Jovialis
Advisor
- Messages
- 9,311
- Reaction score
- 5,860
- Points
- 113
- Ethnic group
- Italian
- Y-DNA haplogroup
- R-PF7566 (R-Y227216)
- mtDNA haplogroup
- H6a1b7
What a concession: Almirante is "controversial". Hey, he was a man of his time. You know, the time when "some" Italians decided to adopt the Anti-Semitism, Anti-Gypsy, Anti-Black, Anti-Homosexual beliefs of their German neighbors so they too could be, well, if not Aryan, since they hardly looked the part, but honorary Aryans. I mean, if the Japanese could be honorary Aryans, why not Italians.
Yes, he was a man of his time. You know, the minority of men of his time who helped the Germans pack the Jews and gypsies, etc. onto the trains to concentration and extermination camps, and helped the SS slaughter old men, women, babies and their priests in the mountains because they gave food to their young sons hiding there so they wouldn't get conscripted and sent to Germany as slave labor, or forced to join the forces of the Salo puppet regime and kill their own people.
Do you have any idea how ridiculous this sounds? We're not talking about a "time" in ancient Rome when everyone believed in slavery. He, and others like him CHOSE this ideology, and they should have paid for it. Just as many others, the majority, I would submit, chose differently, although they lived in the same time.
As for this nonsense about April 25th being a creation of "Americanized" leftists, you have no freaking idea what you're talking about. Americans don't even know there was a virtual civil war in Italy or that we had partisans. The only partisans a few of them have ever heard of are the French ones, who were indeed a tiny percentage of the population.
I don't know where you come from. The Veneto? Lombardia? The South? On what side of the spectrum did your family fall?
Well, don't you dare tell me that we in Toscana, Liguria, Emilia, and other parts of the northwest celebrate April 25th because of the Americans. We celebrate it because our great-grandparents, grandparents and parents were among those who were killed by the Fascist Brigades who sided with the Germans against their own people. My mother's cousin was sent to a concentration camp for trying to sabotage production in the factories of Torino. Was he a Socialist? Yes, he was, but my great-aunt's husband, also a partisan, coordinated with the British in one of the Partisan that was decidedly not Socialist or Communist.
I also had a lot of family who served in the infantry and the navy, including my 17 year old father, who were sent into battle with no shoes, antique weapons and on and on, because that idiot Mussolini dragged us into a war for which we were unprepared. I abhor fascism, but Don't they teach history in Italian schools anymore? After the Armistice, when people like Almirante happily supported the puppet government of Salo, the Germans put our military men into POW camps, or disarmed and then executed them. I call men who would work with the Germans when they were killing and imprisoning Italian soldiers traitors.
Or maybe you want to talk about the average, non-political people who just wanted to survive the war; to protect their children. When, as a little child, my mother went to church one Sunday morning, there were four men and a woman hanging from the tree in front of the church for giving some food to the boys and ex-soldiers in the mountains. Germans regularly raided her uncle's farm, looking for young men, but also stealing all their food so that they were on the verge of starvation. There are memorials all over our hills to the people killed not just by the SS and the Wehrmacht, but by traitors like Almirante.
Don't you dare give me that twaddle about him being "a man of his time". Yes, he was one of the racist traitors of his time, siding with the Germans against his own people, and when he returned to Italy he continued to peddle the same bilge, bilge which Meloni thought was just fine, or she wouldn't have joined his party as a teen-ager.
Look, I get why 25% of Italy voted for Meloni, and 43% for the center-right coalition. I understand the frustrations with the stagnant economy, the high unemployment. I have wanted Italy to get out of the EU for more than ten years. I detest woke ideology, including gender ideology. I believe abortion on demand, past the first trimester, is wrong, and abortions in the last trimester are, imo, tantamount to infanticide. I don't think nationalism is a dirty word. I believe unregulated immigration of people with no skills and some of whom have no commitment to western values or democracy is a disaster for Italy and the rest of Europe.
How much real commitment to democracy does Meloni have, however? How sincere is she about anything? There are her speeches from the past and what she said to get elected. Now she wants to stay in the EU, she won't change the abortion laws or the laws providing for civil partnerships for gay people. She's a Christian woman, but she's not married, and she couldn't get her partner to marry in a church for her sake or even enter into a civil union for all I know. My father stopped going to Church after he was confirmed, never set foot in one except for weddings, baptisms and funerals of family or friends, was a complete anti-cleric, so much so that when I thought, in high school, that I wanted to be a nun, he went to my school and told the nuns to stop indoctrinating me. I could have died of embarrassment. Yet, he married in the Church because my mother was such a committed Catholic.
I don't trust politicians on principle, and I'm afraid Meloni gives me the same vibes that she's just another one who will say anything to get elected. What she'll do if she becomes Prime Minister, I don't know. I hope for my family's sake, for Italy's sake, that she does a good job, and I particularly hope that she's not a wolf in sheep's clothing.
The bolded is exactly why I was delighted for the results. But I agree that Italians pretending to be Nazis is a by the very foundation of the thought, idiotic. The worst thing Mussolini ever did was side with Hitler, and adopt the racialist theories of Giulio Cogni. That's when the fascists they stopped being Italian nationalists, and became junior-partners and a foil to Germany.