General Discussion
Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsBefore our eyes, Italy is becoming a fascist state
Before our eyes, Italy is becoming a fascist state
https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/italy-fascist-policies-march-rome-matteo-salvini-donald-trump-a8586711.html
Whats more, Salvini, who is becoming world-famous as a sort of mini-me Donald Trump, adds that such shops were full of people who drink beer, whiskey until three in the morning and who piss and shit on the doorstep.
Readers may recall the boycott of Jewish shops and businesses pursued by Hitler in the 1930s, and the various curfews imposed on racial minorities by tyrants throughout history. Italys bizarre retail curfew is just the latest in a series of measures designed to turn the entire country into what might be termed a hostile environment for refugees, asylum seekers and economic migrants. A census of Roma people, the refusal to rescue migrants from leaky boats in the Mediterranean and the threat to imprison local mayors who sought to welcome refugees to their depopulated towns and villages are some of the other recent attacks on human rights. Italy leads the world in rolling back civil liberties, if nothing else.
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No one, one hopes, thinks that Salvini and his friends are about to invade Abyssinia or Albania, but they are certainly dangerous and a threat to the harmony of Europe, fought for and forged over the seven decades since the last time the fascists told us they had all the answers. In Poland, in Hungary, in the Czech Republic, fascists run whole countries. In places such as Austria and Denmark they either share power or are close to it. In France the National Front is re-inventing itself, Macron almost a last hope for French democracy. In Germany we know what has happened; the rise of the AfD has pushed the two main parties into an uncomfortable permanent grand alliance, squeezing the life out of the social democrats, and leaving the neo-Nazis as the unofficial opposition. The same appears to be happening in Sweden.
Clash City Rocker
(3,402 posts)Italy ping-ponged between fascism and socialism for a long time. One would think they had learned by now that it doesnt work very well.
Dawson Leery
(19,348 posts)as where Trump is 25 points lower.
I will stay in America.
bdamomma
(63,931 posts)pendulum better swing very hard to the left to get rid of these bastards.
Drahthaardogs
(6,843 posts)Fascism. Always has. The problem is that the controlling rich convince the masses it's the poor to blame.
UTUSN
(70,762 posts)magicarpet
(14,187 posts)Brazil,
Philippines,
Turkey,
(Bone)...Saw-die Arabia,
Almost Fucking France.....
htuttle
(23,738 posts)I was going to post the 'Mussolini hanging upside down under a bridge' image, but decided I'd spare those with more delicate sensibilities.
smirkymonkey
(63,221 posts)Just to remind them of how they can end up if they go too far.
Liberty Belle
(9,538 posts)As well as a racist ruler in Brazil, the U.S. and elsewhere.
What is wrong with our world that this can be happening again?
misanthrope
(7,432 posts)The tribalism, paranoia and bellicosity of authoritarian states will only intensify the negative consequences of climate change. Resources deplete, people starve and thirst, disease spreads, massive migration heightens, borders are closed, shots are fired, missiles fly, it just becomes a big ol' funhouse of humanity's tendency toward self-destruction.
Be glad you are alive now and not 100 years in the future.
And Ill be dead in 20 years ( Im 67) and I dont have a problem with that. Not anymore.
regnaD kciN
(26,045 posts)...working covertly to spread their ideology through the world.
roamer65
(36,747 posts)That power is Putins fascist Russia.
magicarpet
(14,187 posts)Bannon and his secret not so secret moneybags benefactors - the Fascist Capitalists of the Royal House of Mercer.
KentuckyWoman
(6,697 posts)There has been enough of it pass by that WWII gets are mostly gone. 4-5 generations. The current youngsters will learn the hard way. It breaks my heart. I am thankful I am within the last 10-15 years of my ride.
Blue_Tires
(55,445 posts)"We hate the entrenched status quo so much that we'll literally vote for some fringe outsider renegade anti-candidate who has a bunch of overly simple pie-in-the-sky "solutions" for all our problems!"
NewJeffCT
(56,829 posts)in his The Plot to Destroy Democracy - worldwide effort on the part of Russia/Putin to promote RW fascist types. Even if they fail in some countries, it can still cause chaos there and in neighboring countries
allgood33
(1,584 posts)OnDoutside
(19,982 posts)Drahthaardogs
(6,843 posts)Italy has been more socialized than most in Europe. I spent many a summer in Piedmont.
OnDoutside
(19,982 posts)here we are.
In the aftermath of WW2, Italian Nationalism never went away and while there was a certain amount of "denazification/defascistation", it was not nearly as much as Germany and in fact the captured fascists were released in 1946. It was more important to rebuild Italy, to keep it out of the Soviet sphere of influence.
Nationalism in Europe has sometimes (not always) been a cover for fascists.
colsohlibgal
(5,275 posts)Like Yogi Berra said its like Deja Vu all over again.
Collective Memory Folks. The vast majority of people around and of an age to understand the spread of Fascism in the 30s are no longer around now. So round and round we go.
Hassin Bin Sober
(26,347 posts)magicarpet
(14,187 posts)....reality is nasty business for everyone to digest and content with, especially those in their youth. God bless the youths, they have the temerity and the stamina to begin to learn and attempt to understand the reality we dumped in their laps when they were not even looking, or had a clue what reality was all about.
What do you think this self medicating bullshit is all about, they fell off the train and landed on the tracks, then the fucking train ran over them and they got squished - these are people who can not contend with and seek avoidance of reality.
God Bless them, they really seem to be the only ones who have theirs heads screwed on straight, the rest of us, come to find, have our heads screwed on backwards.
Dementia and Alzheimer's are truly a gift from the Gods upstairs - could you order me up a 55 gallon drum, no make that two instead. Reality is getting real fucked up down here, as days go by it is only getting worse, not better.
We need a constant state of Belladonna Haze down here just to contend with reality.
Jesus Christ Almighty - this ain't rocket, ballistic, or anti-anti-ballistic missile science, just human nature.
We all have our limits, we all have finite resources of the mechanisms that permit and allow us to cope, and we all have thresholds of tolerance that are wise not to cross. But remember this also, we are all wired just slightly differently, your acquainted with the genetic codes, then you know what point I labor to convey. We are different from one another but that is a reality that should cause us to celebrate not lash out and discriminate.
trDump are you listening ?
Reality can never ever be allowed to become ugly or fucked up, but rather it is intended to be and must remain a delightful and pleasant thing to behold and cherish, to look forwards to, rather than habitually escape from.
We can't allow ourselves the errors of forgetting that - if we do we introduce the destruction of the thing we all call humanity.
If our goal is to achieve that, we should proceed on our charted course. If our detriment is not the intended goal, all hands on deck, somebody do something, we are about to crash into the shoals and reality will soon become more super duper fucked up.
It would be wise to avoid all that ! Get out the charts and plan a safer course of action. Better days will come for man and woman kind if we strive for and construct better realities, good things will happen, and to boot, we just gave ourselves the promise and the gift of a better tomorrows.
Let's get our asses in gear - clean up this mess we allowed be made in our names.
A working and well functioning DEMOCRACY requires vigilance, and one gift we should not permit be given back or abandon, or surrender.
appalachiablue
(41,182 posts)"We often think that fascism is a grainy, black-and-white newsreel affair, with ranting leaders in ridiculous uniforms strutting around a far off time. Todays fascists are rather different, with their open-necked shirts and social media profiles. Yet the philosophy is identical.
There is the same contempt for democracy, nowadays labelled the Establishment. Traditional politicians are vilified as corrupt, self-seeking failures, just as they were in the 1920s and 1930s. Foreigners, at home and abroad, are blamed for complex economic problems. Protectionism is grasped at as a quick fix; free trade is misunderstood and despised. International organisations, such as the UN and EU, are attacked for their interference in domestic affairs."
Boomerproud
(7,970 posts)K&R with thanks.
Roland99
(53,342 posts)SCantiGOP
(13,874 posts)That one of the first defining issues for Mussolini that launched his career was opposition to the League of Nations.
Certainly fits Trumps bio.
magicarpet
(14,187 posts)Promises you the new and improved junta. But all he has really done is bottled up the same old trDump branded recipe of standard snake oil. This time only, because of the new label he slapped on it and has slightly changed the outside packaging, he has decided to doubled the price this one time special offering.
To make a long story short, some idiots will buy anything you put in front of them, just look at the volumes and volumes of junk and garbage they move on the Home Shopping Network.
kimbutgar
(21,224 posts)It will be interesting to see if this plays out.
democratisphere
(17,235 posts)not the poor as they have tried to make all of US believe.
Mr. Sparkle
(2,950 posts)we have seem trump target immigrants similarly .
DetlefK
(16,423 posts)It all started way back (in Merkel's first term?) when the general election brought a result of 35:35:10:10:10. Normally, a government-coalition is between two parties, but now only a coalition between three parties would have had enough votes for 50%+. But a coalition of three parties would have been politically unstable, so the two biggest parties decided to ally: The center-right Christian Democrats and the center-left Social-Democrats.
In that coalition, Merkel absorbed some of the social policies of the left while sticking to the financial policies of the right. Thus neutered, the SPD had no chance to openly criticize Merkel and endanger the coalition.
Up until that point, the go-to party for anti-establishment sentiment was Die Linke, a far-left party originally rooted in the socialist party of East-Germany.
Then came the syrian civil-war that soon grew into an international war on syrian soil. Massive influx of immigrants to Europe.
Merkel's coalition of CDU and SPD was nice to the immigrants.
Die Linke was nice to the immigrants.
And so the people who were anti-immigrant needed a new anti-establishment party. The other far-right parties in Germany openly have contacts with Neonazis. So, a new far-right party was founded.
The AfD.
Neonazis with a nice, bourgeois face.
1. The AfD is a typical anti-establishment party, with political stunts and no interest in actually solving problems.
2. In the latest general election, the AfD massively gained votes while Die Linke massively lost. The AfD has replaced Die Linke as the party you vote for when you are dissatisfied with politics in general.
Blue_Tires
(55,445 posts)OliverQ
(3,363 posts)muriel_volestrangler
(101,390 posts)Thirty people were evicted from the centre, the second-largest of its kind in Italy and the place where Pope Francis washed residents feet as part of his Easter ritual in 2016, in Castelnuovo di Porto on Tuesday. A further 75 were removed on Wednesday, with the remaining 430 to be evicted before the centres closure on 31 January.
...
Salvini claimed the centre, which has hosted about 8,000 people over the last eight years, was a den for drug-dealing and crime and that the same fate would soon befall the 2,000 people living in the sprawling Cara di Mineo reception centre in in Sicily and at similar structures across Italy.
...
Riccardo Travaglini, the mayor of Castelnuovo di Porto, told reporters that no notice was given before the evictions. Men, women and children, many enrolled in local schools, were reportedly separated before the majority were taken by bus to undisclosed destinations. Some were housed by local residents, including Travaglini, who took in a woman from Somalia and her child.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/jan/23/italy-evicts-more-than-500-people-refugee-centre-near-rome