The mayor of of Rome, Gianni Alemanno, recently made the news when he shocked the public by this statement:

Italy's opposition politicians and Jewish leaders reacted with outrage Monday to a newspaper interview in which Rome's right-wing mayor refused to condemn fascism as evil.

In the interview, Alemanno condemned the racial laws passed by Benito Mussolini's regime in 1938, but when asked if he considered fascism "an absolute evil" the mayor took a softer stance.

"I don't think so and I never thought so: Fascism was a more complex phenomenon," Alemanno was quoted as saying by Corriere. "Many people joined it in good faith, and I don't feel like labeling them with that definition."

So, in short, Gianni basically said that we need to analyze ideas instead of stigmatizing them. Do we combat Fascism by ignoring what it is and how it works, regardless if we believe it's good or bad? Not really. What this discussion really invites to is the question of whether Fascism (here simply meaning "totalitarianism") can take different forms. We're used to the up-front version where a dictator speaks to a large crowd and dictates the rules and laws of the state. Fair enough, but what happens if Fascism was to be integrated into society behind the scenes of public affairs? What if our dictator(s) chose to be Fascist by implementing totalitarian measures in the dark? I call this "closet Fascism" and here's how it works:

An investigation by The Sunday Telegraph found that three quarters of local authorities have used the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA) 2000 over the past year.

The Act gives councils the right to place residents and businesses under surveillance, trace telephone and email accounts and even send staff on undercover missions.

The findings alarmed civil liberties campaigners. Shami Chakrabarti, the director of Liberty, said: "Councils do a grave disservice to professional policing by using serious surveillance against litterbugs instead of terrorists."

Wait--I know what you're going to say: "But those measures were implemented to secure our Freedom!" Right, but that's probably what Hitler, Franco, Stalin and Mussolini would say as well. Do you think any serious totalitarian leader would promote himself by saying that he wants to control and exploit people's private life? Not a chance. He'll wrap it up in neat words, but unlike the situation with traditional up-front Fascism where the goals and ideals of society are clearly stated, our modern society wants to be Fascist without admitting it.

That's why I call it closet Fascist; sure it invades our private privacy, sure it exploits us, sure it fills up with propaganda (yes, TV is also propaganda, although "fun"), sure it punishes dissidents (ask Ron Paul why FOX deliberately excluded him from important election debates)--it's totalitarianism, period. But since it doesn't want to state its real purposes (oligarchs are in control of the democracy and work to exploit us on an international scale), they're forced to keep us in the dark of what is really going on. Now and then the system leaks information that hints at this fact:

Polish intelligence sources have for the first time confirmed that the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) ran a secret prison facility on Polish soil.

The admission comes after a report found the CIA had operated prisons for terror suspects in Poland and Romania.

In 2006, US President George W Bush admitted the CIA had held suspects in secret jails but he did not say where.

An up-front Fascist nation would clearly state what was going on, because it has nothing to hide in this regard. Our closet Fascist nations do, so they're upset as soon as stuff like this hits the news, and people go: "OMFG, we live in a secretly totalitarian world!" Actually, it's not so secret--Plato noted thousands of years ago that democracies always turn into closet Fascism, meaning private interests of a small elite control the mechanisms of society, while the public sphere is manipulated by politicans to make it look like we're "free."

At this point in time, most of us already know this. Smart leaders have confirmed it: we're living in a closet Fascist nation and any time we criticize China or Russia for being "undemocratic" and Communist, remember this: you're only "free" within the limits of your closet leaders and their closet plans. Wake up and smell the coffee, Sherlock!

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