Duce Bags: Italy Leads Fascist Revanche...

[nhboy (Premo)]

"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:"

Chris Floyd Online - Duce Bags: Italy Leads Fascist Revanche in Western Democracies