re: #83 Jack_ITA

Movimento Sociale Fiamma Tricolore is, sadly, just one of the many neo-fascist or pseudo-fascist parties here in Italy, it’s made up of some of those who did not accept Fini’s claim that “Fascism had been evil experience”.

I won’t go into Fini’s past here - he has definitely changed since the early 1990s. However, I have some other comments and questions.

First, I will submit that my knowledge of Italian is more than sketchy. I can’t speak a word, and what I can read of the language I can read as a result of knowing a tiny bit of French, and also with the assistance of those horrible online translators. Yet, there are however some things that are easy to discover, for instance that the Northern League cooperates with a number of other parties around Europe, parties with… well… doubtful qualities.

More intriguing, however, that Northern League-politicians can be found cooperating not only with Silvio Berlusconi, but also notable fascists. And this is why I ask about Andrea Miglioranzi. Now, if I am not mistaken Miglioranzi - a Fiamma Tricolore-politician - has been part of a fascist rock band, “Gesta bellica”, singing songs about Rudolf Hess and Erich Priebke.

If I am not mistaken he is also connected to this fascist skinhead group.

Yet, here he is demonstrating together with… Flavio Tosi, of the Northern League, the man whom you say has been “accused, during his campaign for the local election, [of being] a racist and a xenophobe”. My question: could pictures like this not explain just why people would accuse Tosi of being a racist and a xenophobe. After all, if your political campaign is heavily anti-Sinti (anti-Gypsy) and you demonstrate together with notable fascists, why shouldn’t that result in such accusations?

That series of photographs I linked to includes a number of other interesting pictures, too, by the way. Number 15 in the series shows Tosi together with Piero Puschiavo, the founder of the decidedly fascist Fronte Veneto Skinheads and a politician of Fiamma Tricolore. Puschiavo has, I believe, said that gays have an incurable pathology? I found this quote:

Il mio unico rimpianto aver fatto troppo poco per elevare i valori ideali della nostra tradizione, nella quale si inserisce la nostra lotta ai gay, che sono dei falliti, la loro patologia incurabile”.

Hardly the sort of fellow I would hang out with if I did not want to be associated with fascists. Or what do you think?

Also, I believe the city council of Verona chose the above-mentioned Miglioranzi to sit on the board of the Veronese Institute of Resistance History, with at least the initial suppport of Tosi. As far as I can see, this caused quite a stir in Italian media and in parts of the Italian blogosphere? To me, it is a genuine mystery, why on earth would anyone in their right mind want to put a fascist at the board of a institute working with the history of the Italian resistance? And is it a surprise that reactions have been, well, let’s say, mixed?