• PumpkinSkink@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Not a historian, nor Italian, so double check me on this, but a big part of the “why” is that the facists were never removed from Italy. They’ve just been kind of allowed to fester since 1946. I mean, Germany didn’t really get rid of their facists either, but the Italian facist movement was basically unscathed. Movimento Sociale Italiano (MSI) was founded in 1946 by Facists literally from Mussolini’s party, and maintained relevance by making political alliances with other, more moderate conservative parties.

      Some facists just straight up joined the Liberal parties. Fernando Tambroni, Christian Democratic Prime Minister of Italy for 116 days in 1960, for instance, was a Facist Party member during the war, and was quite the fan of Mussolini. The subsequent Prime Minister, Christian Democrat Party leader, Amintore Fanfani, who served five non-consecutive terms as PM, was also a member of the Facist Party.

      In the 90s other facist parties, particularly Forza Italia, and Alleanza Nazionale were spun off from MSI and basically wore a better better mask, and managed to get Berlusconi, also a Mussolini Stan, in as PM.

      We could continue doing pointing out facists in powerful positions in Italian politics, and we skipped the whole “decades of facist terrorism” thing, but really the reason Italy jumped to fascism is because it has been there the whole time, and has had power semi-regularly.

    • katy ✨
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      1 year ago

      Not a historian but their location makes it easy to scapegoat people so fascists can rise to power

        • SocializedHermit@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          Edge of Europe bordering Africa and it’s aspiring immigrants. Italy is often the first stop for immigrant boats, and on-shoring desperate people. All a right wing government has to do is point to those people and say how they are going to destroy everything you know. Rinse repeat, voila fascism.

        • Kinglink@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          You can deny it, but have you really thought about it.

          Think about American Politics. “Well conservatives are just fascists.” Sure, I mean there’s the party that wants to control what people say, Cancelling them if they ever said anything they don’t like. Want to remove all rights from people in specific parties, and mandate how others act at all times… and then there’s the republicans which are also clearly fascists.

          I’m not trying to say “Republicans are better than Democrats” they’re not, they’re clearly not. But Democrats aren’t that good either. It’s a problem with a desire to control others and when one party wins, they should feel they have a mandate to GOVERN but instead there’s a feeling they have a mandate to RULE or CONTROL. Luckily most politicians are somewhat sane about this, but god damn, some of the die hards on both sides have lost their mind.

          Power corrupts, and Absolute Power corrupts absolutely. That’s kind of a fact of being human.

          • pinkdrunkenelephants@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            Democrats aren’t the ones rolling back civil rights protections for women and the LGBTQ+ community, flying Nazi and Confederate flags, pretending hate speech and hate rhetoric are legitimate political opinions or beliefs, banning and censoring books that so much as talk about the LGBTQ+ community let alone support it, or hiding behind the first amendment to justify all of this while taking away first amendment rights for everybody else.

            Nah, you the baddies, hun

    • Damage@feddit.it
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      1 year ago

      Italy had a strong communist presence since forever, after WWI fascism was supported by the elite to counter that, and after WWII it was supported by the “liberators”, the US, for obvious reasons.