In memory of all those who knew to accept the suffering and death with courage and dignity.

This plaque hangs on the wall of the Holocaust museum at the site of the former Concentration Camp Risiera de San Sabba, in Trieste, Italy. I don’t have to tell you why I am thinking about it and all the other impressions gained during my last visit to Italy in 2018. We owe the victims of fascism to sound the alarm.

I am not sure what is worse, the outcome of this weekend’s Italian elections, with historically low participation due to bad weather as much as disillusionment by younger voters who stayed home, or the white-washing of the result we see in the international media. The right-wing bloc composed of the far-right Fratelli d’Italia (FdI), the right-wing Lega and the centre-right Forza Italia performed as predicted, with FdI leader Giorgia Meloni likely to become the next prime minister.

Meloni is a true heir to Mussolini, and no claims of “post-fascism, breaking the glass ceiling as a woman, she is no tyrant, nothing much will change for Italy since they always vote out those who underperform,” or any of the other softening assurances can hide the factual truth: the Italian voters opted for a self-proclaimed fascist, surrounded by other extremists and abetted by a center-right coalition that wanted power. I think the worst statements for me were by those who had always insisted that there is no chance for a revival of fascism (in Europe or elsewhere) and then, seeing the results, refer to the democratic process that led to right-wing power, essentially saying: “Deal with it.”

In her acceptance speech Meloni used anti-Semitic dogwhistles about refusing to be slaves to international financiers. Yesterday she proclaimed that she considers banning same-sex couples from adopting children, and possibly dissolving same-sex couples’ legal parentage over the children they’ve already adopted. Her program includes disappearing the Sinti and Roma from the street, guarded camps for illegal migrants, incarceration of leftist, and destroying the union offices. Here is an in-depth description of her rise to power and her goals.

In general, Italy is the Western country that has suffered the most severe and prolonged economic decline over the last decades other than Greece. There has been a severe downslide since the 1980s. Italians are earning less in real terms than they did in the 1990s, and large number of scientists and others in the STEM field have left the country due to lack of support. The resulting lack of development and economic stagnation is one of the key conditions that we know leads to people embracing political extremes.

The Italian left has been fighting against each other instead of forging a coalition that would have provided a chance to garner enough votes. It is also the case that the Italian roots of fascism have not been historically worked through, in contrast to, say, Germany, which has tried to analyze and understand the causes for the catastrophe the nation unleashed on the world. Italian voters might have opted for change, rather than the ideology underlying Meloni’s power book. But that does not solve the problem that once in power, these ideologies can quickly turn the world into chaos. Particularly when they are part of an international alliance that mutually reinforces each other, with Victor Urban and Steve Bannon, for example, being declared allies of Meloni.

Trieste itself has a complex history, a place apart under various occupiers, and one that had a complicated relationship with its Slovenian neighbors and part-time occupiers, with lots of anti- Slav sentiment held up to today, as part of a general anti-immigrant movement that the FdI stoked and exploited. The town and harbor were a pivotal part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, a link between Italy, Central Europe and the Balkans. There were violent liberation movements at the beginning of the 20th century, and the US and Britains who controlled Trieste after WW II only gave it back to Italy in 1954, when they were sure it would not fall in then Communist Yugoslavia’s hand.

Trieste was a magnet for intellectuals, with James Joyce, who lived and wrote here for years, still reigning supreme on the literary tourist circuit, next to Italo Svevo. Their commemorative busts have recently gotten dubious company: in 2019 the city erected a statue of Gabriel d’Annunzio, a nationalist who openly inspired fascism and is claimed as a hero by the extreme right. Last year, Trieste was a hotbed of Covid-deniers and demonstrations against vaccination. As a consequence, the city suffered a large number of infected and a serious crisis at the local hospitals.

Historically the city was a symbolically crucial site for Italian nationalism as a laboratory and showcase for fascism, with new buildings erected on a massive scale and fascist agitators shipped in from other parts of the country to encourage the movement’s development there in the 1930s. The central part of the town is a tourist hub, with loads of visitors from cruise ships roaming the small streets and large plazas; the neighborhoods up the hills get quickly less picturesque, with poverty visible in the outskirts.

Mussolini himself visited in September 1938 and announced in a rousing speech, delivered at the Piazza Unità, the promulgation of the racial laws.

He sanctioned the complete expulsion of Jewish citizens from civil society. In 1943, he was toppled after the successful Allied invasion of southern Italy, but the northern half of the country was now occupied by its Nazi “allies.”

Trieste and the province of Fruili became part of the Reich, forcibly tugged back into their pre-1918 alignment with central Europe. It was the Nazis who converted an urban rice processing plant, the Risiera di San Sabba, into a transit camp, with indications that it was also intended from the start as a death camp, the only one actually inside an Italian city, within earshot of the population. Ovens designed for drying rice provided a ready-made infrastructure for a new, grimmer, purpose.

Prisoners held at San Sabba – some to die there, some on their way to other camps across occupied Europe – ranged from local Jews to people with learning disabilities to other members of the area’s resistance to fascism, including the writers Boris Pahor and Giani Stuparich. In charge of the camp was one of Austria’s most notorious Nazis: Odilo Globočnik, the man responsible for the liquidation of the Warsaw Ghetto and the beginning of the ethnic cleansing of Poland, among numerous other appalling crimes.(Ref.)

Here are some photographs from the memorial site – the sculpture in the right upper corner stands in place of the crematorium chimney. The torture cells were directly adjacent to those housing the inmates, leaving them exposed to the screams that would soon be their own. The majority of over 5000 deaths were cause by beatings. Beaten to death, yes. Some prisoners were shot. The neighborhood was directly adjacent, the population fully aware of what was happening. Many of those neighbors and other collaborators of the Nazis were killed and thrown into mass graves in ravines of the area by Tito and his partisans who sought revenge for the thousands of killed Slavs after 1945. The region has clearly experienced the horrors and consequences unleashed by fascism. And yet.

In last week’s elections, the Trieste region voted for the right wing bloc (FdI, League and Forza) by close to 50%.

We can’t despair, but we can’t ignore the developments either. Here is the partisans’ song.

Note to Self: The strength of right wing movements in Hungary, Sweden, and now Italy (and potentially in our own country come election time) should propel us to examine the link between fascism and capitalism. Can’t do that in the framework of a blog, alas. But will write about the stages of fascism next time.