fascism

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English-language coverage of Italian elections packs lots of Meloni media baloney

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English-language coverage of Italian elections packs lots of Meloni media baloney

I have received more texts than usual the past two weeks. Most of them were about a rather unusual subject — Italy’s national elections. I say unusual subject because it’s not every day that this subject is discussed among my American friends.

Many readers of this space may know that I am the son of immigrant parents who moved to the United States from Italy. As a result, I am bilingual (I read Italian news sites almost as voraciously as American ones) and also a dual citizen, meaning I can vote in Italian elections.

But the texts I was getting was coming from a place of fear. They feared that the center-right would win the election (they ultimately did on Sept. 25) and bring Italy back 100 years to an era marked by fascism.

This sentiment came as a result of the English-language press (predominantly the United States and England) that framed the political rise of Giorgia Meloni as threat to democracy. It was this skewed news coverage that got me to write about her twice in pieces for for Religion Unplugged, which included an analysis piece last week on what her election means and the Vatican’s reaction.

Running on a “God, homeland and family” platform, the 45-year-old was labeled a “neo-fascist” and “hard right” by The New York Times largely because of her traditional Catholic views regarding marriage and her anti-abortion views. The Times hailed Meloni’s election this way:

ROME — Italy turned a page of European history on Sunday by electing a hard-right coalition led by Giorgia Meloni, whose long record of bashing the European Union, international bankers and migrants has sown concern about the nation’s reliability in the Western alliance.

Results released early Monday showed that Ms. Meloni, the leader of the nationalist Brothers of Italy, a party descended from the remnants of fascism, had led a right-wing coalition to a majority in Parliament, defeating a fractured left and a resurgent anti-establishment movement.

It will still be weeks before the new Italian Parliament is seated and a new government is formed, leaving plenty of time for political machinations and horse trading in a coalition with major differences. But Ms. Meloni’s strong showing, with about 26 percent of the vote, the highest of any single party, makes her the prohibitive favorite to become the country’s first female prime minister.

The opening of this news story reads more like an opinion piece, loaded with adjectives such as “hard-right coalition.”

This was parroted by other U.S. newspapers as well as major television networks and cable news channels.


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Religion ghosts? The New Yorker offers hellish glimpse of pedophile science in Germany

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Religion ghosts? The New Yorker offers hellish glimpse of pedophile science in Germany

As Ross Douthat of The New York Times noted the other day, every now and then there is a scary news story that demands serious attention, even if readers want to avert their eyes.

That is certainly the case with a recent Rachel Aviv feature at The New Yorker than ran with this headline: “The German Experiment That Placed Foster Children with Pedophiles.”

This is not a religion story. If readers do a few quick searches through the text, they will find no references to words such as “religion,” “faith,” “church” or “Bible.” The word “morality” shows up, but only in a negative context. Hold that thought.

The man at the center of this horror story is Helmut Kentler, a Sexual Revolution hero in post-World War II Germany who sincerely believed, for reasons personal and professional, that it would be a good thing for the government to fund experiments in which lonely, abandoned children were placed in the homes of male pedophiles.

This was not a religious conviction — other than the fact that it was seen as a way of attacking traditional religions.

This raises journalism questions, methinks. The unstated theme running through this stunning New Yorker piece is that the Sexual Revolution has become part of a new civil religion. On the moral and cultural left, sexual liberation helps citizens to escape the chains of the nasty old faiths. Concerning Kentler’s work, Douthat notes:

It seems almost impossible that this really happened. But the past is another country, and Aviv explains with bracing clarity how the context of the 1960s and 1970s made the experiment entirely plausible. The psychological theory of the Sexual Revolution, in which strict sexual rules imposed neurosis while liberation offered wholeness, was embraced with particular fervor in Germany, because the old order was associated not just with prudery but with fascism and Auschwitz.

If traditional sexual taboos had molded the men who built the gas chambers, then no taboos could be permitted to endure. If the old human nature had ended in fascism, then the answer was a new human nature — embodied, in Aviv’s account, by “experimental day-care centers, where children were encouraged to be naked and to explore one another’s bodies,” or appeals from Germany’s Green Party to end the “oppression of children’s sexuality,” or Kentler’s bold idea that sex with one’s foster children could be a form of love and care.

All this was part of a wider Western mood, distilled in the slogan of May 1968: It is forbidden to forbid.

This brings us to the feature’s primary discussion of “morality.”


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Only The Atlantic dares call out the Kanye West–Donald Trump–Jesus Freak axis

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Spencer Kornhauber has turned in a glibly critical review of Kanye West’s new film, Jesus Is King. He is not obliged to like West’s music now more than anyone had to like it before West’s deepened focus on the person of Christ. (West recorded “Jesus Walks” 15 years ago.)

As Kornhauber describes it, Jesus Is King sounds nearly as tedious as Goddfrey Reggio’s Koyaanisqatsi, except that West’s film is 35 minutes, compared to 86 minutes of unsubtle imagery about the evils of using technology to ease our quotidian lives.

Still, there are some clunkers here that suggest an inattention to detail. In two paragraphs, Kornhauber makes the humorous point that having one’s hair dyed is an odd moment for a spiritual awakening:

West replied that his come-closer-to-Jesus episode happened around April, when he got his hair colored purple. “I remember when the hair dye was placed on my head the morning before Coachella,” he said. “It felt cold. I didn’t like it. I had an aversion to it. And then when the guy was dyeing it, I didn’t even like how it came out.”

As far as the beginnings of awakening stories go, this one’s definitely new. Bob Dylan had a cross thrown at him by a fan and then was visited by Christ in his hotel room. Kanye West got a bad dye job — and then what? Dunno. West changed the subject to the decline of manufacturing jobs in the United States.

Hold the phone: a fan threw a cross at Dylan? What part of his body was the target? His head? His heart? His butt?

A simple click of the link provides the same language Dylan has used about this incident since the late 1970s: the fan tossed the small cross onto the stage. There’s no indication of its proximity to Dylan, much less where the fan had aimed.

Here’s something more substantial. Kornhauber writes:

The film made me think of funky, stucco mid-century churches, and the way they can seem like campy architectural artifacts today. It made me think of Jesus Freaks, and Hillsong, and all the other revival movements aimed at hipping up Christ.


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