Neo-fascist and neo-nazi parties: has Europe already forgotten its past?

I've just come back from Krakow, Poland. I wasn't in this beautiful city in order to see the beauties of Eastern Europe, in fact my main destination was the Nazi extermination camps of Auschwitz and Birkenau, to see the lowest point society has ever gone down to. After coming back home, with pictures of those death camps still vivid and terrifying in my mind, I came up with a thought. In my opinion, a visit to Auschwitz should be compulsory at least for once in a lifetime, for everybody.

In fact, not everybody seem to remember those atrocities which bloodstained Europe nearly seventy years ago. The creation of an European Union based on an ideal of a common future of peace is a good sign of change after the World Wars, and it's clear that such horribly well-organized genocides will never be repeated in our history.

Racism and intolerance haven't already been defeated, though. A such mass anti-semitism is today not to be seen anymore, and Nazi apology is illegal in most European countries. However, Neo-nazi parties and organizations were born all over the world, which base their ideology on the German NSDAP (supremacy of the arian or more commonly the white race, anti-semitism), and have a revisionist point of view about the Shoah, which is in my opinion unacceptable. Most of these movements are prohibited and, luckily, they didn't gain enough popularity for being represented in Parliaments, with some exceptions, like the Austrian FPÖ (Freedom Party of Austria). Some movements were born in the US too, like the American Nazi Party. Several neo-nazi organizations and movement were born in Germany, mainly in the eastern part, in which for the young people who were fed up with Socialism it didn't take much time to pass from one extremism to another one. Neo-nazi movements have been born in all countries, which is a really alarming phenomen, but in my opinion another phenomen is even more relevant and worrying: the growing Neo-Fascismand racism in Italy. This country was under the influence of a fascist dictatorship for twenty years, but nowadays a new interest towards the so-called “Fascist Era” is more and more common, mainly in the new generations. Many parties and movements which took inspiration from Fascism are now active in Italy, while in 1946 the new-found Italian republic had Anti-Fascism as one of its main ideals. Some of these parties gained some popularity and some even have seats in the Parliament.

The main Neo-Fascist parties in Italy are Forza Nuova, Fiamma Tricolore, Fascismo e Libertà, La Destra (which originated from MSI – Alleanza Nazionale, a right-wing party which took distance from Fascism), Fronte Sociale Nazionale, and the movement Casapound, which took its name from the right-wing American poet Ezra Pound. These parties recall Fascist ideals under the form of a “social right”, mainly regarding the economy (statalizations, centralized economy, a better distributed wealth), but also a strong nationalism, racism and even Holocaust denial.

However, the most critical situation regards Lega Nord (Northern League), led by Umberto Bossi. In fact, this party, which has no links with traditional Fascism, has as its main ideals racism and secessionism from Southern Italy, or at least federalism. The alarming fact is that, thanks to the growing intolerance in Italy, this party gained a huge consense (more than 8% of the votes in 2008 and many seats even in the European Parliament) and is now one of the leading parties in Berlusconi's government, mainly promoting measures against immigration and for preserving regional differences, such as dialects.

My question is, how can a party whose members think that Southern Italians are inferior actually be a part of the national government which has its head office in Rome, the “Roma ladrona” (thieving Rome), as they described it?

The main question every citizen should ask is just how is it possible. How is it possible that, after WWII, there are still unwanted, feared and hated ethnies, such as Romanis, Maghrebis, Romanians, and many more? How is it possible that many young Italians have as their idol Benito Mussolini and not Giuseppe Falcone and Paolo Borsellino? How is it possible to see Nazi swastikas on many walls? Is it just a joke, do people really know what this symbol used to mean? Or do those people want a dictatorship again, in which nobody could express his own opinions? Do they want to send people to gas chambers again, just because of the colour of their skin, their religion, their culture? In my opinion many of them are just ignorant, it's just a trend. Let's help them remember what really happened, let's make them face the horrible truth, because knowledge is what this society really needs. Let's make another Holocaust or any similar phenomen which today's racism can lead to never happen again in the future, by preserving the memory of the past.

Adriano Barile and Federico Dal Zilio