Gianni Alemanno hailed as Duce

Via the Guardian:

Italy’s new parliament met for the first time today with applause for Rome’s mayor-elect, Gianni Alemanno, a day after followers celebrated his triumph with straight-arm salutes and fascist-era chants.

Alemanno, a former neo-fascist youth leader, took 54% of the vote in a run-off on Sunday and Monday, crushing his rival, Francesco Rutelli, a deputy prime minister in the last, centre-left government.

Silvio Berlusconi, who won a general election earlier this month, welcomed the latest evidence of Italy’s leap to the right by declaring: “We are the new Falange”. Although he took care to wrap his remark in a classical context, his choice of words appeared to be a nod and a wink to his most extreme supporters.

The original Falange — the word means “phalanx” — was the Spanish fascist party, founded in the 1930s, which supplied Francisco Franco’s dictatorship with its ideological underpinning.

The prime minister-elect’s closest ally, Umberto Bossi, the Northern League leader, kept up the intimidating rhetoric, arriving for the first session of Italy’s parliament warning of violence if the centre-left did not go along with his plans for federalism.

“I don’t know what the left wants [but] we are ready,” he told reporters. “If they want conflicts, I have 300,000 men always on hand.”

On Monday night, the area around Rome’s city hall rang to chants of “Duce! Duce!”, the term adopted by Italy’s dictator, Benito Mussolini, equivalent to the German “Führer”. Supporters of the new mayor gave the fascist Roman straight-arm salutes.

I hesitate to categorize this as Retroculture, but certainly they are acting traditionally and with an anticommunist slant…

Real-Life Retroculture is not as vigorous as Lind’s fictional visions

William S. Lind wrote a fiction piece in the 1995 Washington Post that offered an extremely optimistic view of “Retroculture.”

But it was what happened on the cultural front that really made the difference for us. The Retroculture Movement had been growing quietly since the mid-1990s. It wasn’t political, just individuals and families deciding to live again in the old ways. …
The family was the first Victorian institution to make a comeback….

The schools came next. …
We deconstructed most of the universities. …
Christians took back their churches from the agnostic clergy, and the pews filled up again. ….

As the Victorian spirit spread, standards were revived. Communities decided that some things were acceptable and some weren’t. Crime wasn’t; with justice locally controlled and the lawyers digging potatoes, somebody who mugged on Tuesday hanged on Wednesday.

Entertainment was expected to be decent. In a world that had grown ugly enough, there was small desire for ugliness in art and music as well. The Victorian entertainments were revived, and young people in particular went in heavily for choral singing. The last rock concert was held in 2013 in the Cleveland arena. It featured all the big rock bands lift in North America and most of the remaining rock fans too. The Greater Cleveland Garden Club sealed the doors and pumped in a herbal compound, derived largely from Queen Anne’s lace and Viola odorata, that rectified brain damage in the cranial region connecting hearing to taste. The fans were soon holding their ears and whistling “Dixie,” and the ancient Rolling Stones ended up improvising Albinoni on their electrical guitars.

I write this from the real world of 2008. American rock concerts are not likely to stop in five years.

What are the real problems of Retroculture?