When in 1992, barely 15 years old, Giorgia Meloni joined the Gioventù Frontthe Youth Front of the Italian Social Movement (MSI), founded in 1946 by Mussolini officers and to this day considered one of the largest neo-fascist movements in Western Europe, the party no longer organized Hobbit Camps for young people, animated by band performances. The Company of the RingThe Fellowship of the Ring.
Which is not to say that the leader of the Fratelli d’ItaliaBrothers of Italy, the far-right party she herself helped found in 2012 in the wake of the MSI, has not inherited the devotion to the “Lord of the Rings” saga common to Italian post-fascism since at least the mid-1900s. The 1970s of the last century — when criticisms of progressives became popular, calling the work “an escapist and reactionary fairy tale”, and JRR Tolkien’s fantasy was adopted by neo-fascists, eager for new symbols and heroes, Nicholas Burgess Farrell, journalist and author of “Mussolini: A New Life,” recently explained in Spectator magazine.
“In the 70s, the Italian right-wing was looking for symbols, a mythology that would help it fight the alternative left to the Roman Empire, too associated with fascism,” Lucio Del Corso, professor at the University of Cassino and co-author of a book on the subject. “We can find heroism and fight against evil everywhere. What was different in The Lord of the Rings was that the left had not claimed the book in Italy, so the right was free to take possession of it and interpret it as they wished.
During her teenage years in the party, the woman who is now leading the polls in Italy and touted as the country’s most likely next prime minister — and the first woman in office — dressed up and put on public performances for the sons of work. . British writer, together with other activists, in Rome.
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Source: Observadora
