Friday, March 14, 2014
Forum (Omni Shoreham)
This paper takes a historical approach to the subject of resurrections, focusing on the 1950s – a period of economic and political uncertainty in which there was great concern about the reanimation of totalitarian ghosts. In 1953 Giuseppe Bottai, ex-Italian Fascist government minister, relaunched his pre-World War II journal Critica Fascista (Fascist Criticism, 1923-1943) renaming it ABC: Bimonthly of Political Criticism (1953-1959). Despite Italy’s transition from Fascism to democracy in the mid-1940s, most of the journal’s contributors and readership viewed ABC and Critica Fascista as one unified project of political criticism. ABC presented a Fascist critique of Italy’s officially anti-Fascist Republic. However, it is also clear that the journal’s contributors did not call for a return to a Mussolini-style dictatorship. Although many of them were ex-Fascists, they felt alienated by the radicalism of Italy’s neo-Fascist party. My paper argues that the significance of ABC’s critique lies in its similarity to mainstream political perspectives that criticized aspects of the multi-party system, questioned the government’s approach to the fight against communism, and supported European economic integration. Long ignored by scholars of Fascism and the Republic alike, the example of ABC moves the subject of the postwar revitalization of Fascism beyond analyses of the neo-Fascist party to an examination of those points at which “Fascist” and “mainstream” political ideas intersect.
