Men of the Past, Men of the Future

Should we really spend the next four years talking about fascism?

An Italian newspaper has named former Italian dictator Benito Mussolini as its Man of the Year. The story broke on New Year’s Eve as I’d just pressed SEND on my last newsletter of 2024. A career spent working in breaking news has made me pretty ruthless about deciding when a story becomes old, but I’ll make an exception here and bring you this little tale on the day the most controversial American president in living memory takes his presidential oath for a second time, 8 years after the first.

We ended 2024 talking about the ‘Person of the Year’. Time Magazine went for Donald Trump. Politico EU chose another Donald, Tusk, as the most powerful person in Europe. And lots of people on social media unilaterally crowned frenchwoman Gisele Pelicot as their Person of the Year for the courage she displayed during the trial against her husband and the dozens of other men who raped her while unconscious.

And then there was Italian newspaper Libero, obviously not the sort of guys who follow the crowd. They went for none other than Italian dictator and father of fascism, Benito Mussolini, a man who might also have been picked as person of the year in 1924, as he stood on the brink of seizing total power in Italy.

Here is the front page in question. Subtle it ain’t.

Libero is not your avarage newspaper. As you might have inferred, it is stridently right-wing, and its editor is a former spokesperson for Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni.

Apparently Libero’s editorial team had been hesitating between Donald Trump, Elon Musk and the President of Argentina Javier Milei for their man of the year for the whole of December, but eventually Mussolini pipped the others to the post. “WHY” I hear you ask? Well, let’s get it from the team itself. Here’s the translation of the front page, and the newspaper’s motivation for choosing Italy’s last dictator as its person of 2024.

HE IS THE MAN OF THE YEAR

Because 80 years after the fall of fascism, Benito Mussolini is still the obsession of the left. A year of debates, controversies, books, films, with just one protagonist: Il Duce. And so a ghost continues to dominate Italian politics and culture. Thank you to the comrades who get it wrong.

Libero editorial

The Editorial goes on: “When obsession is stronger than reason, the intellectual sees signs of dictatorship emerge from every angle.”

Before you get too schocked by this, let me tell you that this isn’t even the first time over the past 10 years that Italy’s 20th century dictator gets the accolade. What can I say, (some) Italians can be a nostalgic lot. Another newspaper, Il Tempo, made Mussolini its man of the year back in 2017.

Their motivation given back in 2017 has a familiar tune:

Between monuments that should be torn down and websites that should be cancelled, the Duce has been at the centre of the scene for months. He seems to be much more alive than our current petty politicians.

Il Tempo editorial, 2017

There’s obviously a theme here. As the Libero editorial states, what swayed them was “…another year of surreal controversies from the Left about the ghost of Mussolini returning to the corridors of power.”

Talk of fascism is apparently used like a “club against the Right, as they warn of the ‘danger to democracy’…”

Shock factor and the newspapers’ political allegiances aside, it’s an interesting point.

Is all this talk of the threat of fascism’s return helpful?

It’s Donald Trump’s inauguration day as the 47th President of the USA and I’m pretty sure that in a word cloud of social media interactions about it the F word probably features quite prominantly. It’s certainly been brought up by guests in a considerable proportion of interviews I’ve done recently on the subject of the new president.

I confess I think the words fascism/fascist are vastly overused, especially so in English. In Italian the word is usually tethered to something relating to the Mussolini regime, or people who display a misguided nostalgia for a dictatorship they never had to endure. In English meanwhile, the term is too often used as a catch-all accusation towards anyone who doesn’t agree with us.

It’s often said that Mussolini ‘invented’ fascism. He didn’t. He used the word, Fascismo (from il fascio, which is hard to translate but means something like the bundle, to give a sense of strength in unity) to define what was to become his brand of dictatorship, but he hardly invented the concept of authoritarianism. That has been with us since forever, and its threat adapts according to the times.

Even supporters of Donald Trump concede that there are sides to the man that are problematic. His disregard for alliances, his problems with the law and the influential role that Elon Musk seems to have in the administration.

All of this will be heavily scrutinised, as it should be, over the next four year and I’m sure the F word will keep on cropping up.

Victor Hugo is credited with this quote:

"What is history? An echo of the past in the future; a reflex from the future on the past.”

Making comparisons with the past is useful, up to a point. The times are different. People are different. We might well hear echoes of the past, but the language of the past may not always be suitable to make sense of the very modern challenges we’ll face in these changing and unstable times.