Most people, even on the Left, only know fragments of Italy's "Years of Lead." This episode pulls the whole picture into focus: the mass worker upsurge after the boom years, the 1969 Piazza Fontana bombing and the death of Giuseppe Pinelli, the rise of the Red Brigades, the kidnapping and execution of Aldo Moro, and the 1980 Bologna massacre. Alyson and Breht trace how far-right stragismo (mass bombings) intersected with far-left clandestinism, and how segments of the deep state, intelligence services, and the Cold War Gladio architecture shaped a strategy of tension that isolated social movements, kept the socialist and communist left from power, and cleared the way for the establishment of neoliberalism in Italy and beyond. Alyson and Breht then discuss what lessons we can learn from this history and if there are any similarities to the contemporary United States.

Clips for this episode are pulled from this YT documentary HERE

Check out our episode on the Italian fascist Julius Evola HERE

Check out our episode on Carl Schmitt's Concept of the Political HERE

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Italy, the country that first coined the term "fascismo" more than a century ago, is poised on Sunday to elect a prime minister whose party descended from fascism. The failure of Italy's current governing party to maintain a coalition has left Giorgia Meloni and her far-right Brothers of Italy party in the lead. Why would Italy choose to return to its fascist past?

In this episode: 

• Michele Barbero (@MicheleBarbero), AFPTV Live deputy editor-in-chief and writer for Foreign Policy
• Barbara Serra (@BarbaraGSerra), Italian-born journalist and producer of Fascism in the Family: Al Jazeera Correspondent

Episode credits:

This episode was produced by Amy Walters and Ashish Malhotra with our host, Halla Mohieddeen. Ruby Zaman fact-checked this episode. Our production team includes Chloe K Li, Alexandra Locke, Ashish Malhotra, Negin Owliaei, Amy Walters, and Ruby Zaman. Our sound designer is Alex Roldan. Aya Elmileik and Adam Abou-Gad are our engagement producers. Ney Alvarez is Al Jazeera's head of audio.

Connect with us:

@AJEPodcasts on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook

Last Fall, Italians turned out in massive numbers to support the Global Sumud Flotilla to Gaza and to stop weapons shipments to Israel. They held nationwide days of action to "Block Everything." The Unione Syndicale de Base (USB), a grassroots worker-led organization, supported those actions and is now building an international day of action on February 6 against militarization and for stronger social programs. Clearing the FOG speaks with Francesco Staccioli, who leads USB's international organizing, about the current conditions for workers in Italy, state repression, and the necessity of building a global movement against the rise of fascism. Staccioli describes fascism as a product of capitalism and warns that we must work in solidarity to stop fascism and build alternative structures. For more information, visit PopularResistance.org.

The three protagonists of Pasta, Pizza and Propaganda: A Political History of Italian Food TV (Intellect, 2022) are food, television and politics. These are the three main characters that interrelate, collaborate and fight behind the scenes, while in front of the camera the writers, intellectuals and celebrity chefs talk about, prepare or taste the best Italian dishes.

In Pasta, Pizza and Propaganda, Dr. Francesco Buscemi develops a political history of Italian ‘good food’ on national television, and the central role of food in Italian culture. The focus is highly original and this is a unique interdisciplinary study at the intersection between food studies, media studies and politics.

The book retraces the history of Italian food television from a political point of view: the early shows of the pioneers under strict Catholic control in the 1950s and 1960s, the left-wing political twist of the 1970s, the conservative riflusso or resurgence of the 1980s, the disputed Berlusconian era and the rise of the celebrity chefs, which, for better or for worse, makes Italy similar to the other western countries.

The history of Italy since the mid-1950s is retold through the lenses of food television. This lively book demonstrates that cooking spaghetti in a TV studio is a political act, and tries to uncover how it is possible that, while watching on TV how to make pizza, we become citizens.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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Italian filmmaking master, Federico Fellini, takes a nostalgic look at his early life as a teenager in fascist Italy with his final masterpiece, 1973's "Amarcord." While this film is not heavy on the violent and repressive aspects of fascism, it does offer an intricate portrait of a town mostly at ease with its repressive government. Filled with many classic Fellini moments and characters, this time Fellini uses his canvas to portray Italian citizens trapped in a fool's paradise, unable to see the horrors that will befall the country in a few short years.

This episode explores the haunting beauty and quiet devastation of "The Garden of the Finzi-Continis," Vittorio De Sica’s adaptation of Giorgio Bassani’s semi-autobiographical novel. Set in Ferrara, Italy, during the late 1930s and early 1940s, the film focuses on an aristocratic Jewish family who, shielded behind the walls of their estate, remain willfully detached from the mounting threat of Italian fascism. As racial laws erode their rights and community life, their retreat into games, nostalgia, and gentility becomes an allegory for bourgeois denial and complicity.

De Sica renders fascism not through spectacle, but through absence, silence, and subtle exclusion—making this a vital film for understanding how fascism consolidates power not just through violence, but through social norms, legal frameworks, and cultural passivity.

Author Suzanne Cope continues teaching Margaret about the history of women partisans in the Italian resistance, from her upcoming book Women of War.

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Author Suzanne Cope teaches Margaret about the history of women partisans in the Italian resistance, from her upcoming book Women of War.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

International journalist and author Rula Jebreal is currently facing criminal prosecution in Italy for her tweets re PM Meloni’s weaponization of language from the Nazi’s great replacement conspiracy theory, as well as her tweet about Fabio Rampelli’s involvement in a fascist rally (Rampelli is vice president of Italy’s parliament, and a mentor of prime minister Giorgia Meloni).

As The Coalition For Women In Journalism notes, “Jebreal has been a vocal critic of the neo-fascist Fratelli d'Italia party and Israel’s apartheid, military occupation and has faced years of threats, intimidation, surveillance, and smear campaigns.”

Press freedom organizations have documented increasing risks to journalists, especially those working in Palestine, exposing war crimes and Palestinian journalists who challenge ethnonationalism and fascism globally.

Join journalists Rula Jebreal, Naomi Klein, and Nermeen Shaikh for a timely discussion of these critical challenges, and how we can build solidarity with journalists—and others—working on the front lines.

***Please note: This discussion was recorded on January 29, 2025.***

Speakers:

Rula Jebreal is an award-winning international journalist. Jebreal serves on the G7 gender-based violence advisory council and currently is a visiting professor at The University of Miami, where she teaches Communications (course title “Propaganda and Genocides”).

Naomi Klein is an award-winning journalist, New York Times bestselling author, and columnist with The Guardian and co-director of the Centre for Climate Justice at the University of British Columbia. Her newest book is the New York Times-bestseller Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World, now out in paperback.

Nermeen Shaikh is a co-host and senior producer at the independent television news hour Democracy Now! based in New York City. She is the author of The Present as History: Critical Perspectives on Global Power and serves on the Board of Directors of the Nobel Women's Initiative

According to the Financial Times, 225 out of Musk’s 616 tweets and retweets in the first week of January were about UK politics. Meanwhile, Musk has praised the prime minister of Italy, far-right politician Giorgia Meloni, describing her as “even more beautiful on the inside than on the outside.” At a time when his company SpaceX is reportedly in talks for a billion dollar contract with the Italian government. And then there’s his entrance into the German political scene; showing up to AFD rallies and more. Micah spoke to Bojan Pancevski, chief European political correspondent at The Wall Street Journal, about Elon Musk’s political profile in Germany, and its consequences. 

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There is a popular notion that the Italian armed forces of the Second World War were an inferior fighting force. Despite the vast numbers taken prisoner, detailed studies of the experiences of these soldiers remain relatively uncommon and the value of this group to furthering our understanding of the Italian experience of war under Fascism is also rarely acknowledged. The existence in the National Archives of hundreds of pages of transcripts of covert British surveillance of Italian POWs has made it possible to engage with their experiences and opinions in much greater depth. The euphemistically termed 'Special Reports' present historians with a unique insight into how all levels of Italian soldiery viewed Fascist Italy's experience of war, 1940-1943. 

Alexander Henry's book War Through Italian Eyes: Fighting for Mussolini, 1940-1943 (Routledge, 2021) examines reactions to Italian political leadership, the progress of the war, as well as Italian soldiers' 'everyday' views on sex, war, the enemy, death, food, their allies, bravery, race, and killing. These fascinating documents reveal the complexity of the outlook of these men, which persistent - and influential - national stereotypes and historiographical trends fail to acknowledge.

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In this episode of International Horizons, RBI director John Torpey interviews Marla Stone, a historian of Italian fascism at Occidental College, on the resurgence of the far right in Italy. The conversation delves into the origins of this resurgence and how Italy, a fairly homogeneous society, became a recipient of hundreds of thousand migrants, altering the perceptions of threat on Italian citizens that have been successfully instrumentalized by political movements to bring Giorgia Meloni to power. Prof. Stone also discusses the waning of the Italian left, but sees an optimistic future as an increasing number of Italians are promoting diversity.

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On October 1922 Mussolini became head of the Italian government, a situation that would last for twenty years. That power was obtained was largely due to the widespread violence perpetrated by blackshirts throughout Italy (squadristi). Violence however did not end. Old and new blackshirts played a major role in making Italy a fascist country. Contrary to the claims of many scholars that have depicted blackshirts after the March on Rome only as troublemakers for Mussolini, Matteo Millan's The Blackshirts' Dictatorship: Armed Squads, Political Violence, and the Consolidation of Mussolini's Regime (Routledge, 2022) shows that they played a crucial role in establishing a full and totalitarian dictatorship. Squadristi carried out processes of fascistisation, crushed opponents and convinced bystanders and dubious people, consolidating fascist power in many aspects of social, political and even intimate life. By resorting to new archives, a long chronology and a focus on individual perspectives, this book gives voice to the perpetrators of fascist violence and offers new insights into the lives of squadristi throughout the dictatorship, outlining their beliefs, outlooks and expectations. The Blackshirts' Dictatorship: shows that post-1922 squadrismo was not a side effect of Fascism's twenty-year history. On the contrary, violence represents one of the essential components of any definition of Italian Fascism.

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In this first environmental history of Italian fascism, Marco Armiero, Roberta Biasillo, and Wilko Graf von Hardenberg reveal that nature and fascist rhetoric are inextricable. Mussolini's Nature explores fascist political ecologies, or rather the practices and narratives through which the regime constructed imaginary and material ecologies functional to its political project. Mussolini's Nature: An Environmental History of Italian Fascism (MIT Press, 2022) does not pursue the ghost of a green Mussolini by counting how many national parks were created during the regime or how many trees planted. Instead, the reader is trained to recognize fascist political ecology in Mussolini's speeches, reclaimed landscapes, policies of economic self-sufficiency, propaganda documentaries, reforested areas, and in the environmental transformation of its colonial holdings.

The authors conclude with an examination of the role of fascist landscapes in the country's postwar reconstruction: Mussolini's nature is still visible today through plaques, monuments, toponomy, and the shapes of landscapes. This original, and surprisingly intimate, environmental history is not merely a chronicle of conservation in fascist Italy but also an invitation to consider the socioecological connections of all political projects.

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• Get Italian resistance merch

• Thanks to our patreon supporters for making this podcast possible. Special thanks to Jazz Hands, Jamison D. Saltsman and Fernando López Ojeda.
• Edited by Tyler Hill
• Episode graphic: public domain.
• Our theme tune is Bella Ciao, thanks for permission to use it from Dischi del Sole. You can purchase it here or stream it here.

• Get Italian resistance merch

• Thanks to our patreon supporters for making this podcast possible. Special thanks to Jazz Hands, Jamison D. Saltsman and Fernando López Ojeda.
• Edited by Tyler Hill
• Episode graphic: public domain.
• Our theme tune is Bella Ciao, thanks for permission to use it from Dischi del Sole. You can purchase it here or stream it here.

• Get Italian resistance merch

• Thanks to our patreon supporters for making this podcast possible. Special thanks to Jazz Hands, Jamison D. Saltsman and Fernando López Ojeda.
• Edited by Tyler Hill
• Episode graphic: public domain.
• Our theme tune is Bella Ciao, thanks for permission to use it from Dischi del Sole. You can purchase it here or stream it here.

• Get Italian resistance merch

• Thanks to our patreon supporters for making this podcast possible. Special thanks to Jazz Hands, Jamison D. Saltsman and Fernando López Ojeda.
• Edited by Tyler Hill
• Episode graphic: public domain.
• Our theme tune is Bella Ciao, thanks for permission to use it from Dischi del Sole. You can purchase it here or stream it here.

The fastest-rising force in Italian politics is Giorgia Meloni's Fratelli d'Italia - a party with a direct genealogy from Mussolini's regime. Surging to prominence in recent years, it has waged a fierce culture war against the Left, polarised political debate around World War II, and even secured the largest vote share in Italy's 2022 general election. Eighty years after the fall of Mussolini, his heirs, and admirers are again on the brink of taking power. So how exactly has this situation come about?

Mussolini's Grandchildren: Fascism in Contemporary Italy (Pluto Press, 2023) delves into Italy's self-styled 'post-fascist' movements - rooted in historical fascism yet claiming to have 'transcended' it. David Broder highlights the reinventions of far-right politics since the Second World War and examines the interplay between a parliamentary face aimed at integrating fascists into the mainstream and militant fringe groups which, despite their extremism, play an important role in nurturing the broader far right.

Fratelli d'Italia has retained its hegemony over fascist subcultures whilst embracing a raft of more pragmatic policy positions, fusing harsh Islamophobia and anti-communism with support for the European Union and NATO. As countervailing anti-fascist forces in Italian society wane, the far-right party's mission to redeem historical fascism, legitimize its political heirs, and shift the terrain of mainstream politics is proving alarmingly successful.

David Broder is a historian of the Italian far-right. He is a regular contributor to the New Statesman and Internazionale, writing about Italian politics, as well as Europe editor for Jacobin. His writing has also appeared in the New York Times, the Guardian, the Independent, New Left Review and Tribune. He is the author of The Rebirth of Italian Communism: Dissident Communists in Rome, 1943-44 and First They Took Rome: How the Populist Right Conquered Italy.

Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel.

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Sara Goldrick-Rab talks about rampant food and housing insecurity among undergrad and grad students. David Broder, author of Mussolini's Grandchildren and a recent article in the New York Times, discusses the whitewashing of far-right Italian PM Giorgia Meloni.

Behind the News, hosted by Doug Henwood, covers the worlds of economics and politics and their complex interactions, from the local to the global. Find the archive online.

John talks about the newly elected far right prime minister of Italy Giorgia Meloni. He then discusses the 14 early signs of fascism as more countries turn to conservatism and the U.S. embraces many of the signs. Next he interviews Chris Lehmann, DC bureau chief of The Nation magazine, about the Midterms, immigration and Trump. Then he ponders on Senator Kyrsten Sinema's new Republican styled messaging. And finally he chats with Rhonda Hansome about the Brett Favre - Mississippi Welfare scandal.

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Italians have voted decisively for a coalition of right-wing parties, with Giorgia Meloni, leader of the Brothers of Italy, the likely next prime minister. What this means for Italy, Europe and the war in Ukraine remains unclear. Latin American prisons are awful and getting worse. And a surprising hit film makes Chinese authorities nervous.

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Italy’s longest-serving prime minister has died aged 86. He inspired as much derision as devotion, and for all his gaffes and scandals he helped to shape the country’s media—and its economic malaise. Unfettered by the abandoned nuclear deal, Iran is now making its bomb programme unassailable. And bringing the 20th-century idea of “Smell-o-vision” into the 21st.

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When Giorgia Meloni was elected Italy’s prime minister, many people feared she would prove divisive and volatile. Instead, at a time when many other European governments have been in turmoil, her three years in office have been remarkably tranquil. Why German trains no longer run on time. And a very British battle: conker competitions. 

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