Growing up fascist; its lessons*

Author, philosopher and professor Umberto Eco grew up under Italian fascism. In 1942, at the age of 10, he won a prize for "elaborat[ing] with rhetorical skill on the subject 'Should we die for the glory of Mussolini and the immortal destiny of Italy?'" More than 50 years later he explained his prize-winning strategy in all its required depth: "My answer was positive." The reason for his positivity? "I was a smart boy."

Eco's tale stands as a simple yet complexity-layered explanation of what's demanded of life in the prison of fascist precepts. For one, critical thinking is verboten. Its origin lay in the Enlightenment, the dawning of Reason, which to the fascist mind was the dawning of world depravity. Fascism is manly, manliness thrives on action barren of analysis, hence thinking is emasculating.

It also distinguishes between this and that, and distinguishments lead to disagreements, and disagreements mean diversity, while fascism is a syncretistic One. Hence "disagreement is treason," observed Eco, essayist on modernity who taught medieval history.

Maybe it was the Gothic disposition, not Imperial Roman majesty, of Italian fascism that inspired Eco's academic interest in the Middle Ages. That I can't say, I've read nothing else of his early years. Of our nation's rebirthed youth, however, I can say knowledgeably and with malice aforethought that it's an age of authentic darkness, a term unjustly misapplied for centuries to medieval times.

America's Leader bellows with revolutionary spirit and projects forwardness of national purpose while executing policies as reactionary and backwardly Gothic as il Duce's fascism. Thus is Trump's brand the selfsame embarrassment of the richest stupidities.

In late November 2024, former National Security Council deputy director Rush Doshi advised "Trump’s team" in their unread pages of Foreign Affairs to "remember that the key to this decisive decade is not just what the United States does abroad [but] what it does at home."

Six months later, once Trump had had time to obey fascism's precept of action without critical thinking, Doshi wrote that his policies, both foreign and domestic, could best be described as "superpower suicide."

Such indeed was the end of Benito's fellow, contemporary fascism of super-Macht, as was somewhat predicted by a U.S. diplomat 12 years before its curtains were drawn, reporting to State that there were "so many pathological cases involved" in its "madhouse" of a government. Not much of a rosy future.

Speaking of fascist pathologies, in Iowa last Thursday Trump celebrated his victory over Reason and rosiness via passage of what only a psychopath would call the One Big, Beautiful Bill Act. Immediately after praising the legislation's abolition of the "death tax," which was a lie (pathologically), he scurried on in super-Macht style by denouncing the "shylocks" of American banking.

Later, naturally, Trump denied that he'd ever heard the word used as an ethnic slur. And Rudolf Hess never parachuted in Scotland.

Umberto Eco closed his 1995 essay, titled "Ur-Fascism," by noting the ugly phenomenon's eternal presence, "sometimes in plainclothes" instead of "Black Shirts." He continued, "It would be so much easier, for us, if there appeared on the world scene somebody saying, 'I want to reopen [concentration camps]." But "life is not that simple," he urged. "Ur-Fascism can come back under the most innocent of disguises."

In a way we are lucky. For us, life is that simple; here there is no "innocent disguise" of the ugliness that reigns. There is no "uncover[ing] it," as Eco further urged. The hideousness of Trump's fascism and "detention" camps are, as Orwell observed, right before our eyes.

What does remain true of Eco's final words is that it's "our duty ... to point our finger at any of its new instances—every day." Nor is it ill-advised that you throw open a window open and scream ...

*This piece is cross-posted at my Substack page, PUBLICK OCCURRENCES both FORREIGN and DOMESTICK est. 1690.