Managing chaos: fascism and anti-fascism

Another prominent victim of the average (mediocre) individual's inability to accept and manage chaos is the debate on fascism and anti-fascism. Or rather, on fascism and non-fascism. The distinction will be clarified at the end.
Those who feel they belong to the socio-political groups accused of sympathy for fascism deny, out of convenience, that fascism exists. Those who, on the other hand, identify with the factions devoted to anti-fascism accuse the former en masse of being fascism apologists.

As usual, I have to say everyone is a little right and a little wrong: that's the fate of someone who's at ease handling chaos and is called on to assess the positions of people who, unable to appreciate the extreme complexity of reality, need simplified models to make it easier to understand, only to end up not understanding squat.
The first group is wrong to deny that fascism exists. They're right, though, to reject the polarized explanation resting on the traditional political camps: "fascism is all on the right and anti-fascism all on the left" (using those terms has the same effect on me as nails screeching on a chalkboard). The others, obviously, are right and wrong the other way around.

Okay, so what's the explanation without the simplifications? Here it is. Fascism as a well-defined political force no longer exists. As an attitude, though, it very much does.
What it makes sense to call fascism today is really an atavistic, creeping, cross-cutting cultural trait of Italian society. A trait that predates the twentieth century, probably present already in the Renaissance, and maybe even earlier. The ventennio, the twenty years of Fascist rule, embodied it as the hallmark of a specific political movement, gave it a name, and blended it with other components, customizing it.

This is the source of all the misunderstandings, mix-ups, and confusion. And those who by nature can't grasp the nuances of a complex reality, instead of accepting their limits, try to get past them through simplified interpretations. Simple, then, but unfortunately wrong.

If you stop thinking of fascism as a political force and identify it instead with an intolerant, overbearing, aggressive, sly, opportunistic, and cowardly attitude, you'll realize (unless you're a hopeless case) first of all that fascism is alive and well, and second that, even though it may at times be more frequent within certain socio-political groups than others, it's still a cross-cutting phenomenon.

Washing your hands of it — by denying fascism exists in one case or declaring yourselves anti-fascists in the other — isn't enough, my friends. To be sure you're not fascists, you have to make sure you really aren't. And the only way to do that is to behave like non-fascists.
Always.

Drafted from Italian with Blog Translator, then revised by me.

Anachronistic short circuit

There's a question that has haunted me for a long time. Why in Italy, so many years after the key events, are there still so many people who identify with the clash between fascists and anti-fascists? Why hasn't the anachronism of the issues under debate relegated the debaters to the history books too?

One answer might come from drawing a parallel with genetics.
When the collective trauma caused by a social rupture is too damaging, when events have exceeded the limit of what humans can handle, the scarring mechanism that normally lets us turn the page, and lets the news of the day ferment until it becomes history, fails. It simply never kicks in. The wound doesn't close, the trauma stays, the social rupture itself is never repaired, and the flaps of torn flesh stay splayed.

Right — that's the result. But how does the process work? Just as parents' genetic material is passed down to their children, the polarizations in question — the "severe" ones, as opposed to those that have been defused — are mistakenly passed from one generation to the next along with the "healthy" cultural traits. Let's remember, staying within genetics, that even the mechanism of DNA propagation can make errors.

Membership in the opposing groups of a given era, which normally loses its value when history moves on to the next chapter, is perpetuated in these extreme cases. This happens not only from parent to child, but also from teacher to student, elder to young person, group to individual, guru to follower, and so on.

One side effect of this ongoing process, which also fuels a self-reinforcing feedback loop, is the concrete fact that people who have been absorbed into one of the two groups openly declare their membership, and so find themselves facing people who just as genuinely belong to the "enemy" camp. They therefore feel entitled to keep fighting their battles. It's an illusory war, like that of the Japanese soldiers who stayed lying in wait in the Philippine jungles for decades after Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Illusory in its premises, but real in its concreteness. In essence, it's a division that is real but no longer supported by the historical foundations that produced and sustained it.
Fascism and anti-fascism, though they have long had no historical rationale, are seen as necessary movements precisely because people haven't stopped embodying them. That is, they make no sense and make sense at the same time.

The solution to the bind, which people commonly assume must be political, or worse yet military, should instead be sought in the toolboxes of other disciplines: sociology and psychology. Polarization is a genuine group pathology, and like any pathology it shouldn't be debated but treated.
Why would it be important to treat it? First of all because, like any physiological problem, it causes dysfunctional consequences. Moreover, since we're evidently on the verge of an epochal change that should command all the energy we have, if it's even enough, polarization is an extremely dangerous distraction from the fundamental goals of a national system.

Of course, I don't believe at all that we'll be able to come to our senses, wake up, and get out of this dream set in the past in order to face the challenges of the present. I fear instead that the thrashings dealt by those challenges will force us into a very traumatic awakening.

Drafted from Italian with Blog Translator, then revised by me.

M: Son of the century (M. Il figlio del secolo) - Antonio Scurati

Classifying this book is no easy feat. Most of the time it reads like a fictional novel but - especially if you are Italian or a foreigner who’s well acquainted with contemporary Italian history and culture - you’ll be thrilled and quite upset by the fact that the characters portrayed are real life people such as Mussolini, Giolitti, D’annunzio, Sarfatti, Balbo, Togliatti, Kuliscioff, Marinetti, Gramsci or Matteotti, who had a tremendous impact on the events of that period in Italy, in Europe and worldwide as well.
Most of the chapters are supported by official documents, telegrams, letters, articles and recordings, which might temporarily interrupt the flow of the plot, but at the same time contribute to increase the sense of authenticity of the events narrated.

The Mussolini canal (Canale Mussolini) - Antonio Pennacchi

Besides being an excellent read, this is also a very good summary of twentieth century Italian history: the rural society at the turn of the century, the First World War, the socialist uprising, the birth of fascism, Mussolini’s takeover, the Second World War, the post war reconstruction and the ensuing economic growth. These events are all part of a story which revolves around a family - the Peruzzi - from the Veneto (that’s actually where I come from). They are sharecroppers, people who - for generations - have worked the land and farmed animals, gone to war, brought up dozens of children, eaten meager meals and made up for that by drinking barrels of wine, coped with natural disasters and famines, economic crises, pandemics, political instability and social abuse, who have fallen in and out of love, made friends and enemies, fought family vendettas and formed strong social bonds.