“What was it, then? What was in the air? A love of quarrels. Acute petulance. Nameless impatience. A universal penchant for nasty verbal exchanges and outbursts of rage, even fisticuffs.” Near the end of his novel The Magic Mountain, …
Julius Evola: the far-Right’s favourite philosopher
On 25 November 1970, the great Japanese novelist and playwright Yukio Mishima arrived for an appointment with the commandant of the Tokyo barracks of the Japan Self-Defence Forces, Eastern Command. With the help of four others who joined him on …
Why Meloni is rewriting Italy’s constitution
At first glance, the Italian constitution reads like soulless legalese: a thicket of jargon and impenetrable articoli. But the power it wields should not be underestimated. La Costituzione dictates the way the peninsula is governed — and, if rewritten as …
Is Meloni enabling Italy’s new blackshirts?
On a warm night in January, Romans staged a revival of their fascist past. At an event in the southern suburb of Acca Larentia, commemorating three fascist youths killed in 1978, hundreds of men in dark shirts were photographed doing …
What is the point of Nato?
It was early September in 1971. My mother had taken me in a taxi to a boutique hotel in a leafy northern Athenian suburb to visit my favourite uncle, her beloved brother. Before we got out the car, she put …
Can liberals save themselves from extinction?
The heroine of William Gibson’s 2003 near-future novel Pattern Recognition is a professional discerner of emerging trends, so hyper-attuned to semiotic nuance that she experiences physical discomfort if made to wear any item of clothing with recognisable branding. Cayce Pollard …
Why fascism won’t take over Spain
Spaniards heading to the polls this Sunday will not do so cheerfully. Not only is the election disrupting the summer holidays of more than a quarter of Spanish voters — but the options on the ballot paper are, at first …
Is Spain too late to apologise for fascism?
A year ago, I met a man in Madrid who expected to be sued for body-snatching. He gave me the news with a shrug. It was the price, he said, of joining a socialist government that was drafting a new …
The feebleness of white nationalists
Ever since the election of Donald Trump, the putative rise of “white supremacy” or “white nationalism” has been a perennial worry among mainstream pundits, both inside America and abroad. For liberals, the imminent rise of “fascism” serves as a powerful …
The World Cup has never been beautiful
James Maddison in. Ben White and Marcus Rashford restored. Kalvin Phillips and Kyle Walker risked despite injury. As the England squad was announced yesterday, the familiar excitement began to kindle. Even if the reported viewing figure for the 2018 final …
Italy still mourns Mussolini
One hundred years after seizing power, Benito Mussolini still has his admirers. As many as 4,000 black-clad fascist sympathisers marched to the Italian dictator’s crypt on Sunday to mark the centenary of his March on Rome. Cries of “Duce, Duce, …
Stop talking about American ‘fascism’
In the Forties, Dorothy Thompson posed the question “Who Goes Nazi?” Our version today, endlessly asked, is “Who Goes Fascist?” The unfortunate answer seems to be: everybody. Over the past few months, I’ve seen the “fascism” tag applied without a …
Giorgia Meloni is no radical
The international response to Giorgia Meloni’s (amply predicted) victory in Sunday’s Italian elections can be divided into two camps: those on the liberal Left fear that a centre-right Meloni-led government will plunge Italy into a Hungary-style “illiberal democracy”, while those …
Is Giorgia Meloni an EU puppet?
Italy’s first-ever summer election does not take place for another month, but the outcome already appears certain: the country’s centre-Right coalition — comprising Giorgia Meloni’s Brothers of Italy, Matteo Salvini’s Lega and Silvio Berlusconi’s Forza Italia — is leading the …
Vladimir Putin’s fascist fetish
This weekend, 150 days will have passed since Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine and started an all-out war that his flunkies assured him would last no more than three days. News from the ground is mixed. On the one hand, Russia …