During the 1956 Olympic Games in Cortina, the speed skating race was held on a frozen lake. Swede Sigge Ericsson won his medals, a gold and a silver, on the crystal-clear Lago di Misurina against the backdrop of the dragon-toothed limestone walls of the Dolomites.
Today the mountain slopes behind the Swedish cross-country women’s medal dramas in Val di Fiemme are brown and green and practically free of natural snow. The winter culture of the Alps is mercilessly doomed. In the Olympic capital of Milan, the average February temperature has risen 5.6 degrees in the seventy years since 1956.
The political accusation However, the setting of the Olympics is timeless. Last year’s Winter Olympics were held in Beijing, the capital of global totalitarianism, where the ski slopes were surrounded by gray skeletons of smokestacks and industrial hangars and a hellish landscape reminiscent of Tolkien’s Mordor. Today a Ukrainian luger is washed because he wanted to honor his dead compatriots, while Russian flags fly at the Val di Fiemme ski stadium, clear symbols that the pampas of sport ultimately have the same moral status as tech oligarchs. On the Italian television channel RAI – often called “Tele-Meloni” because of the large number of pro-government managers appointed by Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni – the post-fascist takeover is clearly felt, not least during the opening of the Olympic Games, which was commented on by the channel’s amateur sports director.
The shift is worth seeing. The media propaganda is of course not as blatant as at the 1936 Olympic Games in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, but the political power of winter sports is still great. As early as 1937, the year after the Nazi Olympic Games, Italy’s dictator Benito Mussolini had himself photographed shirtless and in ski equipment, well aware of the authoritarian symbolism of snow and cold.
For those who have witnessed armed forces making violence the new social order on the streets of the United States, the parallels are frightening
I choose journalist Eskil Fagerström’s 2023 The Birth of Fascism, a book that describes with commendable accuracy Mussolini’s first years, when fascist militias destroyed democracy and seized power in Italy through terror. For those who have witnessed armed forces making violence the new social order on the streets of the United States, the parallels are frightening. Not least because Italy has often been a role model when right-wing extremist movements have charted their path to the center of power.
Fagerström shows how The decisive factor was the performative, arbitrary and public violence of the years around 1920. Just like ICE, the black shirts of the fascists were committed – Squadristi – to publicly humiliate political opponents, in this case primarily unpopular union leaders and socialist politicians. The militiamen often came at night, tore them from their beds and beat them with batons and clubs.
For example, the murder of the politician Attilio Boldori in Cremona in 1921 caused a national sensation. Boldori was beaten with clubs, punches and punches by around twenty uniformed thugs and was left unconscious and bleeding on the ground. Democratic politicians voiced their displeasure and an estimated 20,000 people attended his funeral. In the fascist press, however, the murder was defended with derisive words. Fascist leader Roberto Farinacci noted – with rhetoric that could have come from Trump’s press office today – that the victim appeared to have “a thin skull. Thinner than fascist batons.”
The consequences of that merciless and degrading violence was unheard of. The militias’ tactic was to intimidate their opponents into both silence and passivity, thereby undermining democracy. Democratically elected community leaders were prevented from carrying out their work and replaced by state prefects (usually the police chief). It was about seizing political power at the local level by force, while the democratically-minded opponents who were murdered were discriminated against as terrorists and enemies of the country – the parallel with today’s USA is made no less frightening by the ever-growing private guards of right-wing extremist fight and activist clubs there and in many other countries.
The violence quickly spread throughout Italian society. Eskil Fagerström shows how the attacks and beatings strengthened the fascists’ self-image and group identity while at the same time frightening the citizens who were not directly involved. The violent close-range attacks showed that the fascists were prepared to go to great lengths to advance their interests. Brutality was trivialized and at the same time politics was betrayed.
“We are therefore facing the hour of collapse,” wrote the socialist politician Filippo Turati in 1921. “What awaits us if we do not act immediately is nothing less than the end of a civilization; we must say this soberly.”
If Eskil Fagerström’s script is followed, within a year or so we will see a leading Democratic Trump critic kidnapped and perhaps even killed
In the light of history is It is no coincidence that so many extreme and right-wing populist movements have drawn their inspiration from Italy. Everything we live with today was there: the glorification of war and violence, the shameless alliance with big business and the dismantling of independent media. If we follow the script in Eskil Fagerström’s book, within a few years we will see a leading Democratic Trump critic kidnapped and perhaps even killed, like the politician and anti-fascist Giacomo Matteotti in Italy in 1924, while the murderers go free.
Excessive? Hard to say. If our time has proven one thing, it is that an updated version of Tage Danielsson’s famous probability theory is needed. Everything people said couldn’t happen happened.
Recently introduced Donald Trump’s former advisor Steve Bannon – ideologically trained in Italy – suggested that ICE agents and the army should “surround” the polling stations in the fall midterm elections in the USA. The statement came after Trump said that states should be stripped of their constitutional right to direct the electoral process and that the Republican Party should instead “nationalize” elections.
The world always gets the Olympics it deserves, shaped by how we were in those years
These United States, as they will now look, will host the next Olympic Games, in Los Angeles in 2028. Did Donald Trump then build his 76 meter high triumphal arch – like the Italian fascists dreamed of in the 1920s? Were elections canceled and political opponents beaten and imprisoned?
The Olympics were from the beginning a political invention. The French Baron de Coubertin dreamed of a fusion of the nobility of antiquity and a reborn imperialism that would restore the glory of the French nation. The world always gets the Olympics it deserves, shaped by how we were in those years.
In two years they may take place in a country where fascism has taken power.
Read more texts by Björn Wiman. Also, subscribe to the Wiman & Beckman newsletter, where he and Åsa Beckman select favorite articles and give cultural tips every Monday.
