“The Book and the Rifle”: Cultural and Racial Policy in Fascist Italy, Part 2

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Giovanni Gentile and Benito Mussolini

Go to Part 1.

Intellectual Debate in Fascist Italy

Tarquini emphasizes that culture in Fascist Italy was by no means monolithic, but allowed considerable stylistic variation and intellectual debate so long as these respected core Fascist principles. Indeed, Fascists emphasized that being a Fascist was more about a certain manly mindset than about theoretical abstractions. As Nietzsche did, the Fascists rejected the bourgeois spirit with its satisfaction with mediocrity, its skepticism and compromise, its concern with careers, and its death-fearing selfishness.

Fascism was born out of diverse groups dissatisfied with Italy’s small gains during World War I, frustrated with liberal impotence, and disturbed by the rise of communism. These included military veterans, self-sacrificial arditi soldiers, futurist artists, revolutionary syndicalists, socialistic republicans, and others. Fascism emerged organically as “a militia in the service of the nation,” a political movement, and finally a government, rather than as a preset set of ideas.

The “spirit of the trenches,” the spirit of hierarchy, discipline and community, which had shown its awesome destructive power in wartime would be used by the Fascists to constructively develop the nation in peacetime. Indeed, Fascism developed a “secular liturgy” (p. 43) and “a conception of the nation elevated to a sacred entity” (p. 51). Fascism rejected internationalism, egalitarianism, and materialism, embracing aristocracy, spirituality, and nationalism. Some Fascists even credited their movement with the potential to save Europe from decadence and degeneration.

Fascism was unabashedly communitarian. Economics and culture were to respect community interests. The Fascist doctrine of corporatism reflected “the relevance to the state [statalità] of every economic phenomenon” (p. 157). Fascists similarly argued that writers had “a political, moral, and educational role” and culture had to support “the struggle for civilization” (p. 184). Read more

“The Book and the Rifle”: Cultural & Racial Policy in Fascist Italy, Part 1

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tarquini

Storia della cultura fascista (Bologna, Italy: Il Mulino, 2011)
by Alessandra Tarquini

Since World War II, the very word “fascism” has always conjured up images of evil in the cultural and political mainstream. This is largely because the fascists lost that war and, as we know, the victors write the history books. It is also because the most famous fascist regime, National Socialist Germany, did in fact have an official doctrine of disregard for the lives of many non-German groups, thus providing ample material for the Allies’ atrocity propaganda.

It is interesting then to note that the original fascist regime, that of Fascist Italy, also been widely demonized despite the fact that this government was far more moderate. Indeed, the deaths attributable Fascist Italy are perhaps an order of magnitude lower than those of the Western Allies or the Soviet Union. Italian Fascism, having ruled for over 20 years, longer than National Socialist Germany and mostly in peacetime, then provides another example of what the West might have been had history taken a different course.

Here at The Occidental Observer, we are obviously extremely interested in culture and its impact on evolutionary adaptiveness and reproduction, that is to say gene-culture coevolution. Italian historian Alessandra Tarquini has provided a useful summary of cultural policy and life in Fascist Italy in her Storia della cultura fascista (History of Fascist Culture). Tarquini’s study is scrupulously neutral and empathetic, even as she dedicates her book to “the memory of the first anti-fascist I knew” (presumably a close relative).

Perhaps the most striking theme in the book is the absolute importance the Fascists gave to culture understood as the systematic education of the people. This meant especially the youth, but also the working masses and women who had been neglected by previous regimes. Tarquini observes: “From 1922 to the end of 1943, one of the main objectives of Fascism’s cultural policy was the education of the young generations” (p. 231). The National Fascist Party (PNF) “for the entire Ventennio [two decades of Fascist government] invested all its energy in the mobilization of the new generations” (p. 232). Furthermore, “from the earliest years, the Fascists showed the will to educate women and workers” (p. 233). This was not done in the lackadaisical way characteristic of liberal regimes — a bit of schooling, perhaps some cultural subsidies, but otherwise leaving young people’s minds in the hands of often hostile television oligarchs —  but systematically, through schooling, sports, Party activities, holidays, film, radio, etc. Read more

Hope for Bleeding Heart Social Justice Warriors

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“When a ship goes down there are never enough lifeboats. Sailors are trained to beat off with violence those still in the sea once the lifeboat is full. If they do not—everyone dies. This is real compassion.”   Sam Gerrans

I know that there are many of you who are deeply affected by the pitiable plight of Syrian refugees, and indeed with the awful privations that poor African migrants suffer. You are full of empathy, but you lack the resources to help them. You feel impotent. It is a helpless feeling, isn’t it?

So instinctively, you implore governments to take action. You ask them not only to provide aid with my tax dollars, but to fling open our borders to allow them to pour in un-vetted, so as to overburden our social safety net, bring chaos and conflict to our society, expose our women to rape, fill up our parks and streets with make-shift tents and rubbish, occupy social housing units left empty by the forcible eviction of our own low income residents, and ultimately make refugees out of our own citizens.

You do everything to pull our heart strings. You even take heartrending pictures of migrant women and children in distress, while ignoring the homeless and the unfed and unclothed in your own backyard.

And then, if this is not enough, you turn to me for help. You appeal to my conscience. You try to guilt me out. Even though I am a pensioner who has worked long and hard to fund the medical system and the benefits that accrue from it, you tell me that I have too much, that I am too affluent, that I can afford to share my “bounty”. And that I should open my heart and wallet to these poor unfortunates and let them have the hospital bed and the dental care and subsidized one bedroom apartment that I am entitled to. Read more

Trump in West Palm Beach

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Donald Trump’s West Palm Beach speech has gotten a lot of attention (see Lawrence Murray’s comments, at The Right Stuff). There does seem to be a ramping up of tone apparent here — a sense that this election is an apocalyptic moment, as indeed it is. Trump understands, as the Alt Right has been saying, that the establishment is corrupt from top to bottom, that we live in a sham democracy, a sham republic:

This election will determine whether we are a free nation or whether we have only the illusion of democracy, but are in fact controlled by a small handful of global special interests rigging the system, and our system is rigged. This is reality, you know it, they know it, I know it, and pretty much the whole world knows it.

As Angelo Codevilla noted, “Because Republicans largely agree with Democrats that they need not take seriously the founders’ Constitution, today’s American regime is now what Max Weber had called the Tsarist regime on the eve of the Revolution: ‘fake constitutionalism.’”

Trump is aware of the special role of the media:

The establishment and their media enablers will control over this nation through means that are very well known. Anyone who challenges their control is deemed a sexist, a racist, a xenophobe, and morally deformed.

As we have emphasized repeatedly on TOO, the media indictment is always fundamentally a moral indictment, as in Clinton’s “basket of deplorables.” Media messages in favor of massive immigration and the displacement of traditional populations have typically been couched in moral terms. If you oppose the transformation of European societies by immigration, you are a bad person. It’s not just that you are mistaken about the practical effects of massive non-White migration in terms of a decline in social cohesion, increase in social conflict, crime, terrorism, etc., you are morally evil. It’s so simple that there’s no need to get into the social science research. Read more

Our Problem is not with “Liberals”

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We in the Alt Right should pat ourselves on the back for giving the reading public a more meaningful vocabulary with which to describe what looks more and more like the dystopia around them. Our political problems are much better understood through the prism of race and ethnicity than “liberal” and “conservative” labels.  That old dichotomy has become irrelevant, yet many still cling to it.

To be clear, I find liberals to be exasperating in their political views, and generally avoid extended conversation with them.  But not a few of them are likely driven by pathological altruism, which, however mischievous in its effects, springs from a good instinct.  So I’m not ready to dehumanize them to the extent that we see in mainstream conservative media.

Whenever we see some type of Black Lives Matter outrage of violence against a hapless White, the reaction from your average conservative is something like, “Well, there go liberals, they’re the ones who are really violent.” Let’s call it Democrats are the real criminals, an aberration of “Democrats are the real racists.”  Can it be that they really miss the most obvious quality of the attacker? They don’t really imagine that a Starbucks-swigging upper middle-class White liberal is “the real criminal.”

Steven Crowder, who apparently claimed leadership of the Alt Right (much to the amusement of The Daily Stormer [here and here]) steps in as the perfect foil to my argument.  In an article from April,  2015, after heaping praise on the peaceful protests of Martin Luther King Jr. and lauding the role of violence in defeating the Nazis and freeing of slaves, Mr. Crowder proceeds to make this rather obtuse observation:

Liberals can’t seem to wrap their heads around this concept.  It seems every time liberals set out to protest, we end up with destruction. Violence is the rule for leftists, not the exception.

He then goes on to give examples of “liberal” protests gone bad, such as in Detroit, Baltimore and Ferguson; but he also throws in Woodstock and Occupy Wall Street for good measure, as though those temper-tantrums were equivalent to the utter savagery of inner-city riots.  But as for noticing the obvious about political violence in America — that it’s really about race, he just can’t go there. Read more

The need for a White Minorities Movement

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The 2011 census revealed that across London, Leicester, Luton and Slough, approximately 4.5 million White British people already live as a minority. The release of the census results was significant as it legitimised what British Nationalism has been saying for years about the extent of mass immigration. No longer can opponents of demographic change be smeared as playing on peoples fears or as ‘racist’ by advocates of structural racism theories as if we had ‘White Privilege’, why would we allow ourselves to become a minority?

Now provides the perfect opportunity to launch a movement representing these new white minorities as being a localised minority but a majority of the population nationally enables us to warn of the dangers of demographic change whilst we still have time to motivate the remaining majority to do something about it.

Brexit changes everything- not just because UKIP is now out of the picture- but most crucially because politicians can no longer use discussing Eastern European immigration as a way to talk about immigration without mentioning demographic change. By combining our traditional cultural and security focused arguments with social, economic and political arguments against demographic change we can back the main parties into a corner as, whilst the main parties can try to argue that immigration is good for voters through bringing in tax receipts to pay for pensions, they can’t say the same about their own voters becoming a minority.

People only vote for the main parties as they think they are the only ones capable of governing, providing economic security and safeguarding public services. If we can prove that the rapid demographic change the main parties support undermines this, then we can build a mass movement. It’s impossible to argue in favour of becoming a minority without the main parties exposing their hatred of their own population.

So what does becoming a minority mean really mean for peoples everyday lives? Read more

Claremont’s Codevilla On The Coming Revolution: “Americans Will Be Nostalgic For Donald Trump’s Moderation.”

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weasel
Posted on Vdare, October 11, 2016, 11:06 pm
Kevin MacDonald

We are nearing the climax of a watershed election. The Ruling Class understands that Donald Trump represents a counter-revolution to all they have built up over the last 50 years. That emphatically includes GOP leaders like Speaker Paul Ryan, who hastened not merely to step on Trump’s bounce back in the second debate by announcing he was suspending support, but is signaling he will continue to damage Trump as much as possible [Inside Ryan’s decision to (almost) dump Trump| The speaker might still fully rescind his endorsement before Nov. 8, sources told POLITICO, by Jakee Sherman and John Bresnahan, Politico, October 11, 2016]

This phenomenon has inspired an important essay from Angelo M. Codevilla, a Senior Fellow of the Claremont Institute and emeritus professor of International Relations at Boston University, After the Republic. [Claremont Review,September 27, 2016]. Codevilla’s basic idea: the cultural revolution of the last 50 years has destroyed America as a constitutional republic. As many on the Alt Right have noted, there is nothing left to conserve. The question now is where our post-republic period will take us. Codevilla [Email him] writes

Because Republicans largely agree with Democrats that they need not take seriously the founders’ Constitution, today’s American regime is now what Max Weber had called the Tsarist regime on the eve of the Revolution: “fake constitutionalism.” Because such fakery is self-discrediting and removes anyone’s obligation to restrain his passions, it is a harbinger of revolution and of imperial power. [Emphasis added]

This is why we see repeated crazy comparisons of Trump to Hitler—most recently, This New York Times ‘Hitler’ review sure reads like a thinly disguised Trump comparison. [By Aaron Blake, Washington Post, September 28, 2016] Despite absolutely no statements from Trump suggesting that he would suspend the Constitution and assume dictatorial powers, the concern is lurking that, like Hitler, he would do just that.

Read more