The atmosphere of fascism

“Are you a fascist, signore?”

“Not at all. On the contrary.”

“Don’t be offended. We are all, a little”

“Do you really believe that?” replied Laurana, amused and irritated at the same time.

-          To each his own, Leopoldo Sciascia.

Sciascia’s use of investigative fiction – from the crime novel to the detective-like essay – was a response to the problem of fascism. Fascism is founded on impunity. Now, impunity is a large thing – it can be the result of chance, or mercy. But when it is politically directed to exempt a person or persons from the rule that noone is above the law, we are in the atmosphere of fascism. An atmosphere that precedes fascism, of course; myself, I think of Louis Napoleon as an exemplar of proto-fascism in Europe, and the whole system of slavery in the U.S. and its criminal descendent in the ordinary expression of the legal system in America are other examples of the fascist atmosphere.

The dialogue I have clipped out, above, is between a man named Benito – after Benito Juarez, not Mussolini – and one of Sciascia’s investigators, the rather sad bachelor, professor Laurana. Benito is considered a bit lunatic by the people around him, for instance his maid, and acknowledges this reputation to Laurana before making the case that Peppino Testaquadra, a Communist politician with an anti-fascist past, imprisoned by Mussolini, is a fascist. “He is one of my friends, I repeat, an old friend. However, I can’t prevaricate, he’s a fascist: A man who finally is elevated into a little niche, even an uncomfortable niche, and begins to distinguish between the interest of the state and that of the citizen, between the rights of his elector and that of the citizen, between efficacity and justice. Don’t you think that one could ask him why the devil, then, in these conditions, he suffered from imprisonment and home arrest?”

It is that little bit of fascism that one sees, especially, in the culture, a culture that cultivates the superhero as saviour and thinks it is being ironic and hip when it elevates the bank robber and the hit man.

Sciascia was extraordinarily sensitive to this moment, and repeats it time after time in his narratives. There is, in his Sicily, always a bit of Nemesis – of that popular justice named “envy”, and of that struggles with Nemesis named “justice” in the organizational sense – that is, the just detective or policeman or judge – the judge being in Italy and France entrusted with the power to order an investigation.

In a plutocracy, of course, nothing is more banned, more condemned than Nemesis – that is, a sense that disproportionate gain is itself criminal. That there are limits to use, to exploitation, to wealth, even to happiness and the “positive” emotions. Envy is always marked with the black spot, while greed is always treated cautiously, a sort of tooth fairy.

From the tooth fairy to the Aryan prison gang boss whose reign shows, as the New York Times likes to put it, a “rightward shift” in American politics – it has all been prepared for decades. And now we are enjoying the feast.