Often the discussions about whether, you know, obviously Trump, Bolsonaro, Modi, Le Pen,

whether they're fascist, often the discussion kind of runs a ground on this comparison

with the 1930s, so political forms change, the ways of doing politics change, what citizens

expect from parties and the way they organize, the level of violence and society, all that

has changed.

But there is actually an institutional continuity.

Like Fratelli-Ditalia is the continuator of the MSI, the post-war, neo-fascist party,

which was an explicitly fascist party, and it makes no apology for that, like the way

it talks about fascism, when it is accused of being fascist and Melani did this during

the campaign, is to adopt this kind of register of speech, which is like very pedantic in its

wording and which is designed to kind of move on from that past, but without like really

kind of critically engaging with it, and Melani gave this like statement to international

journalists, which he said in several languages, you know, we long ago consigned fascism to

history and we condemned the anti-Semitic racial laws of 1938, I mean, even apart from

the fact that making something a matter of history, of course, doesn't necessarily mean

just like forgetting it existed, it's actually precisely designed to separate out the

reliance with Adolf Hitler, being mistake, the Holocaust is wrong, with then some positive

elements, the ordinary soldiers who fought for it, you know, many of them were honest,

some of them tried to save Jews, some of them were murdered by communists, a real obsession

of Fratelli-Ditalia is the claim that Yugoslav Partizans carried out a Holocaust style ethnic

cleansing of Italians in the borderlands at the end of World War II, which is insane, but

actually several Italian regions have under the right wing parties control have introduced

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