Was Mussolini Misunderstood?

[Mesteryo]

Source: Time magazine

Giorgio Napolitano, Italy's grandfatherly President, was trying not to squirm in his seat. But sitting center stage at a ceremony to honor World War II resistance fighters, the 83-year-old head of state couldn't help but wince as Defense Minister Ignazio La Russa shifted gears mid speech. "I would betray my conscience," La Russa declared, "if I did not recall other men in uniform."

Those "other men" were the fascist Italian troops allied with the Nazi occupiers. "From their point of view," La Russa said of the Nembo division, which served alongside the Germans in Rome, they "fought in the belief they were defending their country." La Russa's Sept. 8 speech was the second time in two days that a top leader of Italy's "post-fascist" National Alliance party — a key ally in Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi's ruling coalition — had opened wounds that most Italians have considered closed for decades.

La Russa's controversial speech came just a day after Rome mayor Gianni Alemanno refused to categorically condemn Benito Mussolini's fascist regime. Interviewed by Milan daily Corriere Della Sera following a visit to Israel, Alemanno, who also belongs to National Alliance, said he did not consider fascism an "absolute evil." While racial laws passed by Mussolini in the last five years of his two-decade reign were abhorrent, Alemanno told the newspaper, "fascism was a more complex phenomenon. Many people signed up in good faith."

Read more: http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1839845,00.html

[Bob Dobbs]

1. Fascism is the new IN THING?

Didn't you see its coming out party in the streets of Denver and St. Paul?

[Hugin]

4. ...

Jeebus, I give up!

[Trillo]

5. Likely the "center" here at DU

needs to feel good about their support of corporatism.

From the article: "But fascist or "post-fascist" Italians still try to separate the excesses of the leaders from what they consider a worthy ideology and the good intentions of its followers."

Perhaps, just as there is supposed to be a wall of separation between religion and the state, there should also be a wall of separation between corporations and the state.

[Bob Dobbs]

6. Government's job is TO PROTECT US from corporations

not the other way around, as it is functioning now.

[Forkboy]

2. It's been a terrible blow to my life looking like Mussolini, you know.

Especially when I was a kid, you know, I was about seven, right, and I was down the Youth Club, you know, dancing away, right, like in the 'sixties, doing the Twist..you know. And, em, there was this girl, right, and she comes up to me, and she goes,"'Ere! Are you Mussolini?" I said, "Emmm...Yeah." She says, "I thought you was dead." I says, "No, it was just me day off, you know." So she pulled me over the dance floor and butted me in the face! I said, "What's that for?" She said, "That's for the invasion of Crete!"

[AndyTiedye]

3. Another Country In Which the Robber Barons OWN THE MEDIA

[daleo]

7. It's can be a thin line between fascism and conservatism

The recent anti-intellectual trend in conservatism (in the U.S. and other countries) is very reminiscent of fascism. The veneration of ignorance always leads to a bad end.

[jobycom]

8. Interesting story about Italian politics. Makes me wonder about our own national denials.

There can be no honest argument that our American government over the centuries has practiced genocide against Native Americans, and has committed horrendous human rights abuses against our own citizens through segregation, refusal to punish lynchings and other murderous forms of racial and ethnic intimidations, and war crimes against other peoples in other nations--Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran, Viet Nam, several Central American nations, for example.

Yet we are allowed, even required, to honor our own leaders, our own military forces, and our own law enforcement, even though they were the tools, and at times the instigators, of some of the worst human rights violations the world has seen. And, we are not forced, internally or externally, to unequivocally condemn either capitalism or democracy, even though both overlapping systems not only justified, but often encouraged, these human rights abuses. Whites lynched blacks and massacred Native Americans because we outnumbered them as voters in a democracy. Our capitalism made us spread west into the lands of Native Americans, and to steal those lands at rifle-point. Our capitalism justified slavery, and allowed even a stalwart of freedom such as Thomas Jefferson to argue in favor of continuing slavery, so as not to cost too many of our wealthy too much money and comfort.

I don't know what to think about what's happening in Italy. It's not my country, and as long as fascism doesn't return in its militaristic form, it's not my concern how they work out their own self-portrait, or solve their own identity crisis. But I don't like the denial in this country. Our continued belief--endorsed by our academic high school history courses as well as our political leaders--that America has never been wrong, and has always been the cutting edge of the march of human rights progress leads us to continue the same genocidal foreign policies as in the past.

Not understanding that we have been and therefore can be guilty of genocide leads us to commit genocide. The fact that Viet Nam is not taught as an example of our own atrocious potential led directly to so many Americans believing that our invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan were justified. In fact, the fact that we teach the history of America as one long virtuous march against the forces of evil causes us to believe that any act we commit is part of that virtuous march. So we continue the same actions, not knowing our own bloody history.

That's what I got out of the article.

[Bob Dobbs]

9. Manifest Destiny, HO!

Spot on analysis of the total lack of self inspection that has led to amerikkka's new role as nazis of the 21st century.


USA, USA!