power. When I was a little boy, they taught me that the English were the «five-meals people,» eating more often than the poor but sober Italians. The Jews are wealthy and help one another through a secret network of mutual assistance. But the disciples must nonetheless feel they can defeat the enemy. Thus, thanks to a continual shifting of the rhetorical register, the enemy is at once too strong and too weak. Fascist regimes are doomed to lose their wars, because they are constitutionally incapable of making an objective assessment of the enemy’s strength.

For Ur-Fascism there is no struggle for life but, rather, a «life for struggle.» Pacifism is therefore collusion with the enemy, pacifism is bad, because life is a permanent war. This, however, brings with it an Armageddon complex: since the enemy can and must be defeated, there must be a last battle, after which the movement will rule the world. Such a final solution implies a subsequent era of peace, a Golden Age that contradicts the principle of permanent war. No Fascist leader has ever managed to resolve this contradiction.

Elitism is a typical aspect of all reactionary ideologies, insofar as it is basically aristocratic. In the course of history, all forms of aristocratic and militaristic elitism have implied scorn for the weak. Ur-Fascism cannot do without preaching a «popular elitism.» Every individual belongs to the best people in the world, party members are the best citizens, and every citizen can (or ought to) become a party member. But you cannot have patricians without plebeians. The leader, who is well aware that his power has not been obtained by delegation but was taken by force, also knows that his power is based on the weakness of the masses, who are so weak as to need and deserve a «dominator.» Since the group is organized hierarchically (along military lines), each subordinate leader looks down on his inferiors, and each of his inferiors looks down in turn on his own underlings. All this looking down reinforces the sense of a mass elite.

From this point of view, everyone is trained to become a hero. In every mythology the hero is an exceptional being, but in the Ur-Fascist ideology heroism is the norm. This cult of heroism is closely connected to the cult of death: there is nothing accidental about the fact that the motto of the Falangists was «Viva la muerte!» Normal people are told that death is unpleasant but has to be faced with dignity; believers are told that it is a painful way to attain a supernatural happiness. But the Ur-Fascist hero aspires to death, hailed as the finest reward for a heroic life. The Ur-Fascist hero is impatient to die. In his impatience, it should be noted, he usually manages to make others die in his place.

Since both permanent war and heroism are difficult games to play, the Ur-Fascist transfers his will to power onto sexual questions. This is the origin of machismo (which implies contempt for women and an intolerant condemnation of nonconformist sexual habits, from chastity to homosexuality). Since sex is also a difficult game to play, the Ur-Fascist hero plays with weapons, which are his ersatz penis: his war games are due to a permanent state of penis envy.

Ur-Fascism is based on «qualitative populism.» In a democracy the citizens enjoy individual rights, but as a whole the citizens have a political impact only from a quantitative point of view (the decisions of the majority are followed). For Ur-Fascists individuals have no rights, and the «people» is conceived of as a monolithic entity that expresses the «common will.» Since no quantity of human beings can possess a common will, the leader claims to be their interpreter. Having lost their power to delegate, the citizens do not act, they are only called upon, pars pro toto, to play their role as the people. The people is thus merely a theatrical pretense. For a good example of qualitative populism, we no longer need Piazza Venezia or the stadium in Nuremberg. In our future there looms qualitative TV or Internet populism, in which the emotional response of a selected group of citizens can be presented and accepted as the «voice of the people.» As a result of its qualitative populism, Ur-Fascism has to oppose «rotten»parliamentary governments. One of the first things Mussolini said in the Italian parliament was, «I could have transformed this gray and sordid chamber into a bivouac for my soldiers.» As a matter of fact, he immediately found a better billet for his soldiery, but shortly after that he dissolved the parliament. Every time a politician casts doubt on the legitimacy of a parliament because it no longer represents the «voice of the people,» there is a suspicion of Ur-Fascism.

Ur-Fascism uses newspeak. «Newspeak» was invented by Orwell in 1984, as the official language of Ingsoc, the English Socialist movement, but elements of Ur-Fascism are common to different forms of dictatorship. All the Nazi and Fascist scholastic texts were based on poor vocabulary and elementary syntax, the aim being to limit the instruments available to complex and critical reasoning. But we must be prepared to identify other types of newspeak, even when they take the innocent form of a popular talk show.

Now that I have listed the possible characteristics of Ur-Fascism, let me come to a conclusion. On the morning of 27 July 1943 I learned from a radio news broadcast that Fascism had collapsed and Mussolini had been arrested. My mother sent me to buy a newspaper. I went to the nearest newsstand and saw that there were newspapers, but the names were different. Moreover, after a quick glance at the headlines, I realized that every newspaper said something different. I bought one at random and read the message printed on the front page, signed by five or six political parties, like Democrazia Cristiana, Partito Comunista, Partito Socialista, Partito d’Azione, and Partito Liberale. Until that moment I had believed that there was only one party in every country, and that in Italy there was only the National Fascist Party. I was discovering that in my country there could be many different parties at the same time. What’s more, since I was a smart kid I realized right away that all those parties could not have emerged overnight. Thus I understood that they had already existed as clandestine organizations.
The message celebrated the end of the dictatorship and the return of freedom: freedom of speech, of the press, of political association. My God, I had never read words like «freedom» or «dictatorship» in all my life. By virtue of these words I was reborn as a free Western man.

We must make sure that the sense of these words is not forgotten again. Ur-Fascism is still around us, sometimes in civilian clothes. It would be so easy for us if someone would look out onto the world’s stage and say: «I want to reopen Auschwitz, I want the Blackshirts to march through the streets of Italy once more!» Alas, life is not so simple. Ur-Fascism can still return in the most innocent of guises. Our duty is to unmask it and to point the finger at each of its new forms—every day, in every part of the world. Once more I yield the floor to Roosevelt: «I dare to say that if American democracy ceased to progress as a living force, seeking night and day by peaceful means to improve the condition of our citizens, the power of Fascism would grow in our country» (4 November 1938). Freedom and liberation are never-ending tasks. Let this be our motto: «Do not forget.»

And now I should like to close with a poem by Franco Fortini:

On the parapet of the bridge
The heads of hanged men
In the water of the fountain
The drool of hanged men
On the cobbles of the market
The fingernails of men shot down
On the dry grass of the meadow
The teeth of men shot down
Bite the air bite the stones
Our flesh is the flesh of men no more
Bite the air bite the stones
Our hearts are the hearts of men no more.
But we have read the dead men’s eyes
And the world’s freedom is the gift we bring
While the coming justice is close
Clenched in the hands of the dead.
Migration, Tolerance, and the Intolerable
Migration in the Third Millennium

The year 2000 is almost upon us. I do not intend to discuss whether the new millennium begins midnight 31 December 1999 or 2000, as mathematics and chronology would encourage us to believe that it does. From a symbolic standpoint, both mathematics and chronology are an opinion, and there is no doubt that 2000 is a magical number, whose glamour is hard to resist after all those nineteenth-century novels that hailed the marvels of the year 2000.

On the other hand we know that, even from a chronological point of view, computers and their dating systems will hit a crisis on 1 January 2000 and not on 1 January 2001. Our feelings may be impalpable and erratic, but computers do not make mistakes even when they do make mistakes: if they are wrong about 1 January 2000, then they are right.

For whom is the year 2000 a magical one? For the Christian world, evidently, given that it marks two thousand years from the presumed birth of Christ (even though we know that Christ was definitely not born in the year 0 of our era). We cannot say «for the Western world,» because the Christian world extends to oriental civilizations too, while the so-called Western world includes Israel, which thinks of our system of recording time as the «common era,»