In reading this DR article about Giorgia Meloni, the woman who may well be Italy’s next premiere, I was struck by how freely they referred to her and her party and their allies as neo-fasicsts (nyfascister). I don’t know what to think when I encounter such adjectives in the western press, because when the president of the United States is willing to describe the Republican Party as “semi-fasicsts” and every American conservative is eventually compared to Hitler or Mussolini by Democrats and their media allies, what does it really mean?
One passage in the article struck me:
Movimento Sociale Italiano was recreated as the national conservative party Alleanza Nazionale, which very consciously—and with success—had tried to distance itself from the neo-fascist past.
It wasn’t anything about Italian politics or neo-fascism that struck me: it was the way one routinely reads about European parties renaming themselves to get away from their “problematic” pasts.
Europe is crawling with political parties that are both nationalist and socialist, but none of them would ever dare call themselves a nationalist socialist party for the same reason that you don’t meet a lot of people named Hitler, Goebbels, or Himmler. Stain a name badly enough and no one sane will touch it.
Which prompts a question:
Has the Democratic Party nothing to be ashamed of?
They fought a war to defend slavery. The Jim Crow laws were theirs. The KKK was theirs. They sent Japanese-Americans into camps during World War II. They were on the wrong side of the civil rights movement of the 1960s. They got American into Vietnam.
And yet it’s never dawned on them to take the simple step of renaming their party.
Clearly they feel no need to distance themselves from their past.
By their own woke logic, shouldn’t voters then take a step away from them?
I think I know the official answer to this one:
That’s different because Shut Up!
Probably. But it’s interesting that the Confederate flag had to go because it was a symbol of the Confederacy, but the party that stood behind slavery and Jim Crow and the KKK and Japanese internment camps and the Vietnam war, and so on, is the party of the people claiming to be anchored in opposition to all of those things.
The relentless message being pushed by the Democrats seems to be “We care and mean well, and the other side is evil and don’t”, and that is being pushed always and every time.
Any time you then point out their previous sins, they just divert the discussion and revert to that line and for some reason they manage to get away with that.
Apparently, it only requires that the audience has no knowledge of history and suffers from poor memory and attention deficit disorder. Which unfortunately is increasingly the case…