A-Infos (en) Italy, UCADI #167: DANTE FASCIST OR EUROPEAN? (ca, de, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

The Boutade of the Minister of Culture on the "Dante of the right" is not the 
first and will not be the last to credit quarters of nobility to his political 
party by researching its origins further and further back in time, so as to 
increase his quarters of nobility. ---- After all, a political force so 
unaccustomed to being immersed in history like the Italian right and, in 
particular, the fascist one, so much so that it had to invent rites and 
traditions from scratch, needs "myth and history" like bread. ---- Mussolini had 
been clear in this sense (he who, after all, chewed enough of history) "Italy 
needs myth and not history". ---- This attitude certainly does not belong only to 
the right. The nationalization of the masses would need to create, invent 
something tangible that would link the people to the state. [1] The Nation was 
too impalpable an idea to be understood immediately, so it was necessary to fill 
this gap with invented traditions and stories.[2]
As for Dante, then, his capture by the Italian State takes place immediately 
after his birth, so much so that he becomes the inventor of the "Italian" 
language which is immediately translated into the language of the "Italian State" 
as it was and is understood. An obvious forcing with respect to medieval thought 
and the very concept of "State" which, in the sense we give to the term, did not 
exist at least until the French Revolution.
However, if for the construction of a new national reality it is understandable 
that one looks for distant origins in time, when this is done by a specific 
political force things change a bit. In this sense, assuming that Dante is 
right-wing is nothing new. His membership had already been initiated by fascism, 
enlisting Dante in its team. For the fascists, being Italian meant being, 
precisely, fascists, and whoever was not such did not belong to the nation. By 
creating this identification Italy = fascism, the regime put a very heavy stone 
on any subsequent appeal to the nation. In fact, when the Duce fell and the war 
ended, the reference to the national homeland became very suspicious, so much so 
that it remained the prerogative of the right and the veterans.
Here is the poet's recovery not so much for a national cause (also because in 
this sense Benigni's readings of Dante are not so much more correct from the 
historical point of view, among other things immersed in a sea of rhetoric 
unthinkable a few decades ago) but to a specific political cause (right) it 
clearly appears for what it is: the
attempt at fascist cultural hegemony to be opposed to the now decayed one of the 
left. Thus returns not the right-wing Dante (which is an obvious and evident 
nonsense) but the Italian Dante because he is right-wing.
In the current historical phase, the government team has its hands tied: it can 
do practically nothing economically other than follow the "autopilot" of Dragon's 
memory. He must therefore work on a symbolic level (attention: symbolic does not 
mean harmless, far from it). Attack the DRC from a moral point of view ("he who 
doesn't work doesn't make love" sang the very Christian Democrat Celentano in the 
hot years of protest), invent the crime of "Rave" (a literally non-existent 
urgency), return to the attack on immigration, also take it out on "obscene acts in
a public place". [3]
All initiatives aimed at regaining control of a hegemony that they feel close to, 
given the non-existence (except for the 5S of the shrewd, but not idiotic, 
Giuseppe Conte) of any form of opposition.
We have seen it these days. The expulsion of Russia from the celebrations for 
January 27 belongs to that process of rewriting history pro-domo sua (as if the 
Red Army were Putin's Russian army) and goes so far as to invent by a so-called " 
left media" (when it is said that idiocy is equally distributed) as LINKIESTA a 
delusional article like this 
https://www.linkiesta.it/2023/01/auschwitz-ukraina-russia-campo/ .
What to say? On the road to falsifying history, the right has had good teachers 
and not only on its side.

[1] See George Mosse, The Nationalization of the Masses. Political symbolism and 
mass movements in Germany (1815-1933), Il Mulino, 2009 (ed. or. 1974).
[2] Eric J. Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (edited by), The invention of tradition, 
Einaudi, 1987.
[3] https://www.ansa.it/sito/notizie/politica/2023/01/27 
/fdi-nel-pdl-stretta-sugli-atti-sceni-torna-il-carcere_fd338d48-2340-4b8c-8174-3c68eebbb29e.html

Andrea Bellucci

http://www.ucadi.org/2023/02/01/dante-fascista-o-europeista/
_________________________________________
A - I N F O S  N E W S  S E R V I C E
By, For, and About Anarchists
Send news reports to A-infos-en mailing list
A-infos-en@ainfos.ca
Subscribe/Unsubscribe https://ainfos.ca/mailman/listinfo/a-infos-en
Archive: http://ainfos.ca/en