“Non Ti Schiantare”—On the Road to Rome and Fascism

A hundred years after Mussolini’s March on Rome, Italy is once again asserting itself as a laboratory of the Western world, with a party directly descended from historic fascism headed for power. Faced with this situation, a Calabrian writer friend recently invited us to come and learn from his people of Aspromonte. These descendants of shepherds and Greek philosophers of millenia past have an saying redolent of centuries of resistance to colonization in the north of Italy: “non ti schiantare”—“don’t be afraid.”

It is a saying worth a lot more than the paternalistic “Do not be afraid” of a recent pope. If we shouldn't be afraid, it's not to entrust our fate to some deity or some improbable bulwark of democratic institutions, but to keep our eyes wide open and see clearly what is happening. Non ti schiantare means all at once: keep calm, take in the full extent of the disaster, identify the points of resistance, have no illusions, fight, and face destiny. You’ll be better able to face what is going to happen to you individually if you have done everything possible to confront it ethically and collectively.

It was in search of this spirit that we went on a tour of Italy, starting with our favorite gateway for two decades: the Susa Valley.

The Susa Valley is Bussoleno, one of the places in the world where I feel at home because nature is beautiful there... ands because it’s a place that has defended itself for more than the 20 years I’ve been visiting: Here, the "presidio" (surveillance post and place of conviviality) of San Didero , near the improbable construction site of the “Autoport,” where goods would be unloaded from the improbable Lyon-Turin high-speed rail line (the Treno Alta Velocità, or TAV), whose main tunnel has still not begun to be drilled on the Italian side...

“Autoport, no thanks!”, “Today and forever, No TAV “

In the meeting and dining hall: “Wars are declared by the rich and the powerful who then send the poor and powerless there to die.” No doubt, the No-TAV are still on the move.

Here, in Oulx, higher up than Bussoleno, a few kilometers from the border with France, cohabit two realities that are impenetrable to each other. Skiers from Turin and elsewhere come to their chalets to indulge themselves at their leisure; and migrants from everywhere try to pass…

States play a cruel and perverse game: they do everything to ensure that people fleeing poverty and war come up against state borders and that only a few manage to cross each time. The states know well that the exiles will start again and again until they have passed. This is where our No-TAV friends come in, working with aid associations and in particular a priest who has made Church premises available to anarchists expelled from another place (the same priest has created an excellent restaurant with a Sicilian No-TAV chef and a staff of racialized “people in difficulty'”. We’re not showing a face for obvious reasons...

This capacity of the No TAV to get anarchists and priests, reinforced-concrete Marxists and the non-party types to work together in all the good fights is one of their strengths, despite all the clashes (and there is no shortage of them) among different sensitibilities. It is also the best possible response to those who accuse them of being NIMBYs.

Thousands of people—Afghans, Iranians, North Africans, sub-Saharan Africans—trying to cross the border, alone, with families, in groups, at the risk of dying at the bottom of a ravine, can change here, eat, equip themselves...

But the struggle does not only help others, it helps us: The valley, for a long time a point of attraction for people, often young, in search of a good life, has seen this movement of setting up facilities accelerate with the Covid crisis.

This is where the other strength of the No-TAV movement comes in: its conviviality, seen here at La Credenza, a delicious and very beautiful historical bar-restaurant of the movement...

Here, young people can encounter the memory of other struggles that may well return to the agenda...

The new arrivals can acquire, for example, a plot of land to grow the grape variety Abanà, which the forces of the TAV try to drown in tear gas (above is a label created by the designer Zero Calcare ).

The grandchildren and great-grandchildren of invaders can come and cast off the legacy of hate by reviving villages...

…to work the land or in graphic design workshops, and even install a sauna …

 …to fight against what the No-TAV denounce here ironically: the sale of the territory to the highest bidder …

…which were created by workshops led by Zero Calcare: “Alta Voracità” (great voracity) – an allusion to “Alta Velocità” (high speed).

In Trieste, we stumbled upon a meeting of the Rotary Club ,which was surrounded by music evoking the splendors of the Austro-Hungarian Empire: we are told that these people dream of the glorious past...

…while buying Christ and doing business… 

in Trieste, the city of Joyce and a few others, with its Canal Grande…

…and its charming streets…

… and its two beaches, of which, following a centuries-old tradition, one is reserved for women and the other for men: But no one has spoken to us about “woke culture” or “Islamism” and at least two women among our friends, who are both atheist and sassy, ​​told us that they liked it, after all (not that they wanted all the beaches to be like this)…

…but Trieste is also the gateway from the Balkans, through which migrants arrive on their way to Ventimiglia and Oulx. It is through there, the member of a group which led the dockers' strike against the sanitary pass told us, that they come, people fleeing war and poverty (and we see a lot of young people with brown faces, like the ones we also see in Paris, Stalingrad’s Square, and elsewhere, hanging around town and on the train, people with huge suitcases, who might have come from Bulgaria, Ukraine, or Russia)…

“Shit, Salvini, don’t quote Pasolini”—in Trieste like in Paris there are reactionaries ready to cite Pasolini, who would surely have punched them in the mouth … and there are comrades whose hair would stand on end …

In Milan, our friend Gianni Biondillo shows us Piazza Loretto, the site of the building where the corpse of Mussolini was hung by the feet: since then the building has been replaced by a bank whose current scaffolding could always be put to use if ever Meloni arouses reactions of self-defense…

…because it is true that, for the time being, what dominates the square is an injunction to make the whole Italian fascisphere shudder: “Kebab sfor all.” However, Gianni tells us why this place was chosen to expose Mussolini’s body (people having decided to hang it up to spare him more of the injuries that the Milanese inflicted on him, including four bullets fired at the corpse by a woman in memory of her four murdered resistant children).

On August 10, 1944, in retaliation for a strange attack that allegedly targeted them but killed only passers-by, the Germans executed fourteen hostages and left the bodies in Piazza Loretto to rot before everyone's eyes. Giovanni Barbareschi, a 22-year-old deacon, went to ask the Cardinal of Milan to bless them, but the latter invited him to do it himself. Returning to the square, he went through the crowd and knelt in front of each body, but one of the fascist guards came to jostle him. Barbareschi, getting up and turning around, noticed that everyone in the square had knelt in solidarity with him. This is how we can resist even by kneeling...

…and get closer to power by keeping the party headquarters closed: in Montemario, Rome, where we are now, the superfascists of the MSI (Italian Social Movement), critical supporters of Meloni, have their headquarters next to an electoral office. Hoping everything to go well, in strict compliance with the rules of democracy, they are discreet …

… as they were not in the Italian anti-vax movement. Here, recent MSI graffiti on the headquarters of the UIL union (Italian Labor Union): “Nazi unions”, “compulsory vaccination=violation of rights” show that they found them too accepting of the vaccination policy of the government. But our friends from the Trieste committee told us that what destroyed the movement of resistance to the past in their city was not the fascists, easily spotted and repulsed, but the new-age crazies and occultists who came from all over Italy. ...

Poster in Rome: “No Vote, Our Rage”

Roman banner: “Voting is useless, not voting is not enough.”

The friends and acquaintances we met were either comrades, determined not to vote, most of whom expressed an absolute detestation of the Democratic Party and its one and only electoral argument (“us or fascism'”, or people of the left who no longer knew if there was a left somewhere but still wanted to vote to block the right: in France too, we know this song. We also met very kind representatives of the "ZTL left,",so called by allusion to the Limited Traffic Zone of the city centers ,where the intellectual bourgeoisie is concentrated, who while being sorry that their Polish domestic workers applaud Meloni "because they are fed up with migrants and blacks," lamented the silence of the young, their absolute indifference towards politicians. In a country where there run by a gerontocracy of white males who delegate power to a woman only when she embodies fascism, where precarity has been so increased by the elite, led by the Democratic Party, that young people are emigrating massively abroad, where the birth rate has been in free fall for decades, is the fact that young people have become so opaque to the rest of society really surprising?

We were struck by the fact that everyone—those who were going to vote, and those who were not—took for granted the Meloni’s victory and the triumph of abstention. A self-fulfilling prophecy fulfilled, we know now.

Everyone also predicted that the right-wing coalition would keep power for six months (optimistic version) to two years (pessimistic version), at least enough for the right-wing parties to place their men and women in profitable state positions. in terms of clientelism and income. This assurance, shared by the twenty people with whom we spoke, was reassuring, promising the continuation of the old Italian political comedy. Yet one cannot help but think of those European intellectuals who, when Hitler came to power, also bet on the rapid wear and tear of his rule. Meloni does not have shock troops behind her, ready to overthrow the forms of parliamentary democracy, just a global groundswell bringing to power authoritarian figures destined to tighten the grip of the state in a moment of deep crisis of the capitalist mode of production, while more or less respecting the forms of parliamentarism. After all, Putin, Orban and Erdogan also have parliaments. 

Still, according to various sources, one in three Italians is at risk of not being able to cover their electricity and gas bills by Christmas. The worsening of living conditions, the merging of crises (ecological and social) can open up new possibilities for revolt, just as they can lead to a strengthening of authoritarian powers, in Italy as elsewhere.

As for us who know that only an exit from capitalism and industrial society is likely to put an end to the misfortunes of the times, we will find allies in the impure uprisings to come (it will have been noticed that there we have identified many priests supporting the resistance of yesterday and today: welcome also to thugs, witches, shamans and tutti quanti - provided they do not talk about personal development. We who do not believe in any deity nevertheless notice the position of the foot of this saint spotted on a fresco in the Abbey of Novalesa, in the valley of Susa: if we want to block the movement of the executioner before he cuts of the scapegoats’ heads, we will have to learn to calculate our movements to turn the enemy's strength against him. A return to tact within our ranks would increase our power.