Stronzi

In the early years of my childhood, we lived in the Italian city of Trieste because of my father’s job. My father, an extravagantly sociable man, found many friends in the Slovene minority community in and around Trieste—but two of them stood out, as they couldn’t have been more different. Drago was from the countryside, Mitja from the city. One a bricklayer, the other a lawyer. Mitja drove luxury cars and wore a gold watch. Drago had a battered Fiat pickup and hands like shovels—wrists that wouldn’t accommodate a Rolex even if he could afford or wanted one.

Drago voted for the Italian Communist Party (PCI). Mitja came from a traditional, conservative, affluent Catholic background, which also shaped his worldview. Drago had fought with the partisans during the war; Mitja had, or so I heard—since he rarely spoke of it—briefly joined the Chetniks, the royalist forces, at the beginning of the war. Despite their many differences, they shared certain traits that kept them meeting up, having a drink or two, debating, teasing each other—and often arguing.

Drago and Mitja were both proud Slovenians who had endured and survived the tragic and brutal experience of Italian fascism. This also drove them to take up arms at the outbreak of the war, believing they were fighting for their people. Two choices, two directions taken by two young men, shaped by their upbringing, values, worldview, and social environment. After the war, they agreed politically on almost nothing, but they never argued about who had won the war or who had been on the right side. What united them was their rejection of hatred and evil. What united them was anti-fascism.

Mitja had not joined the royal army to serve the Italian or German occupiers, but because he believed that with the army loyal to the king in exile in London, he could fight against them. His anti-fascism had begun before the war, and the confusing, painful wartime experience only tested and ultimately deepened it.

Their acquaintance and friendship were, of course, possible because they lived in the West. For people like Mitja, there was neither understanding nor space on the Yugoslav side of the border. Many with similar experiences did not survive the end of the war and never returned home. Drago was more conciliatory toward the neighbouring country and its regime, overlooking the fact that in Yugoslavia, there was no luxury of supporting the communist party as merely one of several options in a pluralistic election. On that side of the border, there was no choice. People supported the communist regime mostly because they were forced to, or because they benefited from it. The romantic revolutionaries in Western Europe didn’t see—or didn’t want to see—how grey, suffocating, and unromantic life really was behind the ideological wall.

Drago and Mitja were, each in their own way, living reminders of a time and people now gone. Drago may have been the last—and perhaps only—person I met who truly believed in communism. And even with him, I’m not entirely sure it was ideological. More than anything, Drago was an anti-fascist. In Italian politics, he simply chose the side he felt was most resolute and effective in standing up to fascism. Today, communists in Italy, at least as a political force, no longer exist. In Slovenia, there never really were many to begin with. The idealists were soon disappointed; what remained were party bureaucrats, opportunists, and those who had no other options. Communism in Slovenia today exists mostly in the rhetoric of political converts who publicly denounce their own past to distract from what they once did—and what they do now.

Mitja’s views were at the opposite end of the political spectrum. He was conservative—even fiscally conservative, as Americans would say—religious, traditional in his views on social issues. He was, in a word, a right-winger. Yet I’m convinced he would never have allied himself with the people who today wear right-wing feathers with pride. He belonged to a generation of European conservatives shaped by the likes of De Gasperi, Adenauer, Schuman, even Churchill—Christian democrats and conservatives who, in response to the devastation wrought by Nazism and fascism, built the European institutional, economic, and political model.

That societal system was based on pluralistic democracy, an executive branch under democratic control and limits, political freedoms, the rule of law, human rights, social and international solidarity, and humanism. If that description seems too long-winded, we can just call it liberal democracy. And this is not just one of many political ideologies or an alternative to social democracy or Christian or conservative democracy, as some now claim. Liberal democracy is not the same as liberalism. It is a political system, a societal model, a civilizational arc that includes all democratic political streams—that is, those that, regardless of ideological colour, accept and uphold fundamental democratic values.

The philosophical foundations of liberal democracy—chief among them, the protection of individual rights from arbitrary state power—were laid during the Enlightenment. The fact that today some present liberal democracy as just one option among many, and even seek to dismantle it in the name of conservative, traditional, or even Christian values, is a huge fraud and a slap in the face to the conservatives and Christian democrats who were the architects of Europe’s post-war liberal democratic system.

That same system underpins the European Convention on Human Rights—written by British lawyers—as well as the Slovenian constitution. Anyone who has a problem with liberal democracy has a problem with our constitutional order. The alternative to liberal democracy is elections without freedom. Regardless of the ideology in whose name democratic controls, the rule of law, individual rights, and minority protections are dismantled—the outcome is always the same.

What’s being sold today as the “right” in much of the world is first and foremost an embarrassment for true conservatives. The founding fathers of post-war Europe would be appalled at how their conservative, Christian-democratic, right-wing legacy has been hijacked by those who are tearing down Europe’s civilizational model in the name of values diametrically opposed to those it was built on.

What would my father’s two friends think of the world today? I don’t know—but I can imagine.

Drago never hid his political beliefs; they were never in question. Yet in today’s sleight-of-hand reversal of positions, newly minted right-wingers—those knights of cognitive dissonance—would likely label even his old companion Mitja an extreme leftist. Simply because he was an anti-fascist and a humanist.

They’d probably call them stronzi. And have another glass of Drago’s orange tinted homegrown wine.