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David Broder, "Mussolini's Grandchildren: Fascism in Contemporary Italy" (Pluto Press, 2023)
01:15:07
An interview with David Broder
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Morteza Hajizadeh
Hello, everyone. Welcome to another episode of New Books Network. This is your host, Morteza Hajizadeh from Critical Theory Channel. Today I'm honored to be speaking to David Broder. I'm sorry, I'll start again. I, I, I kind of, I think, mispronounced your name. Is it Broder or.
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David Broder
Yeah, yeah, Broder.
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Morteza Hajizadeh
Yeah, I'll start again. Hello, everyone. Welcome to another episode of New Books Network. I'm Morza Hajizadeh, your host from Critical Theory Channel. Today, I' to speaking to David Broder. David is a historian of the Italian far right. He's a regular contributor to the New Statement and International. If I'm pronouncing the name of this journal correctly, but I'll let David. Yeah, cool, thank you. And he writes about Italian politics as well as Euroba d' etre for Jacobian. And today he's here to talk to us about a book he published with Pluto Press in 2023 called Mussolini's grandchildren Fascism in Contemporary Italy. David, welcome to New Books.
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David Broder
Hi, Mattesa, thanks for having me on.
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Morteza Hajizadeh
Right, David, before you start, can you please tell our listeners a little about yourself, what is your field of expertise and more importantly, how you became interested in studying Italian fascism?
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David Broder
Well, I first, as you may have guessed from my accent, I'm English and not Italian. But I moved to Italy in 2011 and I did my PhD on the anti fascist resistance of World War II in Rome. And while I was living in Rome, I started to write more about contemporary Italian politics, including for some of the publications you mention. And as part of my work, Even for my PhD, I was looking at the history of Italian Fascism. And of course, in a moment in which a lot of people are talking about is there a new fascism? How do we talk about the so called populist right or far right? And so through my journalism, I've been led to more and more to talk about and indeed research the far right. So this book is a kind of culmination of, of that or you might say of my decade or so so far looking at the, the far right in Italy.
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Morteza Hajizadeh
Yeah, I was really fascinated with the title of your book and I'm guessing a lot of other readers feel the same. Mussolini's Grandchildren. What do you mean by this title? Can you broadly tell us this genealogy that you draw from Mussolini all the way to contemporary Brothers of Italy? That's the name of the party, but I can't pronounce the Italian one, so I'll leave it to you.
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David Broder
Sure. So I mean it a little like I just said. I mean, the we have all this discussion, you know, is Donald Trump a fascist or is there a fascist movement? Is Jair Bolsonaro? How about Marine Le Pen? Or even the far right in Israel? You know, how do we, how do we connect these contemporary phenomena to historical fascism? And of course, those discussions often kind of run aground on this question of, you know, are they really reproducing the political forms of the 1930s in terms of things like mass mobilization, violence, the cult of violence, counter revolution against the workers movement? So why I think the Italian case is an interesting way of looking at this, not just because, you know, I am someone who's lived in Italy and obsessed with Italian issues, but rather that this party this political tradition has actually persisted over time. It's not the world of the 1930s sort of arriving back in the present. You know, there's these films like, there's one called look who's Back, which is about Hitler, or in Italy there's one called I Am Back, which is about Mussolini. And in each case, the idea is they kind of land from space in the present and they find that they're still popular. I think this is a quite common view we have of the far right, this kind of this monster from the past that has suddenly reappeared in the present. So what I'm arguing instead is that this is a political tradition that has a continuity, genealogy, in the sense that the old Fascist party reconstituted itself in 1946 as the Italian Social movement, and that was an openly fascist party which endured throughout post war history, which Giorgio Melani herself joined in 1992 and which today's Fratelli d' Italia is the continuator of. So in that sense, they really are the heirs to historical fascism. There's a direct organizational continuity. At the same time, the book is called Mussolini's Grandchildren, not the Clones of Mussolini. The way they act politically and the world they live in has changed over the generations of post war Italian public life. A lot of the kind of assumptions or the parameters of politics have changed, and Fratelli d' Italia reflect that. So on the one hand, they defend parts of the history of their Fascist forefathers, but we should also recognize that it's not just a recreation of the past. So, for example, the utopian and transformative horizon of fascism, the idea of modeling the new man and of the molding of the national community through state action is largely missing from the contemporary far right. Similarly, things like the cult of violence, the open disregard for democracy characteristic of historical fascism, you know, those are no longer parts of their, say, mental framework. So I think what we actually see instead is a kind of fusion of the historical fascist tradition, its history, its anti communism, its ethnic conception of citizenship. So some of these elements, but they're also kind of combined with some of the assumptions of modern liberal democracy and indeed free market capitalism. So of course, the idea of generations might seem a little imprecise. You know, they're not neatly. They're not so neatly delimited or circumscribed. You know, who belongs to one generation or another. But I think that looking at the post war history of Italian neo fascism, we can think generationally in the sense of what political experiences have leaders, have militants, had that shape their attitude to what they're doing. The msi, the post war neo fascist party, was set up in 1946 by men who had participated in the regime and who had fought to the last against Nazi Germany. Those leaders are dead now, but we still have some of the leaders from the generation of the 1960s and 1970s. So an era of political terrorism of very large scale class and social conflict in Italy, and indeed an era when the far right openly supported far right dictatorships elsewhere in the Mediterranean and in Latin America. Then if we get to the generation which I call the grandchildren, which are of course some of the literal grandchildren of Mussolini, biological grandchildren, but also people like Giorgio Melani, you know, people who grow up politically at this kind of moment of the end of history, the fall of their old communist opponent, but also a general lowering of political violence and of social conflict. So all that to say that what this book is trying to grapple with is the fact that there is a continuity of the fascist tradition, but it hasn't stayed the same. It's constantly adapted to the times it finds itself in. And I think that's its strength as a political movement in Italy today is that this kind of activist hardcore has persisted through long defeats and is now in a. And it has now completed its sort of long march out of marginalization. The book is, in a sense, a story of the success of the rehabilitation of this political camp.
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Morteza Hajizadeh
It was a great explanation, and I really like to point you brought up at the beginning that are these right wing parties around the world really fascist or not? Because some people just throw the word randomly around. Now, the question. I have used a term called post fascism in your book. Is that what you mean by post fascism? These new, maybe right wing parties? Or there's a different definition to this post fascism?
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David Broder
Well, in my case, I use the word post fascism particularly to talk about Fratelli d' Italia in the sense that it actually claims to have overcome its fascist past. So they use these very strange forms of words, kind of like we've consigned the regime to history, that fascism is in the past. As I said that they've transcended it. But it's not really a kind of rejection or a critical investigation of fascism. It's really a kind of an overcoming of the tradition of, but which merges elements of it into a sort of new mix. People like Giorgio Melani call themselves conservatives, some people say national conservatives, but really what they've done is they've kind of hybridized parts of a specifically fascist tradition. With other parts of conservative or even liberal thought. So in my case, of course, because there's this genealogy, because there's the. The sort of historical influence, and because arguments around identity and memory culture in Italy are very closely connected to the. To the historical fascist regime, it's easy to talk about post fascism because of course, we can say, you know, these are people who come from a explicitly fascist background. Now they say they've gone beyond it, but they kind of maintain lots of ties to it. The critical argument that could be raised, though, is that whether the idea of post fascism is actually also useful for these other phenomena, like Trump, Bolsonaro and so on. So of course, there's a famous essay on post fascism by the late Hungarian scholar GM Tamas. Also, of course, the term is used by Enzo Traverso, the Italian historian, and they kind of use the term post fascism to talk also about these other phenomena we see internationally, right? It's that people like Trump or Bolsonaro, Le Pen, Orban and so on, they have a anti democratic, anti communist ethnic conception of politics, but it also doesn't take up quite the historical forms of fascism. And nor do they kind of. Nor do they explicitly associate themselves with that tradition. And of course, you know, someone like Trump isn't actually sort of socialized in fascist subculture, didn't have his political formation by being in a fascist youth group in the way that Melanie did. So clearly there are very important biographical and historical differences between these national cases. Nonetheless, I think that the merit of the term post fascism is that in a way, it's able to group these phenomena together and see the way in which they are in fact, converging. So even though Melanie comes from a fascist background, whereas Trump used to be a Democrat, if we look at the kind of conversations they're having at events like cpac, the Conservative Political Action Conference in the United States, if we look at ideas like Great Replacement Theory, which doesn't come from a specifically fascist tradition, but is able to unite various parts of the new far right internationally, then I think we see this a kind of convergence at the level of ideas. But then the kind of historical argument about, well, we're not seeing the return of militias and so on, or at least not on a truly mass scale, and certainly not really in Italy. I think that the term post fascism, its quality is that it can hold those things together. Admittedly, of course, it should be said that the limitation of the term post fascism, in particular in political polemic or indeed in kind of journalistic accounts, is that in effect, it's insinuating a connection to fascism. So it has a kind of strong critical charge inherent within it, which means that kind of, you know, when I'm on debates in Italy in the press or on TV and I use this sort of post fascism category, it basically just gets reduced to, well, you're calling them fascists. Fascists because of course you're kind of bringing up this controversial connection and indeed a history which although Fratelli d' Italia do themselves talk about it quite a lot, they also are very resistant to any kind of critical scrutiny of it.
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Morteza Hajizadeh
And there was another question that I had about Brothers of Itera, but I'll ask it later towards the end of the, the interview. But I really like that the anecdote that you start the book with, what happens in 2017, if I'm not mistaken, in the city of Trist and the Brothers of Italy, the way they draw this, draw kind of a parallel between besieged national identity, Italian identity, and also the history of that city, Trist. Can you talk about that part of the book, please?
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David Broder
Yeah, sure. So the reference you make is that in 2017, Fratelli d' Italia held its Brothers of Italy held its conference in Trieste, which is this city that's right on the far northeastern corner of Italy and is almost totally surrounded by Slovenia. In historically, it's a city that's changed hands between lots of different states. Up till World War I, it was part of the Austro Hungarian Empire. Italy conquered it at the end of the war. But In World War II, when Italy invaded Yugoslavia and then lost the war, this prompted Yugoslav troops to come into Trieste as well as the other Western allies. And then there was a period after World War II where Trieste was a kind of independent territory and very contested. So in the kind of historical myths of Italian nationalism, it's always been this, this kind of longed for city that has to be reconquered in order to make Italy truly united. Historically and certainly before World War I, it was actually very multi ethnic and indeed the broader region around it, its kind of hinterland, actually had kind of majority Slavic populations. So over the 20th century, there's many. I won't go that deeply into it, but there are many moments of very large scale population movements, including ones driven by nationalist and ethnic violence. So not just for the right, but for a long Italian nationalist and so called irredentist tradition, Trieste has been a sort of central focus. The idea of, you know, this city is, you know, by conquering that, by defending that, we are protecting Italy itself and the Fratelli d' Italia conference document I mentioned in the book sort of associates this with the defense of the borders against immigrants today. So we have this story of just as in World War I and then at the end of World War II, Italians fought to keep Trieste Italian, so too today is Fratelli d' Italia fighting to defend the borders, to stop Italians being ethnically substituted by blacks and Muslims who are being sent by the plotters of the great replacement orchestrated by Marxists and George Soros and so on. So this story has, I think, a couple of important elements for understanding Fratelli d' Italia politically. One of which is that it reduces both world wars and indeed particularly World War II to a question of defending Italian sovereignty. So there's no actual reference in this document I mentioned to Italian Fascism or to the invasion of Yugoslavia that it mounted. Instead, we have the story just from the other side, which is the Italian victims of Yugoslav partisans. And there's this big focus on the right, the so called Feuebe killings. Feuebe are sinkholes in the ground in this region. And at the end of World War II, after the armistice, Yugoslav partisans killed many hundreds and probably in the low thousands of Italians. On the far right, it's often said that this was genocide and ethnic cleansing. Historians tend to tend to agree that really it's much more to do with the struggle for political power. Most of the victims are like, you know, Fascist state officials or policemen or soldiers, this kind of thing. But this has become a big victim complex for the far right. And it's something they've very successfully reframed historical memory around in the last couple of decades. To put it in simple terms, today the Holocaust Memorial Day in Italy is paired with a separate memorial day for the victims of the Foiber killings. So the Italian state commemorates both the Jews who were murdered in the Holocaust and Italians who were murdered by Yugoslav partisans. Many local councils will commemorate the two days jointly. Matteo Salvini, who's the deputy prime Minister, has often said, you know, from Auschwitz to the Foiber, you know, from the Jews who were murdered to the Italians who were murdered, there are no Serie A and Serie B victims. So referring to the football league. So he's saying, really, you know, we should remember all genocides, both those perpetrated by Italians and those perpetrated against Italians. So this is obviously a very offensive and drastically reductionist vision of World War II history. It removes the responsibility for the Italian responsibility in bringing war to the borderlands, to Yugoslavia. It ignores other genocides and Mass killings perpetrated by Italians. And it reduces the victims of the Yugoslav partisans to pure innocence. A bit like how we imagine Jews being slaughtered industrially in the Holocaust. But I think, like what? In terms of the kind of frames for this, the ways of talking about history, it's actually very much kind of borrowed from the memory culture of countries like Hungary and Poland and Lithuania where they sort of seek to. Or the sort of ruling right wing forces in those countries, although not only on the political right, seek to tell their 20th century history as we are a nation that wanted its independence, but was crushed between twin totalitarianisms, both Nazis and communists. So if we think of, for example, the kind of museums in cities like the Terror Museum in Budapest and so on, they tell this story where basically Hungarians are innocents, they're just caught between these two totalitarian. And in Italy, the right has tried and quite successfully to reproduce that so that there's this idea of Italians as pure victims. Indeed, the Italian complicity in the Holocaust or the crimes of Italian Fascism are kind of erased and reduced to a question of the Nazis kind of imposing this on Italy. And we have just ordinary Italians caught between totalitarianisms. And of course the point of this is not to criticize or critically expose fascism or Nazism, but rather it has an anti communist purpose. Communists were a leading force in the resistance in World War II. Communists helped to write Italy's post war constitution. Italians often talk about this idea of the anti fascists state and its anti fascist constitution. And basically the political right is trying to remove all that and trying to replace anti fascism with a unity which is based on ethnicity, Italianness, the indivisibility of the nation faced with the foreigners who try to attack its borders. So I think that the story of the borderlands plays a lot. You know, often when I'm talking about the fascist past of Fratelli d', Italia, people say, well, you know, this is just history or an attitude towards events of 80 years ago. So does it really matter? But of course, really it's very important in terms of shaping national identity and of sort of finding a place for Italian nationalism within kind of contemporary identity politics, in particular through the focus on the idea of victimhood and that Italians were not protagonists of the 20th century, but merely caught between Nazis and communists. It's a historically hideous season. It's our 100th ugly house. And if these walls could talk. Do you cry a lot? I do. Ugliest house in America. All new Wednesday at 8 on HGTV.
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Morteza Hajizadeh
And that was a great explanation as how they kind of, kind of manipulate the history of the Second World War. I guess it's one of the common features of any Fascist government to manipulate history to create a narrative that is more appealing to their side of the story. Also, a question about this party, the Brothers of Italy, earlier you mentioned the beginning, you talked a little about their relations with Italian Social Movement, or msi. It would be great if you could kind of expand on that and also tell us how this party managed to maintain itself even in post war Italy. And in the book you also talk about their connections with dictators around the world in Latin America. So it would be great if we could talk about these points as well.
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David Broder
The MSI was created in 1946 by men who had taken part in Mussolini's regime and indeed fought the last together with Nazi Germany, had fought right up until April 1945. And while the Resistance won, while there was the proclamation of an anti fascist constitution, all of the people who had been active fascists didn't just disappear. Of course, it's true that lots of people who'd been fascists or had various levels of complicity in the regime or its armed forces and so on, reinvented themselves politically or withdrew from politics altogether, or withdrew from the electoral arena at least. But some people, like Giorgio Ann Mirante, Milani's political hero, who'd been chief of staff at the Culture Ministry during the Salah Republic, the final Mussolinian regime, or Pino Romualdi, who was the deputy leader of the Republican Fascist Party in 1944-5. These were leading cadres of the regime who managed to survive the war and evaded indictment or capture, and. And they decided to recreate a fascist party. The post war Italian constitution does actually forbid the recreation of the Fascist party, but the bounds of this sort of provision have always been very contested. In general, the law has tended to be applied to violent conspiracies rather than to the dissemination of fascist ideas per se. And the MSI was predominantly electoral party, one that also sought to, as the leader, Giorgio Amirante put it, to be a party of fascists in a democracy. So to some extent they recognized that they had lost. They took up this slogan of neither reneging on the regime nor seeking to restore it. So they set themselves a more limited set of ambitions. And although there's many internal factions and divisions I could go into historically, the predominant one was to try and make the MSI into a strong rear guard against communism and in particular against the Italian Communist Party, which was the, you know, a really mass party, the second biggest force in post war Italian democracy. So in the book I kind of talk about the various ways in which the MSI tried to find other allies, Christian Democrats or conservatives. There were those within the party who were involved in more kind of military initiatives, coup plotting and so on. But broadly, what the MSI sought to do was to build up a party, including through electoral means that could be the sort of hard edge of an anti communist mobilization in Italy. Of course, the first generation of militants are people who had actually fought against the British and Americans when they invaded Italy in 1943. But even in 1951, the MSI turned to support for NATO and basically sought to foster contacts with the U.S. embassy in Italy and in particular with the right wing of the Republican Party in the United States. Sometimes when I publish articles about Italy on Jacobin, lots of people in the comments kind of say, no matter what the article is sort of specifically about, lots of people say, well, why don't you talk about Operation Gladio? You know, why don't you talk about the US efforts to undermine Italian democracy together with these fascists? But I think there's a, you know, it's true of course, that many behind the scenes operations were in the works. Many preparations were made to resist a potential communist victory in Italy. But also, of course, there was a long series of terrorist attacks and military operations in which NATO and the United States government were involved. Nonetheless, I think that it's also true that the MSI probably had an exaggerated view of their own usefulness to the United States as a sort of junior ally. The real web of alliances and so on which United States governments relied on to resist communism in Italy involves a much broader array of forces. There's much more of a kind of element of kind of reformist and social democratic efforts to sort of try and, to try and sort of provide a attractive vision of national development in Italy, which isn't just reducible to sort of naked repression or sort of fascist takeover. The msi, as you refer to in the question, was however, a great admirer of regimes such as Franco in Spain, the Colonel's dictatorship in Greece, the Portuguese dictatorship, and a whole host of regimes in Latin America. Indeed, the regimes such as those, or to take just one example, Pinochet in Chile. The MSI looked at those examples and thought, well, yes, these are cases where faced with the communist threat, the west, the United States anti communists have acted to save liberty from communism by imposing an authoritarian regime. And I think their mindset in that era was very much that of a very reactionary and repressive one of recreating in Italy something like those regimes, which of course wasn't necessarily attractive even to anti communist sections of Italian society in the kind of post war era where Italy was enjoying very strong economic growth, very powerful drive to social liberalization, had a very powerful workers movement. So it was far from sort of, far from necessarily the case that even non or anti communist forces wanted to recreate something like Chile in Italy. So apart from, though, the sort of dimension of sort of admiring the anti communism of these authoritarian regimes or sort of dreaming that they too would one day be able to murder their political opponents, there's also a dimension of their relationship with Latin America which is to do with sort of material networks of solidarity in the sense of, for example, in the immediate post war years, in the development of the far right internationally, as Matteo Albanese writes about, you have this effort to get fascists who are on the run, you know, to get them to protective Latin American countries, not only far right dictatorships, but also countries such as Peron's Argentina. And you know, right up until the 1970s, we see this, indeed the 80s, we see the continuation of this exfiltration of fascist personnel from Europe, people involved in terrorist groups, two friendly states in Latin America. Of course, the most striking example is Stefano Della Chiaye, the founder of Avanguardia Nazionale in Italy, a terrorist group, but who then went to Latin America and directly participated in the Bolivian secret services in their repression and murder of communists. So I think in this era of the kind of 60s and 70s, there was strong ties between the MSI and these regimes. And I think in a sense that provided some of the kind of, you might almost say, political hope for these forces that, you know, that they too would be able to mount some sort of authoritarian takeover in Italy. That said, you know, the msi, while it sort of endured through all this period, you know, it lasted up until the early 1990s as a party in Italy. But, you know, at the level of mass organization or electoral success, the results are very poor. Now we're accustomed in lots of European countries to far right parties getting 20 or 30% of the vote. The MSI didn't even reach 10%. And most of the time, and, you know, its efforts to integrate itself into national government or to become a real political force met a lot of limits. In 1960, there was a Christian Democrat government that relied on MSI votes in parliament. And this short, this even informal sort of external support for a Christian Democrat government Actually produced a huge backlash, very strong social movement, general strikes in several cities, including because of the plans to hold the MSI congress in Genoa, a city with a strong anti fascist tradition. So actually what we. I was too young. But what happened when attempts were made to legitimize the MSI, to bring it into the sort of space of respectable government parties, is that it produced this very strong anti fascist reaction against it. And that's something that it never overcame. It was only in the early 1990s, after the collapse of the old parties, after the collapse of the Soviet Union and of the Communist Party, after the arrival of Silvio Berlusconi as a sort of, you know, as is often said, sort of early version of Trump in Italy, sort of revolutionizing the party system. It was then that the MSI was finally brought into a sort of broad right wing coalition. In 1994, the MSI entered government for the first time as a junior partner to Berlusconi. And you know, that era, of course, is also the same one, as I mentioned before, that Giorgio Milani is getting politically active. So on the one hand we have the MSI in government, but it's also a moment of where, you know, sort of class mobilization, where social conflict, where political violence in particular have already reduced significantly. And in the 1990s, the MSI also begins this kind of renewal process where it becomes, where it starts to call itself a post fascist party, where it tries to take on a kind of conservative identity instead under the leadership of Gianfranco Fini. So, you know, I think often when we talk about the, you know, when, particularly when Melania was about to be elected, we have this idea of this sudden breakthrough by the far right. But really it's already in the 1990s that the key changes are happening. It's then that the anti fascist barrier collapses because on the right, there's no longer anyone willing to maintain it. And the kind of reaction against the MSI being integrated into government is far weaker in the 90s than in the 60s. So it's kind of mainstreaming really takes off in that moment.
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Morteza Hajizadeh
And when they entered the government, did they have to sort of hide or maybe reconfigure or change their fascist ideology to, to be more accepted into, you know, European Union?
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David Broder
Well, when they were, when, when the MSI were first integrated into government, there was a lot of international surprise and alarm. So the first time that the, an MSI minister attended a European Union meetup in Brussels, a meeting with ministers from member states, his Belgian counterpart, the Deputy Prime Minister of Belgium, Erio Di Rupo refused to shake his hand and sort of said, well, there's no political dealings with fascists. And I think that now we wouldn't see that kind of gesture because they've become so normalized. It's certainly true that under Feeney's leadership, Gianfranco Feeney, the final leader of the msi, he mounts this kind of change process which aims to change the identity of the party. So MSI is renamed Alianza Nazionale National Alliance. He talks of this idea of making the old MSI into something like the U.S. republican Party or the Spanish Partido Popular, a kind of normal, so called broad right wing party which includes the MSI tradition, but isn't limited to that. Feeney makes a considerable effort to both change the image of the party externally, while also not sort of pissing off his own militants too much. In particular, this takes the form of a series of condemnations of specific actions of the historical fascist regime, but without rejecting the political tradition of fascism as such, certainly at least in the 90s and early 2000s. So, for example, the statements such as that one of the more famous is in 2003, Gianfranco Fini, the leader, visited Israel and he said that everything that led to the Holocaust was the absolute evil. His words were misrepresented in Italian media. And it's become, as him having said, that fascism is itself the absolute evil. So what's at issue there is that the kind of dominant strategy adopted by this kind of renewal effort is in fact to try and separate out those things, right? It's to say, well, Italian Fascism wasn't all bad, Mussolini did good things too. In particular, for instance, the idea that up until 1938, fascism was going well, but then Mussolini subordinated Italy to alliance with Hitler, and that the antisemitism and the Holocaust and of course the ultimate military defeat all stemmed from that. So I think what we see in the party is a very loud and sort of deliberately. Publicly displayed distancing of itself from fascism by condemning certain specific actions, and indeed important ones, like Italian participation in the Holocaust, but without a real rejection of the political tradition of the MSI or fascist ideas as such. So instead we have this kind of a softened and prettified vision of certain aspects of fascism, in particular by purging it of its association with Nazi Germany. So we have these figures, like, for example, Gabriele d' Annunzio or Giovanni Gentile, some of the ideologues of Fascism, sometimes at odds with Mussolini, in order to build this political tradition that kind of includes fascism, but isn't limited to it and is able to criticize aspects of it. Whether this was really accepted by militants in the party or whether they just saw it as a marketing tool is harder to say. There's a political scientist called Piero Ignatzi who conducted some surveys of the opinions of people attending party congresses. And basically the dominant opinion found was that fascism was necessary as a rear guard action against communism and that the regime did good things too. Feeney actually eventually entered into conflict with many other figures in the party because of the extent to which he began to. To distance himself from fascism. The speech in Israel I mentioned actually prompted Alessandra Mussolini, the dictator's granddaughter, to quit the party. And in 2020, there was a kind of internal split in this Milieu. And in 2012, Fratelli d' Italia was kind of refounded, reclaiming the old MSI tradition, and has a much more ambiguous relationship to the fascist past even than Feeney had proposed. Where Feeney, let's say someone who'd grown up politically in the 60s and 70s, in the time of kind of political violence, you know, so one generation after the war, he had said, you know, we need to distance ourselves from the crimes of fascism, that we need to recognize the. The resistance was on the right side in fighting against the. In fighting for the restoration of democracy. So you had this kind of thing of, well, we're against communism, but we're against fascist dictatorship too. Whereas Fratelli d' Italia doesn't really say those things. It kind of says more like, well, you know, we no longer need to apologize. That's all in the past. And in, in Melanie's case in particular, often brings out this refrain, which is, you know, well, how can I apologize for things that happened before I was even born? So I think in each case, what we actually see is a kind of an ever shifting definition of what fascism actually is. If for the post war leaders of the msi, they might say, well, fascism isn't just the dictatorship, isn't just the historical regime, but rather is a set of ideas, a tradition, political community. When Melanie is accused of ties to fascism, she tends to limit the idea of fascism to just the regime. So she says, well, I have nothing to do with the regime. But in turn, the tradition of the MSI is kind of rehabilitated. So Melanie often refers to the post war MSI as the tradition of the Italian democratic right wing, and sort of doesn't call it a fascist party, even though it did explicitly call itself a fascist party right up until the early 1990s. So in the current kind of discourse of the leads of the party and the government, we see this kind of constant evasiveness about this fascist relationship, this fronting of. Well, of course we condemn anti Semitism and the Holocaust, but we no longer need to apologize for the fascist past, while also sort of saving certain elements of the fascist tradition. So some of the ideologues, some of the ideas, things like the, you know, commemorating the victims of Yugoslav partisans or honoring those who, who died fighting in the Soviet Union and this kind of thing. So it's a kind of a softening of the historical record of fascism, but it's also very inconsistent and full of holes. It's a constitutively evasive way of talking. And its aim is to turn the critical spotlight not on fascism, but on anti fascism. To say that communist crimes are worse, that the fascists were fighting against an enemy who planned an even more brutal and totalitarian dictatorship. So if anything, really, they're defined by a kind of anti anti fascism. They don't openly celebrate the historical heroes of fascism, but rather they talk about the victims of the anti fascists.
- [50:11]
Morteza Hajizadeh
I wanted to ask about Meloni as well. You, you, you, you talked about it her a little bit. I don't really follow politics that much, so I'm asking this question for my own enlightenment. I've heard that after she was elected she also had to kind of modify some of her statements, especially her anti immigration statements. But I don't know how much it's true or not.
- [50:36]
David Broder
Well, I think, I think I'll just give one example, which is Giorgio Melani has very often historically spoken of the great replacement theory, the idea of a organized ethnic substitution of Italians designed to destroy the integrity of the Italian nation and turn Italians into sort of replace the population we just kind of atomized slaves of finance capital with no ties of family or territory. Meloni has often cited the role of George Soros, the Hungarian American financier, who she calls a usurer and speculator, in orchestrating this supposed conspiracy. Since taking office as prime minister, Melania has not again said these words, but some of her other figures in the party, even leading members, for example the agriculture minister Francesco Lolobricida, who is also her brother in law, have spoken about the need to resist the ethnic substitution of Italians. So what it seems to me is playing out is basically Fratelli d' Italia want to cast Melani as a kind of international stateswoman who is above the fray of politics and whose statements are more guarded and cautious, while at the same time more junior members of the government maintain a similar rhetorical pitch and the same ideas in order to play to the party base, in order to maintain political discussion around their preferred themes. Part of this too is that Melanie very rarely agrees to give interviews or to accept questions from journalists, and prefers to issue kind of pre recorded statements and such like to keep her kind of above the fray. So I think that, that, you know, this is working very well as a kind of communication strategy because basically what we've seen since Melanie was elected is that in international media, which is also very sort of reflected in or taken up by Italian press, we have this idea which is like she's grown up, she's serious now, she's less bad than expected, all of these kind of ideas, while at the same time the ideas like ethnic substitution, the idea that. Or for example, the idea that same sex parents are destroying the fabric of the family, that surrogacy is worse than paedophilia, these kind of ideas are still regularly circulated by government figures. So in effect what has happened is that Melanie has changed her tone in order to be a respectable figure in foreign capitals and including in the European Union, while the sort of more conflictual element of far right politics continues apace, but more for domestic consumption. Part of this, I think also is that in general, as I'm British and in British media there's often this kind of idea that other countries are about to follow Britain out of the European Union, which I think is a wildly overblown idea. I think there's no chance that will happen. And so there's this kind of framing of politics that's become quite normal in recent years, which is this idea that on the one hand there are pro Europeans who are open and liberal and cosmopolitan, and on the other hand there are populist nationalists who are against Europe and want to break it apart. What we're instead seeing is that people like Melania, but really particularly Melania, are changing the European Union from within to make it more like the far right's vision of how it should be, which is one which is based on exclusion, one which is based on the harsh repression of migration, in particular through its outsourcing to third countries dictatorships in North Africa or for instance, another key example is Turkey. This didn't start with Melania. It's not entirely new. It is of course largely happening under pressure from the rising far right in Europe. And now we're seeing this come to a head as Melanie sort of old neo fascist militant become post fascist, become prime minister, is now like leading the European delegation to Tunisia to talk with the local authoritarian president said about how Tunisia can repress migration on behalf of Europe. Tunisia's president, by the way, is also an exponent of great replacement theory. So I think that these ideas, this worldview, can adopt a more professional tone and softer rhetoric and dress itself up as pragmatism and European cooperation. But it is nonetheless an advancing far right. It's the mainstreaming of the far right, not because they're forgetting who they are or what they want, but, but because the barriers against them are collapsing and other historically more mainstream centre right or conservative forces no longer have any problem allying with them.
- [56:38]
Morteza Hajizadeh
And are these far right political organizations in Italy or Brothers of Italy connected to underground groups, radical groups, underground groups who might use violence against their opponents?
- [56:53]
David Broder
Yes, but I think the, you know, historically the level of political violence in Italy today is far less. Even, you know, it's far less than in the 1970s or 60s. Never mind the historical fascist regime or the build up to it. You know, Benito Mussolini used to say, you know, the democrats ask me what my political program is. I say it's to break the bones of the democrats. That's not what Fratelli d' Italia say, or indeed are doing. There are certainly incidents of violence, including by Fratelli d' Italia members. Earlier this year there was a major news event, or scandal, if you will, when Fratelli d' Italia's youth group in Florence. But really men in their 20s, they beat, beat up some high schoolers in Florence who were protesting against them, issuing leaflets. And you know, this was caught on film, this kind of punishment beating. There's also, you know, beyond that, though, there are, as I talk about in the book, there are organized neo fascist groups that have several thousand members and which see themselves as kind of extra parliamentary social movements. Some of the more famous are of course, KAZA pound which historically was based or began life as a, as a squat in Rome. In Milan there's a large group called Lelta Azione, which probably has a thousand or so members. There are various kind of football hooligan milieu's as well. And these groups have several thousand members, often organized in activities such as training in martial arts, boxing put strong emphasis on physical preparedness. And these groups have a long record of harassing and beating up their political opponents and migrants. And Indeed there were two cases in the 2010s of CASA pound sympathisers or members murdering more or less randomly encountered black people in the street. There's also other cases of murders and terrorist attacks by far right militants. During the 2018 election campaign, there's a terrorist attack in a town called Macerata by a militant called Luca Traini. So these groups, they have a kind of local level political activity which the institutional parties don't necessarily have in terms of things like the activities of social centres sort of patrolling their neighborhoods, perhaps things like monitoring the activity of pro migrant NGOs, so called watchdogs. And indeed they're very important to the kind of galaxy of far right social movements around things like, you know, depends on, it depends on the, on the, on the particular group. They have different positions, but things like Novax groups, for example, Forza Nuova is a neo fascist group, had an important role in anti abortion and Catholic family values type movements. And so in these circles that's where we see the link between the institutional electoral right and these far right groups. Very often it's the case that their kind of intellectual forums are the same, you know, in the media of these groups. For example, Il Primato Nazionale, which is the magazine of the neo fascist group CASA pound we regularly see Fratelli d' Italia representatives appearing and interviewed. The CASA pound have these kind of debate events which are attended even by the leading figures from the government parties in the name of this intellectual exchange on the far right, very often members of these more properly explicitly neo fascist militant groups will take up roles as election candidates, local councillors, officials in local government with these institutional parties. So, you know, they have different ways of organizing, they have a more grassroots and militant, you know, I'm generalizing a lot here, but you know, there are these grassroots militant groups which are explicitly neo fascist and which are openly, you know, the interlocutors, allies in various campaigns and potential election candidates for the institutional right parties. I don't think it's necessarily the case though that the, and you know, when we've seen the institutional parties in right wing parties in government, they've often helped out these groups a lot in terms of things like giving them spaces in which to organise, allowing them to hold events in publicly city hall owned spaces, this kind of thing. So they're certainly helping them. But does that necessarily mean that the intention of the parties of government is to build violent street movements in order to crush their opponents? I don't think so. I think, in fact what's really remarkable about the current situation is the, you know, of course there are many instances of that happening, but I don't see it as a genuinely mass phenomenon in the akin to historical fascism. The fundamental fact is that the level of social conflict and mobilization in Italy is very low, notably compared even to countries like France. And so in a way, the post fascists also rule over what might be called a kind of post democratic society, in the sense that the general pitch of political mobilization is very low and plays out very much kind of through media rather than sort of organized mass movements.
- [64:06]
Morteza Hajizadeh
And you're a historian, and I know that historians may not like speculative questions, but how do you see the political future of Italy?
- [64:15]
David Broder
Well, I think the, you know, an important fact here, of course, is the recent death of Silvio Berlusconi. So, you know, his party, Forza Italia, which was first created in the 1990s, very much a network of his business associates and personal allies and so on, has long been a structuring force of the right. In recent years we've seen it decline and other sort of leaders emerge on the right. So first Salvini and the Lega and now Fratelli d'. Italia. I think with his death, it's quite likely that his party, or a large part of it, could be subsumed into Fratelli d'. Italia. And Fratelli d' Italia could complete what Feeney hoped to do in the 1990s, which is to create something a bit like an Italian version of the U.S. republican Party, like a broad right wing party. You know, currently, it has to be said, Melani's position looks very strong. The liberal opposition to her is very weak. And then the democrats in the center left or five star, you know, their vote is holding up okay, but I don't see them, you know, picking fights with the government or able to mobilize opposition to even to quite drastic measures, like for example, the recent abandonment of unemployment benefits. So I think really what we see in Italy is a very low intensity democracy, very low levels of social mobilization, and the legacy of World War II, the Resistance, in terms of both mass parties and in terms of the kind of anti fascist identity of the Italian Republic, such as it, to the degree that it ever existed, such as, you know, that's really on the decline. So I see in Italy a strong right wing hegemony, a rise of nationalist identity politics. There are also important counter trends in terms of things like social liberalization of kind of social mores around, even around questions, for example, same sex marriage, of course, the number of Italians or sorry to replace that. I mean, we've also seen a certain change begin In Italy, which is the children of immigrants being born in Italy. And in that sense Italy becoming more diverse thanks to the right, thanks to parties like the Lega and Fratelli d', Italia, those children of migrants born in Italy don't have citizenship. So you know, in that sense the sort of the politics of ethnic defence and ethnic conception of citizenship are still strong. But I also see a strong potential for a fight over that and for the kind of anti racist victories or the ideas of integration and non racial citizenship which have made some advance in countries like Britain. I think it's quite imaginable that in Italy in future that will also advance. Of course, it should be said, even among European far right forces, the kind of explicit racism and homophobia of Fratelli d' Italia isn't necessarily the norm. We see in countries like the Netherlands, for example, that the far right say, oh well, it's these Muslims who are coming in who are sexists and homophobes, or it's them who are the racists. So I think it's quite possible to imagine that Fred Hedy d' Italia's political ideas will actually start to integrate this kind of more kind of cultural conception of nationhood and even of the family. So I think that there are, even within the far right there are certain sort of pulls towards social liberalization, towards individualistic values. But overall it's hard to find particular reasons for political hope or to believe much in the strength of the left. That said, everything I just said, it's kind of always a bit easy with Italian politics to follow the kind of optical illusion whereby the latest leader looks like they have found the kind of winning formula which all of their predecessors lacked. You know, so it looks now like Meloni is doing so well in the polls, she's dominating the right. So, you know, maybe she'll govern for years and years. And there's many people in Italy saying she could be a new Angela Merkel, that she has the power to reorient the European project, to pull it to the right, to produce at the European level an alliance of Christian Democrats, conservatives and her part of the far right. So they have a very ambitious idea of Italy playing a more important role in Europe, not in order to sort of leave the Euro or overcome the sort of fiscal limits imposed by Germany and its constitution, but rather to reframe the European project in more chauvinist terms of civilizational defense. I think we can see some of the contours of that emerging also because of the war and also because of the sort of bigger great power rivalry of the west against China, Fratelli d'. Italia. They don't seek to make Europe sort of some sort of independent pole in the world. Rather, they want to be part of the west. And governments who are allied to them, notably the government in Poland, certainly agree. If Emmanuel Macron said maybe Europe needs to be more independent in its foreign policy, Morawiecki, the Polish prime minister who's a Milani ally, said, no, our strategic alternative is to have closer relations with Washington. So really that's to say that I think that what's going to be interesting in the coming years is how far this alliance of southern European and central Eastern European far right is able to take over Europe. Of course, there's European elections in June, how far it's able to ally with forces who have more ambiguous positions on on NATO, for example, Marine Le Pen's Rassemblement national has quite different positions on the war in Ukraine, as does the alternative for Germany, the far right party advancing there. And of course, the other big question is, if Trump wins the presidency, what effect will that have on the far right? I think in a sense, we've seen a quite different Melanie in office to the one we would have seen if Trump had still been president, much as we can look at other countries, like for instance, Brazil, and think, would the election have played out the same way if Trump had been president rather than Biden? So I think that there's this kind of liberal optimism saying the peak of the far right or populist challenge has passed, that things are back to normal, that the EU isn't going to break up, that there isn't going to be an ital exit. But at the same time, this far right certainly hasn't gone away. And I think that there's a very real prospect that a Trump presidency would also have a considerable effect in radicalizing the right in Europe.
- [72:55]
Morteza Hajizadeh
David, you just depicted a very, very dark and bleak picture. I really hope you're wrong, but I guess only history will tell. Before ending this conversation, is there any other work or project you were currently working on, any books we might expect sometime soon?
- [73:13]
David Broder
Not really, because the thing I've been working on recently is the Italian translation of this book, which is going to come out in Italy next month. So I'm very much hoping that it will be an opportunity for me to pose some of the questions that aren't always being asked in Italian media and to have a more critical and historical perspective on the current party of government. But yeah, I mean, I have no forthcoming publications to announce.
- [73:46]
Morteza Hajizadeh
Thank you very much, David Broder, for this fascinating talk. It was really a pleasure listening to you talking about. About the state of politics in Italy.
- [73:57]
David Broder
Well, thanks a lot for having me on.