Ur Fascism by Umberto Eco
first published in the New York Review of Books in 1995
In 1942 at the age of 10 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 rhetori-
cal skill on the subject "Should we die for the glory of Mussolini and
the immortal destiny of Italy?" my answer was positive. I was a smart
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 bul-
lets, 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 was crowded with people singing and wav-
ing flags, calling in loud voices for Mimo, the partisan leader of that
area. A former maresciallo of the Carabinieri, Mimo joined the support-
ers of General Badoglio, Mussolini's successor, and lost a leg during
one of the first clashes with Mussolini's remaining forces. Mimo showed
up on the balcony of the city hall, pale, leaning on his crutch, and
with one hand tried to calm the crowd. I was waiting for his speech be-
cause my whole childhood had been marked by the great historic speeches
of Mussolini, whose most significant passages we memorized in school.
Silence. Mimo spoke in a hoarse voice, barely audible. He said: "Citi-
zens, 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 pick up 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 colored and smelled good.
One of the officers (Major or Captain Muddy) was a guest in the
villa of a family whose two daughters were my schoolmates. 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
of American liberators was thus-after so many palefaces in black shirts-
that of a cultivated black man in a yellow-green uniform saying "oui,
merci beaucoup, Madame, moi aussi j'aime le champagne..." Unfortunately
there was no champagne, but Captain Muddy gave me my first piece of
Wrigley's Spearmint and I started chewing all day long. At night I put
my wad in a water glass, so it would be fresh for the next day.
In May we heard that the war was over. Peace gave me a curious
sensation. I had been told that permanent warfare was the normal condi-
tion for a young Italian. In the following months I discovered that the
Resistance was not only a local phenomenon but a European one. I
learned new, exciting words like reseau, maquis, armee secrete, Rote
Kapelle, Warsaw ghetto. I saw the first photographs of the 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 Re-
sistance had a real military impact on the course of the war. For my
generation this question is irrelevant: we immediately understood the
moral and psychological meaning of the Resistance. For us is was a
point of pride to know that we Europeans did not wait passively for lib-
eration. And for the young Americans who were paying with their blood
for our restored freedom it meant something to know that behind the fir-
ing lines there were Europeans paying their own debt in advance.
In my country today there are people who are saying that the myth
of the Resistance was a Communist lie. It is true that 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 and poetic 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
of the most powerful clandestine network in northwestern Italy, a man of
legendary courage. Franchi became my hero. Franchi (whose real name
was Edgardo Sogno) was a monarchist, so strongly anti-Communist that af-
ter the war he joined very right-wing groups, and was charged with col-
laborating in a project for a reactionary coup d'etat. Who cares? 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 War of Libera-
tion was a tragic period of division, and the all we need is national
reconciliation. The memory of those terrible years should be repressed,
refoulee, verdrangt. But Verdrangung causes neurosis. If reconcilia-
tion means compassion and respect for all those who fought their own war
in good faith, to forgive does not mean to forget. I can even admit
that Eichmann sincerely believed in his mission, but I cannot say, "OK,
come back and do it again." We are here 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 circum-
stances. If Mussolini's fascism was based upon the idea of a charismat-
ic ruler, on corporatism, on the utopia of the Imperial Fate of Rome, on
an imperialistic will to conquer new territories, on an exacerbated na-
tionalism, on the ideal of an entire nation regimented in black shirts,
on the rejection of parliamentary democracy, on anti-Semitism, then I
have no difficulty in acknowledging that today the Italian Alleanza
Nazionale, born from the postwar Fascist Party, MSI, and certainly a
right-wing party, has by now very little to do with the old fascism. In
the same vein, even though I am much concerned about the various Nazi-
like movements that have arisen here and there in Europe, including Rus-
sia, I do not think that Nazism, in its original form, is about to reap-
pear as a nationwide movement.
Nevertheless, even though political regimes can be overthrown, and
ideologies can be criticized and disowned, behind a regime and its ide-
ology there is always a way of thinking and feeling, a group of cultural
habits, of obscure instincts and unfathomable drives. Is there still
another ghost stalking Europe (not to speak of other parts of the
world)?
Ionesco once said that "only words count and the rest is mere chat-
tering." Linguistic habits are frequently important symptoms of under-
lying 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 the American 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 ex-
pression like fascisct 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 political program. Nazism
had a theory of racism and 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 neo-pagan,
while Stalin's Diamat (the official version of Soviet Marxism) was bla-
tantly materialistic and atheistic. If by totalitarianism one means a
regime that subordinates every act of the individual to the state and to
its ideology, then both Nazism and Stalinism were true totalitarian
regimes.
Italian fascism was certainly a dictatorship, but it was not total-
ly 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 basical-
ly inspired by Giovanni Gentile, but it reflected a late-Hegelian notion
of the Absolute and Ethical State which was never fully realized by Mus-
solini. Mussolini did not have any philosophy: he had only rhetoric.
He was a militant atheist at the beginning and later signed the Conven-
tion with the Church and welcomed the bishops who blessed the Fascist
pennants. In his early anticlerical years, according to a likely leg-
end, 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 not mind being called the Man of Providence.
Italian fascism was the first right-wing dictatorship that took
over a European country, and all similar movements later found a sort of
archetype in Mussolini's regime. Italian fascism was the first to es-
tablish a military liturgy, a folklore, even a way of dressing-far more
influential, with its black shirts, than Armani, Benetton, or Versace
would ever be. It was only in the Thirties that fascist movements ap-
peared, with Mosley, in Great Britain, and in Latvia, Estonia, Lithua-
nia, Poland, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Greece, Yugoslavia, Spain, Por-
tugal, Norway, and even in South America. It was Italian fascism that
convinced many European liberal leaders that the new regime was carrying
out interesting social reform, and that it was providing a mildly revo-
lutionary alternative to the Communist threat.
Nevertheless, historical priority does not seem to me a sufficient
reason to explain why the word fascism became a synecdoche, 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 quintes-
sential state, all the elements of any later form of totalitarianism.
On the contrary, fascism had no quintessence. Fascism was a fuzzy to-
talitarianism, a collage of different philosophical and political ideas,
a beehive of contradictions. Can one conceive of a truly totalitarian
movement that was able to combine monarchy with revolution, the Royal
Army with Mussolini's personal milizia, the grant of privileges to the
Church with state education extolling violence, absolute state control
with a free market? The Fascist Party was born boasting that it brought
a revolutionary new order; but it was financed by the most conservative
among the landowners who expected from it a counter-revolution. At its
beginning fascism was republican. Yet it survived for twenty years pro-
claiming its loyalty to the royal family, while the Duce (the unchal-
lenged Maximal Leader) was arm-in-arm with the King, to whom he also of-
fered the title of Emperor. But when the King fired Mussolini in 1943,
the party 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 was no 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 ar-
chitects but close to their pseudo-Coliseums were many new buildings in-
spired by the modern rationalism of Gropius.
There was no fascist Zhdanov setting a strictly cultural line. In
Italy there were two important art awards. The Premio Cremona was con-
trolled by a fanatical and uncultivated Fascist, Robert Farinacci, who
encouraged art as propaganda. (I can remember paintings with such ti-
tles as "Listening by Radio to the Duce's Speech" or "States of Mind
Created by Fascism.") The Premio Bergamo was sponsored by the cultivat-
ed and reasonably tolerant Fascist Giuseppe Bottai, who protected both
the concept of art for art's sake and the many kinds of avant-garde art
that had been banned as corrupt and crypto-Communist in Germany.
The national poet was D'Annunzio, a dandy who in Germany or in Rus-
sia would have been sent to the firing squad. He was appointed as the
bard of the regime because of his nationalism and his cult of heroism-
which were in fact abundantly mixed up with influences of French fin de
siecle decadence.
Take Futurism. One might think it would have been considered an
instance of entartete Kunst, along with Expressionism, Cubism, and Sur-
realism. But the early Italian Futurists were nationalist; they favored
Italian participation in the First World War for aesthetic reasons; they
celebrated speed, violence, and risk, all of which somehow seemed to
connect with the fascist cult of youth. While fascism identified itself
with the Roman Empire and rediscovered rural traditions, Marinetti (who
proclaimed that a car was more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace,
and wanted to kill even the moonlight) was nevertheless appointed as a
member of the Italian Academy, which treated moonlight with great re-
spect.
Many of the future partisans and of the future intellectuals of the
Communist Party were educated by the GUF, the fascist university stu-
dents' association, which was supposed to be the cradle of the new fas-
cist culture. These clubs became a sort of intellectual melting pot
where new ideas 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 to control it.
During those twenty years, the poetry of Montale and other writers
associated with the group called the Ermetici was a reaction to the bom-
bastic style of the regime, and these 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
cult of optimism and heroism. The regime tolerated their blatant, 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 Mat-
teotti and the brothers Rosselli were assassinated; the free press was
abolished, the labor unions were dismantled, and political dissenters
were confined on remote islands. Legislative power became a mere fic-
tion 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 toler-
ance but of political and ideological discombobulation. But it was a
rigid discombobulation, as structured confusion. Fascism was philosoph-
ically out of joint, but emotionally it was firmly fastened to some ar-
chetypal foundations.
So we come to my second point. There was only one Nazism. We can-
not label Franco's hyper-Catholic Falangism as Nazism, since Nazism is
fundamentally pagan, polytheistic, and anti-Christian. But the fascist
game can be played in many forms, and the name of the game does not
change. 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 spe-
cial 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:
| 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 |
|-----+-----+-----+-----|
| abc | bcd | cde | def |
Suppose there is a series of political groups in which group one is
characterized by the features abc, group two by the features bcd, and so
on. Group two is similar to group one since they have two features in
common; for the same reasons three is similar to two and four is similar
to three. Notice that three is also similar to one (they have in common
the feature c). The most curious case is presented by four, obviously
similar to three and two, but with no feature in common with one. How-
ever, owing to the uninterrupted series of decreasing similarities be-
tween one and four, there remains, by a sort of illusory transitivity, a
family resemblance between four and one.
Fascism became an all-purpose term because one can eliminate 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 Fran-
co and Salazar. Take away colonialism and you still have the Balkan
fascism of the Ustashes. Add to the Italian fascism a radical anti-cap-
italism (which never much fascinated Mussolini) and you have Ezra Pound.
Add a cult of Celtic mythology and the Grail mysticism (completely alien
to official fascism) and you have one of the most respected fascist gu-
rus, Julius Evola.
But in spite of this fuzziness, I think it is possible to outline a
list of features that are typical of what I would like to call Ur-Fas-
cism, or Eternal Fascism. These features cannot be organized into a
system; many of them contradict each other, and are also typical of oth-
er 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. Tradi-
tionalism 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 late Hellenistic era as a reac-
tion 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
the dawn of human history. This revelation, according to the tra-
ditionalist 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 be-
lief or practice"; such a combination must tolerate contradictions.
Each of the original messages contains a sliver of wisdom, and
whenever they seem to say different or incompatible things it is
only because all are alluding, allegorically, to the same primeval
truth.
As a consequence, there can be no advancement of learning. 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 nour-
ished by traditionalist, syncretistic, occult elements. The most
influential theoretical source of the theories of the new Italian
right, Julius Evola, merged the Holy Grail with The Protocols of
the Elders of Zion, alchemy with the Holy Roman and Germanic Em-
pire. The very fact that 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 syn-
cretism.
If you browse in the shelves that, in American bookstores, are la-
beled 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 usu-
ally reject it as a negation of traditional spiritual values. How-
ever, even though Nazism was proud of its industrial achievements,
its praise of modernism was only the surface of an ideology based
upon Blood and Earth (Blut und Boden). The rejection of the modern
world was disguised as a rebuttal of the capitalistic way of life,
but it mainly concerned the rejection of the Spirit 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 for action's sake.
Action being beautiful in itself, it must be taken before, or with-
out, any previous reflection. Thinking is a form of emasculation.
Therefore culture is suspect insofar as it is identified with crit-
ical attitudes. Distrust of the intellectual world has always been
a symptom of Ur-Fascism, from Goering's alleged statement ("When I
hear talk of culture I reach for my gun") to the frequent use of
such 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 a sign of
modernism. In modern culture the scientific community praises dis-
agreement as a way to improve knowledge. For Ur-Fascism, disagree-
ment is treason.
5. Besides, disagreement is a sign of diversity. Ur-Fascism grows up
and seeks for consensus by exploiting and exacerbating the natural
fear of difference. The first appeal of a fascist or prematurely
fascist movement is an appeal against the intruders. Thus Ur-Fas-
cism 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 of political humiliation, and fright-
ened by the pressure of lower social groups. In our time, when the
old "proletarians" are becoming petty bourgeois (and the lumpen are
largely excluded from the political scene), the fascism 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 most common one, to be born
in the same country. This is the origin of nationalism. Besides,
the only ones who can provide an identity to the nation are its en-
emies. Thus at the root of the Ur-Fascist psychology there is the
obsession with a plot, possibly an international one. The follow-
ers must feel besieged. The easiest way to solve the plot is the
appeal to xenophobia. But the plot must also come from the inside:
Jews are usually the best target because they have the advantage of
being at the same time inside and outside. In the US, a prominent
instance of the plot obsession is to be 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 war taught 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 a
continuous shifting of rhetorical focus, the enemies are at the
same time too strong and too weak. Fascist governments are con-
demned to lose wars because they are constitutionally incapable of
objectively evaluating the force of the enemy.
9. For Ur-Fascism there is no struggle for life but, rather, life is
lived for struggle. Thus pacifism is trafficking with the enemy.
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 fur-
ther era of peace, a Golden Age, which contradicts the principle of
permanent war. No fascist leader has ever succeeded in solving
this predicament.
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 peo-
ple of the world, the members of the party are the best among the
citizens, every citizen can (or ought to) become a member of the
party. But there cannot be patricians without plebeians. In fact,
the Leader, knowing that his power was not delegated to him demo-
cratically 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 a military 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 the norm. This cult of heroism is strictly
linked with the cult of death. It is not by chance that a motto of
the Falangists was Viva la Muerte (in English it should be trans-
lated as "Long Live Death!"). In non-fascist societies, the lay
public is told that death is unpleasant but must be faced with dig-
nity; believers are told that it is the painful way to reach a su-
pernatural happiness. By contrast, the Ur-Fascist hero craves
heroic death, advertised as the best reward for a heroic life. The
Ur-Fascist hero is impatient to die. In his impatience, he more
frequently sends other people to death.
12. Since both permanent war and heroism are difficult games to play,
the Ur-Fascist transfers his will to power to sexual matters. This
is the origin of machismo (which implies both disdain for women and
intolerance and condemnation of nonstandard sexual habits, from
chastity to homosexuality). Since even sex is a difficult game to
play, the Ur-Fascist tends to play with weapons--doing so becomes
an ersatz phallic exercise.
13. Ur-Fascism is based upon a selective populism, a qualitative pop-
ulism, one might say. In a democracy, the citizens 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 individu-
als have no rights, and the People is conceived as a quality, a
monolithic entity expressing the Common Will. Since no large quan-
tity of human beings can have a common will, the Leader pretends to
be their interpreter. Having lost their power of delegation, citi-
zens do not act; they are only called on to play the role of the
People. Thus the People is only a theatrical 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 or Internet populism, in which the emotional response of a se-
lected 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 the first sentences ut-
tered by Mussolini in the Italian parliament was "I could have
transformed this deaf and gloomy place into a bivouac for my mani-
ples"--"maniples" being a subdivision of the traditional Roman le-
gion. As a matter 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 a parliament
because it no longer represents the Voice of the People, we can
smell Ur-Fascism.
14. Ur-Fascism speaks Newspeak. Newspeak was invented by Orwell, in
1984, as the official language of Ingsoc, English Socialism. But
elements of Ur-Fascism are common to different forms of dictator-
ship. All the Nazi or Fascist schoolbooks made use of an impover-
ished vocabulary, and an elementary syntax, in order to limit the
instruments for complex and critical reasoning. But we must be
ready to identity other kinds of Newspeak, even if they take the
apparently innocent form of a popular talk show.
On the morning of July 27, 1943, I was told that according to radio
reports, fascism had collapsed and Mussolini 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 the
headlines, 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, the Partito d'Azione, and the Liberal Party.
Until then, I had believed that there was a single party in every
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 clever boy, I immediately realized that so
many parties could not have been born overnight, and they must have ex-
isted for some 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 associ-
ation. These words, "freedom," "dictatorship," "liberty,"--I now read
them for the first time in my life. I was reborn as a free Western man
by virtue of these 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 plain-
clothes. It would be so much easier, for us, 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 can come back under the most innocent of disguises.
Our duty is to uncover it and to point our at any of its new in-
stances--every day, in every part of the world. Franklin Roosevelt's
words of November 4, 1938, are worth recalling: "I venture the challeng-
ing statement that if American democracy ceases to move forward as a
living force, seeking day and night by peaceful means to better the lot
of our citizens, fascism will grow in strength in our land." Freedom
and liberation are an unending task.
Let me finish with a poem by Franco Fortini:
Sulla rpalletta 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 e piu d'uomini
Mordere l'aria mordere i sassi
Il nostro cuore non e piu d'uomini
Ma noi s'e letto negli occhi dei morti
E sulla terra faremo liberta
Ma l'hanno stretta i pugni dei morti
La giustizia che si fara
***
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 the dry 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 no longer human.
But we have read into the eyes of the dead
And shall bring freedom on the earth
But clenched tight in the fists of the dead
Lies the justice to be served.
--poem translated by Stephen Sartarelli
Copyright (C) by Umberto Eco