Italian Fascists
SCRIPT
An ABC Australia Production
Reporter: Mark Colvin
02:23:01Police demonstration
Colvin: One year ago, Italy was in chaos. The political earthquake of the biggest of corruption scandals ever seen had shaken the whole country topsy turvy.
Colvin: The police, far from controlling demonstrations, were out there demonstrating themselves.
Police blowing whistles.
Colvin: On the streets of Rome this spring, nothing and everything has changed.
Demonstration - people with banners
Colvin: The left wing unions are still out there chanting slogans about liberation and workers' rights, but after 50 years of privileged access to the corridors of Italian power, this year the socialists and communists in organised labour, have lost their inside track.
Police whistles.
Man addressing meeting.
Fascist Union meeting
Colvin: The new industrial power is here, with the fascist union known as CISNAL.
Colvin: For the first time since the end of the war, they find themselves with access to power at the highest level.
Meeting
Colvin: Preferring to be known by the image makers' term post-fascists, they were preparing for their first meeting with Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi.
CU Nobilia
SUPER: MAURO NOBILIA
Fascist Union, CISNALNobilia: Our proposals are positive, constructive and responsible. Conscious of our members' interests in this spirit we will meet the Prime Minister.
04:24:13MWIDE Berlusconi
Colvin: Everyone knew the old order in Italy had to change, but none last year predicted that the upheaval would give power to Silvio Berlusconi.
04:39:03TV GirlsTV girls singing
04:49:07Colvin: He was known for his tacky TV stations and his financial empire, not his politics.
04:53:16TV girls singing
Italian parliament
Colvin: But none predicted he would create a new party, then put it into coalition with the fascists who'd been out of power for 50 years.
05:07:02 Cars in street at night. Youth in car giving fascist salute.
Election night cavalcade
Colvin: Yet that's what happened on election night, and however the leadership dressed it up with talk about post-fascism and democracy, the young fascists in the street knew they had won.
05:15:03 Rock concert Rock band singing
Colvin: Only after the fact have Italians really started to worry about they did at the polling booths last month. At his rock concert in Rome, more than 100,000 turned out for democracy and against fascism. But despite their numbers, these are the minority now.
05:34:01Rock band singing.
CU Corato
SUPER: RICCARDO CORATO
Concert Organiser Corato: The analysis of the electoral vote is that the youngsters have voted forty percent left and forty five percent Berlusconi or fascists. This is extremely dangerous.
06:06:19 Interior church Church service
06:17:18Politicians at church service
Council meeting Colvin: With five senior ministers in the Cabinet, the fascist leader, Gianfranco Fini, is a canny player of the political game. He's changed the party's name to the innocuous National Alliance, and he's careful to talk of reconciliation and democracy. But truth may lie under the surface. The National Alliance control a majority on Rome's city council. Their council leader says he's a convinced democrat.
President, Rome City CouncilBuontempo: We are the guarantors of democracy because we believe in democracy and not the democracy of the parties and the unions, but the democracy of the people.
06:40:10CU Buontempo
SUPER: TEODORO BUONTEMPO
06:48:18Buontempo and others at memorial rally
Colvin: Yet this was the same man who was shown on TV recently commemorating the dead who fell in the march on Rome that brought Mussolini to absolute power.
07:02:10B & W archival of German soldiers in cars and tanks
Mussolini hanged in street
Colvin: No surprise then to find Rome's young Green Party mayor right in the Fascists Council's firing line, trying to woo back the young vote.
Colvin: But even among the young at this concert, there was little sens of urgency about the Fascist threat. The politics was sweetened with comedy, Berlusconi seen as a TV Ceasar.
Colvin: 'He promised miracles'. She asks 'Where are they?' 'The miracle' he replies, 'is that i've got control of State TV!'
Interview: In Italy what's happening is a 'Neo-Fascism'. A new way of Fascism.
Colvin and Accame
Colvin: The media revision of Italian history has already begun. It's 50 years since the Germans pulled out of Italy, helped on their way by the odd punch from the local population. The Americans were coming, and democracy was on the way. Italian TV marked the anniversary by showing, for the first time, the corpse of the fascist dictator, Benito Mussolini, strung up after death alongside his lover, Claretta Petacci. If it had happened in previous years, nothing good would have been said about the late dictator. Now, with the fascists inside the government, state TV invited the party's veteran ideologue, Giano Accame, to comment on the footage. His praise for Mussolini caused a storm but he's unrepentant.
07:18:13
07:55:09AccameAccame: Without a doubt he remains the greatest Italian political figure of this century. In a hundred years it'll be hard to remember a name other than Mussolini.
08:06:06Statuary & architecture
Colvin: So seductive was the power of fascist images and fascist ideology that even when all was lost, hundreds of thousands of Italians refused to give up on their beloved Duce. From the last ditch stronghold of Salo, the so-called Italian Social Republic, they continued to help the Nazis resist the allied advance.
B & W archival footage of executions of soldiers
Colvin: Also showing on Italian TV for the first time this Spring, the American film of what happened to the fascist saboteurs who got caught.
Colvin: These were fascist commandos whoF'd been caught and court-martialled blowing bridges and railway tracks behind allied lines. Again there was outrage at the way the executions were presented. No mention that they were fanatics for a brutal and dictatorial regime, just the comment that they and the partisans who fought against Mussolini were all equal in death. And again, the fascist ideologue Giano Accame was there to create the new mythology.
CU AccameAccame: These were the heroes of the Italian Social Republic, a republic that had eight hundred thousand men under arms. And some of them went on sabotage operations behind enemy lines. These were really bold, brave boys who died for the cause as you can clearly see on the film. I can only describe them as heroes.
SUPER: TULLIA ZEVI
Italian Jewish Communities UnionZevi: They were Nazis, they accepted to go all the way with the Nazis and they did terrible things in the North, terrible things happened. In the rest of Europe seventy, seventy-five percent of the Jews were destroyed and the rest survived. Here, twenty-five, thirty percent were destroyed and the rest survived. But that doesn't make the story any better. Terrible things happened here too.
Shots of Chieti
Map of Italy showing Chieti
Police car
Street in Chieti, Colvin and Cucullo walking.
Cucullo at sporting eventColvin: In some parts of Italy, the new fascism is already putting down roots. A year ago, for Foreign Correspondent, I visited the town of Chieti, in Abruzzo to witness the spectacle of a community where the entire local government was either under arrest, or under investigation. It was a microcosm of what Italy was then, a nation drowning in a sea of scandal. My guide to Chieti last year was an elderly and obsessive anti-corruption fighter named Nicola Cucullo, who happened to be a member of the fascist party. Now the eccentric outsider is in power. Nicola Cucullo is the new mayor of Chieti, elected last December in a landslide vote. And here in provincial Italy, where the image makers have yet to reach, the soothing phrases of so-called post-fascism haven't yet caught on.
CuculloCucullo: I'm a Mussolini man. If you want to know, I'm a Mussolini Fascist. Mark my words, this is very important. Everything was positive, except the war. We shouldn't have made war, but unfortunately we were forced to. That's it.
Colvin and Cucullo in unfinished hospital.
Paintings and carvings in town hall.Colvin: Fascism thrives on a combination of political chaos and economic disaster and Chieti had both. The system of kickbacks on projects like the hospital, unfinished 30 years after it started, has bled the city dry. As mayor Cucullo points out, Chieti does have assets which can be sold. The town hall paintings and furniture for example, reluctantly they'll have to go.
Cucullo: These miniatures in wood are priceless works from the eighteenth century because they were made by hand by the artists of the time.
Colvin and Cucullo looking at paintings.Colvin: But even on the most optimistic projections, Chieti will still be massively in debt. The only solution Cucullo can come up with, a public money rescue package from the new right wing government in Rome.
Cucullo and Colvin walking in cemetery.Cucullo:
Colvin: Mussolini made the trains run on time. Nicola Cucullo cleaned up the Chieti cemetery.
Cucullo: The cemetery had fallen into a terrible state.
Colvin: How? Why?
Cucullo: No-one cared. No-one cleaned it up, or looked after it.
Cucullo and Colvin in cemetery.Colvin: Respect for the dead is just one of the old virtues Cucullo wants to get back to. A child in the Mussolini era, his politics are based on nostalgia for a time when government was simple, clear, and above all, tough.
MISSING TRANSLATION OF INTERVIEW
Cucullo addressing school children
Colvin: The man who, as mayor, now visits Chieti's schools to lecture them about the importance of cleanliness and right living is the same whose alleged views on Hitler caused a storm recently in the national press. Mayor Cucullo was quoted as saying Hitler was the most intelligent man of the century and his mistake with the Jews was not to have fried them all. Cucullo's response to the controversy? An attack on the journalist who wrote the story.
Cucullo in officeCucullo: There's no controversy, no version. He is a Jew, the son of a Jewess, so as a guest at the table of mayors elected under the fascist flame, he did nothing but provoke.
ColvinColvin: But did you say what you were reported to have said?
CuculloCucullo: That journalist didn't just play dirty, he's still trying to revive this hate between Jews and non-Jews. That's it. If you turn on your television you'll see that all they do is show films about Nazis, the Holocaust. They always do it at election time.
3 MISSING INTERVIEW TRANSLATIONS
Colvin: On the national level, Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi and his Forza Italia party may appear equally complacent about the fascists entry into their government. But all the party's MPs like Fabrizio del Noce are brand new and have nothing but their confidence to confront a disciplined political force like the fascists.
SUPER: FABRIZIO DEL NOCE
Forza Italia MPdel Noce: The guarantee Forza Italia, a liberal party, can give is a bit more than the threat given by the former supporters of fascism.
Colvin: So you've got them under control essentially? That's what you're saying?
del Noce: Yes, yes, the control, but the democracy is really strong in our country.
Swearing in of Silvio Berlusconi and his government
Colvin: For all the assurances, the fact remains, Silvio Berlusconi has broken the great post-war taboo of western European politics and let fascists into government for the first time in 50 years. The outside world will continue to watch for the consequences.
END
Mussolini believed that modern Italy could, in some way, recreate the glories of ancient Rome. And many of those he ruled believed, for a while at least, that he might be right. Outsiders often forget that MussoliniFs rule was not brief. In fact Il Duce was in power for 20 long years. With little taught in modern Italian schools about the fascist era, itFs only too easy for the young to romanticise the Mussolini period, the war apart, as one of enormous progress and increasing Italian self confidence in the world.
08:29:04
08:51:15Ancient building, statuaryMusic