The SJW jihad against symbols of implicit whiteness marches onward. In The New Yorker, Ruth Ben-Ghiat asks “Why Are So Many Fascist Monuments Still Standing in Italy?”:
Italy, the first Fascist state, has had a long relationship with right-wing politics; with the election of Silvio Berlusconi, in 1994, the country also became the first to bring a neo-Fascist party to power, as part of Berlusconi’s center-right coalition.* But this alone is not enough to explain Italians’ comfort with living amid Fascist symbols. Italy was, after all, home to Western Europe’s biggest anti-Fascist resistance and its most robust postwar Communist Party. Until 2008, center-left coalitions maintained that legacy, often getting more than forty per cent of the vote in elections. So why is it that, as the United States has engaged in a contentious process of dismantling monuments to its Confederate past, and France has rid itself of all streets named after the Nazi collaborationist leader Marshall Pétain, Italy has allowed its Fascist monuments to survive unquestioned?
The writer adds this gem:
I was living in Rome on a Fulbright fellowship in 1994, and was jolted awake more than once by shouts of “Heil Hitler!” and “Viva il Duce!” coming from a nearby pub.
Paranoid much?
Ben-Ghiat, a graduate of Brandeis University and a current Professor of History at NYU, has all the requisite background checkmarks for entry into The Club. From her personal webpage:
Ben-Ghiat grew up in Pacific Palisades, California, where many famous exiles from Nazism relocated. Hearing about their struggles shaped her interest in investigating what happens to societies when authoritarian governments take hold. How do strongmen stay in power, and why do so many people stay loyal to them no matter what they say or do? What are the fates of those who resist? Fascist Modernities (2004, trans. La cultura fascista, 2004) answers these questions, as does her award-winning study of Fascist war propaganda, Italian Fascism’s Empire Cinema (2015).
You get the idea.
Back to The New Yorker piece, where Ben-Ghiat then intones:
The right wing in Germany, lacking the benefit of emotionally charged public monuments, has been orchestrating its gatherings around fringe events such as “right rock” music concerts. Yet, at AfD events, such as a march earlier in September, in Jena, Nazi chants have begun to resound. Unless the Party takes a hard line against Fascist symbols, it’s only a matter of time, one imagines, before they reappear. In Italy, where they never went away, the risk is different: if monuments are treated merely as depoliticized aesthetic objects, then the far right can harness the ugly ideology while everyone else becomes inured.
So, you see, it is imperative that either destroy, put a burka over, or put into deep storage out of public view, any and all symbols of ‘fascism’, the Confederacy, former slave owners, and (hopefully) all white historical figures.
