Date: March 3, 2023
Time: 12:00 – 1:30pm (PACIFIC)
Zoom Info: Webinar ID – 639 7907 3873
Zoom Info: Passcode – 765374
Zoom Info: https://unbc.zoom.us/j/63979073873?pwd=UVZNdVlKV0U0V3lwT2tDNVJxQnhFdz09

CIC Prince George and UNBC Global Friday Present:

Mussolini’s Ghost: Post-Fascism and the Remaking of Italy’s Far Right

The rise of Giorgia Meloni to power in Italy, the country’s first female prime minister and leader of one of the most far-right parties in the history of the post-fascist Republic, has drawn worldwide concern about the return of Fascism to Italy. But is Georgia Meloni a Fascist? Does the recent electoral success of far-right parties signal a decisive rejection of liberal democratic norms and of the so-called ‘anti-Fascist paradigm’ that has defined Italian political life and national identity since the fall of Mussolini? 

Historians Jacopo Pili and Robert Ventresca join Global Fridays to help us historicize the recent resurgence of Italy’s far-right. They examine how the legacy of fascism continues to haunt the country’s governing structures as well as popular memory, but in  more complex ways than is commonly understood. Seen through a historical lens, the rise to power of the far-right does not signal a return to fascism so much as the adaptations by far-right leaders like Giorgia Meloni of a coherent if historically flawed narrative of Italy’s post-Fascist history.

SPEAKERS:

Robert Ventresca is a Professor of History at King’s University College at Western University. He is a Member of the Royal Society of Canada’s College of New Scholars, Artists and Scientists, and also serves on the Committee on Ethics, Religion and the Holocaust at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. He has published widely on various topics related to European history and the Holocaust, the history of Fascism and democratic transitions, public history and memory, as well as migration and mobility. His research and teaching are mainly in Holocaust Studies with a focus on the role of religion in mass violence and genocide, especially the Catholic Church in the Holocaust-era and beyond. His work contributes to a growing comparative scholarship on the role that religion and religious institutions play in conflict and post-conflict transition, reconstruction and reconciliation. Professor Ventresca currently is writing a new book for Cambridge University Press on the Vatican and the Holocaust, to be based on newly released documentation from the Vatican archives.

Jacopo Pili is author of Anglophobia in Fascist Italy, which traces the origins and development of anti-British sentiment in Fascist Italy, as Britain turned from being an ally in the First World War to an enemy in the Second. The book demonstrates that Fascist ideologues framed Britain as a stagnant and decaying country and the polar opposite of Fascism’s new civilization, to the point that the regime’s assessment of British political resolve and military might were distorted by ideological bias. Pili received his doctorate in History from the University of Leeds and has taught at the University of Leeds and Rome Tor Vergata University