Fearing for her life, on November 14, 1938, exactly four months after the publication of the Fascist Manifesto of Race, Jewish journalist Margherita Sarfatti left her home near Lake Como, Italy, got into her car and asked the driver to take her to the Swiss border. In addition to a few personal belongings, in her suitcase she carried 1,272 letters sent by the man she had loved and accompanied for 20 years in the construction of ideology and the fascist party: Benito Mussolini.
We tend to believe that Nazi-fascism arose around the concept of biological racism and anti-Semitism, but the truth is more complex.
In the first two decades of the 20th century, both in Italy and in Germany, these reactionary movements had not yet adopted anti-Semitism and the theory of biological racism in their programs, and they even received support from Jewish nationalist intellectuals who would one day be persecuted by them. movements.
In the case of fascism, biological racism and anti-Jewish laws arise with the alliance between Hitler and the then Italian dictator, the former massimalist socialist Benito Mussolini, who, according to fascism scholars such as Luciano Dalla Tana and Renzo de Felice, decided to adopt the concepts for political opportunism.
Even the fascist philosopher and education minister of the regime, Giovanni Gentile, was against the adoption of the biological concept of race and opposed the fascist manifesto published 16 years after the March on Rome — the demonstration of a subversive nature, organized by the National Fascist Party. on October 28, 1922, aiming at a coup d’état or at least a clear demonstration of paramilitary pressure capable of bringing Mussolini to power.
In the memoir “My Fault: Mussolini As I Knew Him” Margherita Sarfatti, an Italian from a Jewish family of the Venetian aristocracy, who, in addition to being a lover, was Mussolini’s political advisor and “dictator of the arts” during the early years of the regime, argues that fascism began as a positive idea that was distorted over the years.
In the book, written only after the dictator’s death, Sarfatti acquits fascism for all the heinous crimes committed during the Second World War, for the death of his sister and brother-in-law, deported from Italy to Auschwitz, for the destruction of Italian democracy and the establishment of a dictatorship. The fault, for her, was exclusively Mussolini’s.
In contemporary society, the racial issue has become a line that defines and, at the same time, obscures our perception of reality, our subjectivity, our morals and our social relations.
Criticized and penalized for defending that Nazi parties should have the right to exist, youtuber Monark was defended by liberal intellectuals such as philosopher Luiz Felipe Pondé, journalist Joel Pinheiro da Fonseca and federal deputy Kim Kataguiri. The argument of these defenders is that without racism there is no Nazism and that the former presenter had not defended the concept of racial superiority, but the right of expression for everyone, including Nazis.
In the introduction to Sarfatti’s book, historian Brian R. Sullivan writes: “Mussolini and Sarfatti exposed their souls to each other. She heard their secrets, knew almost everything about Mussolini’s hidden weaknesses, his human frailties, his crass behavior, his superstitions, your misunderstandings, your ignorance about so many scientific and medical subjects and about your syphilis.”
Biological racism and anti-Semitism are not the seed, but one of the elements that feed the plague-ridden Nazi-fascist nationalist political model. We cannot forget that before adopting these concepts, the Nazis used Germany as their motto, and not the Germans above all.
The danger of limiting Nazi-fascism to anti-Semitism and biological racism, to monstrous and irrational ideologies, is that in doing so, we are in a way minimizing Nazi-fascist gravity: irrational monsters have no control over their actions. The guilt of Nazi-fascism for all the crimes committed exists because its early supporters were free to rationally defend principles that later proved to be morally heinous. We cannot vulgarize the public defense of Nazi parties by careless “talking shit”.
In Brazil, the threat that one day we will have to face a supernationalist regime with theocratic foundations is born with the proto-fascist slogan “Brazil above all and God above all”.
“The great isolation is to surround yourself with those who think like you”. The sentence contained in the book “The Banality of Evil” —written by the German Jewish philosopher Hannah Arendt, who also lived an intellectual and loving relationship with a Nazi, the philosopher Martin Heidegger — and Margherita Sarfatti’s involvement with fascism are two examples for who forgets that biological racism and anti-Semitism were the worst, but not the first Nazi-fascist evils.
It all started with the vulgarity of everyone who defended him.
