One thing I have noticed since returning to Italy for a longer period, after having lived abroad for more than eleven years, is the constant rise of young people (and not only young people) who openly declare themselves “fascists.”
There have always been somewhat ignorant nostalgics of Mussolini, of course. But the situation is more serious than I thought: very young boys and girls who call themselves “fascists” as if it were a football team, who share posts praising fascism as “the time when things were good,” “the time of order,” “the time when trains ran on time.”
I used to get very angry, I admit it. Then I started asking a simple question: “What is fascism?” I have asked it. They don’t know how to answer.
As Socrates argued, whoever truly knows the good does not choose evil: wrongdoing arises from ignorance.
So I decided to do something different from getting angry: to look at them with a bit of compassion, because perhaps they do not really know what they are saying. And maybe they need someone to explain it to them in simple terms. Maybe through an article.
Let’s start with something simple: being against fascism does not mean being intolerant. It means defending a system that guarantees rights to everyone. Tolerance, by definition, cannot include those who want to eliminate tolerance itself. If it did, democracy would cease to exist.
So: what is fascism?
Fascism is not a “normal political opinion,” but an ideology that, when it was in power under Benito Mussolini, eliminated people’s freedoms.
In what sense?
Under the regime, you could not criticize the government, you could not form political parties, there was no freedom of the press, and there were no free elections. In 1938, racial laws were introduced, excluding Italian Jews from schools, public employment, the army, and universities.
For this reason, when the italian Republic was founded, the Constitution clearly stated, in its XII Transitional and Final Provision, that the reorganization of the fascist party is prohibited.
The framers of our Constitution did not write this because they woke up in a bad mood: it was a concrete historical choice. Because fascism, by its very nature, excludes everything that does not align with it.
So when you declare yourself a fascist, what are you doing?
You are praising a dictatorship, not expressing an opinion.
A dictatorship that would beat you and send you into internal exile for a wrong sentence.
A dictatorship that would decide what you are allowed to read, because newspapers would not be free to write the truth, only what the regime allowed. A dictatorship that would proclaim Italy a great power while sending soldiers to the front with worn-out boots. A dictatorship in which mayors and public officials were appointed from above, by the head of government.
The same head of government who, in 1938, enacted the racial laws, excluding Italian citizens from public life solely because of their origin.
If you call yourself a fascist, you are saying that you would want to live in a state that decides for you.
You are saying that you would accept not being able to criticize the government without risking prison or internal exile; that you would agree to be required to join a party in order to work in the public sector; that you would accept your child being educated from a young age in paramilitary organizations, with marches, uniforms, and mandatory salutes.
You are saying that you would accept the state telling you how many children to have and when to marry (in 1927, for example, a tax was introduced for unmarried men). You are saying that you would accept reading propaganda every day, because newspapers would not be free to write the truth. You are saying that if you belonged to the “wrong” category, you would accept being excluded from school, work, and the army, as happened to Italian Jews.
That is what it means to call yourself a fascist. It does not mean loving order.
And when you say that “under Mussolini trains ran on time,” you might consider that he could simply have been made a stationmaster, not head of government, as the italian actor Massimo Troisi once ironically remarked.
