Is Italy going fascist? A letter from Rome

Bertinotti's view is that it is impossible to understand the shellacking the left took without analyzing the nature of the New Right, whose strength and vitality demonstrated that, more than any other political parties, they were the first in Italy to grasp the sea change consequent to the belated modernization of Italy. Italian society has been "de-ideologized" by modernization, resulting in "a new kind of crisis" for the Italian institutions. Ably exploiting this crisis, the New Right is "not Fascist, even as it uses elements of that culture and its vestiges, while exploiting an aggressive aversion to every kind of diversity when insecurity is transformed into fear—and then the figure of the scapegoat re-emerges from the shadows as a shield from fear."

Bertinotti calls this "a-fascism," as in apolitical, or without fascism. And from this he deduces that if you don't have fascism you are also "a-anti-Fascism, in a Republic without roots and without history," meaning you can't be anti-Fascist if you don't have Fascism to oppose. Parliament itself is weaker, for governability matters more than honest confrontation in a debate, he concluded.

Put more simply, the tragedies Mussolini meant for Italy have been forgotten, but so have the values of the Resistance—the roots and history Bertinotti mentions—which have been a guarantee for a democracy born in 1947 and functioning, however imperfectly, for the past sixty years.

There can be no doubt that this third round of Berlusconi government, in which Berlusconi himself seems puzzled, is different from those that went before.

It foreshadows a different Italy for the future—an Italy that is ill prepared: by its schools that do not train young people for work, by cynicism in the professional classes, by a collapse of the political parties that held the country together for over half a century, and by a collapse in values.

Whether this is or is not re-emergent Fascism, we are witnessing the re-emergence of the scapegoat. Just as it was for Hitler, fear of the outsider is a useful political glue for building what political scientists call a negative coalition.

It is far harder to rally people toward a common goal than to rally them against a commonly perceived enemy, be he Jew or Gypsy. For this reason the perceived wave of terror, which ordinary people here are accepting as real in their fear of petty crime, is of deep concern, even as the same people overlook the blatant misdeeds on the grand scale of Italian governments -- national, regional, local -- which have made and continue to make common cause with businessmen and organized crime bosses.

Ironically, at the same time that Italians are blaming petty crime on Foreign and Other Devils, Premier Silvio Berlusconi is promoting legislation that would shield corruption in business and politics, by making it illegal for police to have wiretaps unless for crimes that command a minimum of a ten-year sentence; significantly, a conviction for corruption means only eight years in the jug, if and when such a trial is held at all.

If Berlusconi has his way, phone taps cannot legally be authorized when corruption is suspected, according to former magistrate Giuseppe D'Avanzo.

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