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From the Guardian
A civil court in Rome has ruled that Facebook must immediately reactivate the account of the Italian neo-fascist party CasaPound and pay the group €800 (£675) for each day the account has been closed, according to local media.
Facebook shut the party's account, which had 240,000 followers, along with its Instagram page in early September. A Facebook spokesperson told the Ansa news agency at the time: "Persons or organisations that spread hatred or attack others on the basis of who they are will not have a place on Facebook and Instagram. The accounts we removed today violate this policy and will no longer be present on Facebook or Instagram."
According to an earlier article:
CasaPound was founded in the late 1990s as a pro-Mussolini drinking club. Named after the 20th-century American poet Ezra Pound, who was known for his fascist sympathies and antisemitism, it claims to support a democratic variant of fascism but it is accused of encouraging violence and racism.
In a 2011 interview with the Guardian, the party's secretary, Simone Di Stefano, described Mussolini's brand of fascism as "our point of reference, a vision of the state and the economy, and the concept of sacrifice". Di Stefano ran for prime minister in the last general election.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 17 2019, @08:50AM (17 children)
Are not they afraid of being hung by their heels from a lamp-post? Or the even more colorful exit of the Khaddafi. Fascists never die peacefully, let alone in their sleep.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 17 2019, @09:13AM (1 child)
Nah, the mafia guys can't afford the time to deal with such trivial matters as drunken wannabees.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 17 2019, @09:37AM
Wot? "Lucky" Luciano?
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Bot on Tuesday December 17 2019, @11:14AM (14 children)
I found myself next to a local casapound section inauguration. Police checkpoint, both sides of the road. My impression is that they were looking for incoming trouble more than the casapound guys. Not one explicit fascist symbol around, note that in Italy it is tolerated to keep Mussolini photos even in public places. There are other groups which are much more explicit. The ones most resembling fascists are of course antifa, another variant of totalitarian socialism.
Account abandoned.
(Score: 3, Informative) by loonycyborg on Tuesday December 17 2019, @12:24PM (13 children)
There is a lot of misconceptions about "fascism". Even though this word is of Italian origin it's mostly associated with German holocaust. Actual Italian ideology from which this name comes is not promoting ethnic purges via mass executions, so no wonder Italian courts would take dim view on censoring it. Maybe Hitlerian variant of it should be renamed to avoid confusion, maybe to "Lebensraum doctrine". That said I'm not a fan of nationalist ideologies in any case. On the other hand I'm not a fan of censorship either.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 17 2019, @02:30PM (2 children)
An easy way to tell the two apart is that with Italian Fascism, everything falls under the purview of the state, nothing against it, nothing outside of it. So long as you are contributing member to the state, you were a valuable asset, didn't matter if you were recently conquered, the circumstances of your birth didn't matter. Think of the Romans conquering and unifying the Italian tribes.
Under German National Socialism, the state takes on a far more paternalistic character, with the lebansraum as a safe home for the people of a nation, and the removal of ill influences a necessary course of action, one way or another. Integrating foreigners into the nation is forbidden. The Italian conquest of Ethiopia was a contention point between the two axis powers.
Another good test would be to ascertain the relationship of state to the nation (and all those living within it). Did the nation create the state or did the state create the nation? The former view is Italian Fascism, while the latter is German National Socialism.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 17 2019, @04:33PM (1 child)
Sounds kinda like China these days.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 17 2019, @07:54PM
and perfectly within a nation's right, assuming the negative influences invaded, instead of having their land annexed against their will.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by fido_dogstoyevsky on Tuesday December 17 2019, @09:17PM (2 children)
Or even "Nazism"?
It's NOT a conspiracy... it's a plot.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 18 2019, @01:32AM (1 child)
Nazism is when someone disagrees with me on Twitter.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 18 2019, @05:15AM
So trump IS a nazi? Phew, glad that is sorted.
(Score: 2) by legont on Wednesday December 18 2019, @01:24AM (4 children)
And while we are at it, let's take back from Nazi swastika and hand salute.
"Wealth is the relentless enemy of understanding" - John Kenneth Galbraith.
(Score: 2) by loonycyborg on Wednesday December 18 2019, @10:09AM (3 children)
Swastika [wikipedia.org] is far from being a purely Nazi symbol. I agree that it's time to return it to its pre-1930s meaning.
(Score: 2) by legont on Wednesday December 18 2019, @06:39PM (1 child)
The salute is Roman, while we, the country of the Law, borrowed the concept and most of the ideas of the Law from Rome.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Students_pledging_allegiance_to_the_American_flag_with_the_Bellamy_salute.jpg [wikipedia.org]
"Wealth is the relentless enemy of understanding" - John Kenneth Galbraith.
(Score: 2) by Bot on Wednesday December 18 2019, @10:20PM
The roman salute isn't depicted or described in ancient Rome. It is depicted on a 17xx painting but that's quite too late.
OTOH The fascio is indeed genuine Roman. The multitude of rods meant many weak units could build up a strong union, and the chopping blade was a warning for those who didn't agree with such a union.
US coins featured it prominently
https://img1.wsimg.com/isteam/ip/a9ca946f-c3c9-4f75-b881-516fdc73f43b/20191103_150700.png [wsimg.com]
Note the motto E pluribus unum which you might be familiar with.
Note also the motto should be EX, but the removal of the X ("incidentally", a cross) makes it 13 letters long. Basically the motto is more sinister than the fascio.
Account abandoned.
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Wednesday December 18 2019, @10:07PM
In the 70's there was a mystic in Edmonton who called himself ManWoman and said that the Virgin Mary herself had given him the personal quest of restoring the swastika to its original sacred meaning before the Nazis corrupted it.
(Score: 3, Informative) by driverless on Wednesday December 18 2019, @06:21AM (1 child)
You forgot to add the keyword "of other Italians". Italy was quite happy to genocide Libyans (they were running concentration camps there long before the Nazis did), targeting civilians in bombing campaigns (Ethiopia/Eritrea), use of banned weapons like dum-dum bullets (Ethiopia), mass killings of civilians (Ethiopia again) alongside more concentration camps, etc. They were just as bad as the Nazis, however they were clever enough to mostly perform their mass killings and war crimes in Africa, which made it OK.
Oh, and the Allies turned a blind eye after the war.
(Score: 2) by Bot on Wednesday December 18 2019, @11:52PM
There were concentration camps in what would become yugoslavia too. In there, people died of malnutrition and illness. But regular troops were woefully underequipped and in the second half of the war I you were possibly better off prisoner of Italians than fighting in the army.
Calling it genocide is wrong, though. Not because I share the current view about genocides as somehow worse than other kind of massacres, aimed to certain social groups or certain religions. Because the correct name is "terror", and it was aimed to counter the guerrilla of the conquered ones.
This is also contrary to the way Romans conquered, so you can say Mussolini (his staff actually, he was a puppet) tragically mocked the Romans.
Infamous were the order to rape and kill given by general Graziani in Africa, and Yugoslavia had its share of terror, but allies did the same things even when less warranted (see "marocchinate").
If you want real infamy by the Italians, it is the attack on Greeks, that were basically innocent and allies.
Account abandoned.