The fascist franchise

 

On September 11, 1936, two bombs exploded in Paris, one in front of the Conferation du patronat francais, the other in front of the building housing an association for metallurgy on 45 Rue des Boissieres.

On December 12, 1969, a bomb exploed  in the Banca dell'Agricultura on Milan's Piazza Fontana that left seventeen dead and eighty-eight injured.

On January 6, 2021, a mob stormed the Congress in Washington, trying to annul the results of the 2020 election in the United States.

What unites these events is that they were all committed by far right groups, and the first two were committed, we know now, as part of a strategy to create a seemingly “leftwing” terrorism that would justify a coup d’etat. In the case of the Trumpists, there was a considerable campaign, after the attack on the capital was made, to blame the so-called anti-fa.

It is interesting to consider the success, or at least partial success, of  this false flag strategy. In Italy, the blaming of right wing acts of terror on the left was covered for months by the police and the prosecutors, until the entire story connecting left wing anarchists or communists to the bomb broke down. In its place, the police and prosecutors found a trail that led to the real perpetrators – who were either not prosecuted or let out of jail on technicalities by the higher courts. In France, the group of people behind the Cagoule – the people who financed it, the people who were in the know about it – all found homes in the Petain government under the occupation. As for the members of the Cagoule, some came back and fought against the Germans – such was their interpretation of the mix of anti-semitism and nationalism of their creed – while some collaborated with the Germans, adopting Hitler as a path to “cleaning” France of Jews and Communists and degenerates, blah blah.

As for the mob of patriot boys and blah blah, they can look forward to a court system seeded with far right figures, including the highest court in the U.S.

History, in as much as history is biased by the media of the time studied, has been kind to the neo-fascists. That fascism was the reigning power in 1970 of three of the main Mediterranean countries – Greece, Spain and Portugal – and that many on the international anti-communist front, including many Americans, some of them having posts in the CIA and Army, thought that the danger of the Italian Communist party called for “extreme measures” – made it geopolitically logical that Italy, too, would have a coup and a neo-fascist government. As it turned out, fascist doctrine was not as pervasive in the  Italian army and security branches as it was in Greece, where many of the “colonels” of the Junta had tasted their first blood under the Nazi occupation, as collaborators (although changing sides to the British and Americans in 1945, and becoming vital to the American side in the Greek civil war that pitted the communists against the forces of “freedom.”

I am a bit startled that this history has gone into the crapper, and the only reference that is made when the fascist party wins in Italy is to Mussolini. There is a reason for this: referring to the Cold War would definitely mess up the Manicheanism between freedom and communist tyranny, which is the paradigm favored by the older generation of Cold War scholars.

There’s a sort of Freudian rule about covering up the fascist part of the anti-communist alliance: it is the rule of the return of the repressed. The repressed were never, looking back, very repressed. And they are now at the door.