Over a thousand people listened to the author Antonio Scuratithe father of the ‘M’ trilogy, one of the editorial cases of recent years (which we’ll also see a Sky Original TV series from soon), at one of the meetings that closed thisVIII edition the Biennale Democrazia, the cultural event conceived and directed by Gustavo Zagrebelsky. An issue entitled “On the Edge of Freedom” – which alternated for four days 220 guests from all over the world, more than 100 sessions – with over 48,000 participants, turning Turin into a veritable laboratory of democracy. The demonstration began last Thursday with a dialogue between the journalists Francesca Mannocchi and the Turkish journalist and activist Ece Temelkuran about “How a dictatorship comes about”, anticipated by the reading of a letter from the senator for life Liliana Segre. And today ended with Antonio Scurati which he reflected together with the deputy director of the daily newspaper Fatto Madeleine Olivelike “Mussolini (also) invented populism”.
The great success of the “M” trilogy (M – The Son of the Century, M – The Man of Providence, M – The Last Days of Europe) lies less in the idea of a “suggestive historical return, 100 years after the facts, which I tell,” he explains Black out, especially given the great topicality of a figure like the political Mussolini. “I believe that Mussolini’s timeliness depends on some of his intuitions about what politics would have become in the era of the masses that was just beginning and is now reaching its mature stage.”
Without ever forgetting “the hand with which Mussolini and fascism raped Italy,” Scurati concentrates on the other handwith which Mussolini did it seduce Italywho within three years as a defeated politician, failed, outcast, to become the people. It is too simplistic and misleading to say that “today they are back, I don’t want to play the screenplay role of the leftist writer because the violence of the fascist troops on the street doesn’t exist,” Skurati replies. But there is – and this is more subtle – then as now, an authoritarian seduction. Mussolini, the inventor of populism, not only understood the importance of total identification between the leader’s body and the people (I am the people. The people am I); the mechanisms of exclusion of the stranger, the different, the dissident; the willingness of an “acrobatic opportunist” to betray and renounce himself (from socialist to staunch follower of socialists, from anti-clerical to clerical, from pacifist to warrior…). Above all, he felt – and here are some references to today and to some political leaders of the Italian scene, but not only, more strongly – the strength of “simplification” and anti-politics (we are not politics, we are anti-politics, we are no party, we are the anti-party) against the old palace mummies.
Mussolini, explains Scurati, argues that “democracy has proved a failed experiment, Parliament unnecessarily complicates life, all problems boil down to a single invading enemy, the enemy stands in front of you and I stand by your side”. He’s the man who lead the masses does not precede and point to high and distant goals, but “like the animals sniff out the coming time”. And what does it smell like? He smells the malaise, the “fear of the hopes of others”. And it is precisely by blowing on these sad passions, on this melancholy of a tired and frightened people, that Mussolini conquers – “one must imagine him as an empty container which fills and grows the more it blows” – Italy. “The audience that Mussolini finds in front of the Opera House (…), the faces are no longer the same (…) – writes Scurati in his M – The Son of the Century – one sees merchants, civil servants, low executives, the dignified and worn jackets of the petty bourgeoisie impoverished by runaway inflation”. A hundred years ago, like today, these melancholic people are still here with us.