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The uneasiness and disorientation that can seize the observer in the face of the various crises (economic, political, cultural, social and moral) that Italian society has been going through for the last thirty years are multiplied tenfold by the feeling that the horizon is moving away, while there no longer seems to be any shore to cling to. The image of a ship adrift, or of a boat without a paddle, is one of the most telling in a period where there no longer seems to be any vision of the future. We are on the eve of the Italian election–and the black tide of fascism is still rising.
On September 25 Italy will hold elections following the resignation of Prime Minister Mario Draghi and the concern is palpable. The Economist wrote that they could hardly come at a less opportune time, in the midst of at least three interconnected crises: the invasion of Ukraine, the energy crisis and inflation, which in late August reached 8.4% in Italy, its highest level since 1986. In addition, Italy’s debt is currently 150% of its GDP, which is “the largest proportion of debt held by residents of any large eurozone country.”
The outgoing President of the Council announced on August 5 that he wanted to go to New York to “reassure investors,” a step that could pave the way for a new “technical” government in the unlikely event that there is not a sufficient majority to form an executive after the elections; an option favored not only abroad but also in Italy by a significant part of the bourgeoisie, who stress to anyone who will listen that the economic policy agenda set by Mario Draghi remains the yardstick by which the next government must be measured: “Yet any significant disruption or deviation from the reform and investment programme, laid out in a 664-page annex to Rome’s deal with the commission, would jeopardise Italy’s full access to the funds,” writes Amy Kazmin in Financial Times.
The concern is all the more palpable because the coalition of the right and the extreme right has a strong probability of gaining the majority this time: the polls give it more than 45%; with the electoral law, this coalition could obtain 70% of the seats in parliament. The announced victory of Giorgia Meloni, leader of the Fratelli d’Italia (FdI) party, and her possible arrival at the head of the government is a serious threat for a party in whose arteries fascism still circulates and whose logo proudly displays the symbol of the tricolor flame in the center representing the still living spirit of fascism.
Now, beyond the snapshot offered every day by a wide range of political scientists, philosophers, activists, sociologists, it is important to try to understand how we arrived at this disaster, in order to grasp the contours of a “change of era,” to go back to the source and see where the (ir)resistible rise of the worst possible outcome—embodied by a nationalist, racist, reactionary, patriarchal right—begins.
More than thirty years of the black tide
The fear of a “return of fascism” occurs at regular intervals in the country that saw its birth a century ago. The international press has been focusing for some weeks on Giorgia Meloni and her movement, forgetting in passing that she is not a newcomer to the coalition of Silvio Berlusconi, who appointed her Minister of Youth in 2008, and reinforcing the idea that she is the only newcomer in the relatively large field of parties that call themselves “anti-systems;” also failing to highlight the enduring ties of Matteo Salvini’s Lega with the neo-fascists, their “captain,” of the 2018 elections. At the time, the presence of Matteo Salvini in the ranks of the right-wing coalition, together with Silvio Berlusconi’s party, Forza Italia, and Giorgia Meloni’s Fratelli d’Italia, reactivated the same fears; all the more so as the 80% of Italians polled then affirmed the need for a “strong man” to emerge from the crisis and those who thought that democracy was the best possible form of government reached their lowest level since 2008 (62%, or minus 10 percentage points in ten years).
Silvio Berlusconi’s party, which had been the driving force of the right-wing coalition before 2018 has been slowly disappearing. But the change in the balance of power within it is a change in the degree, not the nature, of the coalition invented by Silvio Berlusconi more than a quarter of a century ago, uniting the conservative and reactionary right, the “new” far right and neo- or post-fascist organizations. After all, hadn’t Berlusconi himself been “compared” to Benito Mussolini during his various terms as Italian Prime Minister (1994, 2001, 2008)? The arrival in his first government in 1994 of five ministers from the Italian Social Movement was only one of the steps leading to a broadening of the horizon of political legitimacy of a party that was the direct heir of fascism.
Silvio Berlusconi has been the victorious paladin of a black tide in a country where fascism has never disappeared and because it has been inscribed little by little on the social, political, cultural, mental territory of Italy, so that it has “inserted itself in the brutally selfish entrails” of its society. A miasmatic fascism, in a way, exhaling the stale air (la mal aria) of a culture that survived the regime set up by Mussolini.
Berlusconi’s style was a successful form of “hybridization” that combined “old traditions with the new modernizing thrusts of the previous decade.”
Historical revisionism accompanied the Berlusconi regrouping ever more surely. So much so that in 2003, Fabrizio Cicchitto, a former deputy of the Socialist Party, maintained that La Casa delle libertà was “placed in the current of historical revisionism.” Anti-Communism and with it anti-antifascism constituted the ideological cement, but also what Francesco Biscione defined that same year as the “sommerso della Repubblica“, that is, the persistence of a reactionary anti-democratic culture, the real breeding ground of the Berlusconi coalition. To this historiographical offensive were added the repertoires of political action mobilized by the right to erase from memory and history “the misdeeds and infamies of fascism.” In Silvio Berlusconi’s country, the public and political use of history has never been so “unscrupulous/” Constantly seeking to oppose anti-fascism and democracy; where democracy becomes synonymous with liberalism and where the boundaries of anti-democracy extend to everything that cannot be associated with the liberal vision of the world. Thus, as the historian Pier Paolo Poggi pointed out, the “point of connection between revisionism and the dominant political cultures […] is precisely in the judgment on capitalism” and the depoliticization necessary for “the enslavement of billions of human beings.”
The discourse of this right was and remains poor, but effective. It values civil society as a whole, as the only filter for “protecting the national community,” which it places above and beyond class divisions and, above all, the “defects” imputed to representative democracy.
Pretending to get rid of the “scoriae,” the dross, of the totalitarianisms of the 20th century, the post-communist intellectuals abandoned to the general condemnation what they considered from now on, at best as “the past of an illusion” (François Furet), at worst as a too cumbersome heritage. This process was accompanied by the blacklisting of Marxist historians. The parliamentary left has thus shown itself to be open to a rereading of the past, in particular of the period of resistance and anti-fascism, calling for the creation of a “shared memory,” which was the basis of the legitimacy of the alternation of governments of the two political poles that competed for power between 1994 and 2018.
But the so-called radical left too has at least in part, followed these interpretations. Fausto Bertinotti, leader of Rifondazione comunista (Communist Refoundation), the only party of the radical left to have a national audience in the early 2000s, also gave in to this “post-antifascist” ideology in his own way, valuing, in a letter to the editor of Corriere della Sera, “non-violence” as “an essential condition for bringing to life to the end all the radicality of this process of social transformation that we call communism.”
The suicide of the Republic, a daily practice?
This sense of the crisis of Italian politics is hardly new. It has been repeated at regular intervals since the early 1990s and the collapse of the Italian political system, caught up in the turmoil of the “clean hands” [Mani pulite] judicial machine, against the backdrop of an economic and social crisis. This tsunami gave rise to several new forces, or those presented as such, all of which collaborated, each in their own way, in the deepening of inequalities and the destruction of fundamental social rights. Their legitimacy has been eroded by alternating political administrations, marked by an inability to respond to the most pressing needs and by an almost assumed corruption which, as the Italian Communist Antonio Gramsci wrote, is “characteristic of certain situations in which the exercise of the hegemonic function [the necessary balance to be struck between consent and force] is difficult, the use of force presenting too many dangers;”
This irresistible erosion of the new deal of the early 1990s, the time of a generation, has been coupled with the more general failure of politics, which in Italy has taken radical forms unknown elsewhere.
As journalist Carlo Formenti notes, the economic and social crisis that had begun in 2008 was becoming an “instrument of capital aimed at disarticulating the subaltern classes and destroying their capacity for resistance.”
The “withdrawal of the working classes from the political exchange” has become an objective in order to impose a “reaggregated bourgeois bloc.”
The chain of economic crises has relentlessly worsened the living and working conditions of wage earners, transforming little by little, but no less surely, the political horizon and the social legitimacy of the struggle. The backlash against the simple idea that one can organize to fight injustice, seems all the more essential because it has been accompanied by “a dynamic of constant adaptation to the worst,” linked as much to a kind of “trivialization of injustice” as to a form of deterioration of the relationship of Italians to the state. At the mercy of alienation and exploitation, workers have gone from being a class capable of thinking of themselves as the engine of social change to a “phantom class,” singled out by the Italian political sphere.
This dark framework has produced resentment and anger. The Italian population’s relationship of trust with its own political institutions (state, parliament, parties) has been severely shaken. Distrust of politics has been coupled with a crisis of confidence in the state and in the instruments of mediation. Consider the fact that, according to a survey published in La Repubblica in December 2011, trust in the state stood at 29.6%, in the parties at about 3.9% and in parliament at 8.5%.
Que se vayan todos! Away with all of them!
Beppe Grillo and his 5-Star Movement (M5) will for a time ride this Trojan horse and fill the void of representation in Italy by permanently drying up the potentialities of a left to be rebuilt. The movement that took shape in 2009 under the name of the 5-Star Movement (M5S) was initially built on the extraordinary popularity of the Genoa-based comedian. The son of a small businessman from Genoa was discovered by the star presenter, Pippo Baudo, at the end of the 1970s, who opened the doors of the flagship RAI program, Fantastico. But it was the collaboration with Antonio Ricci that made Grillo popular with the show Te la do io l’America [I’ll give you some of America], broadcast on RAI in 1983. The same Ricci would soon frequent the court of Silvio Berlusconi and create, in 1988, the Berlusconian show par excellence, Striscia la notizia (still on the air), a comedy news show with naked women and a deus ex machina embodied by a large red stuffed animal named Gabibbo, the standard-bearer of what he called “popular feelings” and whom he compared in December 2018 to Matteo Salvini.
Beppe Grillo knew how to surround himself with personalities with a strong cultural capital of sympathy from Michele Serra (journalist and columnist of the Repubblica) to Giorgio Gaber, through Antonio Ricci and Dario Fo; he recovered fragments of collective identity that he rearranged as needed.
The Genovese comedian turned his satire into a major political lever. In 2005, Time defined him as “seriously funny” and listed him among the 37 “European Heroes” who are “changing the world for the better.” Time noted in particular his role in exposing the Italian food giant Parmalat, the largest bankruptcy in Europe before the 2008 earthquake. Grillo entered hundreds of thousands of Italian homes through Striscia la notizia. The role of “comic vigilante” was made all the easier by the fact that he had constructed and disseminated a deceptive narrative of his own life, evoking a supposed banishment by the media after denouncing, in November 1986, on Fantastico, the corruption of the Socialist Party and of Bettino Craxi as head of the government. In 1988 he was back on RAI and in 1993 he had his own show in two parts, the Beppe Grillo show. In front of an audience disoriented by the Tangentopoli corruption scandals, he would pronounce his catchphrase: “I don’t know what’s happening, reality exceeds fiction”: his audience was the same one that, a few months later, would vote for Silvio Berlusconi for the first time.
Beppe Grillo can be considered a perfect product of Berlusconism. In the early 2000s, he became the spokesman for the anti-political protest that Silvio Berlusconi had embodied a decade earlier. What changed was his embodiment of the rupture, of a newness that was thought of here and now, without any future or distant horizon of reference. And just like his best enemy, the discourse he carried associated the disarticulation of the social link and expressed the absolute novelty in the Italian political field. He called for an end to professional politicians and all forms of social mediation (as unions), at a time when Sergio Rizzo and Gian Antonio Stella, two journalists from the Corriere della sera, that is, the daily newspaper par excellence of Italian entrepreneurship, were sending back to the whole of Italy the image of a political class that was no longer at the service of the national community and the common good, but of its own interests. Their book, entitled La Casta, would be a landmark; the subtitle is quite telling: “This is how the political class became untouchable”
The book was published on May 2, 2007; four months later, on September 8, Beppe Grillo launched the first V[affanculo] Day [Fuck off-Day], where he announced the death of political parties. Exacerbating the image of the sublimated relationship of the leader with his people, he proposed himself as the “only possibility of reality,” in a period in which the DP was completing its transformation, at the service of “virtuous” economic policies of public debt reduction, becoming the party of the “right-wing,” the other right-wing, the party of the modernist bourgeoisie. The abandonment of its electoral base, especially public sector employees and students, was coupled with a deeper renunciation of the very ideas of justice and equality. This adaptation to the existing order ended up permanently blurring the classic political categorizations in which the new generations no longer recognized themselves. The left has been reduced more and more to the group of those who thought they belonged to it, but without necessarily sharing its fundamental values. Certainly, at about the same time, the metamorphosis affecting the DP was taking place among other parties throughout Europe. However, its precursory status was accompanied here by an unparalleled extremism, the impact of which was particularly devastating, including for the radical left, which has also become disjointed, frayed, decomposed, “evaporated,”, swept away by the ebb tide.
Faced with the disaster of a left that was incapable of shaping a horizon for the anger that was rising, Beppe Grillo and his movement were to impose themselves as the only “alternative subject.” In fact, the appearance on the Italian political scene of the Genoese comedian has, at the same time, captured to his advantage the social sphere of indignation in the immense void left by the left and blocked the experiences of the type that were to spread all over the world (Indignados, Occupy, Fearless Cities, etc.) and their political incarnations (Podemos, Syriza, etc.).
The chalice of death
Umberto Bossi’s Lega had succeeded in disarticulating Christian Democracy, in difficulty in its main strongholds, gaining a lasting foothold in the so-called “white zone” or Catholic and conservative areas of the peninsula, where the Christian Democracy vote was, until the 1980s, a vote “for the Church and against Communism.”
Thus Beppe Grillo chose September 8, 2007 to launch his first “Vaffanculo Day,” a date with a high symbolic value in the Italian history of the 20th century and in particular in the history of fascism. Indeed, on September 8, 1943, Marshal Pietro Badoglio announced the signing of the armistice with the Allies. On that date, the king and the government fled the capital, leaving behind a disoriented population at the mercy of the German troops that had poured into the country since the dismissal of Benito Mussolini 45 days earlier. “Tutti a casa” [everyone home] seemed to be the confused motto of that day, well rendered by Luigi Comencini’s eponymous film. This Vaffanculo Day (V-Day) is the culmination of the thousands of “Vaffanculo” (Fuck you!) that Grillo had shouted on all the stages, big and small, of Italy. Like the one at the Smeraldo theater in Milan, where in 1992 he announced the birth of “gentocracy”, invoking the seizure of power by the mood of the people and their anger; people who “are no longer afraid to say what they think […]”.
While the V-Day mobilizations took place in more than 180 Italian cities, including outside the country, it was in Bologna, in the heart of the so-called red zone, that Beppe Grillo chose to take the floor, challenging the left, or better, seeking to erase its memory. In front of tens of thousands of people, Beppe Grillo was going to tell the politicians to go home with a unique cry: “Vaffa…” [Screw you…] to “the caste”: “Italians, September 8 has arrived, the day of our defeat; this September 8 will be the day of their defeat. V-Day, as in Vaffanculo Day.” By making September 8, the day of the defeat of Mussolini’s war, the day of the defeat of the public he was addressing, Beppe Grillo reappropriated the revisionist re-readings of Italian fascism of the 1990s, including the concept of “death of the nation,” applied by revisionism precisely to September 8, 1943, that rendered illegitimate the parties that had emerged from the War of Resistance.
On that occasion, the comedian announced that he wanted to “take back the country” by organizing a movement of the “bourgeois” and the “conservatives.”
Beppe Grillo has actively sought to erase the memory of the struggles of the oppressed by confiscating space on the left, a left that he defines as “much worse” than the right, while claiming to be “neither left nor right, but on the side of the citizens.”
The “Vaffa” will function as a connector that seeks both to arouse emotion and to play on a set of confused feelings, a tangible link between these “diverse elements” in the same way as the graphic of the V of MoVimento, borrowed from the film by James McTeigue, V for Vendetta, with its composite cultural character, or the “courage” of M5S in choosing the color yellow, a color “carefully avoided in the political world” because it is that of “lies, hypocrisy, betrayal.”
The blog became the vector of what Robert Proctor called a “culturally produced ignorance,” using doubt as the privileged weapon of his “agnotology,” that is, his agnosticism, and the construction of parallel realities.
Very quickly, journalists, all journalists, became the object of invective, going so far as to ban them from the meetings of the movement, including that of Piazza San Giovanni in Rome, at the end of the “Tsunami tour” for the national elections of February 2013. In 2017, Beppe Grillo even went so far as to call for the establishment of a “people’s jury” against newspapers and TV newscasts that publish fakenews, in a country that at that time was in 77th place in terms of press freedom.
Refusing the left-right divide, in the same way as Umberto Bossi before him, Beppe Grillo has been able to constitute a sort of appeal for a growing fringe of the population. He initially drew on the broad opposition to Berlusconi, capturing, rearranging, disarticulating, and emptying a vocabulary proper to the left, attracting to him some of the leading figures of its intellectuals (Erri de Luca, Dario Fo…), and then enlarging his mass base, taking advantage of the decomposition of the Italian political field and blood-sucking of Berlusconism, “an unprecedented form of destruction of democracy.”
Winter is coming
The M5S has long simmered in the bowels of the country, as demonstrated by its rapid electoral victories, inserting itself into the territories and organizing itself at the local level. It has its roots in the depths of the Italian subsoil, in the “sovversivismo” that Antonio Gramsci wrote about, “the ‘subversive’ character [sovversivismo] of these layers has two faces: one turned to the left, the other to the right, but the left figure is just a feint; they always go to the right in decisive moments and their desperate ‘courage’ always prefers to have the carabinieri as allies.” And it is indeed the right and the extreme right (the Lega, Casapound, the southern extreme right) that appeared as the shore to which this ideology of non-ideology had attached itself durably, while actively feeding the lure of an alternative “left” formation. Thus the M5S has on occasion presented itself as a bulwark against the far right. On July 10, 2013, after being received by the President of the Republic Giorgio Napolitano, Beppe Grillo also let it be known in his own way: “[…] I went to the territories, and I’m angry because I’ve gathered the anger of those I met. […] I always try to moderate the spirits, I said it to the President of the Republic, what I say is something I experienced […]; we must moderate the spirits, the spirits of the people who want to arm themselves with guns, with sticks and who say that the revolution is done only like that and I say to them, calm down, let’s try again with the democratic methods […].”
The M5S proved itself adept at “intercepting and interpreting every type of protest and uneasiness” and keeping them together. It has presented itself as a megaphone that gave strength and voice to the “feeling” (or resentment), to the “anger” of a population that, for more than thirty years, has suffered both the consequences of the economic, social and political crises experienced by the whole of Europe and the inversism (radical inversion of values) to which the great cultural revision of Berlusconism and the plural right has led. An inversism that can be seen, for example, in the positioning of the M5S spokespersons on fascism: “an ideology of the past” according to Beppe Grillo, who limited himself to saying that he is not a fascist; Luigi di Maio affirmed that, within the M5S, “there are those who refer to [Enrico] Berlinguer [an italian communist leader in the 1980s], the Christian Democratic Party or Almirante”. He defended the idea that “the categories of fascism and anti-fascism were only used to ‘instrumentalize’ [the debates], because no one deserves to be demonized, and it is possible that mistakes were made on both sides, but also that choices were made in good faith”. Another young leader at the time of the M5S, Alessandro di Battista, sententiously announced that “it is more important to be honest than anti-fascist.” A position that resonates with that of a growing part of the population. Beppe Grillo opened a dialogue with the neo-fascist movement CasaPound, or at least with its activists, and attracted to him men socialized in the Italian Social Movement, such as Luigi di Maio and Alessandro Di Battista, both sons of MSI militants. The father of the current Minister of Foreign Affairs, now outside the M5S, proudly admitted to having worked with Giorgio Almirante and Gianfranco Fini and said he found in the M5S the “values of the old right.”
The rhetoric used by Beppe Grillo, under cover of humor, is that of the extreme right. The shift of the electoral base of the movement towards the positions of the Lega, in dialogue with the general orientations of the M5S embodied by Beppe Grillo, seems to confirm this. In 2008, didn’t he declare, “I’m not a politician…I could do it only in a small dictatorship where I would have the possibility of using a stadium to put the 80,000-100,000 people who are hurting Italy.” And in 2013, after the February elections, did he not say, “Let those who do not want to adhere to our rules say so immediately. Then we can stone them.”
Beppe Grillo’s repeated attacks on the “self-righteous and angelic left” (buonista) concerning immigration policy or anti-racism was only one of the declensions of a new syncretism mixing indifferently the fight against migrants and the fight against corruption and mafias (“the illegal immigrant is useful,” he wrote, “to criminality”.)
The M5S-Lega government from June 2018 to August 2019 attests to this. A government that sociologist Domenico Masi defined as the most right-wing in the history of republican Italy, that analyst Ezio Mauro called the “realized right,” and that journalist Claudio Tito described as a “practical laboratory of a new right” based on a “new social block.”
The same government passed the “Decree on Security and Immigration,” defined today as a mistake by Giuseppe Conte, the new leader of the M5S and at the time nevertheless President of the Council, one of the most authoritarian and reactionary provisions in the entire history of republican Italy, amended in 2020. It provided for the abolition of the residence permit for humanitarian reasons, the doubling of the number of days of detention in the administrative centers set up for this purpose (Permanent Return Center (Cpr), the impossibility for asylum seekers to be registered in the civil registry and therefore to have access to the right of residence. In terms of “security”, the decree authorized the use of tasers in municipalities with more than 100,000 inhabitants and heavier penalties, up to two years in prison, for those who promote the occupation of land or buildings. The government led by Matteo Salvini and Luigi di Maio has made the fight against the poor and migrants its political priority. While racially motivated violence has continued to increase throughout the peninsula (an increase that Luigi di Maio loudly denied), the Lega-5-Star government has chosen to criminalize solidarity and facilitate the legal possession of firearms, including Kalashnikovs.
This governmental experiment lasted 14 months. In August 2019, Matteo Salvini opened a crisis within the government calling for immediate elections; frightened by this prospect after the Lega’s victory in the European elections in May, the 5-Star Movement and the Democratic Party established a new alliance, headed by… the same Giuseppe Conte. Moreover, there was no difference in nature with the neo-liberal policies pursued until then by the DP and the right wing allied with the extreme right, only the degree of difference in terms of job insecurity and restrictions on migration. The establishment of the M5S-PD government in September 2019 and the support of the M5S to the government headed by Mario Draghi in February 2021, in the midst of a health crisis, is the masterful confirmation of this.
The French sociologist Éric Fassin proposed to interpret what he called the “populist moment” not as a reaction to neoliberalism, but as a way of guaranteeing its popular success.
The neither “right or left” slogan about the M5S has functioned as a mantra that has prevented serious reflection on this unprecedented political phenomenon that has served as a conveyor belt for the political lexicon of the ultra-right. Grillo and his M5S have played on what Wendy Brown calls “class resentment without class consciousness.”
Not only did the M5S and its leaders agitate signifiers that are now hollow (direct democracy, freedom…), but also what the historian Furio Jesi, inspired by Oswald Spengler, called “ideas without words” characteristic of the culture of the right, or to be more precise, “spiritualized words” “that pretend to be able to really say and therefore to say and at the same time to hide in the secret sphere of the symbol”; terms that are supposed to conceal a shared “secret”, but that do not need to be explained and that, through their use, become a vector of ideas without words and thus found the present and future solidity of the community to which they intend to address.
The M5S could be identified with a chemical catalyst. Beppe Grillo vouched for the biodegradable nature of his movement, indicating that it could be converted into a simple molecule that could be used by the new politics that it would have helped to create by producing the decomposition of the old
The eternal “return” of fascism
It is not uncommon in recent weeks to see references to a speech given by Umberto Eco at Columbia University on 25 April 1995. Entitled “Eternal Fascism,” it was given in the aftermath of the right-wing bombing that struck Oklahoma City, leaving several hundred people injured and dozens dead. Reflecting afresh on the persistence of fascism, its forms and its evolution over time, it seemed beyond the celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of the Italian liberation, to be an urgent necessity. The text emphasized the still very real risks that the (re)birth of fascism posed to the world: “It would be so much easier, for us,” wrote Umberto Eco, “if there appeared on the world scene somebody saying: ‘I want to reopen Auschwitz, I want the Black Shirts to parade again in the Italian squares’. Life is not that simple. Ur fascism [eternal fascism] can come bac under the most innocent of disguise. Our duty is to uncover it and to point our finger at any of its new instances – every day, in every part of the world.”
Fascist? Many terms are used to describe the right wing facing the doors of power today, hypnotizing the public debate, looking for words “to designate the family of dangerous demagogues.”
It is a country that recently saw a journalist from the daily newspaper La Stampa threatened because of a report dedicated to the nostalgia for fascism. A country where on October 9, 2021, the national headquarters of the largest Italian trade union was attacked and devastated by so-called No Vax groups. A country where a daily newspaper like Il Giornale was able to distribute Mein Kampf in the 1938 Italian translation as a gift to its readers.
“Italy is a circular country,” wrote Pier Paolo Pasolini in his privateer writings, “like the Leopard of Lampedusa, in which everything changes in order to remain as it was before,” because, he continued, “it is a country without memory which, if it had any care for its history, would know that ‘regimes carry ancient poisons, invincible metastases.”
Stefanie Prezioso
Notes:
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