repeated

(portalnovosti.com)

In recent weeks, I have been working intensively on the adaptation of the novel "M. Child of My Time" by Antonio Scurati, which Ivica Buljan will stage on the stage in Nova Gorica.

I am rereading the story of how, in just six years, fascism went from an obscure phenomenon on the fringes of post-war Italian society to the status of a state religion.

But when I emerge from Scurati's documentary fiction, I feel as if I am still deeply immersed in it. Events from more than a hundred years ago are at times so similar to the present that I sometimes feel like I am reading a book that I cannot close.

Our program is simple, we want to rule Italy, perhaps Benito Mussolini once said it, and perhaps that, or something similar, is being said today by Donald Trump, or Janez Janša, or any other modern populist who, like Mussolini's fascists, makes no promises and keeps those promises.

Mussolini, who was initially a socialist and who rejected all his beliefs and ideology on his way to complete power, is today seen as a first-rate politician of the twenty-first century.

A politician who is on the side of the workers today and makes a pact with the industrialists tomorrow; a politician who offers a hand to everyone and at the same time withdraws it; a politician who changes his mind faster than he thinks; a politician whose endless piles of words often contradict themselves.

In Scurati's story, the invocation of a powerful person who will curb the chaos, even though the powerful person largely creates that chaos himself, and establish any order, is even more reminiscent of today's times, but above all, I get goosebumps when I read about liberals, Christians, kings, and everyone else who watched the rise of fascism from the front lines for years and pretended that nothing crucial was happening.

These people are like a copy of today, in which a mass of liberal and conservative dignitaries, a mass of intellectuals, politicians, and entrepreneurs delude themselves that modern fascism is not fascism, that it is not based on violence, that it wants to and can be democratic.

Like the Italian political and economic elite that allowed Benito Mussolini to usurp a fascist dictatorship before their eyes a hundred years ago, today's elites are more concerned about a non-existent social revolution than the unstoppable rise of the far right.

Why weren't these people afraid of Mussolini in the past and why aren't they afraid of Trump today, I wonder, but I can't find the answer.