Eco identified ‘what we are not and do not want to be’. That is the little we need to remember

To the Editor – It is with great interest and no less astonishment that I read Minister Valditara’s tirade against Umberto Eco, who is unable to respond, and whose arguments in the famous short essay “Il fascismo eterno” he describes as “ridiculous” and even “dangerous”. I humbly believe that such characterisations could be sent right back to the sender, but the purpose of these lines is not to engage in pointless controversy, but rather to illustrate that what the Minister says, despite its historical and political inaccuracies, is a clear sign of the times we live in.

Eco’s text was originally a public lecture delivered at Columbia University on 25 April 1995. It is worth recalling the historical context: a year earlier, the ‘variable-geometry’ far-right coalition (FI, Lega and AN) – in which Forza Italia allied with the Lega in the north and with AN in the centre-south – had won the local elections by a landslide and formed a government, only to fall at the end of 1994, replaced by a technocratic government led by Lamberto Dini. Two months earlier, in February, Romano Prodi had founded the Ulivo, a centre-left coalition, which set out to successfully challenge Berlusconi in the elections due to be held in the spring of ’96.

Eco’s reflections took shape against this backdrop, and he believed that the alliance promoted by Silvio Berlusconi was an expression of a resurgent phenomenon and a creeping fascist sentiment, dormant but ready to re-emerge. He makes it clear that he does not mean to refer to historical fascism – the movement founded by Benito Mussolini in 1919 in the Milanese hideout in Piazza S. Sepolcro (now the disused premises of a police station) – but rather to a karstic vein of a psychological nature that flows through the veins of all peoples, a universal idea that never runs dry.

Eco goes beyond the distinction between an ‘accident of history’ – as historical fascism was defined by Benedetto Croce – and Gobet’s ‘biography of the nation’. He draws a clear distinction between the characteristics of the totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century (fascism, Nazism and Stalinism). “If by totalitarianism we mean a regime that subordinates every individual act to the state and its ideology, then Nazism and Stalinism were totalitarian regimes. Fascism was certainly a dictatorship, but it was not fully totalitarian, not so much because of its mildness as because of the philosophical weakness of its ideology.”

Eco is not interested in resurrecting a story that has come to an end, but in denouncing an underground movement, a murky sentiment that is seething and which he senses is emerging in new guises, sharing common traits with the past: ‘Ur-fascism’. The central theme of the piece was outlined in a few lines: ‘Ur-fascism can still return in the most innocent of guises. It is our duty to unmask it and point the finger at each of its new forms – every day, in every part of the world”.

These are lines that could very well have been written today, and the minister deserves our thanks for the valuable opportunity he has given us to recall them. Valditara correctly evokes what Eco describes as the characteristics of the ‘eternal return of Ur-fascism’. “Suspicion towards an intellectual world that serves no political purpose, disagreement viewed as treason, fear of difference, obsession with conspiracy theories, portraying the enemy’s wealth as a source of humiliation, ‘life for the struggle’, the appeal to frustrated classes, the people conceived not as a collection of individuals but as a monolithic bloc expressing a common will, the cult of the hero, even simplistic language”, and observes that “these are all elements found in another form of totalitarianism: communism”.

But Eco does not deny this; it is simply that, in his view, communism and Nazism are phenomena that are indeed linked to a specific historical context, whereas Ur-fascism is perpetually ready to resurface in new guises and perhaps even disguised as a ‘progressive’ movement. Communism, born not of a confused and muddled mythology but of a socio-economic analysis, has been characterised politically by revolutionary forms and the overthrow of absolutist regimes (think of Cuba and Batista, Nationalist China, and Tsarist Russia). It triumphed where oppressive regimes were on their last legs, replacing them whilst continuing to oppress; yet there is no doubt that it took root where democracy was absent and became a global threat by supplanting Nazi-fascism in Eastern Europe. Ur-fascism, by contrast, has developed primarily as a degeneration and crisis of parliamentary democracies and liberal states, both in the twentieth century and today. Communism marked a break, whereas Ur-fascism, at least initially, presented itself as a continuation of democratic systems.

If I were to give an example of what constitutes, in this day and age, a manifestation of worrying anti-democratic authoritarianism, I would cite – as I did in an article published elsewhere – the disciplinary measure taken by Minister Valditara against a teacher who had compared him, ironically enough, to a character from a mythological saga dear to the right. And whilst I’m on the subject, I shall conclude this reflection with a remark directed at "Il Foglio", which, through the editorials of its editor and my friend Gian Domenico Caiazza, laments inconsolably the defeat of the referendum on judicial reform. There are no reforms, dear Cerasa and Caiazza, that can be separated from the history that gives rise to them: and history teaches us that reforms conceived under illiberal regimes are intended to transform and genetically alter democracy.

Therefore, an informed public and a judiciary – even if ‘divided’ and legitimately open to criticism – are always preferable to mere facades of justice and free speech that have been stripped of meaning and autonomy. As someone once said, ‘this alone can we tell you today, / what we are not, what we do not want’.

It’s not much, but it’s just the little bit you need to bear in mind. And I’d like to thank the Minister for this welcome opportunity.