Fifth column. Marcello Veneziani.
Like today, a hundred years ago, Absolute Evil came into the world, Eternal Fascism. Curious that diabolical Eternity has a birth certificate: il 23 March of 1919, in Piazza San Sepolcro, in Milan, the Fasci di Combattimento were born. Eternal Fascism had two parents without whom it would not have come into the world: socialism and war (or interventionism). We wouldn't understand fascism without going back to its parents. Fascism is within the history of socialism, as its internal chapter: fascism was its son and stepson, legacy and reaction. If fascism is eternal, the socialism from which it was born and the conflict from which it arose should also be eternal. In reality, historical phenomena are parables: they have a dawn, a peak and a sunset, of which they remain a legacy, traces and memories. Fascism like communism can sometimes resurface or echo but it is not eternal. Historicizing fascism is the only way to understand its meaning, the scope and effects.
Fascism had a circular destiny: was born from a war, died in a war, his twenty years are sandwiched between two revolutionary two-year periods, the one started in San Sepolcro in 1919 and the final one, sanctioned by the Charter of Verona in 1943. Fascism was born as a national heresy of socialism and ends in Salò as a social heresy of nationalism. He was the son of Father Courage and Mother Fear: the courage of the brave and war veterans and the fear of communism that exploded in Russia and threatened to come to us.
Father Coraggio had just returned from a won war, suffered and betrayed at Versailles. And Mother Fear called together her children frightened by the Bolshevik threat. The mutilated Victory and the two red years of violence justified fascism; Then, a disastrous war and two years of civil war destroyed it. From the combination of courage and fear, the courage of the fighters and the fear of the right-thinking, the Fascism-Italy combination was born. Revolutionary audacity, conservative fear.
The parable of Mussolini, from the direction ofAvanti! al People of Italy and then to fascism, is punctuated by three magazines: In the 1913 Utopia Inn, socialist magazine; then Ardita was born from the war, fighter magazine, then he will found Hierarchy. Three newspapers summarize the transition from utopia to reality, passing through the front.
To its origins, fascism was aradical movement, revolutionary and republican, anticlerical. It was national and revolutionary left, Filippo Corridoni's internationalist action bundles also converged there (died in the trenches), by Michele Bianchi (then quadrumvir of the March on Rome) and Massimo Rocca. In the meeting program of 23 In March, the reference to the Fallen stood out first and foremost, the cult of the dead, the continuation of warrior interventionism in peace; then the "sabotage" of the neutralist parties, the condemnation of Bolshevism and the national and patriotic revival of socialism; hence the Republican preference, the need to modernize the country with the social revolution but also by modernizing industry, still considered "retrograde". The repudiation of "every form of dictatorship" stood out in the San Sepolcro program, the call for an "economic democracy" and the idea of ​​abolishing the Senate (not even Mussolini succeeded, let alone if he could succeed in Renzi); in the background reverberated the futurists' hope of "vaticating Italy". Ten years later, Mussolini will implement the Concordat between the fascist State and the Church... Il 3 July '19, for the first time Mussolini titled an article in quotation marks: “Fascism”.
Recently fascism has been reduced to racism which was a foreign body at least until the infamous racial laws linked to the contingency of times and alliances, after isolation with Sanctions. The originality of fascism was the synthesis between the social and the national, people and hierarchy, state and market, revolution and tradition. His damnation was to impose the will to power, through war, violence and coercion. His works, however, remain, they defy time and the angry blindness of those who deny them.
Fascism can be reborn today? If fascism was born from a war, by a generation of brave people returning from the front, from socialism from which it inherits methods but not aims, from nationalism and revolutionary syndicalism, from the Bolshevik danger and from Futurist and D'Annunzio poetry, there is no possibility of fascism today. A changed context, a conflict that is transferred to videos and social media, an interdependent world, global, dominated by the economy and an Italy stuck in European rules. At that time the nationalization of the masses was spreading, as George Mosse defined it; today the globalization of the masses prevails, reduced to solitary crowds. One hundred years ago, in '19, the America that with Wilson placed itself at the helm of the world, Bolshevik Russia which became the USSR and the nascent fascism were united by an expression: New order. It gave its name to Gramsci and Togliatti's magazine in 1919, laboratory of Italian-communism, it was Mussolini's intention but it was also the phrase printed on the US dollar.
And then In the 1919 there was vital energyof a young and bold company, of a prolific and still poor society, there was a generation hardened by the front and hungry for the future and there was the horror of a war that had "scrapped" millions of kids, among victims, wounded and disbanded. Today there is an old and disheartened society, a mass democracy wilted in affluence, in malaise and in disrepair, and there is the tragic lesson of the 1900s that reminds us how the red and black revolutions ended. Today there are no leaders but drivers, sovereignty is techno-financial, military power transferred to the judiciary, ideology yields to the market; devotion has moved from religion to fiction or pop stars, history is reduced to the present. You don't go in the trenches but online. That 23 March one hundred years ago is light years away.
MV, The Truth 23 March 2019
Source: http://www.marcelloveneziani.com/articoli/il-fascismo-mille-anni-fa/