Last Thursday the anniversaries of the liberation of Italy from Nazi-fascism and of the Carnation Revolution in Portugal were celebrated. The same day, the President of the Government of Spain, Pedro Sánchez, published a surprising letter announcing that he was considering whether or not to continue as head of the Executive, denouncing “a coalition of right-wing and ultra-right interests that do not tolerate the reality of Spain, do not accept the verdict of the polls” and pointing out the “mud machine”, a concept by Umberto Eco. Precisely on April 25, 1995, Eco gave a famous speech, eternal fascismat a conference organized by Columbia University. In a week like this, and in the midst of a considerable rise of far-right forces in Europe, it is worth focusing on some anti-fascist lessons.
In his speech, Eco said many things worthy of interest. The underlying idea is that fascism, unlike other right-wing dictatorships, did not have a monolithic and coherent ideology, it was rather a conglomerate of disparate, sometimes even contradictory, ideas and instincts. Mussolini had more rhetoric and aesthetics than ideology. Eco alerts us that, once the regime has fallen, history has changed, “ways of thinking and feeling, cultural habits, a nebula of dark instincts and unfathomable drives” that were behind the regime may still be alive. This gaseous set of instincts is what gives the concepts of fascism and anti-fascism a more universal dimension than other regimes or movements, such as Nazism, Francoism, the Ustashas, etc., with their own features that make them very specific experiences, hardly exportable. Eco pointed out some of those universal drives of which fascism was a pioneering catalyst: cult of tradition, rejection of modernism, considering dissent as a betrayal, fear of difference, appeal to the frustrated middle classes, obsession with plots, machismo . Do they sound familiar to you?
There are reverberations. At the same time, important differences. Contemporary far-right forces have nothing to do with Mussolinian fascism because they do not resort to violence, they do not directly challenge democracy, they are not imperialists. There are also consistent differences between them. But apart from the debate on the label – in short, whether the repeating features or the elements of difference dominate – it cannot be ignored that part of the nebula of dark instincts that Eco spoke of is detected in them, with the risk that they represent for democratic quality. You have to be alert. We have seen what Trump, Orbán, Kaczynski or Bolsonaro have done or tried to do. Meloni is not the same as Orbán, but gestures of unbearable stench appear, such as the censorship of Antonio Scurati on RAI, precisely for talking about fascism and anti-fascism on the occasion of the liberation festival.
How to face this danger? Some interesting clues for designing a resistance strategy can be found in the life and work of Beppe Fenoglio, the great writer of Italian anti-fascism. Fenoglio is less known than other Italian authors born in the first quarter of the 20th century, such as Cesare Pavese, Italo Calvino, Natalia Ginzburg or Pier Paolo Pasolini. Those who know his work know his stellar quality. Fenoglio fought as an anti-fascist partisan, and his narrative focuses on resistance and peasant life. Calvino wrote the following—in a 1964 preface to his Spider Nest Trail— about Fenoglio’s short novel A private matter: “It was the loneliest of all who managed to write the novel that we had all dreamed of, when no one expected it, Beppe Fenoglio (…) The book that our generation wanted to write, now exists.” In A private matterCalvino points out, “there is the resistance as it was, true as it had never been described, preserved for so many years crystal clear in faithful memory, and with all the moral values, all the stronger the more implicit, and the shock, and the rage”.
And what was that anti-fascist resistance like? Cross. In the pages of Fenoglio—for example in Partisan Johnny— this complicated coagulation of leftists, Christian Democrats and liberals fighting against the same enemy is well seen. There is friction between them. But they park them. Eco himself, in his speech, evokes his childhood memory of “partisans with different scarves”, or his admiration for a partisan who turned out to be a monarchist rightist (Edgardo Sogno, Franchi in his name). And what difference does it make?, asks Eco. He was fighting against the fascists. “Liberation was a common undertaking of people of different colors,” he writes. The transversality, the breadth of the rejection, is essential. Because the alternative is a bipolarity that does not isolate the nebula.
Today’s scenario is completely different from that of then, it is not as dramatic, and yet broad unity against the extreme right is still desirable, to prevent them from eroding democracy, from contaminating public debate. Those who associate with them, history will judge them. They carry a very serious responsibility. But from the progressive perspective we must understand that, if we really believe that we are facing a serious threat – and we are – we must be willing to make substantial concessions. We cannot simply sit on the moral high ground and expect the European right to simply renounce what has become in many cases the only way they have to exercise power. The lasting solution is not a supposedly virtuous bloc with three more votes than a supposedly unpalatable bloc. It is a democracy sealed in the face of Eco’s eternal fascism. That requires commitment, resignations, not just indignation.
In each political system, a specific debate should be fueled on how to stop the extreme right, contemplate State pacts, praxisof formation of national or local governments and other mechanisms in which everyone must make concessions to prevent this greater evil from advancing. If the price of the isolation of the ultras only has to be paid by one party, the communion of intentions will not be stable. In Portugal, where a murky judicial matter forced the resignation of the prime minister without any solid evidence having appeared months later, they are on the right track in terms of height of political spirit. In other countries, no. Unfortunately, it seems to have reached an insurmountable bipolarity, in which, on one side, Eco’s nebula of instincts incubates. At that point, of course we must resist the abuses that come from it. Also reflect on whether he contributed to it, and if there is a way to overcome it.
The second reflection is about that solitary search, crystalline memory and the containment of moral values that Calvino speaks of. Because in all this there must be a dimension of collective action—like the partisan resistance in the hills—but this cannot annihilate one’s own criteria, the search for one’s personal path, the critical spirit. Calvino notes that it was the one who, humanly and literarily, was not in the group, who lived apart in the Piedmontese hills after the war, who pursued his own artistic path away from others, who reached heights. And we need height, a sum of heights, and crystalline memory. It will not be gregariousness, it will not be the uncritical closing of ranks that will get us out of the hole in which we find ourselves. To begin with, those on the right hold their noses and make agreements with the ultras. Subsidiarily, in those on the left for many years who have seemed more interested in taking advantage of the problem by polarizing it than in solving it.
It is not a case that the Skytte Prize in Political Science awarded to Jürgen Habermas was motivated by pointing out that his work has “constantly reminded, theoretically and empirically, that the true vital risk of democracy depends on human capacity and the willingness to respect the others through communicative action and on that basis engage in debate and critical argumentation.” They announced it on April 25.
And yes, we need moral values. But contained, shining as an example in the facts, not in the empty and high-sounding verbiage that invades public discourse. Facts just as they appear in Fenoglio’s narrative, small, but titanic, small flashes of action that say it all, even more than a certain simple rhetoric that – whether we want it or not – only separates and festers. In the wonderful pages of Fenoglio, in that unbreakable attachment to values, memory and the containment of language and spirit, there are answers that remain valid.
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