The Enemy

Thursday 18 December, ANSA: “This morning the Milan Court of Appeal upheld 13 convictions, four months each, for as many far-right militants for fascist demonstration, for those Roman salutes, on 29 April 2018, at the march held every year in memory of Ramelli, a member of the Fronte della Gioventù killed by Avanguardia Operaia in ’75.”

Despite the many final acquittals handed down in similar cases, the ruling mentioned here—and a few earlier ones—runs against the prevailing line, which has also been reinforced by a blunt decision of the Supreme Court (Court of Cassation, Joint Sections, no. 16153/2024): the Roman salute is not, in itself, a crime, unless—considering the overall context—there is a concrete risk of reorganising the dissolved Fascist party or of pursuing anti-democratic and discriminatory aims. This is how, respectively, the Scelba Law and the Mancino Law are interpreted, with reference to the very Cassation ruling that was meant to narrow the punishability of such conduct.

In this specific case, what are the facts and what is the context? A crowd—shapeless in substance, uniform in gesture—of nostalgics, arranged in military formation, commemorated the brutal killing of a young right-wing boy by young left-wing extremists during the Years of Lead. They raised their right arms to the sky and, decisively, shouted three times “present” when the name of the fallen “comrade” was called, then broke ranks; a ritual that has been repeated for a long time, including for other victims of similar crimes (for example in Rome, outside the former MSI headquarters on Via Acca Larentia). “Sergio Ramelli, Benito Mussolini, Italian People, Democracy—we’re here”: this, according to the outcome of the trial, is how the episode was read. A collective remembrance of a life cut short by people who dirtied their hands in the same filth in which those were immersed from whom the nostalgics—at least by proximity—take their cue. The gesture is identical; it evokes order and obedience, cornerstones of the fascist way of life. The aims cannot be taken for granted.

Starting from the ruling above, let’s go further: what makes the nostalgics’ commemorative style feel “necessary”? Simple nostalgia? Pure passion? If so—passion for “history,” for the “good old days” staged theatrically? Or passion for order and obedience, the bread and water Italians lived on during their temporal confinement in the Ventennio?

The order–obedience pairing is internalised by those who crave power by day and dream of it by night. From the years of the economic miracle (between the ’50s and ’60s), with the gradual flattening of traditional social classes—swept away, with docile arrogance, by the civilisation of consumption—Italians started dreaming big again, as they had under fascism. The difference is that there is no longer a flesh-and-blood leader to whip up the crowds with charisma, to intoxicate them with bombastic speeches and empty rhetoric. Instead there is an impersonal, discreet Power that suddenly guides the masses—Italian and, broadly, those of most advanced economies—without making enough noise to be called an outright coup. The average Italian thus relates to this new Power as never before.

During the Ventennio, only a minority was deeply subjugated by fascist ideology; most people, once the fanfare had died down and the costume of authoritarian folklore had been removed, essentially returned to daily life—their habits still broadly coherent with the particular cultures they belonged to. In the case of most Italians: peasant, artisanal, working-class, and petty-bourgeois cultures—distinctions already slowly eroding even then, because of the regime’s (mystified) nationalisation of “peasant ideals” (discipline, obedience, austerity, sacrifice) and, more materially, the rise of the petty-bourgeois model as the one best suited to the whims of consumption: the model used to stimulate the national economy and, more subtly, to standardise behaviour and customs.

In the postwar period, the masses—tired of hunger, cold, and bombs—were led by this unknown Power into the enclosure of “permissive” freedom. It may sound paradoxical, but in the fascist years of repression, the ordinary choices of citizens who adhered to the regime not faithfully but formally—so, as said, almost the majority—were in practice freer than they are now, in the age of permissiveness.

Even granting the overall improvement in living conditions for most people—greater material wellbeing, more development and less progress—Italians underwent a real plundering of values by this Power. Within a few years they found themselves part of a single class of Equals—not in the noblest sense, but in its most degrading one: equal in needs, aspirations, pleasures, fears, clothing, language, and, in general, behaviour and thought—especially along the petty-bourgeois model. The numbing of “free will.”

And no, I don’t celebrate an evident genocide of cultural diversity, paid for with the high price of widespread material wellbeing. Yes, it has certainly increased life expectancy—but at what cost did we pay for it? Should we have stopped halfway? A compromise between development without progress and the persistence of historical class inequalities—the “bad luck” of being born into a poor family: we went too far; capital gallops, humanity limps.

That “bad luck” became even more sharply felt once the preset model of life became the petty-bourgeois one. Before that shift, the proletarian—though economically strained—did not carry the spiritual burden of satisfying needs alien to their own culture. Afterward, they could enjoy material wellbeing (to varying degrees), but at the price of lugging around the weight of being “born into the wrong family,” because they could not satisfy needs imposed by Power through cultural standardisation—again, centred on the petty-bourgeois model.

This is a pseudo-freedom: rather than freeing, it forces the person to be free, it “allows” it—like a father who lets his child go out and come home at any hour, but, if the mood strikes, waits with a whip in hand. How? First, by using traditional mass media like newspapers and television, and today’s smartphones (now a bionic component of contemporary humans), Power devilishly shapes user-consumers (no longer just citizens), deploying additional tools that seem harmless—sometimes even cute and appealing—like advertising, to orient and, at times, manufacture the needs of the masses.

Second, part of this Power’s machinery is made up of public figures (Debord calls them “stars”)—not all, of course, but many—who present themselves as admired, worldly, smiling, carefree, sculpted, financially free, becoming idols for “ordinary people,” who then fantasise about and envy what television, smartphones, advertising, and these very figures (including today’s influencers) elevate—willingly or not—into elements of an “ideal” existence: an existence of hedonism, pleasure for its own sake.

Now, human beings have always been thirsty for power: the possibility of directly affecting other people’s lives is, in fact, an extension of one’s capacity to act upon other bodies. A life (the powerful person’s) is thus filled with meaning by other lives, over which a force—more or less intense—can be exercised, capable of steering this or that movement, this or that reasoning in others.

The contemporary peculiarity is this: the subject still dreams of holding traditional, strictly political power, yet with growing fervour they desire the power of capital—which can, in turn, imply political power. The former can be seized through physical or psychological force, depending on how a community is organised; the latter is more opaque, harder to define, and yet more brutal.

Unlike “traditional” fascists, who became such out of conviction (a few) or conformism (many), today the citizen-user-consumer can turn monstrous in that direction only through pure conformism, mixed with relatively comfortable living conditions (most of us have food, a fridge, running hot water, a sofa, a TV, various entertainments, and so on), spoon-fed by this formless Power whose aim is to standardise the masses once and for all. In that sense, it reveals itself as more totalitarian than all historical totalitarianisms: how can someone buy compulsively, then stash, throw away, or resell, only to start the personal production cycle all over again—pure passion, simple personal inclination? How can someone run their existence as if they were the CEO, the sales rep, the advertiser, and the warehouse manager of themselves?

If yesterday’s totalitarianism—recognisable and therefore resistible—could grab you and throw you into the voting booth, today it leaves us “free” to graze, without so much as a whistle, but on land poisoned by unknown, unchallengeable culprits. These poisons did not exist during the Ventennio: back then repression—also a poison, but a different one—was concrete, visible, it beat without restraint, yet it never reached the point of definitively remoulding the average Italian. So much so that when the regime fell and the war ended—except for the true believers—it was all a bit of “Bella Ciao.” Later, however, certain poisons carried out a revolution, albeit a “gentle” one.

Yesterday no one dreamed of replacing the Duce just to snatch his fez; at most, one participated in his mania for protagonism, in his heroic posturing (“scoundrel-heroism”). Today the dream is to replace—or flank—the “new masters,” so as to keep perpetuating the age-old exploitation of bodies, now reinforced by its contemporary form: the exploitation of minds. To optimise oneself not day by day, but minute by minute. To selfishly sacrifice one’s peace of mind for a greater “social profit” in interpersonal relations, usable to inflate one’s own egoism. A daily struggle with oneself to acquire small shares of the new Power with which to achieve the longed-for “self-realisation,” amid the most inhuman traps of neoliberalism, the Power’s business partner.

Back in the ’70s, Pasolini had already sketched an image of this new Power—still hazy, yet already brilliant (small digression: the same intellectual who today is jealously appropriated by the national-populist right—ever since it moved into Palazzo Chigi). According to Mollicone (FDI), Pasolini would be honoured to be paired with Kirk… what a charming picture. Not to mention how so many—far too many—misuse the expression “the fascism of the anti-fascists,” as if they had no idea what PPP was actually talking about.

Let’s draw the conclusions: are the nostalgics lined up with outstretched arms fascists? One could say that even in the commemorations alone one can detect the feeling—genuine or inherited—of what Pasolini called “archaeological fascism,” the fascism of the Ventennio, of which today remain ideas (some reshaped to fit contemporary reality, keeping their roughness or softening it), gestures, busts, and paragraphs in history books.

Yet the media resonance of these reenactments—however “legitimate” their commemorative intention may be—is such that, in a context where public opinion is easily manipulated and critical thinking is heavily anaesthetised, the average Italian might, without much hesitation, side with the nostalgics: after all, however questionable the methods, they are remembering a young militant killed by ideological hatred from the other side. It is precisely this ambiguity that must be questioned. The risk is the normalisation of those gestures and those paramilitary formations—so it is not unlikely that history may regurgitate what seems already digested.

Therefore, the judicial news item cited at the start seems to suggest that, given the current legal order and the current Italian social context, the court considered it appropriate to keep a tight rein on one rib of the carcass of traditional fascism, in order to prevent the smell of death.

As proof of the potential of these historical echoes, one can see how certain young people today are fascinated by the Ventennio, mimicking songs and doing “black humour.” I suspect this is more about rowdy imitation than real awareness—although, without thinking about it, some end up normalising certain ideas and gestures, no longer sensing their historical discomfort and perceiving only the clownish side of those years—helped along by social networks, where everything seems acceptable and, at the same time, banned.

This mistake leads people to downplay—or worse, to become indifferent to—episodes of violence or intimidation that recall fascist methods, carried out indistinctly by young far-left and far-right actors (or supposed such). Acts that, with great caution in contextualisation, can be compared to those used by “red” and “black” terrorists during the Years of Lead: today there is nothing even remotely like that climate of tension, but between “red” and “black” violence the main difference lies in the uniforms worn by the agents; the conduct and the ideals remain children of neurosis and conformism.

Therefore, one must firmly reject anything that is, at once, traceable to Mussolini’s fascism (even only methodologically) and genuinely threatening to the values of freedom, equality, and democracy enshrined in our Constitution—and thus to peaceful coexistence. As for other manifestations that do not fall into this category, I don’t think we should give them excessive attention—though neither should we be indifferent.

The real danger is fighting the Enemy on one front while leaving the wider front uncovered. Which wider front? The one contested with the “new Power” (described above) and one of its new forms: if the new Power could be called “the new fascism,” and by fascism we mean “totalitarian arrogance,” then this other form could be called “last-minute fascism,” also opaque and hard to pin down.

Let me propose one of the masks it wears: digital fascism, perhaps the most evident. Social networks—governed by algorithms built according to the directives of the “new masters” (first and foremost big tech and large private investment funds)—have demanded human life, and we have given it to them, receiving in return a digital existence whose “laws of nature” are nothing but orders issued by those same algorithms. We expose ourselves to them and feel joy—or torment—because in our home feeds and “For You” pages we consume exactly what we want, based on our interests, silently extracted by increasingly interconnected platforms.

Notifications are the new batons: they leave no bruises on the skin, but they water down concentration and make any truce from the digital world impossible. This has a major impact on concrete reality, which becomes the result of a portion of life lived online in an almost totalising way, since the only truly autonomous choices left are whether to like or not, whether to repost that content or not—without denying, by saying this, the positive value social media can have.

Yes, we can change or revoke permissions for data profiling, but that does not make us truly independent from algorithmic mechanisms. It does not mean we no longer live—but that we are living, once again, in a different form, that same “development without progress” that must necessarily be balanced—along with its benefits, here linked to cultural diffusion and the expansion of social ties (I prefer not to go further on that point here).

All of this is compounded by the flood of data and information—so much that it disorients the average user, no longer accustomed to print—and by the spread of artificial intelligence, in both civilian and military uses: resources as powerful and useful as they are destructive, given human ignorance and human life.

In all this, who are the anti-fascists? What should they do? Without placing myself on a lectern, given the relatively limited (though not nonexistent) relevance today of the remnants of traditional fascism, I believe anti-fascism must also recognise and fight the new forms of fascism.

Taking into account everything said so far, it should become clear in public opinion that anti-fascism—as “the struggle against oppression”—cannot be directed only at busts and outstretched arms, using methods similar to those of the “archaeological” fascists themselves; otherwise psychological reactance would strike too deeply into the average Italian, who would end up identifying the anti-fascist as “the parasite”—just as, alternatively, a critic is branded a communist or a fascist.

So a new bond has to be forged with Italians: the ability not merely to communicate objectives, but to speak frankly, to adopt a humble posture—otherwise any constructive relationship becomes impossible, regardless of the goal. Because anti-fascists, in ideals and in practice, cannot keep grumbling among themselves: they must humanise their relationship with the masses, ever more indifferent and pampered by other actors who have understood very well how to seduce them effectively.

At the same time, anti-fascism cannot keep its sights fixed on the same front while,

elsewhere, the Enemy advances.