A bit of a self-satisfied, everyone-else-is-a-fool, told-you-so story for the teller. IME, those are signals that the story reveals the teller, the culture of the teller, but not facts.
Of course, I don't know. I think the hard thing in these situations is that we humans tend to trust personal stories like this one - it's rude not to. My comment is rude, in a sense, transgressing in this social interaction. But the accurate, truthful course is to treat the facts as [edit:] nothing - not as maybe true, etc., but as if they were never said.
It's a slippery slope. Mussolini defeated the Mafia in southern Italy. However, his gov't did it in a brutal manner. Lots of innocent people rounded up too.
"The hand of Vengeance found the bed
To which the Purple Tyrant fled;
The iron hand crush'd the Tyrant's head
And became a Tyrant in his stead."
--The Grey Monk, William Blake
Fascism is popular everywhere right now, so it's not dependant on the location (Sicily in this case). The question is, how did it become popular in so many places simultaneously?
But the modern, far-right neofascists admire Israel more than the Third Reich.
The resurgence of the far-right began in the early 2000s when Jörg Haider‘s Freedom Party took power in Austria and Jean-Marie le Pen made the run-off in France.
It got much more powerful during the financial crisis of 2008 and the migration crisis caused by the Arab Spring in the mid 2010s.
It’s not a mystery why people are pissed off and looking for non-mainstream candidates.
A big mystery is why the far-left has vanished.
The Occupy Protests fizzled out, Jeffrey Corbyn imploded the Labour Party, and Jacobin put up a paywall.
Inflation in basic goods and exorbitant rents mean that a lot of people are struggling far more than GDP-style indicators would imply.
There's also secular decline in a lot of southern european manufacturing, so the economic basis for stable income and family life in a lot of places just isn't there anymore.
> The left wing is also very pro-... globalization.
That conflates the centrists, including left and right (when there was a center-right) with the left. The progressive left was always dubious at best about globalization, iirc.
The migration thing is, to a great extent, people inflaming ethnic hatred. People like open borders when they want to migrate themselves, or hire migrants; it also brings trade and tourism; it brings peace and eliminates pointless political distinctions.
I agree that globalization needs to address the relatively easy mobility of capital relative to labor. But that problem is arguably extreme capitalism - where the capitalists get whatever they want - not globalization. Globalization writ by labor would have looked a lot different.
Actual “labor” has a strong social conservative streak, especially in regards to migration.
Notice the protests by farmers, truckers, etc.
The progressive left in America is formed in heavily globalized universities. They are 100% in support of globalization, as they are beneficiaries and producers of it.
I don’t know where the “heart and soul” of the European progressive left is. Other than Spanish socialists, I don’t think there are many.
> Actual “labor” has a strong social conservative streak, especially in regards to migration.
Eh, this varies. Most people in the labour force are young, and young people are generally leftward-leaning. In some regions of the UK, labour have traditionally been pretty socially progressive.
It's only 'corrupt' though, if there was any expectation that the resources of the state were to be controlled by anyone but the ultimate leader. Therefore, the view of whether a given absolute leader is corrupt or not depends more on the society's expectations of them than it depends on their actions. A monarch in an absolute monarchy can never be considered corrupt, even if widely seen as wicked.
The semantics are not very meaningful; I will concede that :) My point was simply that the concept of democracy isn't necessarily an obvious one. Perhaps in early 20th-century Italy, where there was still a technically supreme monarchy, and the tradition of democratic elections itself was only a few generations old, putting trust in one man alone (Mussolini) might have seemed reasonable or even ideal.
> Perhaps in early 20th-century Italy, where there was still a technically supreme monarchy, and the tradition of democratic elections itself was only a few generations old, putting trust in one man alone (Mussolini) might have seemed reasonable or even ideal.
Might have? Do we have evidence? And if it did, what do you conclude from that?
> the concept of democracy isn't necessarily an obvious one
That was due to the Allied Military post-WW2 occupation of Italy. There are a couple of books on that very subject. These Mafioso presented themselves as anti-fascist and anti-communist to help their appointment into positions of power.
lots of Mafia in the USA placed in positions of authority in labor unions -- see Teamsters. Some US political thinking was to use these harsh, often effective people as a "lesser evil" versus genuine communist-labor organizers. Due to many abuses of workers (see History of Slave or Indentured Labor) there were many communist labor organizers, for real.
Of course, I don't know. I think the hard thing in these situations is that we humans tend to trust personal stories like this one - it's rude not to. My comment is rude, in a sense, transgressing in this social interaction. But the accurate, truthful course is to treat the facts as [edit:] nothing - not as maybe true, etc., but as if they were never said.