«I love you, but mine is another path». Thus, with a sentimental farewell phrase, Roberto Vannacci bids farewell to Matteo Salvini and leaves the League, of which he was vice-president, but no longer well regarded by the Northern League leadership. Especially from the old guard, who stubbornly continues to declare themselves anti-fascist like the founding fathers (starting with Umberto Bossi and Roberto Leoni).
So what is this “other path”? It’s called National Future. Challenging name, very challenging indeed. That “national” already sounds like an alarm bell, because in Europe nationalism has never been a walk in the park and refers to ultra-right movements.
Like any new political formation, Futuro Nazionale is still an open construction site: a project in progress, a creature without defined contours, a still shapeless “thing”. There is little doubt about the colour, however: it is a black thing. And, like all black things that aspire to become a movement, it already has its symbolic place: a castle in the province of Alessandria, home to a think-tank with an Evolian flavor where the loyalists meet. Among these, also Mario Borghezio, an old Northern League agitator, recycled without too much difficulty.
What we already know, however, is enough to arouse concern. First of all there is the book that launched Vannacci, The World in Reverse, a sort of ideological manifesto in which he claims the right to hate as if it were a civil freedom. Women become “sorcerers”, homosexuals and blacks become targets of sarcasm and contempt, all seasoned with bizarre racial theories about the “white” skin of Italians.
Then there is the obsession with X Mas, which the former general slips into every speech like a watchword. He never clarified whether he was referring to the X Mas “before” or the one “after” September 8, or both. At the beginning, under the command of Prince Junio Valerio Borghese, the X Mas was a unit of daring naval raiders. After the armistice, however, he chose to be with the Germans, even before the Social Republic was born, gradually transforming himself into an armed gang in Hitler’s service, stained with war crimes. It is the same group as the coup plotter Borghese who, on 8 December 1970, attempted a grotesque coup d’état which involved the assault on the Quirinale and ended up taking refuge in Spain.
Lately Vannacci, who won 500,000 votes in the European elections, has also been attacking history books, particularly school ones. They should be rewritten, he says, especially in the pages dedicated to the twenty-year period. According to the MEP, Mussolini’s seizure of power and the laws of the regime were fully legitimized by the context of the time, therefore the result of a calm democratic process. The March on Rome? Not a coup d’état, but a street demonstration. His speech had a revealing title: Repetitions for those who have studied history in left-wing manuals.
To complete the work of rehabilitation of the “good man Mussolini”, Vannacci promises a new manual. Title: “History backwards”. A perfect name, it must be acknowledged, for those who systematically exchange victims for executioners.
Politicians have always tried to bend history to their own convenience. But not even Almirante’s social movement had gone that far: to ridicule and distort it to the point of erasing almost everything of the twenty-year period. From the murders of Matteotti and Don Minzoni to the ferocious squadrism of 1919, from the racial laws to the “fascist laws” that transformed the State into a dictatorship, from the repression of the Ovra to the alliance with Hitler and the war fought on the wrong side.
With similar premises, it is legitimate to ask what future awaits Futuro Nazionale, which aims to win the votes of the right disappointed by Meloni and Salvini.
