In 1937, the director of To have to of the time, Georges Pelletier, reports with admiration on the Italy of Benito Mussolini throughout travel notes published in October and November. A country, he depicts to us on October 28, “recovered since 1920, because a leader found himself to take it in hand, shake it, instill in it a will and because he partially carried out his gigantic task of to reform a nation worthy of a glorious past”.
“The strength of the fascist regime is its works”, he continued on November 9, taking care to point out the few dangers of totalitarianism but concluding, nevertheless, that “who admires the fruit of this tenacious effort towards the reconstruction of a whole country can only wish that the regime lasts”.
Another time, certainly. Not because of fascist temptation, or because in the Quebec of the 1930s, this complacency fueled anti-communism, but because at that time, anti-fascist criticism was not discreet. “Who pays them to accomplish this beautiful apostolate? » asks the journalist Flambeau in 1938 in the newspaper authorityabout not only Pelletier’s “admiring tour”, but more generally, as he also wrote in 1936 in Canada, about our “‘good’ newspapers, which do not hide their fascist sympathies”. Other times, certainly, because while today, the apologies of fascism take their ease and brandish just as much the threat of the ugly left, the Quebec media space gives them free rein.
Comfortable grandstand
Since the rise to power of the neofascist Giorgia Meloni and the Fratelli d’Italia party on September 25 in Italy, the main newspapers of the province have served as a comfortable platform for a dangerous complacency towards them. The appeal of the far right, we read in a formidable circular reasoning, is explained quite simply by the dangers posed by non-white immigration. “The best way to roll out the red carpet for the far right is to open the borders wide and let in more immigrants than we are able to integrate,” wrote Richard Martineau on September 26, before his colleague Joseph Facal adds to it the next day: “The answer lies in one word: immigration. »
And Meloni like his party, we are also told, would not be (neo or post) fascist, far from it, especially since the real threat would be on the left of the spectrum anyway. ” [Q]what do we think of his program”, assures us Christian Rioux on September 30 in the pages of To have to, Meloni claims to have distanced himself from fascism. Even more, he explains to us in his charge against the “anti-fascist theatre”, the real problem of fascism would in any case be its anchoring… on the left.
What is surprising here is not so much, unfortunately, the positions expressed and their distressing lack of rigor. The least informed readership knows this: decades of research in the humanities and social sciences indicate, contrary to what our columnists assert, that, against a backdrop of neoliberal destruction of our public services, living conditions and collective capacities, the best way to open the door to the far right is unequivocally the normalization of its themes, including, specifically, the threat of “mass immigration” and other ideological pirouettes inspired by the “great replacement”.
The same is true when Christian Rioux strives to “romanticize” fascism, from which Meloni would distance himself anyway, by calmly brandishing the proposals of Renzo de Felice, a historian who died nearly 30 years ago and whose the works are part of a more recent historiography which has long theorized what Rioux does not seem to have mastered. Numerous works, including those of Roger Griffin, allow us to appreciate the evolution of the extreme right which, faced with the impossibility of expressing ideas directly inspired by the fascist and Nazi parties of the Second World War because of the unanimous condemnation of the atrocities that have resulted from it engages in a process of normalization and legitimization of which movements such as the coalition led by Giorgia Meloni are the product.
What is surprising here is therefore not so much, very unfortunately, these dangerous and not very rigorous positionings, but rather the open field through which they weave their way, the appearance of indifference and the absence of response emanating from the media ecosystem. Quebec.
With the exception of a text by journalist Sam Harper on the subject, published in the media Pivot on September 29, 2022, our “‘good’ newspapers, which do not hide their fascist sympathies”, meet with no resistance. At the very moment when the extreme right is gaining ground everywhere, and when its normalization, its apologies and the complacency towards it directly participate in the violence of which it is the name. Let’s not stay silent.
Replica of Christian Rioux
It is not a question of making the “apology” of anything, but of recalling that before being of the right or the left, fascism is first of all a revolutionary and totalitarian project which rejects the principles of liberalism and parliamentary democracy. Theses that we find nowhere in the program of Fratelli d’Italia, and even less in that of his center-right coalition. According to your logic, The duty, which supported the war effort from 1940, should therefore also be qualified as a neofascist on the pretext that the one who was its director for 15 years, Georges Pelletier, would have admired some of Mussolini’s achievements? But in a militant discourse that goes so far as to accuse the entire “Quebec media ecosystem” of “fascist sympathies”, what room is there for nuance?