Umberto Eco

Ur-Fascism
June 22, 1995

The New York Review of Books www.nybooks.com

In 1942, at the age of ten, I received the First Provincial
Award of Ludi Juveniles (a voluntary, compulsory
competition for young Italian Fascists – that is, for every
young Italian). I elaborated with rhetorical skill on thesubject “Should we die for the glory of Mussolini and theimmortal destiny of Italy?” My answer was positive. I was asmart boy.
I spent two of my early years among the SS, Fascists,
Republicans, and partisans shooting at one another, and I
learned how to dodge bullets. It was good exercise.
In April 1945, the partisans took over in Milan. Two days
later they arrived in the small town where I was living at
the time. It was a moment of joy. The main square wascrowded with people singing and waving ﬂags, calling inloud voices for Mimo, the partisan leader of that area. A
former maresciallo of the Carabinieri, Mimo joined the
supporters of General Badoglio, Mussolini’s successor, andlost a leg during one of the ﬁrst clashes with Mussolini’s
remaining forces. Mimo showed up on the balcony of thecity hall, pale, leaning on his crutch, and with one hand
tried to calm the crowd. I was waiting for his speech
because my whole childhood had been marked by the great
historic speeches of Mussolini, whose most signiﬁcantpassages we memorized in school. Silence. Mimo spoke in ahoarse voice, barely audible. He said: “Citizens, friends.
After so many painful sacriﬁces … here we are. Glory to
those who have fallen for freedom.” And that was it. He
went back inside. The crowd yelled, the partisans raised
their guns and ﬁred festive volleys. We kids hurried to pickup the shells, precious items, but I had also learned that
freedom of speech means freedom from rhetoric.
A few days later I saw the ﬁrst American soldiers. They
were African Americans. The ﬁrst Yankee I met was a blackman, Joseph, who introduced me to the marvels of Dick
Tracy and Li’l Abner. His comic books were brightly coloredand smelled good.
One of the oﬀicers (Major or Captain Muddy) was a guest
in the villa of a family whose two daughters were myschoolmates. I met him in their garden where some ladies,surrounding Captain Muddy, talked in tentative French.
Captain Muddy knew some French, too. My ﬁrst image ofAmerican liberators was thus – after so many palefaces inblack shirts – that of a cultivated black man in a yellowgreen uniform saying: “Oui, merci beaucoup, Madame, moi
aussi j’aime le champagne …” Unfortunately there was nochampagne, but Captain Muddy gave me my ﬁrst piece ofWrigley’s Spearmint and I started chewing all day long. At
night I put my wad in a water glass, so it would be fresh forthe next day.
In May we heard that the war was over. Peace gave me acurious sensation. I had been told that permanent warfare
was the normal condition for a young Italian. In thefollowing months I discovered that the Resistance was not
only a local phenomenon but a European one. I learned
new, exciting words like réseau, maquis, armée secrète,
Rote Kapelle, Warsaw ghetto. I saw the ﬁrst photographs ofthe Holocaust, thus understanding the meaning before
knowing the word. I realized what we were liberated from.
In my country today there are people who are wondering
if the Resistance had a real military impact on the course of
the war. For my generation this question is irrelevant: we
immediately understood the moral and psychologicalmeaning of the Resistance. For us it was a point of pride toknow that we Europeans did not wait passively forliberation. And for the young Americans who were paying
with their blood for our restored freedom it meant
something to know that behind the ﬁring lines there wereEuropeans paying their own debt in advance.

In my country today there are those who are saying thatthe myth of the Resistance was a Communist lie. It is truethat the Communists exploited the Resistance as if it were
their personal property, since they played a prime role in it;
but I remember partisans with kerchiefs of diﬀerent colors.
Sticking close to the radio, I spent my nights – the windows
closed, the blackout making the small space around the set
a lone luminous halo – listening to the messages sent by the
Voice of London to the partisans. They were cryptic andpoetic at the same time (The sun also rises, The roses will
bloom) and most of them were “messaggi per la Franchi.”Somebody whispered to me that Franchi was the leader ofthe most powerful clandestine network in northwestern
Italy, a man of legendary courage. Franchi became my hero.
Franchi (whose real name was Edgardo Sogno) was amonarchist, so strongly anti-Communist that after the war
he joined very right-wing groups, and was charged withcollaborating in a project for a reactionary coup d’état. Whocares? Sogno still remains the dream hero of my childhood.
Liberation was a common deed for people of diﬀerent
colors.
In my country today there are some who say that the Warof Liberation was a tragic period of division, and that all weneed is national reconciliation. The memory of thoseterrible years should be repressed, refoulée, verdrängt. But
Verdrängung causes neurosis. If reconciliation means
compassion and respect for all those who fought their own
war in good faith, to forgive does not mean to forget. I caneven admit that Eichmann sincerely believed in his mission,
but I cannot say, “OK, come back and do it again.” We arehere to remember what happened and solemnly say that
“They” must not do it again.
But who are They?
If we still think of the totalitarian governments that ruled
Europe before the Second World War we can easily say that
it would be diﬀicult for them to reappear in the same form

in diﬀerent historical circumstances. If Mussolini’s fascism
was based upon the idea of a charismatic ruler, on
corporatism, on the utopia of the Imperial Fate of Rome, on
an imperialistic will to conquer new territories, on an
exacerbated nationalism, on the ideal of an entire nation
regimented in black shirts, on the rejection ofparliamentary democracy, on anti-Semitism, then I have nodiﬀiculty in acknowledging that today the Italian Alleanza
Nazionale, born from the postwar Fascist Party, MSI, andcertainly a right-wing party, has by now very little to do withthe old fascism. In the same vein, even though I am muchconcerned about the various Nazi-like movements that havearisen here and there in Europe, including Russia, I do notthink that Nazism, in its original form, is about to reappear
as a nationwide movement.
Nevertheless, even though political regimes can beoverthrown, and ideologies can be criticized and disowned,
behind a regime and its ideology there is always a way of
thinking and feeling, a group of cultural habits, of obscureinstincts and unfathomable drives. Is there still anotherghost stalking Europe (not to speak of other parts of theworld)?
Ionesco once said that “only words count and the rest ismere chattering.” Linguistic habits are frequently
important symptoms of underlying feelings. Thus it is worth
asking why not only the Resistance but the Second World
War was generally deﬁned throughout the world as a
struggle against fascism. If you reread Hemingway’s For
Whom the Bell Tolls you will discover that Robert Jordan
identiﬁes his enemies with Fascists, even when he thinks of
the Spanish Falangists. And for FDR, “The victory of theAmerican people and their allies will be a victory against
fascism and the dead hand of despotism it represents.”
During World War II, the Americans who took part in the
Spanish war were called “premature anti-fascists” –meaning that ﬁghting against Hitler in the Forties was amoral duty for every good American, but ﬁghting against
Franco too early, in the Thirties, smelled sour because it
was mainly done by Communists and other leftists… . Why
was an expression like fascist pig used by American radicals
thirty years later to refer to a cop who did not approve of
their smoking habits? Why didn’t they say: Cagoulard pig,
Falangist pig, Ustashe pig, Quisling pig, Nazi pig?
Mein Kampf is a manifesto of a complete politicalprogram. Nazism had a theory of racism and of the Aryan
chosen people, a precise notion of degenerate art, entartete
Kunst, a philosophy of the will to power and of the
Ubermensch. Nazism was decidedly anti-Christian and neopagan, while Stalin’s Diamat (the oﬀicial version of Soviet
Marxism) was blatantly materialistic and atheistic. If by
totalitarianism one means a regime that subordinates every
act of the individual to the state and to its ideology, thenboth Nazism and Stalinism were true totalitarian regimes.
Italian fascism was certainly a dictatorship, but it was nottotally totalitarian, not because of its mildness but rather
because of the philosophical weakness of its ideology.
Contrary to common opinion, fascism in Italy had no special
philosophy. The article on fascism signed by Mussolini in the
Treccani Encyclopedia was written or basically inspired by
Giovanni Gentile, but it reﬂected a late-Hegelian notion of
the Absolute and Ethical State which was never fully
realized by Mussolini. Mussolini did not have any
philosophy: he had only rhetoric. He was a militant atheistat the beginning and later signed the Convention with the
Church and welcomed the bishops who blessed the Fascist
pennants. In his early anticlerical years, according to alikely legend, he once asked God, in order to prove His
existence, to strike him down on the spot. Later, Mussolini
always cited the name of God in his speeches, and did notmind being called the Man of Providence.
Italian fascism was the ﬁrst right-wing dictatorship thattook over a European country, and all similar movements

later found a sort of archetype in Mussolini’s regime. Italianfascism was the ﬁrst to establish a military liturgy, afolklore, even a way of dressing – far more inﬂuential, withits black shirts, than Armani, Benetton, or Versace would
ever be. It was only in the Thirties that fascist movements
appeared, with Mosley, in Great Britain, and in Latvia,
Estonia, Lithuania, Poland, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria,
Greece, Yugoslavia, Spain, Portugal, Norway, and even in
South America. It was Italian fascism that convinced many
European liberal leaders that the new regime was carryingout interesting social reform, and that it was providing amildly revolutionary alternative to the Communist threat.
Nevertheless, historical priority does not seem to me asuﬀicient reason to explain why the word fascism became asynecdoche, that is, a word that could be used for diﬀerent
totalitarian movements. This is not because fascism
contained in itself, so to speak in their quintessential state,
all the elements of any later form of totalitarianism. On thecontrary, fascism had no quintessence. Fascism was a fuzzy
totalitarianism, a collage of diﬀerent philosophical andpolitical ideas, a beehive of contradictions. Can one
conceive of a truly totalitarian movement that was able tocombine monarchy with revolution, the Royal Army with
Mussolini’s personal milizia, the grant of privileges to the
Church with state education extolling violence, absolutestate control with a free market? The Fascist Party wasborn boasting that it brought a revolutionary new order;
but it was ﬁnanced by the most conservative among thelandowners who expected from it a counter-revolution. At
its beginning fascism was republican. Yet it survived fortwenty years proclaiming its loyalty to the royal family,
while the Duce (the unchallenged Maximal Leader) was
arm-in-arm with the King, to whom he also oﬀered the titleof Emperor. But when the King ﬁred Mussolini in 1943, theparty reappeared two months later, with German support,
under the standard of a “social” republic, recycling its old

revolutionary script, now enriched with almost Jacobin
overtones.
There was only a single Nazi architecture and a single
Nazi art. If the Nazi architect was Albert Speer, there wasno more room for Mies van der Rohe. Similarly, under
Stalin’s rule, if Lamarck was right there was no room for
Darwin. In Italy there were certainly fascist architects but
close to their pseudo-Coliseums were many new buildings
inspired by the modern rationalism of Gropius.
There was no fascist Zhdanov setting a strictly culturalline. In Italy there were two important art awards. The
Premio Cremona was controlled by a fanatical anduncultivated Fascist, Roberto Farinacci, who encouraged
art as propaganda. (I can remember paintings with such
titles as “Listening by Radio to the Duce’s Speech” or“States of Mind Created by Fascism.”) The Premio Bergamo
was sponsored by the cultivated and reasonably tolerant
Fascist Giuseppe Bottai, who protected both the concept ofart for art’s sake and the many kinds of avant-garde art that
had been banned as corrupt and crypto-Communist inGermany.
The national poet was D’Annunzio, a dandy who in
Germany or in Russia would have been sent to the ﬁring
squad. He was appointed as the bard of the regime becauseof his nationalism and his cult of heroism – which were infact abundantly mixed up with inﬂuences of French ﬁn desiècle decadence.
Take Futurism. One might think it would have been
considered an instance of entartete Kunst, along withExpressionism, Cubism, and Surrealism. But the early
Italian Futurists were nationalist; they favored Italianparticipation in the First World War for aesthetic reasons;they celebrated speed, violence, and risk, all of whichsomehow seemed to connect with the fascist cult of youth.
While fascism identiﬁed itself with the Roman Empire andrediscovered rural traditions, Marinetti (who proclaimed

that a car was more beautiful than the Victory of
Samothrace, and wanted to kill even the moonlight) wasnevertheless appointed as a member of the Italian Academy,
which treated moonlight with great respect.
Many of the future partisans and of the future
intellectuals of the Communist Party were educated by the
GUF, the fascist university students’ association, which was
supposed to be the cradle of the new fascist culture. These
clubs became a sort of intellectual melting pot where newideas circulated without any real ideological control. It was
not that the men of the party were tolerant of radical
thinking, but few of them had the intellectual equipment tocontrol it.
During those twenty years, the poetry of Montale andother writers associated with the group called the Ermetici
was a reaction to the bombastic style of the regime, andthese poets were allowed to develop their literary protest
from within what was seen as their ivory tower. The mood of
the Ermetici poets was exactly the reverse of the fascist cultof optimism and heroism. The regime tolerated theirblatant, even though socially imperceptible, dissent because
the Fascists simply did not pay attention to such arcane
language.
All this does not mean that Italian fascism was tolerant.
Gramsci was put in prison until his death; the opposition
leaders Giacomo Matteotti and the brothers Rosselli wereassassinated; the free press was abolished, the labor unions
were dismantled, and political dissenters were conﬁned onremote islands. Legislative power became a mere ﬁction
and the executive power (which controlled the judiciary as
well as the mass media) directly issued new laws, among
them laws calling for preservation of the race (the formal
Italian gesture of support for what became the Holocaust).
The contradictory picture I describe was not the result of
tolerance but of political and ideological discombobulation.
But it was a rigid discombobulation, a structured confusion.

Fascism was philosophically out of joint, but emotionally it
was ﬁrmly fastened to some archetypal foundations.
So we come to my second point. There was only one
Nazism. We cannot label Franco’s hyper-Catholic Falangism
as Nazism, since Nazism is fundamentally pagan,polytheistic, and anti-Christian. But the fascist game can beplayed in many forms, and the name of the game does notchange. The notion of fascism is not unlike Wittgenstein’s
notion of a game. A game can be either competitive or not,it can require some special skill or none, it can or cannot
involve money. Games are diﬀerent activities that display
only some “family resemblance,” as Wittgenstein put it.
Consider the following sequence:12
3
4
abc bcd cde def
Suppose there is a series of political groups in whichgroup one is characterized by the features abc, group twoby the features bcd, and so on. Group two is similar togroup one since they have two features in common; for thesame reasons three is similar to two and four is similar to
three. Notice that three is also similar to one (they have incommon the feature c). The most curious case is presented
by four, obviously similar to three and two, but with nofeature in common with one. However, owing to theuninterrupted series of decreasing similarities between one
and four, there remains, by a sort of illusory transitivity, afamily resemblance between four and one.
Fascism became an all-purpose term because one caneliminate from a fascist regime one or more features, and it
will still be recognizable as fascist. Take away imperialism
from fascism and you still have Franco and Salazar. Take
away colonialism and you still have the Balkan fascism of
the Ustashes. Add to the Italian fascism a radical anti-

capitalism (which never much fascinated Mussolini) and you
have Ezra Pound. Add a cult of Celtic mythology and theGrail mysticism (completely alien to oﬀicial fascism) and you
have one of the most respected fascist gurus, Julius Evola.
But in spite of this fuzziness, I think it is possible tooutline a list of features that are typical of what I would liketo call Ur-Fascism, or Eternal Fascism. These features
cannot be organized into a system; many of them contradict
each other, and are also typical of other kinds of despotism
or fanaticism. But it is enough that one of them be present
to allow fascism to coagulate around it.
1. The ﬁrst feature of Ur-Fascism is the cult of tradition.
Traditionalism is of course much older than fascism. Not
only was it typical of counter-revolutionary Catholic thought
after the French revolution, but it was born in the lateHellenistic era, as a reaction to classical Greek rationalism.
In the Mediterranean basin, people of diﬀerent religions(most of them indulgently accepted by the Roman
Pantheon) started dreaming of a revelation received at thedawn of human history. This revelation, according to the
traditionalist mystique, had remained for a long time
concealed under the veil of forgotten languages – in
Egyptian hieroglyphs, in the Celtic runes, in the scrolls of
the little known religions of Asia.
This new culture had to be syncretistic. Syncretism is not
only, as the dictionary says, “the combination of diﬀerent
forms of belief or practice”; such a combination musttolerate contradictions. Each of the original messages
contains a silver of wisdom, and whenever they seem to say
diﬀerent or incompatible things it is only because all arealluding, allegorically, to the same primeval truth.
As a consequence, there can be no advancement oflearning. Truth has been already spelled out once and for
all, and we can only keep interpreting its obscure message.
One has only to look at the syllabus of every fascist
movement to ﬁnd the major traditionalist thinkers. The Nazignosis was nourished by traditionalist, syncretistic, occult
elements. The most inﬂuential theoretical source of thetheories of the new Italian right, Julius Evola, merged theHoly Grail with The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, alchemy
with the Holy Roman and Germanic Empire. The very factthat the Italian right, in order to show its open-mindedness,
recently broadened its syllabus to include works by De
Maistre, Guenon, and Gramsci, is a blatant proof of
syncretism.
If you browse in the shelves that, in American bookstores,
are labeled as New Age, you can ﬁnd there even Saint
Augustine who, as far as I know, was not a fascist. But
combining Saint Augustine and Stonehenge – that is a
symptom of Ur-Fascism.
2. Traditionalism implies the rejection of modernism.
Both Fascists and Nazis worshiped technology, while
traditionalist thinkers usually reject it as a negation of
traditional spiritual values. However, even though Nazism
was proud of its industrial achievements, its praise ofmodernism was only the surface of an ideology based upon
Blood and Earth (Blut und Boden). The rejection of themodern world was disguised as a rebuttal of the capitalistic
way of life, but it mainly concerned the rejection of theSpirit of 1789 (and of 1776, of course). The Enlightenment,
the Age of Reason, is seen as the beginning of modern
depravity. In this sense Ur-Fascism can be deﬁned as
irrationalism.
3. Irrationalism also depends on the cult of action foraction’s sake. Action being beautiful in itself, it must be
taken before, or without, any previous reﬂection. Thinking
is a form of emasculation. Therefore culture is suspectinsofar as it is identiﬁed with critical attitudes. Distrust of
the intellectual world has always been a symptom of UrFascism, from Goering’s alleged statement (“When I hear
talk of culture I reach for my gun”) to the frequent use ofsuch expressions as “degenerate intellectuals,” “eggheads,”

“eﬀete snobs,” “universities are a nest of reds.” The oﬀicial
Fascist intellectuals were mainly engaged in attacking
modern culture and the liberal intelligentsia for having
betrayed traditional values.
4. No syncretistic faith can withstand analytical criticism.
The critical spirit makes distinctions, and to distinguish is asign of modernism. In modern culture the scientiﬁccommunity praises disagreement as a way to improveknowledge. For Ur-Fascism, disagreement is treason.
5. Besides, disagreement is a sign of diversity. Ur-Fascismgrows up and seeks for consensus by exploiting andexacerbating the natural fear of diﬀerence. The ﬁrst appeal
of a fascist or prematurely fascist movement is an appeal
against the intruders. Thus Ur-Fascism is racist by
deﬁnition.
6. Ur-Fascism derives from individual or social
frustration. That is why one of the most typical features of
the historical fascism was the appeal to a frustrated middle
class, a class suﬀering from an economic crisis or feelings ofpolitical humiliation, and frightened by the pressure oflower social groups. In our time, when the old“proletarians” are becoming petty bourgeois (and the
lumpen are largely excluded from the political scene), thefascism of tomorrow will ﬁnd its audience in this new
majority.
7. To people who feel deprived of a clear social identity,
Ur-Fascism says that their only privilege is the mostcommon one, to be born in the same country. This is theorigin of nationalism. Besides, the only ones who canprovide an identity to the nation are its enemies. Thus at
the root of the Ur-Fascist psychology there is the obsession
with a plot, possibly an international one. The followers
must feel besieged. The easiest way to solve the plot is theappeal to xenophobia. But the plot must also come from theinside: Jews are usually the best target because they havethe advantage of being at the same time inside and outside.

In the U.S., a prominent instance of the plot obsession is tobe found in Pat Robertson’s The New World Order, but, as
we have recently seen, there are many others.
8. The followers must feel humiliated by the ostentatious
wealth and force of their enemies. When I was a boy I wastaught to think of Englishmen as the ﬁve-meal people. They
ate more frequently than the poor but sober Italians. Jews
are rich and help each other through a secret web of
mutual assistance. However, the followers must be
convinced that they can overwhelm the enemies. Thus, by acontinuous shifting of rhetorical focus, the enemies are at
the same time too strong and too weak. Fascist
governments are condemned to lose wars because they are
constitutionally incapable of objectively evaluating the forceof the enemy.
9. For Ur-Fascism there is no struggle for life but, rather,life is lived for struggle. Thus paciﬁsm is traﬀicking with theenemy. It is bad because life is permanent warfare. This,
however, brings about an Armageddon complex. Since
enemies have to be defeated, there must be a ﬁnal battle,
after which the movement will have control of the world.
But such a “ﬁnal solution” implies a further era of peace, aGolden Age, which contradicts the principle of permanentwar. No fascist leader has ever succeeded in solving thispredicament.
10. Elitism is a typical aspect of any reactionary ideology,
insofar as it is fundamentally aristocratic, and aristocratic
and militaristic elitism cruelly implies contempt for the
weak. Ur-Fascism can only advocate a popular elitism.
Every citizen belongs to the best people of the world, themembers of the party are the best among the citizens,
every citizen can (or ought to) become a member of theparty. But there cannot be patricians without plebeians. In
fact, the Leader, knowing that his power was not delegatedto him democratically but was conquered by force, also
knows that his force is based upon the weakness of themasses; they are so weak as to need and deserve a ruler.
Since the group is hierarchically organized (according to amilitary model), every subordinate leader despises his own
underlings, and each of them despises his inferiors. This
reinforces the sense of mass elitism.
11. In such a perspective everybody is educated to
become a hero. In every mythology the hero is an
exceptional being, but in Ur-Fascist ideology, heroism is thenorm. This cult of heroism is strictly linked with the cult ofdeath. It is not by chance that a motto of the Falangists was
Viva la Muerte (in English it should be translated as “Long
Live Death!”). In non-fascist societies, the lay public is toldthat death is unpleasant but must be faced with dignity;
believers are told that it is the painful way to reach asupernatural happiness. By contrast, the Ur-Fascist hero
craves heroic death, advertised as the best reward for aheroic life. The Ur-Fascist hero is impatient to die. In his
impatience, he more frequently sends other people todeath.
12. Since both permanent war and heroism are diﬀicult
games to play, the Ur-Fascist transfers his will to power tosexual matters. This is the origin of machismo (which
implies both disdain for women and intolerance andcondemnation of nonstandard sexual habits, from chastity
to homosexuality). Since even sex is a diﬀicult game to play,
the Ur-Fascist hero tends to play with weapons – doing so
becomes an ersatz phallic exercise.
13. Ur-Fascism is based upon a selective populism, aqualitative populism, one might say. In a democracy, thecitizens have individual rights, but the citizens in their
entirety have a political impact only from a quantitative
point of view – one follows the decisions of the majority. For
Ur-Fascism, however, individuals as individuals have norights, and the People is conceived as a quality, a monolithic
entity expressing the Common Will. Since no large quantityof human beings can have a common will, the Leader

pretends to be their interpreter. Having lost their power ofdelegation, citizens do not act; they are only called on toplay the role of the People. Thus the People is only atheatrical ﬁction. To have a good instance of qualitative
populism we no longer need the Piazza Venezia in Rome or
the Nuremberg Stadium. There is in our future a TV orInternet populism, in which the emotional response of a
selected group of citizens can be presented and accepted
as the Voice of the People.
Because of its qualitative populism Ur-Fascism must be
against “rotten” parliamentary governments. One of theﬁrst sentences uttered by Mussolini in the Italianparliament was “I could have transformed this deaf andgloomy place into a bivouac for my maniples” – “maniples”
being a subdivision of the traditional Roman legion. As amatter of fact, he immediately found better housing for his
maniples, but a little later he liquidated the parliament.
Wherever a politician casts doubt on the legitimacy of aparliament because it no longer represents the Voice of thePeople, we can smell Ur-Fascism.
14. Ur-Fascism speaks Newspeak. Newspeak wasinvented by Orwell, in 1984, as the oﬀicial language of
Ingsoc, English Socialism. But elements of Ur-Fascism arecommon to diﬀerent forms of dictatorship. All the Nazi or
Fascist schoolbooks made use of an impoverishedvocabulary, and an elementary syntax, in order to limit the
instruments for complex and critical reasoning. But wemust be ready to identify other kinds of Newspeak, even if
they take the apparently innocent form of a popular talkshow.
On the morning of July 27, 1943, I was told that,
according to radio reports, fascism had collapsed andMussolini was under arrest. When my mother sent me out
to buy the newspaper, I saw that the papers at the nearest
newsstand had diﬀerent titles. Moreover, after seeing theheadlines, I realized that each newspaper said diﬀerentthings. I bought one of them, blindly, and read a message on
the ﬁrst page signed by ﬁve or six political parties – among
them the Democrazia Cristiana, the Communist Party, theSocialist Party, the Partito d’Azione, and the Liberal Party.
Until then, I had believed that there was a single party inevery country and that in Italy it was the Partito Nazionale
Fascista. Now I was discovering that in my country several
parties could exist at the same time. Since I was a cleverboy, I immediately realized that so many parties could nothave been born overnight, and they must have existed forsome time as clandestine organizations.
The message on the front celebrated the end of the
dictatorship and the return of freedom: freedom of speech,of press, of political association. These words, “freedom,”“dictatorship,” “liberty,” – I now read them for the ﬁrst timein my life. I was reborn as a free Western man by virtue ofthese new words.
We must keep alert, so that the sense of these words will
not be forgotten again. Ur-Fascism is still around us,
sometimes in plainclothes. It would be so much easier, forus, if there appeared on the world scene somebody saying,“I want to reopen Auschwitz, I want the Black Shirts toparade again in the Italian squares.” Life is not that simple.
Ur-Fascism can come back under the most innocent ofdisguises. Our duty is to uncover it and to point our ﬁnger
at any of its new instances – every day, in every part of theworld. Franklin Roosevelt’s words of November 4, 1938,
are worth recalling:
I venture the challenging statement that if
American democracy ceases to move forward as aliving force, seeking day and night by peacefulmeans to better the lot of our citizens, fascism willgrow in strength in our land.

Freedom and liberation are an unending task. Let meﬁnish with a poem by Franco Fortini:

Sulla spalletta del ponte
Le teste degli impiccati Nell’acqua della fonte La
bava degli impiccati.
Sul lastrico del mercato
Le unghie dei fucilati Sull’erba secca del prato I
denti dei fucilati.
Mordere l’aria mordere i sassi
La nostra carne non è più d’uomini Mordere l’aria
mordere i sassi Il nostro cuore non è più d’uomini.
Ma noi s’è letto negli occhi dei morti
E sulla terra faremo libertà Ma l’hanno stretta i
pugni dei morti La giustizia che si farà.
(On the bridge’s parapet
The heads of the hanged
In the ﬂowing rivulet The spittle of the hanged.
On the cobbles in the market-places
The ﬁngernails of those lined up and shot On thedry grass in the open spaces
The broken teeth of those lined up and shot.
Biting the air, biting the stones
Our ﬂesh is no longer human
Biting the air, biting the stones Our hearts are nolonger human.
But we have read into the eyes of the deadAnd shall bring freedom on the earth
But clenched tight in the ﬁsts of the dead Lies thejustice to be served.)– poem translated by Stephen Sartarelli