fascism – Paola Trimarco

Deconstructing Ciao Bella Ciao Ciao Ciao

I first learned and instantaneously joined in singing the chorus of Ciao Bella Ciao Ciao Ciao a couple of years ago at a fundraiser for Ukrainian refugees. Despite the lyrics resembling the passé Italian ‘cat call’ once hurled at women, I quickly realised its true nature: a protest song. It’s about a country under invasion, with a narrator who would rather die than surrender, asking the supporters (the partigiani) to take him or her away. At least, that’s the gist of the early verses. The dead body is to be buried in the beautiful mountains of the beloved country, where flowers will grow above the grave. The song ends with a rambunctious cry for freedom.

This is the 1940s version, widely interpreted as being anti-fascist even though there is no mention of fascists or Mussolini. I see the goodbye my beautiful, goodbye, bye bye as a farewell to the country and the days of freedom. Putin’s sending troops into Ukraine is an invasion of a sovereign nation. Those were my thoughts – nothing to do with fascism – as I sang the chorus in the gardens of a church in Cambridge decked in the now familiar blue and yellow flags. We were calling for freedom and showing support for the people of Ukraine.

Since the 1960s the song has become a generic protest anthem across the world. It’s been used to defend workers’ rights, object to taxes, protest oppression, and rally against war. It’s another form of We Shall Overcome. In this way, the song has returned to its 19th-century origins in the rice fields of northern Italy. In that version, the lyrics describe insufferable working conditions and a boss who beats the workers with a stick. They, too, would rather be dead, and the song also ends with a wish for freedom.

The song has recently been dragged into the headlines with the assassination of the far-right influencer Charlie Kirk. Bullet casings from the assassin’s gun were reported to have the words Ciao Bella Ciao Ciao Ciao engraved on them. If my language is hedged and my tone a bit sceptical, it’s because the US president and others of that ilk started blaming the ‘radical left’ and ‘antifa’ before a suspect had even been identified, returning the song to being anti-fascist. That narrative sounded a bit too convenient – and out of touch. Now that a suspect is in custody, we have learned that he was raised in a conservative Mormon household. His parents are registered Republican voters, and he registered as an Independent. So far, nothing has suggested he belonged to a left-wing organization – or to any political organisation.

The accused is an individual with mental health issues who was also in a gay relationship with a partner who was transitioning. This individual may have been offended by the well-documented attacks from Mr Kirk against gays and transpeople . Living in America, this mentally ill individual had easy access to a gun – an issue that is not being debated this time around.

Seeing the shooter as an individual and not necessarily influenced by the left, it’s worth noting that the 22-year-old alleged assassin was an avid gamer. In the world of video games ‘ciao bella, ciao ciao ciao’ holds several meanings, including ‘see you,’ ‘I got you – bye bye’ and ‘I’m tired of this.’ The casings also had a few abbreviations used by gamers that middle-aged journalists are still trying to decipher.

I doubt we’ll ever know the true motivations of the assassin. His actions were unquestionably wrong and sadly are likely to be replicated by others given the heated and polarized times we live in.

On the less violent and more measured side of protest, we still have the right to sing Ciao Bella Ciao Ciao Ciao. If you want this infectious song in your head, complete with lyrics, I recommend BELLA CIAO: VERSIONE PARTIGIANA E DELLE MONDINE (Canzone Originale + Testo).

What I’ve been reading

Crime fiction that’s not really of the genre. These two novels were intended to be late summer escapism from the horrors of the world news, but neither Colson Whitehead’s Crook Manifesto or Olivier Norek’s Entre Deux Mondes (Between Two Worlds) could keep my mind from the bigger social problems of racism and anti-immigration positions.

Crook Manifesto is set in 1970s New York, with its notorious crime problems and seediness and follows on from Whitehead’s Harlem Shuffle – which I hadn’t read. For me, this book worked fine on its own as it uses dark humour and elements of crime drama to weave a story about a criminal who had gone straight but was then dragged back into the underworld. It’s full of social commentary on race, poverty and crime and made me strangely nostalgic for 70s America, with societal divisions that seem innocuous by today’s MAGA and social media-fuelled standards.

The Norek novel doesn’t have the laughs or the comfort of reader hindsight that Whitehead’s book has. It’s a crime thriller set in the Jungle, the notorious refugee camp in Calais, France. It follows two police officers – Adam, a refugee fleeing Syria and his job in Assad’s military police, and Bastion, a French lieutenant newly assigned to the Jungle. This gripping tale is complex and heart wrenching, with a high body count – definitely not a light read for the nightstand.

Il Duce and the Donald

It’s easy to see how much these two men are alike, down to their speeches made through puckered lips and puffed-up chests. But I’m going to stick my neck out and say how much these two are different. After recently reading Antonio Scuratti’s M: Man of the Century, I look at Mussolini in a different way and as less of a cardboard cutout. This first history-come-novel of a trilogy depicts Mussolini’s early political life from the time of post First World War Italy until he gained power in 1924.

Unlike Tr*mp, Mussolini was not born gagging on a silver spoon. His father was a blacksmith and his mother a schoolteacher. Mussolini trained to be a teacher but worked for a living as the editor of Il Popolo d’Italia, a newspaper for the fasci movement. Mussolini also served in his country’s armed forces during WWI and was wounded. Not so with the former US president, who avoided the draft with student deferments and finally, when those ran out, a medical exemption. Tr*mp’s CV consists of basically one thing – businessperson, a position obtained with properties inherited from his father.

Unlike Tr*mp, Mussolini knew politics and the ways of government. He was active in the Socialist Party before defecting with others to create their own movement over the issue of pacifism during WWI. Mussolini supported workers’ rights while supporting the industrialists, who were trying to reshape and capitalise off the country left bloodied and poor after the war, with little help from their allies America, France and Britain. Tr*mp’s political career was a spin-off from his media personality and self-publicity as a ‘successful’ businessperson.

While both men, once they achieved political power, encouraged and denounced violence in the same breath, Mussolini’s hands were dripping in blood. Metaphorically, of course, since he sent out others to do his dirty work. He specifically ordered the killing of his enemies, including the leader of the socialist party. Some would argue that the orange one is responsible for the deaths on 6 January 2021 at the Capitol, the deaths of anti-racists activists during his term in office and even the deaths of thousands of Americas due to his reckless response as president to the Covid pandemic. But all these examples are about responsibility through verbal coercion and propagandizing.

When it comes to public speaking, while the two men may have presented themselves in similar fashions and to my bewilderment been able to stir up a crowd, the prose of their speeches are starkly different. A skilled writer, Mussolini could craft his language and make logical arguments. And unlike Tr*mp, he never attacked his opponents with schoolchild slurs and name calling, which I’m not going to reprint here as I have reached my saturation point. Mussolini’s discourse would typically pick apart his rivals’ arguments and then tip the rhetorical balance by making threats of violence: “The Socialists ask what is our program? Our program is to smash the heads of the Socialists.”

While both men attacked democracy, it’s worth considering the nuanced differences. Mussolini called democracy a ‘fallacy’ because people do not know what they want and because ‘democracy is talking itself to death.’ Tr*mp said that if he lost the 2020 election, it proved that democracy was an ‘illusion’ because ‘the system is rigged’ and ‘everyone knows it.’

One final noteworthy difference, Mussolini’s fascism, unlike the MAGA campaign, spawned an art movement. Il Novecento rejected the avant garde of the early 20^th century in favour of more traditional large landscapes and cityscapes, reflecting the fascists’ ideology. From Scuratti’s book, I’ve learned that this movement was founded in part by one of Mussolini’s many mistresses. Whatever the motivations and manipulations of Il Novecento, Tr*mp and his MAGA movement are in a word artless.

Painting by Mario Sironi of Il Novecento

Pointing out the differences between these two leaders not only highlights the unfitness of the former US president for any position of governmental leadership, but it makes me think that fascism is an overused term that like so many political and ideological words, changes its meaning over time. Yet, the essence of it remains as noted in a recent interview with writer Naomi Klein. On the topic of fascism, she said ‘I’m scared whenever we get whipped up in a mob and don’t think for ourselves. That’s how the updated far-right is drawing people in. It’s extremely dangerous.’

What else I’ve been reading

This has turned out to be a summer of big fat reads, with the Antonio Scuratti book weighing it at 750+ small print pages. To counter this, two excellent novellas have capped off the summer. I’ve finally gotten around to reading something by the Belgium writer Amélie Nothomb. Stupeur et Tremblement (avail. in English) is a drole, at times laugh-aloud funny, story of a young Belgium woman’s experience working for a Japanese company. The expected East meets West clashes are there, but so too is a humorous take on workplace bullying (I know, it can be serious and soul-destroying).

The other lightweight but not intellectually so was Thomas Mann’s classic Death in Venice. I first read it decades ago at university. Having since seen the film with Dirk Bogarde, I could only envisage his twinkling brown eyes as those of Aschenbach. The older me also appreciated the references to the paintings of Caspar David Friedrich (who wasn’t on my radar until 5 years ago), adding more meaning to the book’s meditation on aestheticism.

Standing Up to Racism and Fascism

Is it a multi-circled Venn diagram or a spider-gram that will best illustrate the connections between Nigel Farage, Steve Bannon, Geert Wilders, Belgium’s racist-right politician Filip Dewinter, current UKIP leader Gerard Batten, Donald Trump and British Nazi Tommy Robinson? It would be too easy to draw circles and lines around the racist and fascist ideas these political figures have come to represent. What also connects these men is far more disturbing. They have all publically endorsed at least two of the names on this list and in doing so have helped to spread each other’s popularity and toxic beliefs. They’ve succeeded in making the hate-filled lone wolves across the West feel and act as members of an international pack.

This wider picture makes a lot of us feel out of control and helpless. Of course, we can always find like-minded people amongst our friends, co-workers and fellow liberal activists. We can choose to read the newspapers and follow on social media those who share our anger and disgust. These things might take the edge off, but it wasn’t until this past Saturday that I found a more satisfying way of confronting this barbarism – by yelling at it.

On a hot Saturday afternoon in Cambridge, a couple thousand protesters gathered to rally and march against another march planned by a group of Tommy Robinson supporters. For my international readers, Robinson is a former leader of the far-right English Defence League who is currently in prison for contempt of court. His supporters, including Steve Bannon, Nigel Farage, Geert Wilders and Gerard Batten, want him released from prison on grounds of freedom of speech. (See what I mean about Venn Diagrams.)

A small group (perhaps 200) of Robinson’s lesser known supporters appeared at the march in Cambridge. We easily out-numbered them – which is intensely empowering. Unlike Trump’s visit to the UK earlier that week, these racists/fascists were within earshot and I felt justified in participating. Will our screamed chants of ‘Nazi scum off our streets’ change the minds of these fascists? Of course, not. Will they think twice before they return to Cambridge for another march? Maybe. Just maybe. And that’s worth holding on to. Aside from the obvious therapeutic effects of yelling at these racist/fascists characters, I’d like to think these groups lose some of their influence and power to directly offend each time they’re pushed away.