Social/Political Comment – News from Everywhere

Comment for Audrey

I wrote this comment in response to the latest essay By Audrey Watters (21st Feb 2025): https://2ndbreakfast.audreywatters.com/automated-contempt

Hi Audrey, Have read your stuff for some years now. It always stirs me, leads me, and makes me think.

These are indeed amazing times. I am surely not the only one who has fallen foul of Godwin’s Law if I note that the TV film “M – Son of the Century’ is surely relevant to understanding the current cultural and political darkness that is swallowing America (I’m in the UK, where it’s typically very dull politically and where we have not left the years of Tory disdain behind but now suffer its replacement, a Tory-Lite form of politics … but that is another story … ).

Anyway, the film is stunningly well made – and, paradoxically, brings cinematic beauty to one of the darkest topics. The non-fiction novel on which it is based is also good (though a challenging read). Key point, to me, is that Trumpist politics is much, much closer to Mussolini’s fascism than to the more obvious Nazi parallel. Vanity and ego, self-delusion and self-aggrandisement, and above all violence, violence, violence all perpetrated for the good of the nation, the rebirth of the Italian soul … just as today for example Steve Bannon, that vile creature Alex Karp, and others, talk brazenly about murdering people in large numbers. Yet no-one blinks.

(Karp is the relevant case here – encouraging shareholders to invest in AI that he openly says he uses to instil fear and to commit murder, as he does against Palestinians …)

In the film the last word is spokne at the very end of Episode 8 when in 1924, faced with the loss of power resulting from the latest savage murder of a political opponent, Mussolini demands of the elected assembly that all it takes under the terms of the Italian constitution is for one member to call for an impeachment.

“Come on, speak, just one of you …”. No-one does of course.

He turns to us, the fourth wall, and with a subtle smirk to camera says simply “silencio”.

END.

Saying nothing says it all!

Must stop. Love your writing. We share your despair – hope this comment does not add to it!

Incidentally I have got hold of a copy of Karp’s book ‘The Technological Republic’ which glows radioactively inside my Kindle (if you can bear to look at it, it is grist to the mill-stones of anger that burn us up). The TechnoRepublic must return to it roots he says, which lie with the military machine, the machine that kick-started everything worthwhile techn0logically (AI) but which has become mired in trivia … (so says the billionaire technologist!).

Same old shit!

Mussolini

Watched ‘M’ the other night – a brilliant piece of TV film about the rise of Mussolini, and the emergence of modern fascism. So good I got hold of Antonio Scurati’s book, “M: Son of the Century” on which it is based. Also a good read, although literary in form rather than documentary.

We forget, and of course cannot feel, the appalling degradation that the First World War brought to those countries that ‘lost’ … except that Italy’s loss was not military defeat, because of course they were among the Allies, but the betrayal of promises made in the Treaty of London. It was a very complicated situation – after all Italy decided not to fight with the German/Austrian alliance of which they were a part because Italy saw an opportunity to regain territories it had lost in previous wars! And by the end of the 1st World War Europe as a whole was burning with the passionate possibility of a widespread socialist revolution stimulated by the the Bolshevik revolution.

Scurati and the film emphasise the depths of despair that the Italian survivors of that war had fallen into. All the promises of victory wiped away and to make the humiliation of the conscripts worse the promises of a fulsome welcome on their return from the battlefields were replacd with ostracism.

Mussolini had been a Marxist until he rejected the threat of the seizure of power by the socialist Movement following the Bolshevik successes. He (supposedly) never rejected the working class foundations but sought an active overthrow of all party political government. An ‘anti-party’

Thus fascism in Italy arises from the depression of defeat and national humiliation in spite of sharing the victory in a turbulent war..

None of this directly explains the rise of fascism today (for that is what is happening) although many of the markers are there. A particular idea early in the book catches eye: the fear that many of us feel as the madness of our increasingly psychotic democracies stretches its tentacles and encircles us. Some say, there is little you can do but look at the things you can control – and these aren’t many – but a least you might hang on to your sanity and avoid the dark wind of except that fear blows away confidence in the future.

This is all very well, and is a comforting idea – whatever it is that you can do will at least maintain your soul. But isn’t this exactly what Martin Niemöller was writing about … “First they came for …”?

Scurati writes about the fear that stalked Italian cities as division and often brutal strife caused people to lock their doors and shutter their windows and the political mobs paraded and or rampaged in the the streets:

“Faced with that future, they walled themselves up in the prison of the present.”

Capone, Chicago … Trump

Just re-read ‘Scarface and the Untouchable: Eliot Ness and the Battle for Chicago‘* by Max Collins and Brad Schwartz. * An excellent book based on a load of research. Also if you, like me, you cannot abide the superficiality of American culture, its overweaning self-importance, its breeding of corruption and racist colonialism it provides some useful background.

Of course my home, the UK, is not completely innocent of these traits (e.g. smugness and a creepy shift to the right side of politic aka the wrong side!) but America has for some time been a sad nation in search of style and humanity.

In a casual moment a while back I watched the movie ‘The Untouchables’ with San Connery and Kevin Costner and realised it is a load of baloney. I went back to the book that I read a few years ago and the authors confirm that the movie is BS. The story they tell is much more interesting and bears little relation to Hollywood’s ideas about prohibition crime as depicted in that movie (though some of the pre-war noir movies are well worth watching and more accurate).

Takeaway:

What is striking is the character of Capone. A murderer yes, famous for killing three of his gang byt swinging his own baseball bat and then having his cronies shoot them until they were not quite dead but what stands out, and it quite chilling, is how closely Trump’s attitudes and beliefs so like Capone … him but without his intelligence or style! Trump is a black void, preferring corruption over honesty, confusing sycophancy for proof of self-worth and a less than hidden disdain for the law.

At least, the very least, Capone had brains.

Mind you, The US legal system and its enforcers were significantly to blame as well – the stories about Chicago’s mayoral elections of the time are eerie because of their similarity to contemporary US politics (e.g. Mayor Thompson). Lies and graft, lies and graft. I am not sure that much has changed in the years since.

The overall conclusion of the book is pessimistic: the effort to fight gangster crime, to stymie its flourishing, is fruitless:

“There are a thousand Dillingers … and a thousand Capones who know better than to write checks. The Bureau of Investigation is designed to prune the criminal tree but the tree goes on flourishing.”

Posted to Twitter and BSky:

Just re-read ‘Scarface and the Untouchable’. Relevance? What stands out is that Trump is so like Capone but without his intelligence or style!!

Capone’s moral compass was bent but at least he he had one! Trump is a zombie. Never honest, never kind, always greedy.

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Posted to BSky

The new vanguard of crooks, liars and traitors swindling their way into the political mainstream is depressing. A good case study is to be found in ‘Scarface and the Untouchable’.

Paradoxically, fighting gangster crime is like pruning a plant to make it stronger.