Italy gets it right
ON THE face of it, Jacinda Ardern and Giorgia Meloni are very similar people. They’re both in their 40s, unmarried, with young daughters they share with their respective partners. They’re both women, obviously. And they’ve both been involved in politics for decades.
But then differences emerge. Ardern is the Prime Minister of New Zealand, a nation with a smaller population than Sydney. Meloni will soon become the Prime Minister of Italy, a nation with a $2 trillion GDP.
Ardern represents New Zealand’s Labour Party. Meloni represents … well, let’s hear how US television news reports lately categorised the Brothers of Italy.
It’s a party, they universally decided, “with roots in Neo-Fascism”, “whose roots go back to post-WWII Neo-Fascists”; with “roots in Italy’s post-war fascist movement”; and with “roots in Italy’s 20th century NeoFascist movement”.
Reviewing that roster of roots during Sky’s Paul Murray Live last week, Senator Jacinta Price marvelled at the voluntary lack of diversity.
“It’s as if they’ve got just one scriptwriter,” Price said, “and that script is shared.”
Benito Mussolini, to whom
Meloni is often absurdly likened, would be proud. As a genuine Italian fascist, his government required that Italian newspapers present themselves “as a solid bloc” committed to “the Cause”.
Western media have long formed a “solid bloc” dedicated to, among other things, the worship of St Jacinda. Global media adores her. “America deserves a leader as good as Jacinda Ardern,” the New York Times announced in 2019.
So the US elected Joe Biden. Be careful what you wish for.
Ardern, of course, ticks every modern media approval box. She’s a climate activist. She’s against colonialism. She’s all empathy and ivory. Her default facial expression is a patented white leftist combination of compassion and pity. Teal MP Allegra Spender must use that look under licence.
Being the media’s latest Hitler, Meloni isn’t viewed quite so kindly. In 2009, as a junior minister in Silvio Berlusconi’s government, Meloni received an early taste of journalistic hostility from then-ABC star Emma Alberici – whose line of questioning was so insulting that her interviewee stormed out (“You are spreading a pack of lies throughout the world!”).
So what positions has Meloni taken that identify her as “Neo-Fascist”? Well, here they are, detailed in a speech earlier this year:
“Yes to natural families, no to the LGBT lobby, yes to sexual identity, no to gender ideology, yes to the culture of life, no to the abyss of death, no to the violence of Islam, yes to safer borders, no to mass immigration, yes to work for our people.”
Sounds like a platform that mainstream Italians could get behind. And they did.
Outside of the mainstream, though, those unremarkable attitudes are now seen as far or even very far right. “There’s no denying her beliefs, values, and aspirations lie in the very far-right territory,” Mamamia’s Gemma Bath wrote last week, “with many comparing her to America’s Donald Trump.”
It’s easy these days to become a fascist. All Trump did was deliver record employment to women and blacks, provide cheap energy and start no new wars. He didn’t even call for suppression of free speech or describe alternative views as “weapons of war”.
He left that to Ardern, who recently told the United Nations that “disinformation online” was something “we must as leaders address”.
“We cannot ignore it,” the NZ PM said. “To do so poses an equal threat to the norms we all value.”
Where would we be without precious norms? “We have an opportunity here to ensure that these particular weapons of war do not become an established part of warfare,” Ardern continued.
“There is cause for optimism. Because for every new weapon we face, there is a new tool to overcome it. For every attempt to push the world into chaos, is a collective conviction to bring us back to order. We have the means; we just need the collective will.”
With all that talk of “collective will” and “order”, Ardern is not a million miles away from Mussolini’s command that media unite “as a solid bloc” in commitment to “the Cause”.
“This is the face of authoritarianism – even though it looks different than you were taught to expect,” journalist Glenn Greenwald wrote of Ardern’s performance. “This is someone so inebriated by her sense of righteousness and superiority that she views dissent as an evil too dangerous to allow.”
Correct. “How do you tackle climate change,” Ardern added, “if people do not believe it exists?”
One way her dutiful citizens are tackling climate change is by this year launching in Wellington a $7.4m all-electric ferry called the Ika Rere, a traditional Maori term meaning “nothing green ever works”.
“Passengers on Wellington‘s new electric ferry were rescued by a police boat,” the NZ Herald reported last week. “The Ika Rere had run out of battery in the harbour and all passengers on board were transferred to the police boat.”
The non-electric police boat, obviously. Incidentally, you can build nearly three normal vessels for the cost of Wellington’s electro-floater.
Uh-oh. That might be disinformation. I await a visit from Jacinda’s UN brain police.