Letters from Vienna #120
Fellini, Pasolini and the Fascination of Fascism
Italy before, during and after the war
Whitney Webb said in a recent interview[1] that the direction we’re moving in (at a mind-blowing speed) is Fascism; there’s no reason to doubt her. Socialism and Communism might be Deep State ideologies, which are dear to the heart (if such a word is appropriate) of the Establishment (for the simple reason that they allow the state to control the lives of each and every individual) but the ideology of choice is Fascism. This is what is meant by “private/public partnership” (corporatism): the oligarchs are being permitted to take control of everything; our personal property, our bodies as well as our minds. Thus, the concentration of wealth, the censorship and brainwashing which preceded and accelerated in the course of the Scamdemic were no accidental by-products; on the contrary: they were the aim of the exercise.
Pasolini
Pier Paolo Pasolini (who was born in 1922) once said: “I was born in a fascist world and I didn’t notice fascism, just as a fish does not notice he is in the water. That was while I was a child. But when I was about fourteen or fifteen I gave up reading adventure stories and stopped saying my Hail Mary; I became an agnostic and started having literary ambitions; I began to read my first serious books, Dostoyevsky and Shakespeare, and then Rimbaud and the hermetics, who belonged to a culture which fascism disapproved of and rejected, I felt outside society (or the society began to be challenged unconsciously by me). The thing which produced this was my reading of the poets. As with the peasants and Friulian, it only needed a moment to make me realise I was on the side of the opposition. From the start, my opposition was an ingenuous one, it was purely in the realm of ideas; I just thought it was normal and easy to discuss things and when I spoke up on a literary topic in public meetings, the GUFs (fascist university youth) or in one of the pseudo-cultural meetings the fascists organised from time to time I did so ingenuously without realising that this was an act of rebellion.”[2]
Of note is the fact that he was a member of a Fascist organisation to begin with, his father was an officer in the army (and a Fascist) and when he talked of “being called up”[3] (in September 1943) he failed to mention that a year before, in July 1942, he’d attended a three-week course in order to become a reserve officer.[4] He was most probably thinking of following the career of his father before catastrophe struck.
The capture of his father by the British, the Allied invasion of Italy and the fall of Mussolini changed everything. Instead of being an officer in the army he found himself to be a prisoner of war. He managed to escape and fled to Casara, a tiny village in Vicenza, a province of Veneto where he experienced the world of the peasantry, who he literally fell in love with. While he started to write poetry in the language of the peasants (Friuli) his brother joined the resistance in the hills, where he eventually perished in a maelstrom of intrigue and treachery.
Fellini
Federico Fellini (who was born in 1920) was, according to Hollis Alpert: “not anti-fascist as much as non-fascist”.[5] “By his own admission, he did everything he could think of not to be called up. Through the help of friends, he obtained a medical certificate stating that he had a heart murmur. Once, when due for a physical examination, he arranged to stay in a clinic, swathed in bandages.”
“De Bellis, the editor of “Marc’ Aurelio”, was viewed favourably by the Minister of Popular Culture, and the paper continued on its humorous course with the proviso, from on high, that it devote itself more often to current matters in line with officially decreed policy. This, of course, meant supporting the war effort, both Italian and German. In fact, the paper was for a time printed in a bilingual edition for German consumption.”[6]
“Fellini, during the early war years (1940-1942), stayed out of the army by means of the “sick leaves” granted to him each time he presented his medical certificate. But early in 1943 he was ordered to report once more for examination…He went to the military hospital to have his disability certificate renewed. Each time, in the past, friends on the staff had helped him, but this time he saw only one familiar face, and was given a shrug of resignation. The reason became clear when Fellini saw that German officers were observing the examination procedures. After a cursory going-over, Fellini was declared fit for military service and handed three documents. One notified him that he was hereby inducted into the army, a second indicated his regiment, and a third ordered him to report immediately to its headquarters in Puglia. He also learned that the regiment was to embark to Greece.”
“Fellini was in an unreasoning rage when he left the hospital. While an astonished sentry looked on, he tore the army documents into shreds…”[7]
Only a madman or someone with extremely good connections would do something like that and Fellini was certainly no madman. Without listing all the similar stories recounted by Alpert, such as the blowing up of the recruiting station and destruction of Fellini’s records or his escape from captivity by embracing a German officer, it suffices to say that Fellini’s account of his war years is less than reliable.
Tullio Kezich paints a more prosaic but better documented picture of the director.[8] What becomes apparent is that Fellini was a hard-working, relatively prosperous journalist who worked for the radio as well as a screenwriter. He wasn’t sent to the front as cannon fodder because the regime regarded him as being highly useful. In fact, between 1942 and 1943, he worked directly for the Ufficio Soggetti (office for screenplay ideas) of the ACI, the Italian film association run by Vittorio Mussolini, Benito’s son. There he met Roberto Rossellini who later asked Fellini to work on “Roma città aperta” (Rome, Open City), which would help establish both as bone-fide anti-Fascists.
Postwar
Tony Judt tells us: “Although a former Axis power, Italy was authorised by the Allied governments to carry out its own trials and purges — it had, after all, switched sides in September 1943. But there was considerable ambiguity as to what and who should be prosecuted. Whereas elsewhere in Europe most collaborators were by definition tarred with “Fascism”, in Italy the term embraced too broad and ambiguous a constituency. Having been governed by its own Fascists from 1922-43, the country was initially liberated from Mussolini’s rule by one of his own marshals, Pietro Badoglio, whose first anti-Fascist government itself consisted largely of former Fascists.”
“The only obviously prosecutable Fascist crime was collaboration with the enemy after (the German invasion of) September 8th 1943. As a result, most of those charged were in the occupied north and were connected to the puppet government installed at Salò on Lake Garda. The much-mocked “Were you a Fascist?” questionnaire (the “Scheda Personale”) circulated in 1944 focused precisely on the difference between Salò and non-Salò Fascists. Sanctions against the former rested on Decree #159, passed in July 1944 by the interim legislative Assembly, which described “acts of special gravity which, while not in the bounds of crime, [were] considered contrary to the norms of sobriety and political decency”.”
“This obscure piece of legislation was designed to get around the difficulty of prosecuting men and women for acts committed while in the employ of recognised national authorities. But the High Court established in September 1944 to try the more important prisoners was staffed by judges and lawyers who were themselves mostly ex-Fascists, as were the personnel of the Extraordinary Assize Courts set up to punish minor employees of the collaborationist regime. In these circumstances the proceedings were hardly calculated to garner much respect among the population at large.”
“Unsurprisingly, the outcome satisfied no-one. By February 1946, 394,000 government employees had been investigated, of whom just 1,580 were dismissed. Most of those questioned claimed gattopardismo (“leopardism” or “spot-changing”), arguing that they had played a subtle double game in the face of Fascist pressure — after all, membership of the Fascist Party had been obligatory for civil servants. Since many of those doing the questioning could just as easily have found themselves on the other side of the table, they were decidedly sympathetic to this line of defense. Following the highly-publicized trials of a few senior Fascists and generals the promised purge of government and administration petered out.”
“The High Commission assigned the task of administering the purge was shut down in March 1946 and three months later the first amnesties were announced, including the cancellation of all prison sentences under five years. Virtually every prefect, mayor and mid-level bureaucrat purged in the years 1944-45 would get his job back or avoid payment of the fines imposed, and most of the nearly 50,000 Italians imprisoned for Fascist activities spent little time in jail. At most 50 people were judicially executed for their crimes, but that does not include 55 Fascists massacred by partisans in Schio Prison on July 17th 1945.”
“During the Cold War, Italy’s suspiciously painless transition from Axis power to democratic ally was often blamed upon foreign (American) pressure as well as the political influence of the Vatican. In reality matters were more complex. To be sure, the Catholic Church got off very lightly indeed, in view of Pius XII's warm relations with Fascism and the pro-actively blind eye he turned to Nazi crimes in Italy and elsewhere. Church pressure was brought to bear. And the Anglo-American military authorities certainly were reluctant to remove compromised administrators while they were trying to re-establish normal life throughout the peninsula. And on the whole the purge of Fascists was more efficiently carried out in regions where the left-wing Resistance and its political representatives held sway.”
“But it was Palmiro Togliatti, the 51-year old leader of the Italian Communist Party who, as Minister of Justice in the post-war coalition government, drafted the June 1946 Amnesty. After two decades in exile and many years as a high-ranking official in the Communist International, Togliatti had few illusions about what was and what was not possible in the aftermath of the European war. Upon his re turn from Moscow, in March 1944, he announced in Salerno his Party's commitment to national unity and parliamentary democracy—to the confusion and surprise of many of his followers.”[9]
If there is ever proof of the fact that both Fascism and Communism are two sides of the same coin: Palmiro Togliatti provided it.
It’s easy to condemn both Fellini and Pasolini for not being more honest about their involvement with Fascism but at the same time their creation of great films more than outweighs any failing.
[2] p.17 Pasolini on Pasolini, Interviews with Oswald Stack
[3] p. 19, Ibid
[4] p.44 Pier Paolo Pasolini, Nico Naldini
[5] p.43 Fellini A Life, Hollis Alpert
[6] pp.43-44
[7] p.45
[8] Federico Fellini, Eine Biografie, Tullio Kezich
[9] pp. 47-48 Postwar: a History of Europe since 1945, Tony Judt