My grandfather was an Italian Fascist. Here's what my British friends don't understand about Fascism.

I’m writing this post from the idyllic island of San Pietro, just off the south-west coast of the much bigger Italian island of Sardinia. I’m having a cup of tea, as I always do when I sit down to write. Every summer I bring boxfuls of ‘proper English’ tea bags from London (PG Tips or Tetley fyi, and no I’m not sponsored), burnishing my Britalian dual-national credentials. But if the beverage is the same, the view couldn’t be more different: The magnolia walls of my London home are replaced by the coast of Sardinia and boats sailing on the crystal blue waters of the Mediterranean.

The view as I’m writing. I’m in Carloforte, on the Island of San Pietro. Italy.

As well as working on this post, I’ve been putting the finishing touches on the book I’m writing, based on my documentary ‘Fascism in the Family’ - the story of my grandfather, the fascist Mayor of a key mining town in Mussolini’s Italy. You can watch the film here.

Fascism has been an interesting (to say the least) topic to be working on considering what’s been happening back home in the UK.

My last news presenting shift before my summer break was a few days after the horrific attack on a dance class in the English town of Southport, where three little girls between the ages of 6 and 9 were killed and several others were seriously injured. That senseless horror triggered a wave of racist and islamophobic riots in several parts of the country. I’ll direct you to Sky News’ detailed coverage and analysis of it for the details, but it has revealed the stain of the Far Right in the UK and raised questions about the presence of fascist ideologies in British society.

Since my film came out in 2020, I’ve been fascinated by the different perceptions of Fascism and the documentary itself depending on which side of the English channel the viewers came from. If you’re a regular reader of this newsletter, you’ll know I often write about language and culture being inter-linked: When you use a language, you also ‘use’ the culture that language comes from. And what I started noticing was how different the reactions from British and American viewers were, compared to those from Italians or continental Europeans.

Over the years I’ve given a lot of thought to those differences, and whether it may make the countries and cultures who have not had historical experience of home-grown fascism more susceptible to its current and changing forms. I wish I could say that means a country like Italy has the anti-bodies - it doesn’t. But it does have a more realistic idea of what fascism was and is and how it can spread within a society, which perhaps is lacking in the UK, a country that has no recent history of being ruled by dictatorship. That’s certainly the feeling I got speaking to friends and colleagues in the UK. The topic is vast (that’s why I’m writing a book on it) and I’m simplifying some issues for brevity, but here are a few differences that are worth noting.

The thing that started to annoy me first was the surprise.

I don’t know when I started noticing it exactly. Putting together a documentary about my fascist grandfather hadn’t exactly been easy. There was an emotional element to it of course, but the research aspect had also been extremely challenging: trawling through 80 year old archives is a frustrating task since you’ll never find all the pieces of the puzzle and I worried that I’d failed to unearth some crucial piece of evidence that may or may not exist. Linking the past to the present is always tricky and there is the danger a forcing parallels that aren’t really there. Add to that my regular job as a news presenter and an energetic 3 year old, and you can see why it was a pretty stressful time.

But I was fascinated and consumed by the project and started talking about it with friends and colleagues. Thats’s when I realised how different the reactions of my British friends were to those of Italians and continental Europeans.

“So, yeah, I’m making a documentary about my Italian grandfather. He was a Fascist. As in, a proper one, in Mussolini’s regime.”

Silence. Of the awkward kind.

Usually their eyes would narrow a little, like they’d mentally pressed ‘stop/rewind’ to make sure they’ve heard me right. Then my interlocutors would usually look away, eyes darting in all directions to hide their unease. This would be followed by some comment along the lines of: ‘Oh. Wow’.

Bilinguals (and due to the nature of this newsletter, many of you are bilingual) will know that even when we’re only speaking one of our languages, we can’t switch off the cultural part of our brains shaped by the various languages and heritages that are part of us. So after versions of the above exchange started happening a few times, I’d have to bite my tongue to stop my Italian side from blurting out:

“Why are you surprised? Have you never opend a history book? Why is it shocking to you that someone of Italian heritage would have a fascist grandfather? Do you not realise that Mussolini ruled Italy, in some form or other, for more than 20 years?”

Because that’s the first thing that my British friends don’t understand about Fascism: Just how common it was.

When I’ve had the same conversation with Italian friends and acquantainces, at least one out of three people reply to the phrase “My grandfather was a fascist” with a “So was mine.”

My grandfather in fascist uniform in the main square of the town of Carbonia, the mining town built by Fascism he was mayor of. Date probably between the late 1930s to early 1940s.

This, of course, isn’t to say that everyone was a fascist. There was always strong anti-fascist sentiment, which grew during WW2 and especially during the years 1943 - 45 when the Nazis occupied Northen Italy and collaborated with what was left of Mussolini’s regime (who had by this point lost power in the South of Italy, which was under the control of the Allies and Italian anti-fascist forces).

But many Italians were part of fascism. Some joined the PNF, the National Fascist Party, for pragmatic reasons - there were jobs and positions you couldn’t hold without party membership. But many, many others, my grandfather included, joined because they believed in it. Italian historians call the first decade of fascism ‘the years of consensus’. Some of that consensus was obviously achieved by silencing dissenting voices, many of whom were threatened, jailed and sometimes killed. Violence was and is a defining aspect of fascism. But that doesn’t mean fascism didn’t manage to build genuine support among huge swathes of the population. It did.

Every nation’s culture is shaped by its history and the UK, while it may have many questions to answer when it comes to colonialism and Empire, was indeed on the right side of history when it comes to WW2. Yes, British appeasement towards Germany during the 1930s showed weakness and a lack of understanding of Hitler’s final aims. And yes, there was the British Union of Fascists founded by Oswald Mosley in 1932. But membership peaked at around 40,000 and fascist ideology never managed to sink its talons into British society the way far right extremism did in many other European countries. Furthermore the UK, as part of the Alliance, saved Europe from fascism rather than being a contributing part of it. Great Britain is rightly proud of its role in WW2.

So it’s understandable that many Britons feel that, ultimately, what happened in continental Europe ‘could never happen here’. But the recent racist and Islamophobic riots suggest otherwise. Many people were genuinely shocked at that eruption of far-right sentiment. The UK, having been on the right side of history, never had to go through the soul-searching that its European neighbours engaged in after the war, both on a national and personal level. But you learn more from failure than success. And when you look at individual stories and the complexities of history you get a more detailed understanding of what happened. Not just of the historical facts, but about what pushed people to act the way they did.

I will readily admit that during all the research I did about my grandfather, never once did I think “Oh, I would NEVER have done that.”

I certainly hope I would have made other choices, but it would be naive to just assume it. After 20+ years in news, many of them focused on parts of the world where dictatorships are rife, I am not naive about human nature and the power of fear, intolerance and indifference.

Feel free to disagree with me in the comments (I mean it, this is why I love Substack. Feedback, community and discourse, without the insanity of Twitter/X) but I’ve found that when I speak to anglophones about Fascism, mainly Brits and Americans, what they’re really talking about is nazism. Nazi Germany was the main military and ideological enemy in WW2. The discovery of the horrors of the extermination camps added to making nazism the ‘epitome of evil’ in the words of a Holocaust expert I spoke to after the film came out.

If when talking about fascism we mean Italian fascism under Mussolini, there is the risk of falling into the ‘well, fascism was nowhere near as bad as nazism’ trap. In fairness, that’s a pretty low bar, but many Italians try to absolve their country of historical sins by saying that Mussolini’s big mistake was the alliance with Hitler and passing anti-Semitic racial laws in 1938. If you’ve seen my documentary you’ll know I don’t hold back my punches when it comes to linking fascism and nazism. Ultimately, I think the pact with the devil is made once you support a dictator and suppress dissent, and that came with the original support for Mussolini. But it is important to note that anti-semitism was not an inherent part of the birth of fascism like it was with nazism. It grew.

Racism was present in Italian fascism in the form of hyper-nationalism, but the initial enemies and scapegoats were mainly political. Not out of the goodness of Mussolini’s heart but because the Jewish communities in Italy were relatively small, concentrated in a few parts of the country and generally well-integrated. They would not have made an efficient scape-goat. Anti-semitism - always present, as it was across Europe - increased gradually. The Racial Laws of 1938 were passed nearly two decades after Mussolini’s Black Shirts started to emerge as a political power in Italy. The deportation of Italy’s Jewish population to concentration camps started at the end on 1943 from the parts of Italy under Nazi occupation. Few supporters of fascism would have foreseen that when they joined the party years before, or possibly (and this of course is harder to prove) agreed with it.

But initial intent is irrelevant because once a dictatorship takes hold, there’s no telling in which direction it will go. And if you give a dictatorship your support at the start, depriving others (and yourself) of a future choice, you are responsible for its actions, regardless of what they are.

I mentioned a Holocaust expert a few paragraphs ago, who called Nazism the epitome of evil. It was part of a wider discussion that has always stayed with me.

The conversation was private so I won’t report their name, but they have dedicated their life to documenting the Holocaust and keeping its memory relevant. They saw my film and got in touch.

Over a long lunch in London about a year after my film had aired, where I mentioned that I’d started noticing differences in how different people reacted to the film, they replied with this: “In an increasingly secular society, we in the West have turned Hitler into the Devil. Considering the horrors of the Holocaust, it’s easy to see why. But when we demonise someone or something, we distance ourselves from it. We know we’re not be perfect but no one sees themselves as evil. And that way of thinking makes it easier for us to say ‘we would never do that because we’re not evil.’ That distancing is a dangerous way of thinking.”

That phrase is always at the back of my mind. A return to the horrors of the Holocaust is, mercifully and at least for the foreseeable future, inconcievable. But we are seeing so much political and cultural division these days, some of it just a step away from demonisation. We should never shy away from condemning certain beliefs and behaviours, or using specific terms to describe them, such as islamophobia. But it is crucial to try to understand what motivates people, to understand what makes them act the way they do. As I know from personal experience, that’s much, much easier said than done.