandescence" a real practice.
But I would like to reverse instead in another sense its reading. Doubt has never crossed his mind, I say to Recalcati and to the Collective Intellectual of la Repubblica, that there may be many other immortal desires that move those they condemn as fascists and reactionaries?
For example, permanent need of authority and hierarchy, the eternal need for identity, of loyalty, of love of country and community roots (fundamental needs of the human soul, said Simone Weil, Jewish and socialist, anything but fascist).
For example, need to connect to a tradition, to recognize sovereignty, rights and duties, merits and abilities, social justice and not class struggle. These are fundamental needs of every civilization; In fact, I would like to hope that they are truly immortal desires, irrepressible. Then, right, every great virtue separated from measure and truth, in weak or agitated minds, it can degenerate into vices and impostures.
What Eco and the echoing Relacati define “a need for chains” is rather a need for bonds, of connections, of continuity and sense of limit. Freedom without measure and without constraints ends in chaos and despotism.
But to the Recalcati, like the Ecos and the teachers of the new inquisition, those who do not align themselves with the gentlemen are possessed by the fascist devil, they should not be understood nor should one dialogue with them: they just need to be demonized.
Then do not be surprised if the minds are weaker who drink these anathemas, beat a "fascist" boy bloody or want the death of someone, in uniform or in politics, represents eternal fascism and its damnation in their obsessed eyes.
The fanatic, the criminal idiot, takes those theses to their extreme consequences. So it turns out that killing a fascist is not a crime; but in the name of freedom and reason, of anti-fascism and non-violence…