Giorgia Meloni 'Mussolini'? Old Ignorance and a New ‘Plan For Africa’

💭 Giorgia Meloni in 1996: “Mussolini Was a Good Politician, in That Everything He Did, He Did for Italy.” Wow!

😈 Meloni's Neo-fascist past

Meloni was a teenage activist with the youth wing of the Italian Social Movement (MSI), formed by supporters of fascist dictator Benito Mussolini after World War II.

At 19, campaigning for the far-right National Alliance, she told French television that “Mussolini was a good politician, in that everything he did, he did for Italy.”

Italy’s colonial history speaks volumes not only about the Fascist regime but also about postwar Italy and how the ‘continuity of the state’ influenced the historical development of Italian democracy.

On May 5, 1936, after seven months of war, Marshal Pietro Badoglio telegraphed the news to Rome about the entry of the Italian Army’s troops into Addis Ababa, the capital of Ethiopia.

On May 9, Mussolini, from the balcony of Piazza Venezia, triumphantly announced “the resurgence of the Empire on the destined hills of Rome.” All this history is now following Giorgia Meloni like a long shadow in her trip to the former Italian colony, the first post-fascist Prime Minister and political daughter of the MSI, the heir party to Mussolini’s movement.

In reality, the fact that there was never a reckoning with that part of history is not exclusive to the far right and calls into question Italian society as a whole. Even nowadays, streets, squares and monuments all over the country are named after and dedicated to the imperialist war waged by Fascism, and no government or institution has thought to intervene to at least give an explanation of what Via dell’Amba Aradam, Via Addis Ababa or Largo Ascianghi mean in their historical context.
Giorgia Meloni could learn in Ethiopia the story of another of the founding fathers of her MSI: Alessandro Lessona, placed by Mussolini at the head of the Ministry for Italian East Africa. In the postwar period, having gone through the purge unscathed, he would be a member and then senator of the MSI in 1963. In April 1969, he resigned from the party and joined the National Front of Junio Valerio Borghese (another honorary president of the MSI) shortly before the coup attempt of December 7-8, 1970.

Thus, while she’s touting a chimerical “Mattei Plan” for Africa, Meloni might take the opportunity to think back to those founding fathers and “those people who are no more” to whom she dedicated her electoral victory in September. Instead, she will continue to ignore the issue (and so will national public opinion), banking on the country’s disinterest in knowledge of its past and relying on the sad spirit of our times, which recalls Karl Kraus’ famous aphorism: “When the sun of culture is low, even dwarves will cast long shadows.”