Beppe Grillo has much in common with Mussolini
By
The stand-up comedian Beppe Grillo, like the fascist dictator Benito
Mussolini before him, has a craving to take over the piazza and
mesmerise the crowd. Where once young Italians chanted the mantra
‘Du-ce! Du-ce!’ now they chant ‘Bep-pe! Bep-pe!’. But it is not just a
shared need to rant and rave at large numbers of complete strangers that
hirsute Beppe and bald Benito have in common. Worryingly, for Italy and
also for Europe (where democracy seems incapable of solving the
existential crisis), there is a lot more to it than that.
Beppe Grillo founded the MoVimento 5 Stelle (M5S) in Milan on 4 October 2009. The capital ‘V’ stands for his signature slogan ‘Vaffa!’
which roughly speaking means ‘Fuck off!’ — in his case, to everything
more or less, except wind farms. ‘Surrender! You’re surrounded!’ he
bellowed over and over again at his rallies. The phrase was
traditionally very popular with Italian fascists. He was referring to
all Italy’s politicians, except his lot.
Now, less than four years after its foundation, his movement is the
largest single party in the Chamber of Deputies, the lower house, after
it secured 26 per cent of the poll at this week’s inconclusive Italian
general elections. It is not, insists this fascist of the forest, a
party. It is a movement. Parties, he is adamant, are the problem, not
the solution.
Mussolini founded his Fasci di Combattimento in Milan on 23 March
1919 and less than four years later he was prime minister. Fascism was
not, he insisted, a party but a movement. Parties, he was adamant, were
the problem, not the solution. Fascism would be an ‘anti-party’ of free
spirits who refused to be tied down by the straitjacket of parties with
their dogmas and doctrines. This is precisely what Grillo says about his
own movement.
Mussolini was the rising star in Italy’s Marxist party until his
expulsion in 1914 because he — like the French and German Marxists but
unlike the Italian ones — was in favour of Italian intervention in the
first world war. He looked destined for the scrapheap.
Grillo, a former communist, was banned from national television in
the late 1980s as a result of his defamatory performances. Things did
not look rosy for him either. Forced to perform in piazzas and theatres,
he took to ridiculing and demonising politicians, and then in 2005 he
founded a blog that quickly became the most popular in Italy and a forum
for the angry and the disaffected, mostly young, for all those whose
state of mind is defined by the word ‘Vaffa!’. He duly began a national ‘Vaffa! Day’ or ‘V Day’ in 2007.
Shortly before he founded his movement, he tried to become leader of
Italy’s main left-wing party — the ex-communist Partito democratico (PD)
— but it would not let him stand in its leadership elections. At this
week’s elections, the PD’s coalition was a winner of sorts with a
majority of the seats in the lower house, thanks to the latest Italian
electoral law that gives the majority of seats to the party with the
most votes, however few. The PD’s coalition polled just 29.6 per cent of
the vote compared with the 29.1 per cent of Silvio Berlusconi’s
centre-right coalition. But despite that, the PD grouping gets 340 seats
to his 121. In the senate, though, where different rules apply, no one
has a majority.
If, however, the PD had allowed Grillo to stand in its leadership
contest, he would no doubt have led it to overwhelming victory. Instead
it chose the monumentally smug and tedious former communist Pier Luigi
Bersani. But we haven’t seen the last of Beppe.
What gave Mussolini popular traction is what gives Grillo traction: a
virulent hatred of parliament and the politicians who infest it. The
dictator famously said he could have moved his bivouacs into ‘this deaf
and grey chamber’ but had chosen not to. The comedian uses the same
language. Whereas Mussolini spread the word through his own mass daily
newspaper Il Popolo d’Italia, and enforced it by means of his
blackshirts, Grillo does so through his website, Il Blog di Beppe
Grillo, and violent verbal abuse and ostracism of opponents. Whereas
Mussolini travelled by train to his rallies, Grillo travels to his by
camper van.
‘I did not invent fascism,’ said Mussolini, ‘I extracted it from the
Italian people.’ Grillo did not invent his movement, he says, he merely
provided the humus — the internet forum — in which it grew. During the
election campaign, he did not give one television or newspaper
interview, because journalists, like politicians, are the enemy. Both
Mussolini and Grillo appeal to the spirit and soul rather than the
wallet and mind of Italians. Fascism was a civic religion and the Duce
its god. The MoVimento 5 Stelle is a sect, with Grillo its guru, and
like all good sects it does not have an office. Its HQ is not real, but
virtual: Beppe’s blog.
Italian fascism, even though no one is allowed to say so, was a
left-wing revolutionary movement which Mussolini founded because the
first world war had made him realise that the proletariat is more loyal
to its nation than its class. At the May 1921 general election, the
fascisti won their first seats in the Italian parliament (only 35). Yet
just 18 months later, after the March on Rome in October 1922, King
Vittorio Emanuele III had appointed Mussolini prime minister.
At this week’s elections, no coalition, let alone party, got more
than 30 per cent of the vote. Any government that somehow emerges from
the debacle is bound to be short-lived. History repeats itself first as
tragedy, wrote Karl Marx, then as farce: the comedian Grillo’s version
of Mussolini’s March on Rome could be only a matter of months away.
Fascism was able to flourish thanks to the impotence and corruption
of Italian democracy, especially in the first two decades of the 20th
century, which made it incapable of dealing with an existential crisis —
the threat of communist revolution. In 1945, with the fall of fascism
and the monarchy, Italy returned to an updated form of the same impotent
and corrupt democracy. Through fear of dictators, the new constitution
severely limited the powers of prime minister, cabinet and president,
and complex versions of proportional representation made it impossible
for any one party to obtain a majority of the seats.
This was fine, more or less, in the boom times. Not any more. Italy
has the third highest sovereign debt in the world as a proportion of
GDP, its economy is in permanent recession, its tax burden and red-tape
suffocating businesses, and its labour market paralysed by a forest of
laws that make it virtually impossible to be taken on full-time or
fired.
As with fascism, Grillo and his movement have flourished thanks to
the impotence and corruption of the Italian parliament in the face of
the current economic crisis — the threat of meltdown caused by the euro.
The unelected economics professor Mario Monti, who replaced
Berlusconi as premier in a palace coup in November 2011, merely raised
taxes and invented new ones.
But austerity is not just raising taxes; it’s cutting spending. Monti
did nothing to hack back the monstrous debt (it rose from 120 per cent
to 129 per cent). He did nothing to stimulate growth. Youth unemployment
is at 35 per cent, and unemployment in total is much higher than the
official 12 per cent if you count the hundreds of thousands still
technically employed but paid by the state not to work.
Like fascism, Grillo’s movement is essentially left-wing and in
favour of the state sorting things out — the Italian state. But it is
against the euro and Europe — and Germany in particular.
Mussolini wrote soon after founding fascism that it is ‘difficult to
define’. Fascism does not have ‘statutes’ or ‘transcending programmes’.
Therefore ‘it is natural’ that it should attract ‘the young’ rather than
the old who are likely to refuse its ‘freshness’.
Grillo’s manifesto is called ‘Il non statuto’. On his blog he says,
‘We’re all young … We’re a movement of many people who are uniting from
the bottom up. We don’t have structures, hierarchies, bosses,
secretaries … No one gives us orders.’
Welcome to the new fascist future.
http://tinyurl.com/c3pj8zz
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