Mussolini

What Will Its First Far-Right Leader Since WW-II Mean For Italy?

While the Brothers of Italy’s conservation of the post-fascist flame may be more smoke than fire for some groups, for others it will be incendiary.

“Una vittoria storica” – a historic victory. That’s how the website of one of Italy’s major newspapers, the Corriere della Sera, reacted to the exit polls released after voting closed in Italy’s general election on Sunday night.

With a predicted vote share of between 40-45%, the right-wing coalition led by Giorgia Meloni looks on course to secure at least 230 of the 400 seats in the Lower House, giving it a clear majority.

Meloni’s party, Brothers of Italy, was the big winner on the right, with various agencies estimating it at around 25% of the vote. This was more than the combined total of her two main allies, as Matteo Salvini’s League was tipped to receive approximately 8-9%, with former prime minister Silvio Berlusconi’s Forza Italia just below that.

In just four years, Brothers of Italy has gone from minor to major player on the right. In 2018, they took 4.4% compared to the League’s 17.4% and Forza Italia’s 14%. And, if we look further back, Italy’s right-wing coalition has moved from having been dominated for over 20 years by a centre-right populist party (Forza Italia), to being dominated now by a far-right populist one (Brothers of Italy).

Brothers of Italy’s victory represents several firsts. Italy will have its first woman prime minister. And both Italy and Western Europe will have their first far-right majority government since the fall of Mussolini and the end of the Second World War.

Who is Giorgia Meloni?

Meloni’s trajectory owes much to that history. Beginning as an activist of the post-fascist Italian Social Movement in the Roman working-class district of Garbatella in the early 1990s, Meloni rose to prominence in a political milieu that didn’t deny its heritage.

She stated in an interview with French TV in 1996 that Mussolini was a “good politician” and “all that he did, he did for Italy”.

While Meloni now says Italy has consigned fascism to history, vestiges of her party’s political roots remain. For example, the flame in the party’s symbol is taken from the post-fascist Italian Social Movement, and there have been recent instances of its politicians and supporters performing fascist salutes.

Meloni and her party’s success can be traced back to Berlusconi’s entry into politics in 1994. His centre-right Forza Italia movement legitimised two smaller radical right parties (the northern regionalist League and the National Alliance) by bringing them into a coalition that easily won that year’s general election.

The coalition that will soon take power almost 30 years later contains the same three ingredients, but their internal balances have now drastically changed.

While some commentators focus on the continuity the new government will represent, there’s a historic change here. The pendulum on the right has shifted from Berlusconi’s centre-right populist governments with a far-right edge in the 1990s and 2000s, to Meloni’s far-right populist government with a centre-right edge in 2022.

Giorgia Meloni, leader of the far-right Brothers of Italy party, takes a selfie during a rally in Duomo square ahead of the September 25 snap election, in Milan, Italy, September 11, 2022. Photo: Reuters/Flavio Lo Scalzo

What do these results mean for Italian politics?

Within the overall success of the right, there are winners and losers. Meloni is obviously the former, and Salvini is the latter.

Salvini is the politician who, having revitalised his party between 2013 and 2019, has now overseen a huge fall in its support from over 35% in the polls in July 2019 to under 10% today. Only the lack of an obvious successor may save Salvini from losing his party’s leadership.

For the main party on the Left, the Democratic Party, it’s yet another bad day. Having dropped to under 20% in the 2018 general election, they look unlikely to do much better than that this time. Their failure to find a campaign narrative beyond “stop the far right” and to create a broader coalition underlined the strategic ineptitude that has long undermined the Italian left.

Another “first” of this election is the turnout, which has slipped below two-thirds for the first time in Italian post-war history, declining from 73% in 2018 to 64% in 2022. This speaks to the image of a country in which large swathes of the population, especially in the South, are disillusioned with decades of politicians who have promised the earth and delivered little.

In economic and foreign policy terms, Italy may not change much in the short term. Meloni will be keen to show Italian and international elites that she’s a responsible leader. Powerful domestic interest groups, such as the employers’ federation “Confindustria”, must be kept onside. As must the European Union which supports Italy through its post-COVID recovery plan.

But much could change for the far-right’s “enemies of the people”: ethnic, religious and sexual minorities; immigrants; and those judges, intellectuals, and journalists who dare to criticise the new regime.

Things will also change for those far-right Italians who, as Meloni recently put it, have had to “keep their head down for so many years and not say what they believed”. So, while the Brothers of Italy’s conservation of the post-fascist flame may be more smoke than fire for some groups, for others it will be incendiary.

Sofia Ammassari, PhD researcher, Griffith University and Duncan McDonnell, Professor of Politics, Griffith University.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Watch | Modi Has ‘Largest Personality Cult in Human History’, India Now a 30:70 Democracy

Ramachandra Guha gives Karan Thapar three key reasons why he believes India’s democracy has slipped badly in the last 15 years.

In an interview to talk about how India has fared in the 75 years since independence in August 1947, Ramachandra Guha, the foremost historian of modern India, says that today the country is a 30:70 democracy. He said, 15 years ago, when India celebrated its 60th anniversary of independence, India was a 50:50 democracy and a flawed democracy. Today he says it’s slipped significantly further.

Explaining why he believes India’s democracy has slipped so badly in the last 15 years, Guha identified three key reasons. First, the decline of institutions such as the press, parliament, the judiciary and the civil services. Second, the majoritarianism practised by the ruling party and its conscious attempts to convert India’s Muslims into second-class citizens. Third, a personality cult around Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

Speaking at a later point in the interview, Guha called the personality cult around Modi “the largest in human history”. He said ministers and Supreme Court judges compete to lavish sycophantic praise on him.

In particular, Guha was sharply critical of the fact that a cricket stadium in Ahmedabad has been named after Modi during his lifetime. “Nehru would never have countenanced that and even Indira Gandhi didn’t do this,” he said.

Guha said that with this step, Modi is now in the same league as Hitler, Mussolini, Gaddafi, Kim il Sung and Saddam Hussein. The historian said that just as the personality cult surrounding Mao has been bad for China, “the cult of Modi will be bad for India”.

In the interview, Guha said that the present treatment of India’s Muslim citizens is “an utter and total betrayal of what we said to Muslims in 1947”. He called it “terrifying”. Guha said that although discrimination against Muslims predates Narendra Modi, it has become “explicit under this regime” and “legitimate”.

This 35-minute interview with Karan Thapar for The Wire with Ramachandra Guha is the latest in a series of select interviews to mark the 75th anniversary of Independence and explore what this anniversary means. As part of this series, Shashi Tharoor, Hamid Ansari, Romila Thapar and Swapan Dasgupta have already been interviewed. On August 20, Tamil Nadu finance minister P. Thiaga Rajan will be interviewed.

The Two Guernicas: Innocence Will Overcome Destruction

Alain Resnais’s film ‘Guernica’ (1950) is a moving commemoration of both Picasso’s masterwork and the Spanish Civil War (1936-39).

The bust of a man fades in slowly onto the darkened screen. Clasped to his chest and his rugged hands is a bleating lamb with a gaunt neck. The camera zooms in ever so slowly on the man’s rough-hewn face, which sets off his large, eloquent eyes with their intense gaze. As we look at that face and into the eyes, the voice-over’s rousing words cry out defiantly:

Under the dead oak tree in Guernica
to the ruins of Guernica
under Guernica’s pure skies,
a man came back, holding a bleating lamb,
and a dove in his heart.

For all men he’s singing
the pure song of rebellion,
grateful for love, rejecting oppression.

The wasps of pain rush
into the broken horizon.
The bees of his songs made
their nests in the heart of humanity.

Guernica:
Innocence will overcome destruction.
Guernica

That final intonation of the word ‘Guernica’ is a fervent cry of hope, of ardent affirmation. Of a sudden, we are lifted out of a terrifying welter of death and devastation and on to sanity and the rhythm of the renewal of life. At the coda of Alain Resnais’s magical film, Guernica becomes an incantation.

Guernica (1937) by Pablo Picasso.

The man with the bleating ram in his hands is Pablo Picasso’s 1943 large-format sculpture, cast in patinated plaster, titled ‘L’homme au mauton’ which recreates, in an allegorical representation of peace and freedom, the Good Shepherd of early Christianity. Today, it is housed in Madrid’s magnificent Museo Reina Sofia, which also hosts some of the other paintings and sculptures that populate the world of Resnais’s 1950 film – Guernica.

Reina Sofia is now home to the painting that lends its name to the film, too, dedicating an entire gallery to the canvas’s immensity (25 foot-by-12 foot). At the time the film was made, however, the painting sat at New York’s Museum of Modern Art from where, Picasso was categorical, Guernica could not move to Spain as long as democracy had not returned to his homeland and dictator Francisco Franco’s ghost exorcised. ‘Only over my dead body’ was his reply to a Spanish government request to allow the painting to travel to Spain.

Other Picasso creations that figure on the film’s canvas are now spread over several museums across Europe, including in Malaga, Madrid, Paris and, of course, Barcelona. The treasure house at Barcelona’s Museo Picasso happens to have provided the film with at least two ineradicable images of the human condition: A Frugal Meal (1902) and Motherhood (1903).

One of Picasso’s preparatory drawings for his painting that Resnais’s film uses.

What is truly extraordinary about Resnais’s Guernica is not only that it is about Picasso’s magnum opus, or that it sears into the viewer’s memory even without incorporating any graphic image of the carnage that Picasso memorialised in that work. What it really achieves is this: it situates the Fascist massacre of a quiet little corner of Republican Spain on a balmy April afternoon within the wider context of death’s unrelenting animus towards life. In Resnais’s schema, human life is sustained by innocence, simplicity and togetherness, while Fascism, feeding as it does off death and destruction, is the very antithesis of life, as Picasso’s 1937 masterwork brings out with its terrifying directness.

A face from Picasso’s oeuvre Resnais deploys.

Remarkably, Guernica is all of 13 minutes long. The film’s first couple of minutes comprises a brief, dry voice-over reporting the wanton slaughter of nearly 2,000 non-combatant civilians in the northern Basque town of Guernica by Hitler’s airmen on April 26, 1937 about a year into the Spanish Civil War.

Next, Resnais proceeds to depict, via some quick, deft jump-cuts, the lives, loves, pleasures and pain of ordinary lives as encapsulated in a number of paintings, drawings and sculpted figures created by Picasso between 1902 and 1949. The beauty and the pathos of these lives, their simplicity and their innocence, their ordinariness as well as their nobility, are brought home by Maria Casares’s soulful rendition, in the background, of the Paul Eluard poem ‘Victory of Guernica’ written soon after that fateful April day of 1937 – the suggestion being that all this was what the Nazi bomber squadron had sought to wipe off the face of the earth in their murderous aerial campaign.

About 6 minutes of screentime later, the narrative’s tone changes and the momentum picks up dramatically. The screen goes dark momentarily, as though night has suddenly descended upon the earth, and then screaming sirens begin to tear the darkness apart. Incendiaries, one can sense, have started raining down from the sky. The obliteration of an entire landscape is suggested by a number of Picasso sketches, made preparatory to his Guernica canvas (and all on display at the Reina Sofia today), that erupt on the screen one after another at a frenetic pace and fade out with equal rapidity. It is as though the viewer’s senses are being strafed by a relentless hail of bullets. The background score takes on a grim, grating tone, at times sounding unsettlingly dissonant, even off-key, at other moments menacing in its high-pitched intensity.

That intensity tapers off slowly, however, before the image of the Good Shepherd forms itself bit by bit on the screen. First, we see the man’s feet, planted firmly on the pebbly earth; then his legs, spindly and long; then the torso, the lamb pressed to it earnestly; then on to his face, unremarkable but for his high forehead with the innumerable furrows running across it, and his enormous eyes with their piercing gaze. The music sheds its strident note, now sounding hopeful and radiant as the voice-over’s impassioned words seem to tumble out verily from the viewer’s throat: “Innocence will overcome destruction. Guernica.”

Picasso’s preparatory drawing becomes Resnais’s cry of anguish.

We must bear in mind that at the time the 28-year-old Resnais was conceptualising his ground-breaking film, Franco was securely ensconced in Spain still, and even the routing of Nazism/Fascism in Western Europe and the death of both Hitler and Mussolini had scarcely had any impact on the politics and political economy of Spain. The Spanish dictator’s reign was to last a quarter-century more and democracy – the rallying cry of the Spanish Republicans in the Civil War – was not to be restored to Spain for another 30 years.

More than anything else, therefore, Resnais’s invocation of hope was an act of faith in the possibility –indeed, the inevitability, as the young French artist-activist saw it then – of freedom and peace for Spain as well as for the wide world. About such hope, such faith, we are likely to feel somewhat ambivalent today as we look around us, and we cannot be blamed if we do. It is idle to speculate how Alain Resnais and Pablo Picasso, if they were alive today, would have looked at their own belief in peace and progress. But we cannot but bow our head before the courage of the convictions of these two great artists of the 20th century.

Resnais’s invocation of hope in the midst of a welter of devastation.

Like many other people that I know, I had also seen countless prints in varying sizes of Picasso’s magnum opus before I got a chance to visit room number 205 of the Reina Sofia where the Guernica stands in solitary magnificence today. I always thought I knew the painting inside out. And yet nothing had prepared me for the experience of standing in front of the canvas myself. I was simply overwhelmed. The memory of that clammy winter evening from many years ago is still fresh in my mind. And I reckon that one’s memory of Resnais’s Guernica will also be as enduring. As we look back to that day from 86 years ago when the Civil War in Spain got off to a tumultuous start, we can do little better than pay homage to these two resplendent works of art commemorating one of history’s most stirring episodes of hope and despair.

Anjan Basu writes about culture and the politics of culture. He can be reached at basuanjan52@gmail.com

Mussolini’s Granddaughter Wins Seat for Far-Right Party in Rome Civic Poll

Rachele Mussolini said she wanted nothing to do with the “burden” of her surname.

Rachele Mussolini, the 47-year-old granddaughter of Italy’s fascist dictator Benito Mussolini, has garnered enough votes in Rome’s municipal election for a second term as a city councilor.

With almost all of the votes counted on Wednesday, she received over 8,200 votes in the October 3-4 municipal election — more than any other candidate.

Standing for the far-right Brothers of Italy party, Mussolini won far more votes than the 657 she had received in the previous ballot in 2016.

Mussolini told La Repubblica newspaper that she wanted nothing to do with the “burden” of her family name, adding that she had “many left-wing friends.”

“In the past, I got interviewed only because of my family name. During my last term, they started asking about the initiatives I promoted on the city council. I’ve worked hard,” she told Wednesday’s edition of the paper.

“I learned to live with my surname since I was a child,” she said. “At school, they used to point at me, but then Rachele emerged and the person (that I am) prevailed over the surname, however burdensome that name is.”

She refused to be drawn too far into answering a question about her views on fascism, saying only that she was against its glorification and adding: “To deal with this subject, we’d need to talk until tomorrow morning.”

She is the daughter of Romano Mussolini, who was a jazz pianist and brother-in-law to actor Sophia Loren.

What happened in the elections?

Italy’s four largest cities, Rome, Milan, Naples and Turin, as well as more than 1,000 smaller centres, held mayoral elections on Sunday and Monday.

Cities where no candidates win 50% or more of the votes will h
ave a run-off in two weeks.

Center-left candidates are poised to win without a run-off in Milan, Naples and Bologna.

A run-off for Rome’s mayor is due to take place on October 17-18. Right-wing candidate Enrico Michetti, a lawyer and radio host received 30% of the votes, versus 27% for the center-left’s Roberto Gualtieri.

This article first appeared on DW.

Why Do We Fuss Over Humble Beginnings?

Is it Ghulam Nabi Azad’s view that Modi ji’s memory of his humble origins has produced a government that has, in the last seven years, uplifted the humble Indian?

Ghulam Nabi Azad recently praised Prime Minister Narendra Modi for not having forgotten his humble beginnings.

As a student of culture, I have some questions to ask of Azad sahib here. Although, before I ask my questions, his averment about Narendra Modi at once calls to my mind the image of a wall that was quickly erected to conceal slum dwellers in Ahmedabad from the then visiting US President Donald Trump.

For precisely this reason, I am unable to square Modi’s alleged candour about his humble beginnings with that rather insulting action of hiding away humble people from a visiting VIP’s gaze. I cannot understand why we should have been embarrassed to let them be as they in reality are.

So why do we think it is laudable for a person in high office not to “hide” his humble beginnings?

There is more than one possible answer to this. It can be that the memory of humble origins helps keep an element of empathy alive in the person who now commands the strings of high power, thus inspiring him to frame policies directed primarily at uplifting millions who continue to be suffering their humbleness.

But, it can also be that the great man’s recall of his own humbleness functions as a grim reminder that he must, at all costs, prevent his slide into humbleness again.

Of the second possibility first: at least three figures of unchallenged authority in modern history that I can recall presto had beginnings even more humble than Modi might have had, namely, Napoleon, Mussolini, and Stalin (Hitler may have been a shade better placed) and yet, consider where their policies got us. Beginning as a source of great radical hope for the little men of Europe, Napoleon himself became emperor; Mussolini and Hitler used the humble as fodder for wars that destroyed the humble most of all; and Stalin, challenging aristocratic rule, became a law unto himself, destroying any trace of democracy.

Also read: Reading Between the Lines of Narendra Modi’s Tearful Farewell to Ghulam Nabi Azad

Clearly, then, the humble origins of any ruler need not imply that, once in the seat of power, his or her heart would bleed for the humble.

Indeed, the popular cultural imaging of any humble person hemmed in by historical disadvantages, within modern capitalist societies, tends to showcase stray individuals who struggled against the odds of the system to make it big. Such examples are often foregrounded with great instruction by corporate media channels to inform us that robust individualism is the true answer to penury, and how the humble must learn not to depend on the bounties of the state-system. In any rightwing middle-class household, such images form the bedrock of advancement in general, propagating the virtues of private initiative over progressive social governance.

On the first possibility, I must confess, no example comes to mind of anyone who rose to the political heights that Modi has, from humble beginnings and then set about managing the assets of the realm primarily to raise other humble people to human status.

Modi’s career here, of course, will be better evaluated by historians, but, here is what I would like Azad sahib to tell us: is it his view that Modi ji’s memory of his humble origins has produced a governance system in the last seven years that has lifted the humble Indian to the detriment of the fat cats?

And if he thinks it has, why should then he also say that whereas he lauds Modi ji for not hiding his origins, he remains opposed to the party that Modi ji belongs to?

Senior Congress leader Ghulam Nabi Azad speaks in the Rajya Sabha during the Budget Session of Parliament, in New Delhi, Tuesday, February 4, 2020. Photo: PTI

The record would show that he does not think Modi ji has done great things for the humble. Or else why would we hear that constant refrain of how the Modi dispensation has worked blatantly to the welfare of the Adanis, Ambanis and of the corporate class overall? And if that is the truth, in what way, we may ask, has Modi ji’s acknowledgement of his own early modesty of life helped to better the lives of many millions who remain sunk in humbleness of destitute proportions?

There are two things one can do with a ladder: climb and help others to climb. Or, climb alone, a step at a time, and kick the ladder once at the top so that others may not be able to climb. Time will tell which of these paradigms fits the Modi case.

But, there is now a contrary paradigm too: of people who had anything but humble beginnings, but, once in the seat of power, sought to orient their thinking towards those left behind by nature and government policy.

Also read: Some Observations on Prime Minister Modi’s Tears in the Rajya Sabha

Gandhi and Nehru come to mind immediately, as well a plethora of others who came from endowed backgrounds but immersed themselves in progressive causes, both during the freedom struggle and in independent India. They left their silver spoons behind and descended into the muck in order to clear as much of it as circumstances allowed.

Who is to say then that those who left their silver spoons behind and descended – rather than rose – to cater to the humble millions may not have a better case for praise in history than those who rose, and, rather deterred by their memories of their own origins, set about to cater to their own newly-acquired greatness with zeal and self-love, as well as to support structures of wealth and social clout that enable that greatness to be bolstered and made unchallengeable?

The most memorable case study of this conjecture of humbleness is that of Dickens’s enactment of Uriah Heep in the beloved novel, David Copperfield. Recall that Uriah Heep never fails to make mention of his humbleness even as he seeks to climb the next ladder to power and prominence.

Humble origins, therefore, Azad sahib might consider, do not necessarily, in and of themselves, ensure any wider empathy with the humble. Indeed, more often than not, it works rather the other way to keep humbleness at an arm’s length, as does that other personage in another Dickens novel, Little Dorrit. There, one Mr Podsnap, having grown into great modern wealth from stock-jobbing, extends a great right arm to block anyone who brings news of misery from the world outside.

God knows if the farmers may now have much the same feeling – of being blocked out with a great right arm.

Finally, more than Azad sahib or this writer, those humble Indians who are now unable to refill their cooking gas cylinders may have the more dependable answer to the conundrum.

Badri Raina taught at Delhi University.

A 1930s Novel Reminds Us That Dictatorship Often Comes Dressed as Democracy

“It Can’t Happen Here’ by Sinclair Lewis was about the US, but it resonates today around the world.

In 1936, Senator Berzelius ‘Buzz’ Windrip was elected the president of the US by defeating Franklin Delano Roosevelt. In the run-up to the elections, Windrip came across as a folksy politician, with a cheery disposition and offering a very people-friendly face: he talked about patriotism and traditional family values, economic and social reforms and said he would give each citizen $5,000 a year.

Windrip’s admirers included businessmen, common folk and sections of the media. One of his big endorsers was Bishop Prang, whose weekly talks on radio, full of not fire and brimstone against all kinds of imagined enemies, including Jews, were followed by millions of listeners. Prang’s followers transferred their vote to Windrip, who defeated Roosevelt in the Democratic convention and then won against his Republican rival, Senator Walt Trowbridge in the November election.

Soon after taking over, Windrip outlawed dissent, threw politicians into concentration camps and created an armed paramilitary force called the Minute Men, whose job was to act as his enforcers against citizens. Congress was made ineffective and minority rights were taken away. It was also a corporate-friendly administration, which allowed businessmen to run the country.

For those wondering why they hadn’t read about this before—these events did not actually happen. It is the plot of the 1935 novel, It Can’t Happen Here, by Sinclair Lewis, which shows how democracies can turn into dictatorships swiftly.

Also Read: Demagogues Today Have Much in Common With Nazi Ideology: Filmmaker Marshall Curry

As the US votes, in possibly the most polarised elections in recent memory, it is a good time to read the book. Even otherwise, the book helps us make sense of what is happening around the world, as democratically elected nations turn proto-authoritarian.

Lewis was a well-known writer of his time and the first American winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature. He wrote satirical novels, “portraying what he regarded as the mediocrity, materializing, corruption and hypocrisy of middle-class life in the United States,” wrote Michael Meyer in his introduction to a 2005 edition of the book. Lewis saw emerging signs of fascism in Europe and the support Hitler and Mussolini were getting in the US. His wife, Dorothy Thomson, was the first journalist to be expelled from Nazi Germany and had written and broadcast extensively about life under Hitler.

Sinclair Lewis
It Can’t Happen Here
Doubleday, Doran and Company (1935)

Fascism was also being discussed in the American media. In 1934, The Modern Monthly invited well-known writers like Theodore Dreiser and Charles A. Beard to discuss the question, “Will Fascism Come to America.” In 1935, The Nation published pieces on “forerunners of American Fascism”, Meyer writes.

The novel opens with the Ladies Night Dinner at the Fort Beulah Rotary Club, where a woman speaker thunders, “What this country needs is Discipline…We don’t want all this highbrow intellectuality, all this book-learning.” She is followed by an army general who talks about “college professors, newspapermen and notorious authors secretly promulgating seditious attacks on the Constitution.”

At a dinner following the meeting, the local businessmen of the sleepy town of Fort Beulah, Vermont, discuss politics and rail against unions and communists and Jews. The sole skeptic there is Doremus Jessup, a newspaper editor and somewhat of a liberal, who has in the past supported the unions in their battle against the host of the evening. Jessup is still liked by them, even if they find him a bit odd, perhaps even a leftist and an intellectual, not the least because he wears a beard.

He pours cold water on their enthusiasm for Windrip, pointing out the dangers of the politician coming to power. “People will think they’re electing him to create more economic security. Then watch the Terror!” When one of the guests protests that “it can’t happen here,” Jessup cuts loose: “The hell it can’t! Why there’s no country in the world that can get more hysterical – yes, and more obsequious! – than America.”

“Why are you so afraid of the word ‘Fascism’, Doremus? Just a word-just a word! And might not be so bad, with all the lazy bums we got panhandling relief nowadays, and living on my income tax,” responds another businessman, expressing a wish for “real Strong Men like Hitler or Mussolini.”

They get their wishes fulfilled soon enough and Windrip, as Jessup has predicted, turns authoritarian as soon as he is elected. A few people resist – the defeated candidate Senator Trowbridge starts a movement called the New Underground and Jessup is recruited to it. Jessup had never thought of himself as an activist, but just a woolly liberal standing up for the small man. But he feels he has to participate and eventually pays a heavy price. Readers will find many echoes in the novel of the world we live in today.

Graffiti of the US flag. Photo: Flickr/Jason CC BY 2.0

Fascism in today’s context

Fascism in a word much thrown about today, often in a casual manner. But more and more debates are being held on those lines, as democracies are seeing the rise of strong men who are subverting the law, controlling the media and institutions and clamping down on dissent. A recent essay in the New Statesman discusses the “legacy of violent nationalism” that is reflected in the US in the age of Donald Trump.

This is not true only of the US – the same discussions are going in many European nations. The spectre of the 1930s variety fascism in Europe has not entirely gone away—every European country now has a small, ultra-right-wing party that shows fascist tendencies, centring around issues like immigration. And all of them are fully participating in the democratic process, knowing that it will give them legitimacy and help them control parliament; indeed, Hitler and Mussolini were elected too.

Trump or Erdogan or Duterte and, as we can see, Narendra Modi – all of them elected leaders – also have a large support base, not just among the masses but also, most importantly, influential businessmen and opinion-makers. They couch their support in different ways, but essentially are facilitators of Modi and what he stands for. It is important to remember that many so-called dissenters today had rooted for Modi in 2014. A handful may have seen the light, but the prime minister personally and his party and all that it stands for, still remain popular with vast numbers of Indians, many of them who believe that “Indians need a dose of discipline.”

In India, the word ‘fascism’ has no immediate historical resonance, but many commentators have pointed out similarities between the RSS and European fascists. Certainly, the BJP government has shown authoritarian tendencies and one of the party’s leading lights, Yogi Adityanath, uncaring of democratic niceties or even the law, has come down heavily on dissidence and the minorities.

Also Read: BJP’s Illiberalism Resembles a Ruling Party in an Autocracy: Study

Can India become a fascist state? That is not an easy question to answer. But seeing how our democratic institutions are being manipulated and mangled, how intolerance is growing and how minorities are being crushed, it is clear that some aspects of a fascist state are already visible. And these repressive measures are being cheered by the elite, by the upper middle-classes and by the sold-out media. By all accounts, it is going to get worse before it gets better. Yes, on balance therefore, it can happen here, but with Indian characteristics.

Drones, Mobs and Encounter Specialists: Players in the Killing Game

The Khashoggi case should open our eyes to the expanding killing options of the modern state.

Despite repeated denials, it is clear by now that Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, who was a bitter critic of crown prince Mohammad Bin Salman’s policies, was killed for his intransigent conduct.

Precision instruments for bone-chopping, an expert intelligence team and post-mortem specialists were sent to the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, where Khashoggi was to come for an appointment. He was made to ‘disappear’: his remains, including his bones, doubtless pulverised and the crime scene sterilised well enough for the authorities to now defiantly open the consulate premises for Turkish inspection.

The incident – bone-chilling in the literal sense of the term – serves one good purpose: it highlights the stage we have reached in the popular game of state killing.

Execution style

In our time, while some countries have dispensed with the joy of killing, there are still 90 nations that retain it on their statute books, though 36 seem to have fun fatigue and are not doing it any more.

China takes the crown, for having killed 12,000 in 2002, 6,500 in 2007 and 2,400 in 2013, according to the Dui Hua Foundation. It not only kills its people in droves, it keeps the figures a state secret, though its own figures show that two-thirds of its organ transplants are from people executed. Iran and Saudi Arabia both love making public spectacles of their executions; they also kill minors.

Also Read: Yakub Memon, Maya Kodnani and the ‘Chain of Action and Reaction’

Advanced countries that are ‘very high’ on the UN’s Human Development Index, like the US, Japan and Singapore, continue to hang, shoot, electrocute or poison people. The US has repeatedly found its system tainted by racism, spurious evidence and official wrongdoing – they have placed at least 140 innocent people on death row. Still the killing continues and has, in some states, expanded the grounds for execution.

These are only the cases of official killing, where there is at least the appearance of a stated procedure, including a court and occasionally an appeal process. Legendary US lawyer F. Lee Bailey concluded that a trial has more to do with a gladiatorial contest than any notion of justice: whoever can pay for the better gladiator wins. Imagine the average citizen’s chance of saving his neck if he is charged with a capital crime.

A new report looks at how former SC judges view the death penalty and the criminal justice system. Credit: Pixabay

Several countries still retain the death penalty. Credit: Pixabay

Encounter specialists

But that average citizen is worse than naïve if he or she believes that the threat to their life comes only from a noose or an electrocution gurney. This is where the Khashoggi case opens our eyes to the expanding killing options of the modern state. It does not have to prosecute you, prove your guilt and then hang you. It has more effective options.

The simplest is to twist existing laws and bring in covert, nasty provisions that allow the state to get rid of adversaries without wasting words, money or time. All that you need is what is called in espionage novels the ‘cover story’, the threadbare argument of a national need or a terrorist threat, to help the gullible accept the change of law.

Note with what flimsy evidence the Emergency was installed in India; or how the ghastly Patriot Act glided through the US Congress. Once that happens, the courts are a mockery. You can do with the detained what you like, as the Abu Ghraib guards did with their wards and the US secret cells in Eastern Europe did with their suspects. Nobody knows how many died during and after torture.

Also Read: A Chronicle of the Crime Fiction That is Adityanath’s Encounter Raj

Another option is to organise small gangs or paramilitary groups with overt or surreptitious official support to do the dirty work. Those who think the RSS in India is a comical fringe will do well to recall the havoc of the Black Brigades of Mussolini, who carried firearms, had police powers and became notorious for their brutality.

Better known are the Storm Troopers of Hitler, whose resolve to smash ‘Judeo-Bolshevism,’ led to mayhem against the Nazis’ political opponents. In a pogrom that has come to be known as Crystal Night, they sledgehammered 300 synagogues, ruined 700 Jewish businesses and killed hundreds of Jews over two days. The benefit of this option is that the depredations of such gangs can always be explained as excessive zeal and the authorities can wash their hands of culpability.

A variation of this is to create an elite section of police, name them Terrorism Task Force or Emergency Anti-Drug Personnel and vest them, like 007, with the power to kill.

This is what Rodrigo Duterte has done in the Philippines, in the name of fighting narcotics, with handsome emoluments for each kill. Twenty thousand have been killed – the government has admitted to 4,000 – including a huge number of drug users, petty criminals, small traders and bystanders and witnesses. Two senior police officers have said they were paid additionally for killing Duterte’s critics, as well as their family members.

Predator drones and prey

Now, technology has come to the aid of authorities eager to teach a lesson to their supposed enemies. Most people think of drones as something only the US uses against terrorists or fighters in places like Yemen and Afghanistan. The fact is that seventy countries are developing weaponised drones, and manufacturers like General Atomics and Northrop Grumman are churning them out in record numbers for eager buyers.

The biggest use will not be for external conflict, but internal surveillance to identify protesters. They will then be punished with pinpointed spraying, rubber bullets or even highly accurate missiles. Saudi Arabia, not known for accommodating dissent or respecting human rights, is the world’s largest buyer of drones. Raising the slogan of combating terrorism – along with transparent phrase, ‘urban terrorists’ – is enough to satisfy the public that drastic government action was necessary.

Also Read: We Can Use Strike Drones in J&K If People Will Accept Collateral Damage: Army Chief

If all else fails, there is of course the ultimate recourse of hired assassins, aided by governmental knowhow. Iran’s agents allegedly stabbed Shahpour Bakhtiar, a former premier who had fallen out of favor, right on his doorstep in Paris. Vladimir Putin’s agents have dispatched several uncompromising Russians overseas using radioactive poison. Kim Jong Un’s agents trained two young women to amorously rub a chemically treated handkerchief on his cousin’s face in an airport and asphyxiate him.

You may oppose a government, as did Jamal Khashoggi, living in presumed safety in another land, but you cannot escape the long reach of its murderous wrath.

While these may seem like overly dismal scenarios, which could happen only in other countries at other times, when journalists get killed on their doorsteps, one might legitimately wonder whether the chickens are coming home to roost.

Manish Nandy is a former diplomat, executive and World Bank official.

The Left and Opposition Unity: How Fascism Can Be Defeated in 2019

While classical fascism was characterised by the fusion of corporate and state power, contemporary fascism is the fusion of corporate and communal power rising from the crisis of neo-liberalism.

The real obstacle to understanding, or even recognising, contemporary fascism is alas, the memory of the 1930s. The fact that we have fascists in power in India, at the helm of a liberal bourgeois state, is indubitable: their organisation, the RSS, to which they belong and swear by, has made no secret of its admiration of classical fascism. But we do not have a classical fascist state and are not moving towards it at break-neck speed, as the Nazis in power had effected. This is what makes many people question whether we are at all confronting fascism. Indeed, through the prism of the 1930s, it would appear that we are not.

But contemporary fascism must necessarily be different from the 1930s because of a basic difference in context. The fascism of the 1930s emerged in a world where different nation-based finance capitals were engaged in intense rivalry; today we have globalised or international finance capital under whose hegemony such rivalries do not exist.

Also Read: Seventy Years On, India Cannot Allow the Divisive Forces to Triumph Again

This has two implications: first, the ability of any particular nation-state, even a fascist state, to overcome the economic crisis that spawns fascism in the first place, is limited, unlike in the 1930s when German and Japanese fascist-states had overcome the depression in their countries through borrowing-financed military expenditure. This is because, with relatively free cross-border financial flows today, borrowing-financed state expenditure, which globalised finance dislikes, would cause a capital flight from the country, nipping any such recovery in the bud. (The US is one possible exception to this because the dollar continues to be considered “as good as gold” by the world’s wealth-holders).

Secondly, inter-power rivalry leading to a war unleashed by fascism, which burns itself out in the process, is also not a realistic scenario: globalised finance does not like any break-up of the world into warring powers.

Contemporary fascism threatens to be a lingering phenomenon

Contemporary fascism therefore can neither proceed headlong into erecting a fascist state (since its social base would still be limited), nor exhaust itself through war. It threatens to be a lingering phenomenon, a state of “permanent fascism”, through which the fascists are periodically in and out of power. There would be a progressive ‘fascification’ of society, with even its opponents pusillanimously imitating it (as with the “soft Hindutva” of the Congress), unless it is overcome through a transcendence of the very conjuncture that produces it. What is required therefore, is both a recognition of its reality as fascism and an appropriately innovative way of combating it.

There would be a progressive ‘fascification’ of society, with even its opponents pusillanimously imitating it.

The former should not be difficult once we stop insisting upon an exact congruence with the fascism of the 1930s, complete with its concentration camps. Several other characteristics of fascism are amply evident in India today. The glorification of a muscular hyper-nationalism that sets the “nation” above the people (which is the diametrical opposite of the inclusive, people-centric, anti-imperialist nationalism that informed our freedom struggle); the identification of this so-called “nation” with the government and the “Leader”, so that all dissent is treated as anti-national, seditious, and synonymous with terrorism; the unleashing of a combination of lynch-mobs and state repression (through UAPA arrests and CBI cases), not to mention “troll” armies, to terrorise and silence opponents; the close union between the state and the corporate-financial oligarchy (Benito Mussolini, one must remember, had defined fascism as a “fusion of corporate and state power”); the targeting of a hapless minority as the “enemy within”; the obliteration of any distinction between mythology and history, between science and prejudice, and between “fact” and fiction; and the general disparaging of all intellectual activity are all visible.

The counter-revolution that fascism invariably unleashes has particularly obnoxious implications in India’s case, since, while scuttling democracy and freedoms, it would re-furbish traditional caste-hierarchy and caste-oppression, which had been somewhat undermined by the combined onslaught of the anti-colonial struggle and the social emancipation movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It would push us back by centuries.

Benito Mussolini’s bust and crypt in San Cassiano cemetery are a sensitive topic in Predappio, Italy. Credit: Wikimedia Commons/Saiko

Benito Mussolini, one must remember, had defined fascism as a “fusion of corporate and state power”. Mussolini’s bust and crypt in San Cassiano cemetery. Credit: Wikimedia Commons/Saiko

The conjuncture that produces fascism

Opposition unity, in any form that prevents a split in votes, is absolutely essential for this. But while such unity would unseat the fascists from the position of power they currently occupy, it would not change the conjuncture that produces fascism. This conjuncture is one of neo-liberalism at a dead-end.

The glorification of a nationalism that places the “nation” above the people, demands sacrifices from the people for a “nation” whose supposed interests (such as high GDP growth or rapid capital accumulation) are best served by appeasing the corporate-financial oligarchy and hence makes people subservient to the interests of this oligarchy. Such nationalism had already characterised metropolitan capitalism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (whence Rudolf Hilferding’s remark that the ideology of finance capital is the “glorification of the national idea”).

It appeared in India in the neo-liberal era marked by the hegemony of the corporate-financial oligarchy. But with the crisis of neo-liberalism, it is virulently promoted with the additional help of Hindutva forces to ward off any threats to corporate hegemony. A corporate-communal alliance thus comes into being, even as the economic distress of the working people keeps getting aggravated.

Also Read: The BJP Is Looking to Shut Down Politics. That is Why the Opposition Must Unite.

If this conjuncture is to be changed, if 2019, even if it sees an unseating of the Hindutva forces from power, is not to result merely in putting the clock back so that these forces again come back to power the next time around, then opposition unity must be around a minimum agenda of action. This must include a scrapping of the UAPA (under which innocent Muslim youth are arrested and jailed for years, their lives irreparably damaged), a scrapping of the sedition law, stringent measures against lynch-mobs, enforcing minimum ethical standards on the media, reining in the CBI so that it ceases to be a tool in government hands for settling scores, ridding universities and other academic and cultural institutions of the incubus of Hindutva-fascism so that they once again become sites of free discourse; and other such measures of damage-repair.

The notion of common citizenship

In addition, however, it must both address the growing economic distress of the working people and strengthen the notion of common citizenship, by instituting a set of fundamental economic rights, among which I would list at least the following five: right to food, right to employment, right to free publicly-funded quality universal healthcare, right to free universal publicly-funded quality education and right to adequate old-age pension and disability benefits. These measures should not cost more than 10% of the GDP, which a 4% wealth tax (such a tax no longer even exists in India) on the top 1% of households, should be quite adequate to finance.

Of course there will be specific measures for the different classes, such as reviving the market intervention role of commodity boards, restoring the profitability of agriculture, enforcing a minimum living wage, strengthening trade union rights and such. But the strengthening of “citizenship” through economic rights enjoyed by all, irrespective of caste, community, gender and other identities, will mark a sea-change. All these rights may not be introduced immediately; but some must be, while others may follow over time. The immediate institution of some rights would already help other objectives: a national health service, for instance can generate employment through “care work”.

The immediate institution of some rights would already help other objectives: a national health service, for instance can generate employment through “care work”. Credit: Reuters

The task of achieving opposition unity to defeat fascism is therefore even more complex than mere seat-sharing. The Left alone can take the lead in achieving this task, for at least three reasons: first, of all the forces in the country it is the one most implacably opposed to fascism (which the fascists themselves implicitly concede while dubbing all their opponents “Left”). Second, it alone sees the link between neo-liberalism and fascism, or more generally understands the political economy of the rise of fascism and hence can think beyond an opposition unity based merely on seat-sharing (important though that is). Third, in principle at any rate, what matters for the Left is not “party interest” but “people’s interest”, for which the party can sacrifice its own perceived immediate interest.

Communism was primarily responsible for the defeat of classical fascism, one of its enduring historic contributions. Communism again has to rise to its historic responsibility and defeat contemporary fascism by taking the lead in uniting the entire opposition. I believe it will. Even on the earlier occasion, it had been tardy in getting down to this historic task. Its current tardiness, therefore, should not make us think that it would shirk its historic responsibility. But if perchance it does, which I consider unlikely, it would have done irreparable damage to itself.

Prabhat Patnaik is professor emeritus of economics at Jawaharlal Nehru University.

The Battle That the Victors Lost: The Artistic Legacy of the Spanish Civil War

Though the Spanish Republic ended up on the losing side of the Civil War (1936-1939), the Republican cause left behind many enduring images of triumph and despair to be treasured by successive generations.

This is a second part of a series on the Spanish Civil War. The first piece can be read here.

When US secretary of state Colin Powell was making what he thought was a cogent case for the US war on Iraq on February 5, 2003, he was party to two acts of covering up.

The first we now know to be one of the biggest swindles in modern statecraft. History has already nailed the American-British lie about Saddam Hussein’s ‘Weapons of Mass Destruction’.

But a somewhat lesser-known manoeuvre consisted in smothering a tapestry that for years had hung inside the Security Council chamber in the UN, where Powell made his presentation. The tapestry, a reproduction of Pablo Picasso’s Guernica, was considered so subversive in temper that it was carefully covered with a blue curtain, so that the writhing, twisted human forms that scream at the viewer from a nightmarish canvas of war, did not trouble the assembled diplomats’ genteel consciences overmuch. The irony, however, was inescapable for everyone who was present, for Guernica had long entered the collective consciousness of humankind.

It had taken Picasso all of 35 days in May-June 1937 to complete work on his monumental (11.5 ft-by-25.5 ft) Civil War masterpiece. The Republican government in Spain, busy fighting a desperate battle of survival, had asked him to contribute a mural to its pavilion in the upcoming World’s Trade Fair, to be hosted in Paris in July that year. Picasso was still struggling to focus on a suitable theme around which to construct his painting, when news broke of the Guernica horror.

In the course of a mere three hours on a placid spring-day afternoon in the idyllic Basque Country town in northern Spain, German fighter-bombers killed nearly 2,000 (mainly) women and children in violent bursts of carpet bombing that flattened Guernica and shocked the whole world. The Condor Legion that carried out the carnage made no secret of the fact that its sorties were only target-practice, for Guernica was not a theatre of war yet.

Pablo Picasso had found his motif. A terrifying welter of dead, dying and dazed humans and animals over which towered a raging bull, rapidly took shape. The canvas, drawn in austere grey, white and black and lit by a single naked light-bulb, helped give Guernica an eerily photograph-like texture. Soon enough, the painting became the most powerful symbol of the Spanish resistance to Fascism, indeed of all human resistance against the bestiality of war. Living in exile like its creator, Guernica entered Spain only after the exorcising of General Francisco Franco and the restoration of democracy, as Picasso had wished. The artist himself was dead by then.

“In creating the world’s memory of the Spanish Civil War”, Eric Hobsbawm wrote in 1996, “the pen, the brush and the camera wielded on behalf of the defeated have proved mightier than…. the power of those who won”.

Pablo Picasso, Guernica. Credit: pablopicasso.org

The astonishingly rich and varied harvest of artistic accomplishments that the war gave rise to is what the historian is talking about here. Picasso and Joan Miró, Ernest Hemingway and Don Passos, Claude Simon and George Orwell , W.H. Auden and Stephen Spender – each of these great 20th century artists/writers gave the world memorable works crafted around the war. Remarkably, even when some of them happened later to recant their socialist/Marxist faith – which seemed to have drawn them to the Spanish cause in the first place – they never gave up on Spain.

Writing in The God that Failed (where disenchanted former fellow-travellers of Communism record their own ‘confessions’), Stephen Spender yet did not hesitate to call the Civil War “the poets’ war”. Orwell recalls having once observed to Arthur Koestler, who had swung from ardent communist faith to unabashed Cold-War anti-communist fervour, that ‘History stopped in 1936’. “ (H)e (Koestler) nodded in immediate understanding. We were both thinking of totalitarianism in general, but more particularly of the Spanish Civil War”.

In an earlier submission, I cited Auden’s Spain, arguably one of his best poems. The largest body of poetry dedicated to the Civil War, however, unsurprisingly comes from poets writing in Spanish: Antonio Machado, Cesar Vallejo, Octavio Paz, Miguel Hernandez and Pablo Neruda. Federico Lorca, Spain’s most-loved poet, had been killed in Granada by Falangist Guards within weeks of the war breaking out, and a macabre bonfire of his books had been lit at the town’s Plaza del Carmen soon thereafter. Antonio Machado paid this moving tribute to his dear friend’s memory:

Carve, friends, from stone and dream,

in the Alhambra, a barrow for the poet,

on the water of fountains that weep

and whisper, for eternity :

the crime was in Granada,

in his Granada!

Miguel Hernandez, whose face, as Neruda was to write somewhere, ‘was the face of Spain’, fought the war, was arrested, sentenced to death and died in prison, but not before he had written some of the most moving poetry of the war period. Here he remembers with tenderness his dead comrades from the International Brigades:

Around your bones, the olive

groves will grow,

unfolding their iron roots in

the ground,

embracing men, universally,

faithfully.

Neruda himself was in Madrid as the Civil War started, as Chile’s consul to Spain. He travelled extensively around the country and Europe, seeking to engage the public’s attention, lecturing, writing ceaselessly, exhorting anti-Fascists everywhere to join battle on the Republic’s behalf.

Pablo Neruda. Credit: Wikipedia

His book Spain in our Hearts, later incorporated in Residence on Earth, was first printed by Republican fighters at the frontline of their battle, and contains some the most memorable pieces of poetry to have come out of any human conflict anywhere:

And one morning all that burned

and one morning the bonfires

leapt from the earth

devouring people,

and from then on fire

gunpowder from then on,

and from then on blood.

Bandits with planes, and Moors,

bandits with signet rings, and duchesses,

bandits with black friars with hands raised in blessing

came through the sky to slaughter children,

and the blood of children flowed through the streets,

simply, just like children’s blood.

Anguish and scorn, tender compassion and searing anger tumble out of the stanzas, each of a varying length, until one reaches the poignant crescendo of the last few lines :

And you will ask why his poetry

speaks nothing of the earth, of the green leaves,

of the grand volcanoes of his native land?

Come and see the blood in the streets,

come and see

the blood in the streets,

come and see the blood

in the streets!

“In this instance, history has not been written by the victors”, Hobsbawm says memorably about Civil War literature and goes on to quote the English poet-novelist Laurie Lee (who had fought in the war himself) from his memoirs, A Moment of War: “I believe we shared something else, unique to us at that time – the chance to make one grand and uncomplicated gesture of personal sacrifice and faith, which might never occur again… few of us yet knew that we had come to a war of antique muskets and jamming machine-guns, to be led by brave but bewildered amateurs. But for the moment there were no half-truths and hesitations, we had found a new freedom, almost a new morality, and discovered a new Satan – Fascism”.

These lines speak as much to the tragedy of the Civil War as to its triumph, and it is this powerful amalgam of contrasting, even conflicting, emotions that seems to have held the strongest appeal for creative artists. George Orwell opens Homage to Catalonia with a thumbnail picture of a young Italian militiaman—rugged, shabby and clearly unlettered – whom he met on his very first day in the War, inside Barcelona’s Lenin Barracks.

“He was standing in profile to me, his chin on his breast, gazing with a puzzled frown at a map which one of the officers had open on the table”. “Obviously he could not make head or tail of the map”, as Orwell noted, and yet this impoverished Italian working-man “with reddish yellow hair and powerful shoulders… (h)is peaked leather cap…pulled fiercely over one eye…(on whose face) there were both candour and ferocity, (as) also the pathetic reverence that illiterate people have for their supposed superiors”, had come out of Fascist Italy to fight an unequal war in which his side was pitted against the might of Mussolini and Hitler and Franco.

Years later, when Orwell was to reminisce about the War (in his 1942 essay Looking Back on the Spanish Civil War), the memory “of the Italian militiaman who shook my hand in the guardroom, the day I joined the militia” had still stayed with him.

The writer explains why: “When I remember – oh, how vividly! – his shabby uniform and fierce, pathetic, innocent face, the complex side-issues of the war seem to fade away and I see clearly that there was at any rate no doubt as to who was in the right. In spite of power politics and journalistic lying, the central issue of the war was the attempt of people like this to win the decent life which they knew to be their birthright… This man’s face, which I saw only for a minute or two, remains with me as a sort of visual reminder of what the war was really about. He symbolises for me the flower of the European working class, harried by the police of all countries, the people who fill the mass graves of the Spanish battlefields and are now, to the tune of several millions, rotting in forced labour camps (Orwell was thinking of Nazi death camps here)”.

He dedicated one of his rare poems – after he had left school, Orwell seldom tried his hand at poetry – to this militiaman whose name Orwell had never managed to find out. This is how that poem ends:

Your name and your deeds were forgotten

Before your bones were dry,

And the lie that slew you is buried

Under a deeper lie;

But the thing that I saw in your face

No power can disinherit:

No bomb that ever burst

Shatters the crystal spirit.

Here the rough-hewn nobility of the verse succeeds in capturing, with remarkable power and intensity, the spirit of the Spanish Civil War. This, after all, was a war of which the defining quality was the death-defying courage of the vanquished, rather than the strident triumphalism of the victors. It is this quality, unspoilt and inextinguishable, that has stayed on in mankind’s collective memory, hopefully for many more years to come.

Anjan Basu freelances as literary critic, translator of poetry and commentator. ‘As Day is Breaking’ is his book of translations from the work of Subhash Mukhopadhya, one of the great poets in the Bengali language. He can be reached at basuanjan52@gmail.com.

Salvatore Quasimodo and his Quest for ‘Unity of the Arts’

In the fifty years since the passing of the Nobel-winning Italian litterateur on June 14, poetry continues everywhere to be subjected to ‘the silent siege’ he spoke about.

In his Nobel lecture in 1959, Salvatore Quasimodo (1901-1968) spoke of how, in the 20th century, “…the politician’s defence against culture and thus against the poet operates both surreptitiously and openly, in manifold ways”. The easiest defence, says the poet, “is the degradation of the concept of culture. Mechanical and scientific means, radio and television, help to break the unity of the arts, to favour the poetics that will not even disturb the shadows. The politician’s most favoured poetics is always that which allies itself with the memory of the Arcadia for the artistic disparagement of its own epoch. This is the meaning of Aeschylus’ verse: ‘I maintain that the dead kill the living’….”

Fifty years after his death, when we are well on our way into a new millennium, these words ring quite as true as they did then. In the post-truth world, the politician has an even more fail-proof toolkit with which to ‘break the unity of the arts’, to conjure into existence a new Arcadia, to resurrect the dead so as to liquidate the living. Does the modern-day poet have it in her to not deviate from her “moral or aesthetic path…. (which inevitably binds her to the) double solitude in the face of both the world and the literary militias”?

Quasimodo’s personal quest of the unity of his own art, of how he would confront his own double solitude, was punctuated by some of the most perilous episodes in man’s history – Fascism, genocide and the two World Wars. He had started off in what was known as the Hermetic mould, aligning his craft with celebrated contemporaries such as Giuseppe Ungaretti and Eugenio Montale, and made his mark in the early 1930s’ Italian poetry with anthologies like Acque e terre, Oboe sommerso and Odore di eucalyptus:

Tindari, I know you gentle
in broad hills hung over waters
of the god’s sweet isles;
today you assail me
and lean into my heart……

Exile is bitter
and my search for peace
that ended with you, changes today
to an early wishing for death;
and every love is a screen from sadness,
mute step into the dark
where you have placed
bitter bread for me to break. ………..

– (Wind at Tindari)

Desire of your bright
hands in the flame’s half light;
flavour of oak, roses
and death.

Ancient winter.

The birds seeking the grain
were suddenly snow.

So words:
a little sun; a haloed glory,
then mist; and the trees
and us, air, in the morning.

– (Ancient Winter)

The intimate flavours of a very private world, the sometimes recondite symbolism that traces back to the French 19th century poets Mallarme and Valery, and the recurring motifs of the Sicilian isles, religion and death rendered in sparse, personalised but powerful word-pictures – combined to locate Quasimodo at the centre of the Hermeticist genre in Italy. Often, a very personal experience is sought to be verbalised in these poems via a deliberate rarefication of the poetic medium, so that both the experience and the language transcend the boundaries of the traditional, the hackneyed. And yet a richly lyrical voice quite often breaks free of the somewhat idiosyncratic confines of the chosen idiom:

Sometimes your voices call me back,
and what skies and waters
waken inside me!

A net of sunlight tears
on your walls that at night
were a swaying of lamps
from the late shops
full of wind and sadness…..

Alley: a cross of houses
calling out low to each other,
never knowing it is the fear
of being alone in the dark.

– (Alleyway)

With Poesie and Ed e subito sera, Quasimodo’s Hermetic period draws to a close, but not before he had presented us with that unforgettable three-liner:

Everyone is alone on the heart of the earth
pierced by a ray of the sun;
and suddenly it’s evening.

– (And Suddenly it is Evening)

Quasimodo’s poetic journey had begun in the shadow of Italian fascism. His anti-fascist sympathies were well-known, and he was briefly imprisoned by Mussolini’s Blackshirts, too, though he never really associated actively with the Italian Resistance except at its peripheries. Through the 1940s, his poetry veered away from the tightly-packed landscape of the individual’s cognitive and moral preoccupations to human society at large, to the devastating war raging in Europe and elsewhere. His themes continued to revolve around the human condition, but they surveyed that condition now in the light refracted through the prism of catastrophic events, not the mellow light of a crepuscular sky:

Evening falls: again you leave us,
dear images of earth, trees,
beasts, poor people enfolded
in soldiers’ greatcoats, mothers
with bellies dried up by tears.
And snow from the fields lights us
like the moon. Ah, these dead ones! Beat
your foreheads, beat right down to the heart.
Let someone, at least, howl in the silence,
in this white circle of buried ones.

– (Snow)

Here, far from everyone
the sun beats down on your hair, kindling its honey,
and now from its bush the last cicada of summer
and the siren deep-wailing
its warning over the plain of Lombardy
remind us we are alive.
O air-scorched voices, what do you want?
Weariness still rises from the earth.

– (Written, Perhaps on a Tomb)

The tonal asymmetries with the Hermetic period are palpable here, and even the form takes on sharper contours, the hard narrative element enters the canvas which, till recently, was suffused in a softer light. The calamitous allied bombing of Milan of August 1943, for example, draws the poet out in this bitter lament:

In vain you search in the dust,
poor hand, the city is dead.
Dead: on the heart of the Naviglio
the last hum has been heard…..
Dig no wells in the courtyards,
the living have lost their thirst.
The dead, so red, so swollen, do not touch them:
leave them in the earth of their houses;
the city is dead, is dead.

– (Milan, August 1943)

“The poet is the sum total of the diverse ‘experiences’ of the man of his times”, Quasimodo said in his Nobel acceptance speech. “His language is no longer that of the avant-garde, but rather is concrete in the classical sense”. At the same time, “(h)e may seem to destroy his forms, while instead he actually continues them. He passes from the lyric to epic poetry in order to speak about the world and the torment in the world through man, rationally and emotionally”.

Quasimodo’s own poetry is a fascinating account of this transformation, as witness the almost graphic, rather than impressionistic, picture of the dead Mussolini and his cohorts hung upside down from meat-hooks in Milan’s vast Piazzale Loreto on April 29, 1945. What is truly extraordinary, though, is that the poet manages to invest even this lurid spectacle with basic human concerns by engaging a mother-son duo in a passionate examination of all that was at stake here:

SON:
Mother, why do you spit at a corpse
hanging tied by the feet from a beam, head down?
And the others dangling beside him, don’t they
disgust you?…………..
…………………..No, mother, stop! Shout
to the crowd to go. This is not grief but leering
and joy. The horseflies are glued already
to the knots of veins. Now you have aimed at that face:
mother, mother, mother!

MOTHER:
We have always spat at corpses, son:
hanging from window-bars and masts of ships,
burnt at the stake, torn to pieces
by hounds on estate bounds for the sake of a little
grass. An eye for an eye, a tooth
for a tooth, turmoil or quiet no matter:…..
…….. They have gouged your eyes, maimed
your hands, just for a name to be betrayed.
Show me your eyes, give me your hands:
you are dead, son, and because you are dead, my son,
you can pardon, my son, my son.
The son responds to his mother by noting “(t)his sickening, sultry heat, this smoke / of ruins, the fat green flies bunched on the hooks”, and goes on to cry out in anguish:
tomorrow they will pierce my eyes and hands
again. All down the ages pity
has been the howl of the murdered.

– (Laude, April 29, 1945)

Thus, when writing about human dignity, mortal aspiration or man’s inhumanity, Quasimodo does not treat these as general themes, but as closely felt personal experiences. For, to him this was what poetry is all about. “From his night, his solitude, the poet finds day and starts a diary that is lethal to the inert. The dark landscape yields a dialogue”. The politician, on the other side, “judges cultural freedom with suspicion, and by means of conformist criticism tries to render every concept of poetry immobile”.

Ever wary of political establishments, Quasimodo – who greatly admired what the October Revolution stood for—had joined the Italian Communist Party at the end of the war, only to leave it soon after, when the party wanted him to harness his talents for producing ‘political’ poetry. “An accord between poet and politician will never be possible”, so he believed, “because the one is concerned with the internal order of man, the other with the ordering of men”. He could visualise, though, how “(a) quest for the internal order of man could, in a given epoch, coincide with the ordering and construction of a new society”. In the time of great social change, the general also becomes personal, the image coalesces into the object. It is perhaps at such times that, in the words of Leonardo da Vinci, “every wrong is made right”.

Was it in the great struggle against fascism that Quasimodo himself stole a glimpse of that rare ‘human time’? May be he did, or he maybe dreamt of that time. Either way, he did not fail to record that vision for posterity:

In the wind of deep light she lies
my loved one of the time of doves.
Alone among the living, love,
you talk of waters, leaves and me,
and your voice consoles the naked
night with shining
ardours and delight.

Beauty deluded us, vanishing
of every memory and form,
the lapse and slide revealed to feelings
mirroring the inner splendours.

But from the deeps of your blood with no
pain, in the just human time
we shall be born again.

– (In the Just Human Time)

Anjan Basu freelances as literary critic, translator and commentator. ‘As Day is Breaking’ is his book of translations from the Jnanpeeth award winning poet Subhash Mukhopadhyay. Basu can be reached at basuanjan52@gmail.com