of fascism. if somebody looks from outside and they see italy in 2024 with hundreds of people in the main second city of italy doing the fascist salute, how do you think that looks? if you are commemorating, er. ..um, a person dead, even if he was a fascist, this is not a crime, because. but should it be? ..being a neo fascist is another thing. should it be a crime to use that gesture, to use the fascist salute in the middle of an italian city? no, no, i don t think so. you are fascist if you want to reintroduce the fascism in your country, not if you make the fascism salute. that is the roman salute. because the fascism is only 20 years in the italian history. italian history is really bigger than 20 years of fascism.
at the centre of the fight against fascism. here are the names and faces of the partisans that died defending this city from the fascists in the 1940s. but then it went on to 1980 with italy s worst terror attack, bombings at the train station here in bologna by neo fascists that killed 85 people. and so fascism and anti fascism have always been at the heart of this city s, this country s, political lexicon. we re seeing things in these recent years that are very similar to what happened at the beginning of the regime, and at the beginning of fascism a century ago. attacks on freedom of press, censorship, um, freedom for the lgbtqi community, attacks on the liberty and freedom of women to determine what they can do on their own body. so do you feel that the fight, the anti fascism fight,
the name, architecture and gestures of the regime allowed to live on. what do you think, we have to destroy everything? this is the cancel culture that we don t share. the question is, does the ideology itself survive? i would say there is a silent majority that would say yes, yes, yes on a lot of our ideas. and is italy the laboratory of fascism, once again a political testing room ? what should be seen as a crime, as apology of fascism, is actually again downplayed as, oh, no, it sjust nostalgic, it s a tribute. the worry here is not that italy s democracy per se is under threat, but that a governing party which has not severed its historical roots still winks to that support base. and that speech, notions, even policies once banished are increasingly normalised.
was violent and criminal? yes, absolutely, i deny that. mussolini signed the racial laws, i mean, he deported, this was a regime that deported jews to death camps, that outlawed the opposition, that put political opponents in internment camps. are you honestly saying that you support those measures? the internment camps are things that happened with the war. the americans did it, the germans did it, the italians did it, and so on. i m talking about people who were gassed, who were shot, who were exterminated for their religion. fascism has never been accused of this. i m talking about fascism as a regime. mussolini and all his ministers have never been tried for this. do you believe that this government in power in italy is occupying your political space? no, i believe that they are freeing a lot of the political space that we are going to take. why? one of the main points is immigration. we have always been
against immigration. meloni has always been against immigration, sometimes with our same tone and strength. now, immigrants last year, this year, have increased the number of 50%. where do you think italian people are going to go after this betrayal of, um, original positions? your movement or a movement like yours would not exist and has been banned in greece, for example golden dawn, in germany it would never exist. you would never be able to use the symbols and the slogans that your party uses in a country like germany. why is that the case? because germany has got a bigger problem. you think germany s got the problem rather than italy? no. yes, because freedom is freedom. neither victor nor vanquished. italy memorialises in a way others do not.