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03.05 Open Letter to Congressman Bart Stupak Health & Environment
Video National Health Care Systems In Other Countries 03.18 Pressure Drop: Brave Sir Dennis Ran Away 03.12 Slick Barry and the $100-Billion Medicaid/Medicare Fraud Claim 03.09 Kill Bill: Death to Obamacare! 03.09 Obama’s Rhetoric May Be “Fiery,” But His Health Care Reform Is Still Lukewarm Media Watching
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03.11 Power Rangers: Policing the System With the "Fightin' Progressives" 03.09 Thinking About Countings 03.07 Unnatural Acts: Breaking the Fever of Militarism 02.25 Future Shock: A Better World Beyond the Imperium High Crimes?
03.18 The Lawfare Project's Anti-Democratic Agenda 03.16 America's Secret Prisons 03.13 Palestinian Dispossession in East Jerusalem 03.12 Israeli Settlement Expansions Continue 03.11 Brutalizing Palestinian Children 03.08 The Russell Tribunal on Palestine: Barcelona Session 03.05 Targeting Israeli Apartheid 03.01 America's Permanent War Agenda 02.25 Global Sweatshop Wage Slavery Economics & Business Non/Mis/Malfeasance
03.14 The Crisis in America's Telecommunications Network 03.09 The Business of Water: Privatizing An Essential Resource 03.05 Is the Recovery Real? 03.04 IMF-Style Austerity Measures come to America: What “Fiscal Responsibility” Means To You 03.04 Barry C. Lynn's "Cornered: The New Monopoly Capitalism and Economics of Destruction" 03.01 Thinking About Fees International
03.15 Peace Process Hypocrisy: Stillborn from Inception 03.03 Muslim Disunity 03.02 Funding Israeli Militarism, Belligerence and Occupation 02.26 Iran Captures a 'Good' Terrorist We are a non-profit Internet-only newspaper publication founded in 1973. Your donation is essential to our survival.
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COMMENTARY:Duce Bags: Italy Leads Fascist Revanche in Western DemocraciesSunday, 13 July 2008![]() As Faulkner said, "The past is never dead; it's not even past."
The first by-lined piece I ever had in a newspaper dealt with the rise of political parties in Italy that proudly claimed descent from the Fascists of Benito Mussolini. This was almost 30 years ago, when memories of the Fascist era in Italy and Germany were still relatively fresh; one didn't have to be very old – hardly middle-aged – to remember growing up under those regimes or else being touched by their shadow in one way or another. And of course, the Fascist regimes in Spain and Portugal had only ended a few years before the article appeared. So the emergence of openly neo-Fascist mainstream parties in Italy – the birthplace of the movement – was a genuine shock in those days. It's not shocking anymore, of course. For the past 14 years, Italian politics has been dominated by a Fascist-aligned bloc led by sleazy oligarch Silvio Berlusconi. A capsule description of the dubious neo-Duce that I wrote five years ago for the Bergen Record – on the occasion of Berlusconi's visit to the Crawford ranch of his good friend, sleazy oligarch George W. Bush – is still apt today:
Berlusconi was turfed out of office in 2006, but returned to power this year at the head of his most hard-line coalition yet. And these days – in our "changed" post-9/11 world, when Western governments have embraced aggression, authoritarianism and the adoration of raw power as never before – there is no need for Berlusconi's blackshirts to sugarcoat their Fascist proclivities. Yet even though we have learned to expect the worst from our degraded democracies (and are rarely disappointed), it still comes as something of a shock to see Italy reviving one of Fascism's most brutal policies – the official demonization of an entire ethnic group – against one of the movement's most ravaged historical targets: the Gypsies. Seamus Milne reports in the Guardian:
As Milne notes, this Fascist revanche has not drawn a single protest from the leaders of the "free world." Indeed, they welcomed Berlusconi back with open arms to the gilded circle of G-8 supremos last week. Bush was the most enthusiastic of all, greeting his old friend and partner in war crime with enthusiastic shouts of "Amigo!" (Well, it's a foreign word anyway, if not quite Italian), then commiserating with him over Berlusconi's continuing criminal indictments (which, once again, he is using state powers to try to squirm out of). “I read the courts are after you again,” the American lawbreaker told the Italian sleaze merchant. “It’s unbelievable. I’ve never seen anything like it. Constantly after you.” (One can only hope that relentless prosecutors will be "constantly after" Bush in the years to come.) II. But Milne makes a further point. The rise of neo-fascism in Italy, and elsewhere, is tied to the collapse -- or rather the surrender -- of center-left parties to the pernicious doctrines of the Right. Everywhere, these parties --- Democrats in America, Labour in the UK, various Social Democrats throughout Europe – have turned themselves into pale copies of conservative parties, adopting policies that have degraded society, destroyed communities, entrenched injustice, rewarded greed, poisoned the earth, embraced militarism and aggression, inflicted vast suffering on developing nations (through the straightjacket of "market reforms," i.e., corporate-crony welfare), subverted democracy, diminished liberty and gutted the very notion of the common good. [Yet we are being too kind in calling this process a "surrender." As Arthur Silber has pointed out many times, the Democrats – and New Labour and other craven centre-left parties – have embraced the Right's agenda of elitist domination, militarism and scorn for the common good because they agree with it. Any figures with genuinely "progressive" views have been winnowed out or marginalized by the big money machines that run the parties. Such people are always a minority amongst the self-interested factions who vie for domination over a nation's affairs, of course. But there used to be a more substantial minority of such folks in U.S. politics, with enough leverage to sometimes affect national policy and even score some successes. But this strain has been almost completely bred out, as we have seen in the latest Democratic Congress – the most reviled and unpopular Congress in American history.] Back to Milne:
In the current U.S. presidential campaign, we can see this dynamic of center-left collaboration with the Right – which has been going on for almost a quarter-century in America – playing itself out once again. Barack Obama's "surge" to the Right – as exemplified by his vote for the tyrannical FISA measure – is just another iteration of this process. Likewise, his embrace of the Terror War; true, he wants to do it more "efficiently," and perhaps add a few more targets – in Pakistan, say – but he still wants to do it. He makes no bones about continuing this militarist project which has already killed hundreds of thousands of innocent people, bankrupted the national treasury, and is now – through the Terror War oil price spike – strangling the entire national economy. All of this – especially the Terror War's continuing brutalization and coarsening of the national ethos – is meet food for neo-fascism to feed upon. And it's already gorging itself in its ancestral homeland. Rounding up Gypsy children, fingerprinting them, driving them from their homes, applauding pogroms -- as Faulkner said, the past is never dead; it's not even past. Chris Floyd has been a writer and editor for more than 25 years, working in the United States, Great Britain and Russia for various newspapers, magazines, the U.S. government and Oxford University. Floyd co-founded the blog Empire Burlesque, and is also chief editor of Atlantic Free Press. He can be reached at cfloyd72@gmail.com.This column is republished here with the permission of the author. Copyright © 2008 The Baltimore News Network. All rights reserved.
Republication or redistribution of Baltimore Chronicle content is expressly prohibited without their prior written consent. Baltimore News Network, Inc., sponsor of this web site, is a nonprofit organization and does not make political endorsements. The opinions expressed in stories posted on this web site are the authors' own. This story was published on July 14, 2008. |
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