Reader strongly disagrees with Janzen’s column

To the Editor:

When Canada, Britain, and the USA invaded Sicily in July 1943, my maternal grandfather Corporal Phil Arundell was one of the soldiers of the Saskatoon Light Infantry battling against the fascist Italian regime and its German ally; first in Sicily, then Italy. The cost of the Italian campaign was high with 5,300 of my grandfather’s Canadian comrades being killed, and 19,000 wounded. Personally, Grandpa returned with medical issues and what would now be known as PTSD. He died much too young in 1950.

I strongly disagree with Your West Central Voice columnist Joan Janzen’s assertion in the October 18, 2022, edition, that the election of Georgia Meloni as Italian Prime Minister is cause for celebration. There is a direct line connecting Meloni and her Brothers of Italy (FdI) party to the fascist movement began by Italian dictator Benito Mussolini in the 1920s - the movement that Canadians fought against in the 1940s.

Multiple sources confirm that in the 1990s Meloni was a youth wing member of the neo-fascist Italian Social Movement (MSI) (which was formed by followers of Mussolini after WWII), and then led the student movement of the neo-fascist National Alliance (AN) party that legally succeeded the MSI. In 2012 she co-founded her Brothers of Italy party which succeeded the National Alliance.

Although Meloni tries to soft pedal her fascist bent, her words and actions betray her intentions. When she was 19, she praised Mussolini as “a good politician, in that everything he did, he did for Italy”. Two of Mussolini’s descendants have run for Meloni’s party, a party that is also a home for many openly fascist “nostalgics”. Meloni added the neo-fascist tricolour flame symbol to the Brothers of Italy flag after the party was formed in 2012 and has refused to remove it. The tricolour logo is known to represent the flame that burns on Mussolini’s tomb. To whip up support, Meloni uses anti-immigrant, anti-government, ultra-nationalist, and anti-LGBTQ rhetoric to stoke a permanent feeling of fear and emergency in the public – all promoted by the FdI and the two other far right parties in her coalition government as being “common sense”.

Besides rejoicing in the rise of far-right politics in Italy, Joan Janzen has also used the election of Georgia Meloni as another of her tedious knee-jerk Trudeau trashing opportunities. Her criticism that Justin Trudeau was silent on Meloni’s win was premature. On Saturday October 22, Justin Trudeau appropriately congratulated Meloni “as Italy’s first woman Prime Minister” – the same day as US President Joe Biden and Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky also issued their congratulations.

As November 11 approaches, let us not excuse the re-emergence of fascism, or forget the sacrifices made by Canadians to try to rid the world of fascism’s hate during WWII.

Sincerely,
Doug Bone,
Elrose, SK