Roger Cohen has become one of the most powerful voices against the resurgence of global — and Trumpist — fascism:
"A banner is a banner, nothing more" wrote Giovanni Bianconi on the front page of Corriere della Sera, the leading Italian daily. "But also nothing less."
His piece flanked a photograph of a crowd in central Milan holding aloft with one arm a banner saying, "Honor to Benito Mussolini," their other arms outstretched in a Fascist salute. The gathering this week took place not far from Piazzale Loreto, where the Fascist dictator was hung upside down at a gas station after being executed by Italy’s partisan liberators on April 28, 1945.
The crowd was composed mainly of supporters of the Lazio soccer club, whose so-called "ultras" form an extreme-rightist stronghold. It was not a large crowd. Their display of Fascist allegiance will have little practical effect beyond demonstrating again that the unsayable has become legitimate discourse in the age of Trump, and that a white supremacist message has renewed global resonance.
Still, on the eve of Italy’s April 25 national holiday marking the country’s liberation, those raised right arms were shocking. "Honor to Benito Mussolini" is not quite "Honor to Adolf Hitler," but it is not a million miles from it either.
Words that marked that century’s course — Fascism, Communism, totalitarianism, Holocaust — have become weightless in the 21st century, fungible elements in a furious fake-news theater.
Even though I was trained as a historian — a student of mankind's folly — it remains incomprehensible to me that successive generations are incapable of learning the needless, mindless devastations of man's violent past. Hitler assumed the carnage of the Kaiser, who assumed the carnage of 19th-century revolutions and Napoleon, who assumed the carnage of countless emperors and bloody dictators of earlier eras, not one of whom succeeded in their visions of victory. We just go on and on, repeating the imbecilities of "great" and glorious leaders.