Aftermath of an attempted massacre. Guido Picchio/EPA

A shooting rampage against African migrants in the town of Macerata, in central Italy on February 2, unveiled the extent to which the debate about migration in Italy is shaped by fascist forces and racist ideas.

By the end of the rampage, six people had been shot, one woman and five men. One is in a regional hospital with a chest injury, the others suffered lesser injuries and are in stable conditions.

A 28-year-old man called Luca Traini, arrested at the scene draped in an Italian flag, was charged with an attempted racially-aggravated massacre. A copy of Mein Kampf and books on fascism in Italy were reportedly found at his flat. In 2017, Traini stood as a candidate for the far right Lega Nord at a local election, albeit scoring zero votes.

The attack came soon after the macabre death of Pamela Mastropietro, whose dismembered body was found in two suitcases in late January, dumped along the road near Macerata. A Nigerian man called Innocent Oseghale residing in Italy with an expired permesso di soggiorno (or permit of stay) was arrested the day after, accused of killing her.

The man identified by the police as Luca Traini. EPA
 

Extra-ordinary lives

I never met Gideon Atzeke, Jennifer Otioto or any of the other victims of the attack, and hardly anyone has mentioned who they were. But I did meet many asylum seekers in Macerata in summer 2017 during my research on the Italian government’s reception system for asylum seekers. And even then, the everyday and institutional racism confronting them seemed to be their main preoccupation.

Talking to them on the phone in the days since the attack I’ve been struck by the fatalist nature with which they processed the events. A sign, perhaps, of their extraordinary lives, and of their ordinary fears, aspirations, and claims for a secure and decent life, all of which which are constantly devalued and obscured by the migration debate.

Some Nigerians blamed the accusations against Oshigale for putting “all Nigerians in a bad light”. Others evoked the violent and racist abuse they faced in Libya, drawing explicit parallels between their treatments in the two countries. Unfortunately, all seemed to agree that it was best for them to stay put in the hotels and houses where they are hosted, as they wait for their asylum claim to be processed.

I strongly encouraged them not to do so, and to join the various protests and marches that have already taken place or that are planned.
 

Ordinary racism

The attempted massacre appears to epitomise how fascist groups and ideas have been mainstreamed and glamorised in Italy, particularly in the run-up to elections on March 4.

After his arrest, Traini was heralded as a patriot by some on social media. Forza Nuova, the party founded by the far right politician Roberto Fiore, expressed full support for Traini and offered to pay his legal expenses.

Other political parties distanced themselves from his alleged actions. Yet they still managed to shift attention away from the political context of the rampage.

Casapound, a far right group, condemned the attack, and denied reports of Traini’s affiliation with them. Roberto Salvini, leader of the Lega Nord, tried to minimise Traini’s past candidature for his party, and linked the event to the “social confrontation” that is brought about by “uncontrolled migration”.
Silvio Berlusconi, the former prime minister and leader of Forza Italia, defined immigration as a “social bomb about to explode” and pledged to deport up to 600,000 irregular migrants. Other right wing parties, such as Fratelli d’Italia, used the events to emphasise their belief that Italy faces a security emergency caused by migration, which needs a strong response from the state.

Marco Minniti, Italy’s minister of the interior, a member of the Partito Democratico, appealed for unity. He tried to placate the situation by insisting that the shootings were unorganised and carried out by a loose cannon. The Five Star Movement, the largest party in Italy according to polls, insisted that it was the responsibility of political parties to maintain “silence” about the attack.

As the migrant support group Coordinamento Migranti asserted, underlying these responses lies a growing racism which pervades Italian politics and which frames migration as a threat to Italians, and seeks to legitimise military and security solutions.

I believe this was an act of terrorism and that it wasn’t an isolated event, but the latest episode of a series of fascist aggressions aimed at intimidating immigrants and those who support them. A strong mobilisation is required against this drift.

Paolo Novak, Lecturer, Development Studies, SOAS, University of London

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

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Women protest against sexual violence in Paris in the wake of the Harvey Weinstein scandal. Photo: Somer/ABACA/ABACA/PA Images. All rights reserved.

As the Harvey Weinstein scandal continues to erupt, there’s been an outpouring of allegations against powerful men, accused of committing similar abuses during their careers.

The media, politics, the tech industry, and the art world are all having their own Weinstein-inspired moments of reckoning, although it’s too early to say if there will be a sea change in behaviour.

Experiences shared via the #metoo hashtag on social media have shown how widespread this kind of abuse of power is; women around the world face sexual harassment at work everyday.

‘women around the world face sexual harassment at work everyday’

In Italy, however, media coverage of the Weinstein scandal has been predictably outrageous, focusing on actress Asia Argento’s behaviour. Instead of focusing on abuse, and how to end it, we have been victim-blaming.

There has been no “Weinstein effect” here, and discussions around sexual harassment at work remain largely taboo. Of course that’s not to say Italy doesn’t have a sexual harassment problem; we do.

The only research on this topic is from 2008-2009, when the Italian National Statistics Institute (ISTAT) revealed that over one million women in Italy have been harassed or ‘sexually blackmailed’ at work.

This number is huge, but the true figure is likely even larger. The ISTAT study said almost 99% of victims do not report such abuse to the police. Women stay silent for many reasons: concerned over proof, shame, fear of being treated badly, or not believed at all.

An artist’s effigy of Harvey Weinstein. Photo: Gareth Fuller/PA Wire/PA Images. All rights reserved.In 2015, an Italian journalist published a book entitled Toglimi le mani di dosso (“Get your hands off of me”) about her experience of sexual harassment in a national newsroom. She used a pseudonym, Olga Ricci, and anonymised the newspaper and identifying details.

In the book she described how her editor-in-chief promised her a contract, then began making advances, inviting her to dinner, before more explicit requests to spend the night in a hotel room with him, and finally blackmailing her. In the end, she lost her job.

Harassment and ricatto sessuale (‘sexual blackmail’ – when a man takes advantage of a position of power over women who want to start or progress in their career, or are fearful of being fired) is “pervasive in Italian media”, Ricci told me.

After her book was published, she received messages from other female journalists who tried to guess the identity of her harasser, suggesting editors and publishers who had behaved in similar ways.

These stories have yet to come out.

#Metoo protests continue in the wake of the Weinstein scandal. Photo: NurPhoto/SIPA USA/PA Images. All rights reserved.The lack of debate on workplace sexual harassment in Italy also means there’s a lack of awareness of what it is.

Ricci herself did not immediately realise what was happening to her. “I thought that my boss’s behaviours were normal,” she said. “He treated lots of women in the same way in the newsroom.”

She explained that harassment can be difficult to prove, as there may not be witnesses. Such behaviour may also be minimised by other women.

“We learn it as children. It is unimaginable, according to ‘common sense’, to consider a dinner invitation, a compliment, a shoulder massage, or a hand on a hip as harassment. Even sexual jokes are considered normal. And if you point out [these acts] to your colleagues…they will call you tragic or a bigot.”
“Sexual jokes are considered normal. And if you point out [these acts] to your colleagues… they will call you tragic or a bigot”

For her, awareness of this issue came only after she left Italy to study. She told me: “Now, I use the word ‘violence’ to describe what happened to me. Too many women still do not use it, because they do not know they can.”

“I still receive messages from women who say that after reading the book they finally are able to give a name to what they have been through,” she added.

Italian ‘showgirl’ Miriana Trevisan is one of the very few women on Italian TV who disclosed her own experiences of workplace sexual harassment in the wake of the Weinstein scandal.

Earlier this month, Trevisan said she had been in Italian director Giuseppe Tornatore’s office about 20 years ago, and that he “put me against the wall and started to kiss my neck and my ears, and touched my breast aggressively.”

“He may not recall it, but I do,” she said. Tornatore has denied the allegations and announced legal actions, while Trevisan has been engulfed in a flurry of piublic criticism.

She also described a case of sexual assault by an unnamed TV personality. “His approach was sneaky. At first he flattered me – which made me think I had an opportunity. Then the conversation became sexual,” Trevisan told me.

At this point, she remembers feeling confused, asking herself: “Did I do something he misunderstood? Am I dressed too sexily? Am I overreacting?”

Then, “he said I had to be nice to him, because we could only talk about work if we were close. Then he tried to kiss me, but I said no.”

Leaving his room, she met his assistant: “She gave me a quick look and said: ‘You still have your lipstick on, I think we will never see you again.’”

“Did I do something he misunderstood? Am I dressed too sexily? Am I overreacting?”

“I was not able to give a name to the discomfort I felt. I almost convinced myself that it was the way it worked. I felt that everyone around me was addicted to these behaviours,” said Trevisan.

But after Asia Argento came forward, with her allegations against Weinstein, “all the pain resurfaced, together with the anger” that she had previously repressed.

“I think there’s a problem in our media. Newspapers and TV are showing no courage in talking about the implications of Weinstein case,” Trevisan said.

“They talked a lot about Asia Argento and said almost nothing about ‘our Weinsteins’. We have them, and everybody knows it.”

Recently, a few actresses – some of them anonymously – have recounted experiences of sexual harassment on the Italian TV show Le Iene; though most of their abusers have not been named. 

Harsh treatment endured by Argento is a clear example of why women may feel forced to choose between staying silent about abuse or being blamed – and if they talk after many years, they may be blamed for having waited too long.

“Public opinion is uneducated, sexist and fierce,” said Ricci. “Those commentators [who attacked Argento] will never change their point of view if the debate in the media doesn’t offer them new ones.”

“When a boss invites you to dinner, talks to you about his private life or his problems, says how beautiful or attractive you are, when he kisses you, hugs you, touches you, he is abusing his power,” she insists.

And this is the whole point: sexual harassment is not about sex. It’s about power. If we want women in Italy to speak up, Italian public opinion needs to understand this first. Our reaction to the Weinstein scandal has shown the dire need for cultural change.

Claudia Torrisi is an Italian freelance journalist focused on social issues such as migration and civil rights. In 2015 she was a finalist for the Roberto Morrione Award for investigative journalism with a video report on the application of the law on abortion in hospitals in Rome. She is part of Chayn Italy, an open-source project that uses technology to empower women against violence. Claudia writes monthly features for openDemocracy 50.50. Follow her on Twitter: @clatorrisi.

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Photographer Gaia Guarnotta, 25, who was accosted by the group of men at around 11:30pm on Wednesday, posted about 58-year-old flower seller Hossein Alamgir’s selfless heroism on Facebook, reports the Daily Mail.

In the post, she wrote: “I was walking alone on the street at 23.30. I like to walk, I love Florence and I love the night. Then the nightmare begins.”

Guarnotta said a large group of men approached her at the time and first attempted to convince her to have sex with them by using profanity and saying such things as “Come on with us, let’s have fun, 25 against one, you will have a good night.”

When Guarnotta refused their advances and attempted to flee, the men grabbed her by the arm and attempted to drag her to an unknown location, going so far as removing her glasses.

Hearing the commotion, rose seller Hossein came to her rescue and chased the miscreants away.

Not stopping there, Hossein also gave her a towel to clean up and a rose as a present.

“Thank you to this world for there are people like Hossein, who help without wanting anything in return. This is a face I will never forget,” Guarnotta wrote.

Courtesy: Dhaka Tribune
 

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A protest in Rome on August 26 after violent evictions from Piazza Indipendenza. Angelo Carconi/EPA

Unjustified and disproportionate state violence was exercised on these vulnerable people from dawn to dusk by the Italian police. They used tear gas, batons and water cannons to clear people from the square. It was a spectacle of violence and human misery: women crying out in protest were swept away by water cannons, children and elderly people wrapped in blankets had to run for safety.

Most of the 800 or so residents of the squat on via Curtatone were refugees. But there has been no safety for them, and no sanctuary for those who should be protected under international law. The authorities said the migrants had refused to accept alternative accommodation and pointed to the risk of cooking gas canisters they were using.

After the Piazza Indipendenza events, a mass protest took place in Rome on August 26, attended by over 5,000 people. A group of 40 elderly, sick and young refugees were subsequently permitted to return to the building for six months.

The violent manner of the original eviction was aimed at erasing the presence of migrants and refugees from the city centre: they apparently must disappear, become invisible in the name of public decorum and order. This is a war on migrants, on the poor, on the vulnerable, on those whose lives are precarious and disposable.

This eviction is part of several recent state interventions in Rome against refugees and migrants. In June, the city’s mayor, Virginia Raggi, announced that the city was “facing a new migrant emergency” and that it could not take new arrivals. This is a marked contrast to comments she made in December 2016 about the need to offer refugees human warmth in Rome.

As migration scholar Nando Sigona argued on The Conversation, this shift in approach was made within the context of pre-election political opportunism in Italy. The issue of migration is moving centre stage as parties look to woo voters.
 

From warmth to water cannons

The inhumane treatment and denial of most basic rights to those in Piazza Indipendenza is the fruit of emergency politics to address migration rather than of a continued approach to sanctuary. Democracies are treating their vulnerable with violence instead of protection and eviction instead of sanctuary. The mayor’s idea of “human warmth” has quickly morphed into water cannons.

Migrants are dying at sea and disappearing from visible public spaces because their presence poses uncomfortable questions about the human condition, and about Western democracies. This is not a migration crisis, it is a crisis of human values – and these events signal that democracy is ailing and failing.

American philosopher Judith Butler observes that we approach certain forms of violence with horror, and other forms of violence with acceptance. This schism in moral evaluations occurs because certain lives are regarded as liveable, worthy of protection and worthy fighting for. But other lives are seen as unworthy of protection, not quite lives, at the limits of humanity. They are disposable.
 

Moral disintegration

Across the world, people who live precarious lives at the margins of society and at the limit of humanity continue to be met with violence. In the words of the Cameroonian philosopher Achille Mbembe, this is “the normalisation of a social state of warfare” – when the social state is weakened and ultimately erased.

The failing democracies of the West are plunging into what the Jamaican cultural philosopher Stuart Hall called “authoritarian populism”, marking the end of the world as we know it. When asked about this social system and the fate of our species, the American philosopher Noam Chomsky replied that: “It’s terminal disaster. We have constructed a perfect storm.” Under these conditions, our moral compass has been readjusted and our humanity – in the sense of being humane – is compromised.

Resistance, like that staged by the residents of via Curtatone who occupied the piazza after their eviction, can claw back shreds of democracy, dignity and rights. But it is the dominant cultural norms which must be resisted, the very ones regulating and influencing society’s biased moral response towards refugees and migrants. In the era of post-truths, when knowledge is overtly, unquestionably and routinely assailed, critical thinking is more crucial than ever to halt the moral disintegration of human kind.

Unlike the cowardly, brute force which can break arms like lifeless sticks, knowledge and critical thinking can be used to stem the tide of oppressive powers. Challenging the inhumanity of police brutality and society’s acceptance of it is a transformative, emancipatory form of resistance. As the American writer Toni Morrison put it, it is “critical to refuse to succumb to [the world’s] malevolence … that is how civilisations heal.”

Mariangela Palladino, Lecturer in Postcolonial Studies (Migration, Mobilities, Diaspora), Keele University

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

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The story of how close Germany – and much of Europe – came to liberating its LGBTQ people before violently reversing that trend under new authoritarian regimes is an object lesson showing that the history of LGBTQ rights is not a record of constant progress.

Very recently, Germany’s Cabinet approved a bill that will expunge the convictions of tens of thousands of German men for “homosexual acts” under that country’s anti-gay law known as “Paragraph 175.” That law dates back to 1871, when modern Germany’s first legal code was created.

It was repealed in 1994. But there was a serious movement to repeal the law in 1929 as part of a wider LGBTQ rights movement. That was just before the Nazis came to power, magnified the anti-gay law, then sought to annihilate gay and transgender Europeans.

The story of how close Germany – and much of Europe – came to liberating its LGBTQ people before violently reversing that trend under new authoritarian regimes is an object lesson showing that the history of LGBTQ rights is not a record of constant progress.

The first LGBTQ liberation movement

In the 1920s, Berlin had nearly 100 gay and lesbian bars or cafes. Vienna had about a dozen gay cafes, clubs and bookstores. In Paris, certain quarters were renowned for open displays of gay and trans nightlife. Even Florence, Italy, had its own gay district, as did many smaller European cities.

Films began depicting sympathetic gay characters. Protests were organized against offensive depictions of LGBTQ people in print or on stage. And media entrepreneurs realized there was a middle-class gay and trans readership to whom they could cater.

Partly driving this new era of tolerance were the doctors and scientists who started looking at homosexuality and “transvestism” (a word of that era that encompassed transgender people) as a natural characteristic with which some were born, and not a “derangement.” The story of Lili Elbe and the first modern sex change, made famous in the recent film “The Danish Girl,” reflected these trends.

For example, Berlin opened its Institute for Sexual Research in 1919, the place where the word “transsexual” was coined, and where people could receive counseling and other services. Its lead doctor, Magnus Hirschfeld, also consulted on the Lili Elbe sex change.

Connected to this institute was an organization called the “Scientific-Humanitarian Committee.” With the motto “justice through science,” this group of scientists and LGBTQ people promoted equal rights, arguing that LGBTQ people were not aberrations of nature.

Most European capitals hosted a branch of the group, which sponsored talks and sought the repeal of Germany’s “Paragraph 175.” Combining with other liberal groups and politicians, it succeeded in influencing a German parliamentary committee to recommend the repeal to the wider government in 1929.

The backlash

While these developments didn’t mean the end of centuries of intolerance, the 1920s and early ‘30s certainly looked like the beginning of the end. On the other hand, the greater “out-ness” of gay and trans people provoked their opponents.

A French reporter, bemoaning the sight of uncloseted LGBTQ people in public, complained, “the contagion … is corrupting every milieu.” The Berlin police grumbled that magazines aimed at gay men – which they called “obscene press materials” – were proliferating. In Vienna, lectures of the “Scientific Humanitarian Committee” might be packed with supporters, but one was attacked by young men hurling stink bombs. A Parisian town councilor in 1933 called it “a moral crisis” that gay people, known as “inverts” at that time, could be seen in public.

“Far be it from me to want to turn to fascism,” the councilor said, “but all the same, we have to agree that in some things those regimes have sometimes done good… One day Hitler and Mussolini woke up and said, ‘Honestly, the scandal has gone on long enough’ … And … the inverts … were chased out of Germany and Italy the very next day.”

The ascent of Fascism

It’s this willingness to make a blood sacrifice of minorities in exchange for “normalcy” or prosperity that has observers drawing uncomfortable comparisons between then and now.

In the 1930s, the Depression spread economic anxiety, while political fights in European parliaments tended to spill outside into actual street fights between Left and Right. Fascist parties offered Europeans a choice of stability at the price of democracy. Tolerance of minorities was destabilizing, they said. Expanding liberties gave “undesirable” people the liberty to undermine security and threaten traditional “moral” culture. Gay and trans people were an obvious target.

What happened next shows the whiplash speed with which the progress of a generation can be thrown into reverse.

The nightmare

One day in May 1933, pristine white-shirted students marched in front of Berlin’s Institute for Sexual Research – that safe haven for LGBTQ people – calling it “Un-German.” Later, a mob hauled out its library to be burned. Later still, its acting head was arrested.

When Nazi leader Adolph Hitler needed to justify arresting and murdering former political allies in 1934, he said they were gay. This fanned anti-gay zealotry by the Gestapo, which opened a special anti-gay branch. During the following year alone, the Gestapo arrested more than 8,500 gay men, quite possibly using a list of names and addresses seized at the Institute for Sexual Research. Not only was Paragraph 175 not erased, as a parliamentary committee had recommended just a few years before, it was amended to be more expansive and punitive.

As the Gestapo spread throughout Europe, it expanded the hunt. In Vienna, it hauled in every gay man on police lists and questioned them, trying to get them to name others. The fortunate ones went to jail. The less fortunate went to Buchenwald and Dachau. In conquered France, Alsace police worked with the Gestapo to arrest at least 200 men and send them to concentration camps. Italy, with a fascist regime obsessed with virility, sent at least 300 gay men to brutal camps during the war period, declaring them “dangerous for the integrity of the race.”

The total number of Europeans arrested for being LGBTQ under fascism is impossible to know because of the lack of reliable records. But a conservative estimate is that there were many tens of thousands to one hundred thousand arrests during the war period alone.

Under these nightmare conditions, far more LGBTQ people in Europe painstakingly hid their genuine sexuality to avoid suspicion, marrying members of the opposite sex, for example. Still, if they had been prominent members of the gay and trans community before the fascists came to power, as Berlin lesbian club owner Lotte Hahm was, it was too late to hide. She was sent to a concentration camp.

In those camps, gay men were marked with a pink triangle. In these places of horror, men with pink triangles were singled out for particular abuse. They were mechanically raped, castrated, favored for medical experiments and murdered for guards’ sadistic pleasure even when they were not sentenced for “liquidation.” One gay man attributed his survival to swapping his pink triangle for a red one – indicating he was merely a Communist. They were ostracized and tormented by their fellow inmates, too.

The looming danger of a backslide

This isn’t 1930s Europe. And making superficial comparisons between then and now can only yield superficial conclusions.

But with new forms of authoritarianism entrenched and seeking to expand in Europe and beyond, it’s worth thinking about the fate of Europe’s LGBTQ community in the 1930s and ‘40s – a timely note from history as Germany approves same-sex marriage and on this first anniversary of Obergefell v. Hodges.

In 1929, Germany came close to erasing its anti-gay law, only to see it strengthened soon thereafter. Only now, after a gap of 88 years, are convictions under that law being annulled.

John Broich is Associate Professor, Case Western Reserve University.

This story was first published on The Conversation. Read the original.

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It was on this day, 71 years ago that Benito Mussolini, the proud founder of fascism was summarily executed after being captured by the partisans, on April 28, 1945. For the 20 years that he ruled Italy, it was only two as elected prime minister of the Fascist Party. By 1925 he gave himself the title of Il Duce[1] leading the National Fascist Party.

The Fascists have been accused of committing many grave offences for which they would have had much to answer for in an international court of criminal law.  But as Mussolini’s most erudite biographer and expert on modern Italian History, Denis Mack Smith has put it, “No Italian was ever brought before the Nuremberg tribunal, and local Italian courts preferred wherever possible to ignore or exonerate…and black out what was painful in the past.”[2]

The execution was brutal. In 1940, Mussolini took his country into World War II, siding with the Nazis in Germany and met with defeat. By 1945, he was reduced to being the leader of a German puppet state in northern Italy and was faced with the Allied advance from the south and an increasingly violent internal conflict with the partisans. In April 1945, with the Allies breaking through the last of the German defences in northern Italy and a general uprising of the partisans taking hold in the cities, Mussolini lost control and power that he had so brazenly used. He fled Milan on April 25, where he had been based, and tried to escape to the Swiss border. He and his mistress, Claretta Petacci, were captured on April 27, 1945 by local partisans near the village of Dongo on Lake Como. Mussolini and Petacci were shot the following afternoon, two days before  Afolf Hitler committed suicide.

Mussolini succeeded in his aim of making Italy feared and hated in the world. Blood-letting for him and his vision of a militaristically strong Italy, was ‘normal and desirable.[3] Eventually he brought economic ruin and civil war to Italy. Obsessed with territorial expansion –the menacing expression of Mussolini’s nationalism led him to make an armed landing on the Greek island of Corfu, as early in his political career as 1923. There were huge casualties, duplicity involved in justification for the attack and finally humiliation when Italy was forced by international opinion to withdraw.

It was in 1923 itself that Mussolini, united, his Black Shirts[4] with the Blue Shirts[5] of the National Fascist Party. "Fascist Italy" is the era of National Fascist Party rule from 1922 to 1943 with Benito Mussolini as head of government. The fascists imposed totalitarian rule and crushed the political and intellectual opposition, while promoting, in the name of economic modernisation, transfer of public resources to privatised corporate interests. A narrow definition of traditional social values, and a rapprochement with the Catholic Church also marked their reign.[6] “Fascism should more appropriately be called Corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power”, Mussolini in Doctrine of Fascism.

"The Fascist regime passed through several relatively distinct phases," says Payne (1996). The first phase 1923–25 was nominally a continuation of the parliamentary system, albeit with a "legally organised executive dictatorship." Then came the second phase, "the construction of the Fascist dictatorship proper from 1925 to 1929." The third phase, with less activism, was 1929–34. The fourth phase, 1935–40, was characterized by an aggressive foreign policy, warfare in Ethiopia, which was launched from Italian Somaliland and Eritrea,^[2] confrontations with the League of Nations sanctions, growing economic autarchy, and semi-Nazification. The war itself (1940–43) was the fifth phase with its disasters and defeats, while the rump Salo regime under German control was the final stage (1943–45). 

Italy was allied with Nazi Germany in World War II until 1943. It switched sides to the Allies after ousting Mussolini and shutting down the Fascist party in areas (south of Rome) controlled by the Allied invaders. The remnant fascist state in northern Italy that continued fighting against the Allies was a puppet state of Nazi Germany, the "Italian Social Republic", still led by Mussolini and his loyalist Fascists. Shortly after the war, civil discontent led to the Italian constitutional referendum, 1946 on whether Italy would remain a monarchy or become a republic. Italians decided to abandon the monarchy and form the Italian Republic, which is the present form of Italy today. Much damage had been done by then, however.

After being shot dead, the bodies of Mussolini and Petacci were taken to Milan and left in a suburban square, the Piazzale Loreto, for a large angry crowd to insult and physically abuse. They were then hung upside down from a metal girder above a service station on the square. Initially, Mussolini was buried in an unmarked grave but, in 1946, his body was dug up and stolen by fascist supporters. Four months later it was recovered by the authorities who then kept it hidden for the next eleven years. Eventually, in 1957, his remains were allowed to be interred in the Mussolini family crypt in his home town of Predappio. His tomb has become a place of pilgrimage for neo-fascists and the anniversary of his death is marked by neo-fascist rallies.

Three distinct and different strains of Indian political opinion and ideological thought are linked in public discourse to Benito Mussolini. The most controverted are Netaji Subas Chandra Bose’s flirtations with the Axis Powers and his blinkered views on Italy’s Fascism and Germany’s Nazism. As discussed and contested is the Hindu supremacist’s open admiration for the fascist and nazi ideologies. Last but not the least, the Hindu right’s diversionary response is to selectively quote from Mahatma Gandhi’s views on Mussolini. Gandhi had visited Italy and seen part of the work; his later observations on the Italian dictator are however ignored.

Indian historical studies on Subhas Chandra Bose's flirtation with the Axis powers, first Hitler's Germany and Mussolini's Italy and next Tojo's Japan, either condemn him or evade aspects of the association. Bose’s crucial phase in Germany that preceded the trial(s) of the Indian National Army at the Red Fort in New Delhi are glossed over. Here, students of history could benefit from Romain Hayes' work, based on extensive research.[7] It is both nuanced and fair; it examines Bose’s views on democracy and the fallout with Gandhi and Nehru. Here we are left with the actions of a man, Bose, who, while incapable of being anybody's stooge could be an  opportunistic, albeit fierce, nationalist. Hayes is unsparing in his censures of Bose's moral blindness to the crimes of his deliberately chosen allies.
 
Gandhi and Mussolini in popular perception and narration is a relationship that has been deliberately confused. Every so often, be it supporters of fascists in Italy, or the Hindutvawaadis in India, the photograph of Gandhi visiting Mussolini and his oft quoted words re-enter and re-circulate in the public domain.

In 2000, a well researched paper by the Italian scholar Marzia Casolari has revealed, on the basis of archival evidence, the Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh's (RSS) links with and admiration for Mussolini's fascist regime under the title“Hindutva's foreign tie-up in the 1930s”, Economic & Political Weekly, January 22, 2000.

Based on this researched article, The Hindustan Times  has carried an article by Bharat Bhushan titled The Other Italian Connection (February 18, 2000) in response to which Sangh ideologue,
K.R. Malkani (February 23) had, in the same newspaper tried to obfuscate the connection by saying that the RSS was founded before Moonje visited Italy, that its heroes were Indians, and that Gandhi also met Mussolini. Dilip Simeon, historian had then further responded saying that “It was the militaristic mind-set of fascism, not its specific heroes that inspired Moonje. All ultra-rightists had their own "national" heroes. Mussolini seized power in 1922, and his impact was evident by the time the RSS was founded in 1925. And whereas Moonje was greatly impressed by Mussolini, Gandhi told the latter that his state was "a house of cards", and took a dim view of the man – "his eyes are never still". Moonje’s trip was not an innocuous replica of Gandhi’s.
 
Casolari says in her research that,
 
“One can easily come to the conclusion that, by the late 1920s, the fascist regime and Mussolini had considerable popularity in Maharashtra. The aspect of fascism which appealed most to Hindu nationalists were, of course, both the militarisations of society and what was seen as real transformation of society, exemplified by the shift from chaos to order. The anti–democratic system was considered as a positive alternative to democracy which was seen as a typically British value.

“The first Hindu nationalist who came in contact with the fascist regime and its dictator was BS Moonje, a politician strictly related to the RSS. In fact, Moonje had been Hedgewar’s mentor, the two men were related by an intimate friendship. Moonje’s declared intention to strengthen the RSS and to extend it as a nation–wide organisation is well known. 

“Between February and March 1931, on his return from the Round Table Conference, Moonje made a tour to Europe, which included a long stop–over in Italy. There he visited some important military schools and educational institutions. The highlight of the visit was the meeting with Mussolini. An interesting account of the trip and the meeting is given in Moonje’s diary and takes 13 pages. 

“The Indian leader was in Rome during March 15 to 24, 1931. On March 19, in Rome, he visited, among others, the Military College, the Central Military School of Physical Education, the Fascist Academy of Physical Education, and, most important, the Balilla and Avanguardisti organisations. These two organisations, which he describes in more that two pages of his diary, were the keystone of the fascist system of indoctrination — rather than education — of the youths. Their structure is strikingly similar to that of the RSS. They recruited boys from the age of six, up to 18: the youth had to attend weekly meetings, where they practised physical exercise, received paramilitary training and performed drills and parades.

In 1934, Moonje started to work for the foundation of his own institution, the Bhonsla Military School. For this purpose, in the same year he began to work at the foundation of the Central Hindu Military Education Society, whose aim was to educate them in ‘Sanatan Dharma’, and to train them “in the science and art of personal and national defence”…

“…Moonje’s Plans for Militarising Hindus:
Once Moonje was back in India, he kept the promise made in his diary and started immediately to work for the foundation of his military school and for the militant reorganisation of Hindu society in Maharashtra.
 
Ironically, among the Allied western powers too, there were the fair share of those leaders who admired Mussolini and Italy under him. At one time, Churchill expressed his admiration for Mussolini. Public opinion in Great Britain and France was divided about fascism. The Duce kept in close touch with foreign newspaper editors, most prominently William Randolph Hearst and Lord Rothermere. Rothermere famously wrote to thank Mussolini “ for his great services to civilization and humanity.” Hearst even praised the ‘astounding ability” of this “marvellous man.” On June 26, 1925, Mussolini, Il Duce by now, had a letter in his name published in the The Times, London. Here he insisted that fascism in Italy had no intention of curtailing liberties!

This cover of the American news weekly, Newsweek, says it all. Peculiarly, the British fioreign office, under Austen Chamberlain (1924-1929) pinned its hope on Mussolini ultimately becoming respectable and civilized. Four times he went to Italy with this vainly held belief. It was these attentions by foreign leaders that gave fascism the veneer of respectability. One image is painted in historical memory: Lady Chamberlain asked for Mussolini’s fascist badge and pinned it on her dress for a photograph.

 
This great skill of Mussolini’s –used by Tinpot and other dictatorial regimes all over the world since, including in South Asia — was in the manufacture and communication of such myths. Propaganda and the propaganda machine have been invaluable to the fascist project. The inability of the older generation of Italian liberals to distinguish between the reality and illusion of fascism, in Italy in the 1920s, not just allowed Mussolini to ride to power by taking his propaganda at face value; a similar inability to distinguish reality from spin doctored imagery, even today, in 2016, allows a justification of authoritarian regime(s).
 
A historical study and analysis of Italy then is also, incidentally a study of the effectiveness and the dangers of propaganda. Fascism then largely succeeded in isolating Italy from the rest of Europe. Not only was the press used in its service as was the radio, but the educational system was also manipulated to build up a series of convenient myths. Through these falsified histories and myths Mussolini silenced criticism, crushed dissenters and dissent.
 
This author’s extensive analysis and study of Indian history and social studies textbooks used in schools revealed shockers from the state of Gujarat in 1999. Textbooks that had been used (and continue to be used) in that state since 1989 have an apologetic rendering on Fascism and Nazism.
 
The Standard X Textbooks say,
“Ideology of Fascism: The views regarding the State administration adopted by the topmost leader of the Fascist Party, Mussolini came to be known as the Ideology of Fascism (Principles of Fascism). According to this ideology the State is sovereign. An individual exists for the State. An individual does not have freedom over and above the State. Here, everyone is absorbed within the State. Since the party firmly believed in Militant Nationalism, it opposed Internationalism. National interest and progress were its basic aim. The Party believed that the total power of the nation should be wielded by a leader endowed with Divine power. This party was a staunch opposer of democracy and individual freedom and also of communism. Thus Fascism was totally opposed to Democracy”.
(Gujarat state social studies text for Std. X)
 
“Ideology of Nazism: Like Fascism, the principles or ideologies for governing a nation, propounded by Hitler, came to be known as the ideology of Nazism. On assuming power, the Nazi Party gave unlimited total and all embracing and supreme power to the dictator. The dictator was known as the ‘Fuhrer’..Hitler had strongly declared that ‘the Germans were the only pure Aryans in the entire world and they were born to rule the world’. In order to ensure that the German people strictly followed the principles of Nazism, it was included in the curriculum of the educational institutions. The textbooks said, ‘Hitler is our leader and we love him’. 

“Internal Achievements of Nazism: Hitler lent dignity and prestige to the German government within a short time by establishing a strong administrative set up. He created the vast state of Greater Germany. He adopted the policy of opposition towards the Jewish people and advocated the supremacy of the German race. He adopted a new economic policy and brought prosperity to Germany. He began efforts for the eradication of unemployment. He started constructing Public buildings, providing irrigation facilities, building Railways, roads and production of war materials. He made untiring efforts to make Germany self-reliant within one decade. Hitler discarded the Treaty of Versailles by calling it just ‘a piece of paper’ and stopped paying the war penalty. He instilled the spirit of adventure in the common people. 
(Gujarat state social studies text for Std. X)
  
This is before the advent of Dinanath Batra’s textbooks, now compulsory reading for over 4,00,000 students in Gujarat and a proportionate number in Haryana. Welcome to our very own brand of supremacist propaganda in the state system of education.

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Alberto Moravia’s earlier, even more brilliant novel The Conformist, published in 1951, was structured on comparable lines, exploring the deep structures of the fascist state in Italy under Mussolini. Moravia himself had been ostracised under fascism, having his books seized or banned, and had an acute sense of how ‘society’ adapted to regimes of the most authoritarian kind. The essay below summarises the story in the novel and shows why its underlying themes (the search for ‘normality’ and the wider complicities abetted by this) resonate or should resonate with us in India today

The great Italian writer Alberto Moravia(1907–1990) published The Conformist in 1951, less than a decade after the fall of fascism in Italy. The English translation of the novel by Tami Calliope runs to some 320 pages. The novel has an exceptionally strong plot line and the narrative is conveyed entirely through the eyes of its hero or anti-hero, a young Italian called Marcello Clerici.

The story revolves around a mission to assassinate his former professor, one Edmondo Quadri, who has left Italy to play an active role against fascism from his newly chosen base in Paris. Quadri leaves his academic job in Italy when Marcello is still a student, and one surmises from the briefest chronological hints in Moravia’s novel that this must have been some time at the end of the1920s.

The assassination of Quadri is in many ways the narrative backbone of the novel, which is partly told like a thriller. However, the chief interest or even contribution of the work lies in what it tells us about Marcello himself and in the retrospective act of reflexion which makes the reader ask, at the end perhaps, ‘so why did he call it “The Conformist”?’  She’s bound to ask this because the words ‘conformist’, ‘conformism’ don’t appear even once across the tense expanse of Moravia’s story.

The novel is divided into a Prologue of three chapters (approx. 60 pages), Part One (approx 80 pages), a long Part Two (of close to 140 pages) and a brief Epilogue (just over 30 pages). The structure alone shows that the narrative concentration is in Part Two, which deals with the mission itself, that is, Marcello and his wife leaving for Paris on their honeymoon and Marcello setting Quadri up for the assassination by passing crucial information on to an agent he works with called Orlando.

Both the Prologue and Part One set the scene for these chapters but they do so through a vivid intense portrait of the protagonist. The Prologue is about Marcello as a child driven by an obsessive sense of his own ‘abnormality’. The term appears repeatedly through the novel, as does its ostensible opposite ‘normality’, even more frequently. Marcello’s ‘abnormality’ is not a physical one, it is entirely of his own making and linked, in his mind, to acts of violence that stemmed or once stemmed from a childish cruelty.

Philosophically Moravia was probably closest to existentialism but to an existentialism of despair such as Kierkegaard’s more than one of choice and moral dilemma such as Sartre’s. Marcello’s character is repeatedly painted in terms of an underlying anguish or melancholy that he’s never quite able to pin down and which may well have a lot to do with his loveless childhood in a home dominated by a violent father.

What he was about to do, he reflected, was certainly much worse than killing a few lizards; just the same, so many people were with him…’  In short, here was a criminality no longer suffered in solitude and therefore perhaps not criminality at all. The crime of Quadri’s murder, Marcello reflects at one point, ‘would have been a crime if he had not known how to justify and make sense of it’

The Prologue, immersed in the memory of this drab childhood, contains two seminal events of the type that Sartre himself in Saint Genet came to call ‘original crises’. These are events that have the potential to define the rest of your life, so forceful or traumatic is one’s experience of them in childhood.

The first of these crises is the rapid escalation of Marcello’s acts of violence from a wanton destruction of a flower bed to a mass slaughter of lizards to the killing of the neighbour’s cat. When Marcello kills the cat, he does so unknowingly, firing shots from a sling at a mass of ivy in the garden that separates his own from the neighbour’s and with the vague thought that his childhood friend Roberto may well be there behind the fence. He is mortified to find that he has killed Roberto’s cat and could well have killed Roberto himself.

The feelings of shame and remorse that dog him then and for much of his childhood lie at the root of Marcello’s deep need for absolution either through the complicity of others, such as when he tells Roberto about the slaughtered lizards but fails to evince any approval, or by ‘being the same as everyone’, absolutely indiscriminately ‘normal’.

The second ‘original crisis’ as I called it is more devastating for Marcello. Once he starts going to school, he is often ragged for being effeminate. The same ambiguity that Moravia hinted at in the killing of the cat (Marcello could have killed Roberto if he’d been there) recurs here as a motif of sexual ambivalence. This culminates in a group of his classmates (his ‘fiercest tormentors’) following him from school one day and then pouncing on him to forcibly tie a girl’s skirt round him.

He is saved from this attack by a man in a dark gray uniform who turns out to be someone now working as a chauffeur who was, in his own description, a defrocked priest. This man, Lino, is a pederast and takes Marcello home. Nothing happens on this occasion but the following Monday when they meet again (Lino has promised to give him a pistol if he comes home with him again), he flings Marcello into the bedroom, throws him onto the bed, and starts to assault him sexually. Marcello grabs the gun which is lying on the bed and fires at Lino.

This act of homicide, as Marcello imagines it to be, concludes the Prologue, filling Marcello, once again, with a ‘stunned premonition of doom’, just as the killing of the cat had inspired him with the sense of a ‘solitary and threatening destiny’, the feeling that in ‘some fatal and mysterious way’ he was ‘predestined to commit acts of cruelty and death’. Like remorse, like the need for absolution and the ‘desperate aspiration’ for ‘normality’, this sense of being ‘predestined’, of having no control over the things you do or will do, is a major leitmotif in The Conformist.

Let me run through the major parts of the story as rapidly as I can. The four chapters of Part One largely revolve around Giulia, Marcello’s wife to be and the role this marriage and the fabric of domesticity connected with it play in constructing a sense of normality for him. But it starts with him going to the public library to look up old newspaper reports of the death of Lino; and then to ‘the ministry’, we are not told exactly which one, to learn of his assignment to assassinate his old professor.

As with his impending marriage, Marcello’s insertion into normality hinges even more decisively on this assignment or ‘mission’. Between these episodes, both in the same chapter, Moravia inserts a passage that I shall come back to, because it strikes me as one of the best insights I myself have read into the nature of contemporary politics.

In India in recent times we’ve lived through all of this, through something frighteningly similar to the regime in Marcello’s Italy, the same unshakeable sense of a ‘nation’ under siege, a nation that demands loyalty, weaves its subtle webs of complicity in crimes committed at many different levels, a nation one is either for or against, and so on. We’ve seen the most dreadful pogroms being orchestrated in secret and publicly televised as well as openly defended on TV.

This part of the novel also includes a chapter where Marcello who is not a religious person by any stretch goes to Santa Maria Maggiore for confession. In the confessional he tells the priest about his encounter with Lino and the subsequent killing, but holds back from saying anything about the murder he will be committing.

Part One ends with a searing description of the madness of Marcello’s father whom he and his mother have gone to visit in an asylum. Marcello was frightened by the thought that there might be a link between his father’s madness and his own distressing sense of abnormality.

Part Two is the narrative crux of the novel. The eleven chapters that make it up move rapidly across a series of encounters that Marcello and Giulia now have with Quadri and his wife Lina (Anna in Bertolucci’s film of the novel), all of this of course in Paris. Here Moravia introduces a new theme entirely, of the violent sexual attraction that Marcello now feels for Lina, which he himself thinks of as ‘love’.

Bound up with this new feeling (Marcello doesn’t love Giulia, he has married her because he needs the stability that his life with her will offer) is an ‘intoxicating sensation of freedom’, the sense that if his feelings are reciprocated he can start an entirely new life, even betraying his ‘political faith’. This ‘new and violent emotion’ as Moravia describes it, generates the dream of an ‘angelic kind of normality’ secured by ‘the strength of love alone’. But Lina, it turns out, detests him and makes no effort to conceal this. She hates him politically because her husband has told her that Marcello is almost certainly a fascist spy, and finds him no less repugnant physically, since she, on the contrary, is strongly attracted to Giulia.
In the interval between their first meeting at Quadri’s apartment and the dinner scheduled by them for that evening, Marcello walks through Paris delirious at the idea of a possible affair with Lina. But when he returns to the hotel, the concierge tells him that his wife has gone up to the room ‘with a lady’. Sure that Lina has come as well, he enters the room without knocking and finds the door to the bedroom slightly ajar. Giulia is sitting on the bed half naked and Lina is embracing her legs with both arms and pressing her breasts against Giulia’s shins.

It was clear to Marcello that while Giulia was flirting, Lina was simply mad with desire for her. He watches them for a while and then heads for the stairs, profoundly shaken. Again Moravia brings in the theme of ambiguity, this time an intensely sexual one, the ‘ambiguous figures of men-women and women-men who crossed paths at random, doubling and mingling their ambiguity’ (p. 237). Marcello promptly abandons his dream of a life with Lina and readjusts painfully to the mission he has come to Paris to pull off.

Moravia’s chapter describing their dinner that evening has the agent Orlando follow them into the restaurant (Marcello has to identify the target by shaking hands with him so Orlando can see what Quadri looks like), and from time to time Orlando’s head stares at Marcello in one of those massive mirrors that Parisian restaurants are so full of, looking as if it’s ‘suspended in midair’. Moravia alludes to this image at least three times in the chapter, for example, Marcello ‘lifted his eyes to the mirror again: Orlando’s head was still there, suspended in the void, his eyes fixed on them’. The dinner itself is laden with the most subtle emotional intrigues as Lina navigates between her passion for Giulia and her repugnance for Marcello. By the end of the evening, Marcello, repeatedly rebuffed, has developed a ‘bloody, murderous hatred’ for Lina, but a hatred ‘mixed in with and inseparable from his love’. In the end, Marcello lets the agent know exactly what Quadri’s movements will be the next day.

This, the longest part of the novel, ends with Marcello back in Rome, scanning the French papers to discover that both Quadri and his wife were murdered out in the countryside. Orlando tells him that an order from the ministry countermanding the assassination because it was more useful for the Italian government to have Quadri alive than dead since they now wanted a rapprochement with the French was never actually received by him, so the murders were, he says, pointless. ‘All that effort, two people dead, and it wasn’t necessary, in fact it was counterproductive’ (p. 283).  The absurd contingency of all this is not lost on Marcello, who is also given a first-hand report which tells him that when they opened fire Lina threw herself on to her husband to protect him from the bullets. Quadri tried to escape but had his throat cut.

 
Moravia’s short epilogue begins with the day Mussolini’s government falls, 25 July 1943. There is a subdued panic in Marcello’s mind, even more in Giulia’s, that he had, ‘as they say, bet on the losing horse’. Marcello discovers that his wife has always known, ever since their trip to Paris, that he was ‘part of the political police’ (Lina had told her) and had always suspected his role in the murder of the Quadris.

That evening they drive around Rome to watch the crowds celebrating the dismissal of Mussolini by the king. Later that night they end up in the gardens at the Villa Borghese where Giulia wants Marcello to make love to her when he is suddenly accosted by Lino, the chauffeur he thought he had killed all those years ago. It strikes him that all these years he had been searching for redemption from an ‘imaginary crime’.

In the final chapter Marcello, Giulia and their small daughter head out for the town of Tagliacozzo in the hills east of Rome when some hours later their car is consumed in flames from an air strike. Marcello and his family are killed in a tranquil sunlit countryside the day after Mussolini is brought down.

There is clearly a strong moral-political subtext to the novel which the writer is careful never to articulate didactically, and I’d like to look at a few remarkable passages where this pushes through the controlled exuberance of Moravia’s prose. The idea of a former student agreeing to assassinate his professor for reasons of state seems at least mildly shocking at several levels but to the writer it is part of Marcello’s underlying quest to affirm his absolute and complete ‘normality’ by engaging in an active expression of loyalty to the state. That loyalty, Moravia tells us in a striking phrase, ‘had origins deeper than any moral standard’ (p. 73).

To Marcello the regime embodied an authority which was ‘mysterious’, ‘like all authorities’, but deeper and more powerful than the authority of the Church (p. 117).Moravia elicits a notion of loyalty to an authoritarian regime as somehow impervious to morality, as if it lies in a different galaxy governed by completely different laws of motion. Moreover, in the confessional at Santa Maria Maggiore where Marcello doesn’t confess the crime he is about to commit, he was held back from the confession by ‘something that would not let him go forward’.

‘It was neither moral disgust, nor shame, nor any other manifestation of guilt, but something very different that had nothing to do with guilt. It was an absolute inhibition, dictated by a profound complicity and loyalty. He was not to speak of the mission, that was all; the same conscience that had remained mute and passive when he had announced to the priest, “I have killed”, now imposed this silence on him with great authority’ (p. 117).

Here the notion of complicity ties into the wider solidarity of a sort of ideological community bound by its invisible codes and faith. Being part of this community of faith gave crime itself a different meaning. Waiting for his mother to get ready so they can visit his father at the asylum, Marcello is again confronted by a lizard (‘It was a big lizard of the most common kind, with a green back and a white belly that throbbed against the yellow enamel of the table’), and he ruminates, ‘He had been left alone to face the death of the lizards, and in this solitude he had recognized the clue to the crime.

But now, he thought, he was not and would never again be alone. Even if he committed a crime – as long as he committed it for certain ends – the state; the political, social, and military organizations that depended on the state; great masses of people that thought as he did; and, outside of Italy, other states and other millions of people would stand behind him.

What he was about to do, he reflected, was certainly much worse than killing a few lizards; just the same, so many people were with him…’ (p. 125). In short, here was a criminality no longer suffered in solitude and therefore perhaps not criminality at all. The crime of Quadri’s murder, Marcello reflects at one point, ‘would have been a crime if he had not known how to justify and make sense of it’ (p. 271).

It made sense because there were wider solidarities behind it, others who needed to do their ‘duty’ to make fascism a resounding success. “The others”, as he knew, were the government he had understood he was serving with that murder; the society embodied by that government; and the very nation that accepted guidance by that same society’ (p. 272).    

Here finally is the passage I said I would come back to. On his way to the ministry to be told his assignment, a newspaper seller is shouting as a headline announces Franco’s latest victory in Spain. Marcello reads this news with true satisfaction. ‘From the beginning he had wanted Franco to win, not fervently but with a sentiment both deep and tenacious, almost as if that victory would bring confirmation of the goodness and rightness of his tastes and ideas, not only in the field of politics but also in all others.

Perhaps he had desired and still desired Franco’s victory for love of symmetry, like someone who is furnishing his house and takes care to collect furniture all of the same style and period. He seemed to read this symmetry in the events of the past few years, growing ever clearer and more important: first the advent of Fascism in Italy, then in Germany; then the war of Ethiopia, then the war in Spain.

This progression pleased him, he wasn’t sure why, maybe because it was easy to recognize a more-than-human logic in it, a recognition that gave him a sense of security and infallibility. On the other hand, he thought, folding the newspaper back up and putting it in his pocket, it couldn’t be said that he was convinced of the justice of Franco’s cause for reasons of politics or propaganda. This conviction had come to him out of nowhere, as it seems to come to ordinary, uneducated people: from the air, that is, as when someone says an idea is in the air.

He sided with Franco the way countless other people did, common folk who knew little or nothing about Spain, uneducated people who barely read the headlines in the papers. For simpatia, he thought, giving a completely unconsidered, alogical, irrational sense to the Italian word. A simpatia that could be said only metaphorically to come from the air; there is flower pollen in the air, smoke from the houses, dust, light, not ideas.

This simpatia, then, arose from deeper regions and demonstrated once more that his normality was neither superficial nor pieced together rationally and voluntarily with debatable motives and reasons, but linked to an instinctive and almost physiological condition, to a faith, that is, shared with millions of other people. He was one with the society he found himself living in, and with its people.’ (p. 72–3)

In this passage Moravia comes close to describing what Sartre would some years later, also in the fifties, describe as ‘seriality’ and the stronger forms of it which he calls ‘recurrence’. Those are Sartre’s drably mathematical expressions for the structures of alterity through which ‘ideas’, inert ideas, take root and circulate, becoming self-evident and unshakeable. They ‘come out of nowhere’ because they stem from a perpetual flight of otherness, since the other is always only other to the other, and Moravia’s ‘chain of normality’ or Sartre’s flight of recurrence are pure infinite regresses.

More importantly, however, the lived experience of these ensembles generates a notion of truth that Moravia himself goes on to spell out a few lines after the passage I just quoted. ‘What else could the truth be, in fact, if not that which was evident to everyone, believed by everyone, held irrefutable?’And for Marcello ‘possession of the truth not only permitted action but demanded it. It was like a confirmation he must offer to himself and others of his own normality…’.(p. 73)
The best commentary on this is what Moravia would tell his biographer Enzo Siciliano in an interview he must have given in the late seventies: ‘Integration into Fascism…always had to be paid with a crime: to begin with, a betrayal, the first thing Mussolini asked an intellectual was to write an article against one of his enemies’.

In India in recent times we’ve lived through all of this, through something frighteningly similar to the regime in Marcello’s Italy, the same unshakeable sense of a ‘nation’ under siege, a nation that demands loyalty, weaves its subtle webs of complicity in crimes committed at many different levels, a nation one is either for or against, and so on. We’ve seen the most dreadful pogroms being orchestrated in secret and publicly televised as well as openly defended on TV; fake encounters being exposed by judicial enquiry, then publicly defended as part of a drive to get the killers off; extra-judicial killings being condoned and the killers let off because they were acting under orders, viz. doing their ‘duty’, that is, fighting a fabricated ‘terrorism’;  ministers being covertly assassinated because they told the truth about crucial events and implicated (‘betrayed’) their leader; and so on, forever. And all of this is camouflaged behind an equally constructed ‘nationalism’ that is pure manipulated hysteria…

Read the way Moravia wanted it to be read, not as a purely moral text but a political one, The Conformist speaks directly to us today, more directly indeed than the brilliant amazing film that Bertolucci made out of the novel in 1970.
 

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