I took these photos of the movie "A Special Day," which is playing on The Criterion Channel (in its current tribute to Marcello Mastroianni). Begin around 53:23 to view just this segment, which has Mastroianni's character poking around inside the apartment of Sophia Loren's character and finding her fascism scrapbook. (It's 1938, in Rome.)Loren's character also has a portrait of Mussolini that she made out of buttons. He sardonically tells her it's wonderful and "Besides, now that they've invented the zipper, all those buttons have to be used for something."
Anyway, I'm bringing this to you today not just because you might have The Criterion Channel and some susceptibility to my push to you to watch this great movie, but because I wanted to confess what I said out loud when I saw "The man who is not a husband, father, and soldier is not a man." I said: "Sounds like J.D. Vance."
Are you too busy to react to that prompt? Busy making a portrait of Vance out of buttons?
Here's something else, a BBC article from 2013 that the movie caused me to look up: "A gay island community created by Italy's Fascists."
Seventy-five years ago in Fascist Italy, a group of gay men were labelled "degenerate", expelled from their homes and interned on an island. They were held under a prison regime - but some found life in the country's first openly gay community a liberating experience....
Gay men undermined the image that the dictator wanted to project of Italian manhood.
"Fascism is a virile regime. So the Italians are strong, masculine, and it's impossible that homosexuality can exist in a Fascist regime," says professor of history at the University of Bergamo, Lorenzo Benadusi.
So the strategy was to cover up the issue as much as possible. No discriminatory laws were passed. But a climate was created in which open manifestations of homosexuality could be vigorously suppressed....
So in 1938 around 45 men believed to be homosexuals in Catania were rounded up and consigned to internal exile. They eventually found themselves about 600km away on the island of San Domino, in the Tremitis....
[The men] would arrive handcuffed, and then be housed in large, spartan dormitories with no electricity or running water....
Unwittingly, the Fascists had created a corner of Italy where you were expected to be openly gay. For the first time in their lives, the men were in a place where they could be themselves - free of the stigma that normally surrounded them in devoutly Catholic 1930s Italy....
ADDED: When I said: "Sounds like J.D. Vance," I meant it sounds like something J.D. Vance would say! I didn't notice the ambiguity until I read some of the comments.
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92 comments:
Nazis, too. There is something about leftism that causes males to transition.
Ancient Greeks would sodomize boys to force them to take a knee. However, they also sodomized girls in freak parades with the same motive. They were far more equitable and inclusive than straight transgenders today.
The Vikings had a god that dressed as a woman so he could hammer other dudes.
"The man who is not a husband, father, and soldier is not a man." I said: "Sounds like J.D. Vance."
You'd make a good left-wing blogger if you ever felt like being a lazy writer.
I just read about this film on Peter Hanson's great "Every 70s Movie" blog right here on Blogspot. It was posted December 2016 and I was surprised he resisted referencing Vance's current running mate, who had just shocked the world.
"Seventy-five years ago in Fascist Italy, a group of gay men were labelled "degenerate", expelled from their homes and interned on an island"
The OG freak off.
If that was supposed to sound horrible, it came out sounding like a dream gay vacation. So long as there is plenty of olive oil.
I'm a husband, a father, and have been a soldier--and I went to a top ten law school and did well. That doesn't make me J.D. Vance. Also doesn't make me an Italian movie writer or star. It just makes me me.
After two weeks in hospice, my father passed last week. His funeral Mass was yesterday. We prepared a slide show of pictures from his life, and it was wonderful. Yes, he was a husband, father, and soldier. He was only in the Army for three years after the end of the Korean war; the husband and father part were the bulk of the photos. He had a good life.
Did you ever stop and think that your irresponsible rhetoric on the many MAGA connections to fascism might be inciting violence against DonnyTrump!
I had two illuminating run-ins with fascism, Italian style: My father's side of the family were all off-the-boat from Southern Italy. I was making the rounds with my new wife, 32 years ago and stopped by a 90 year-old uncle's place. My dad was Republican but all of the older, born in Italy relatives were devoutly Democrat and this uncle was no exception. In our chit-chat, he brought up that the US needed a strong Democratic leader, somebody like Mussolini.
Many years later, my wife and I took a trip to Rome and the Amalfi Coast for our 25th anniversary. Part of the tour package was a bus ride through Rome, with a nice long stop at the Colosseum. Here and there, the guide pointed out some things done by Mussolini and/or done during that era. There was no tone or sense that they considered him an unusual leader.
I think the reason is that Italians understand fascism more correctly than Americans. To simplify: It is a variety of socialism, which is also patriotic/nationalistic. Italians are mostly pretty aggregable to socialism and most people in most places are proud of their country.
Italians in general, probably not their leftist showbiz types, but generally, are pretty neutral about fascism, very different from Germans with their form of fascism.
agreeable
That's a great movie. Much of the interactions between the 2 main characters occurs in an apartment by a piazza while a fascist rally is taking place outside. You overhear well-known fascist national marching songs while the couple in the apartment are saying, and doing, some very unfascist things. This is a subversive way of diminishing the the power of those songs, almost in a mocking way.
Luckily, Vance doesn't ever claim that he wants the trains to run on time. So he's definitely not Mussolini.
Widespread affluence and safety have created the illusion for many that we have transcended mere biological and cultural necessities such as reproduction and the transmission of knowledge and values to the next generation. This is a potentially fatal illusion for those who value affluence and safety.
"The man who is not a husband, father, and soldier is not a man." I said: "Sounds like J.D. Vance."
This also describes Tim Walz, yet they project themselves as men very differently.
I'm a big fan of The Criterion Channel and only recently watched Mastroianni in "La Dolce Vita" and "8 1/2" for the first time. Thanks for this recommendation.
Sergeant (I know nothink!) Walz agreed with the Mussolini's definition and traded on it until his betrayal of his unit came to light.
Despise Mussolini for his politics by all means, but give the devil his due. He was a courageous soldier. He had been raised by internationalist socialist parents to be a revolutionary, (his given name was in honor of Benito Juarez) but Mussolini's experiences on the Isonzo front led him to embrace syndicalism and Italian nationalism in equal measure.
The Isonzo was a series of twelve battles between Italian and Austro-Hungarian forces that killed or maimed a million and a half men and decided exactly nothing. Benito Mussolini was among the mained, and carried dozens of metal shards in his flesh to the end of his misspent life.
Didn't Castro arrange a similar fate for his gays? The Marxists used to consider homosexuality a function of bourgeois decadence. The Fascists didn't have the corner on homophobia......As I understand it, the Latin word for virtue originally meant valor in battle. There was a school of thought that held that societies that didn't produce enough strong, virile men were destined to be conquered by societies that produced strong, virile men.
"The man who is not a husband, father, and soldier is not a man."
i notice, NO ONE is implying that this is NOT true
So fascists inadvertently invented the first gay all-inclusive island resort. Seems fitting…
Yesterday at the Flint Michigan “Town Hall”, Sarah Huckabee Sanders said “So my children make me humble, Kamala Harris has nothing to make her humble.”
This idea that denigrating people without children will bring Trump more votes just sounds so small minded and blinkered. Aren’t there Trumpublicans that have no children? Does she even know WHY Kamala Harris has no children?
Let us know talk of doomed love affairs. P. Diddy's quest to openly express his sexuality now looks like it's going to end in tragedy. The sad fates of the gays under Mussolini was not so sad as the sad fate of Mussolini and his mistress at the hands of the mob.......To these sad lovers, I'd like to add the names of Trotsky, Frida Kahlo, and Diego Rivera. This is the most politically charged clusterfuck in the history of cluster fucking. Diego Rivera was the key figure in petitioning the President of Mexico to offer Trotsky asylum in Mexico. Trotsky to show his gratitude slept with Diego's wife, Frida. She was thirty years younger. Frida for her part slept with Trotsky partially because she thought it would be a neat way of getting back at Diego Rivera who had slept with her sister. Trotsky's wife knew about the affair and was hurt by it, but discreetly left the house during Trotsky's assignations. It's uncertain if Diego Rivera ever knew of the affair......Some years after Trotsky's murder, Frida and Diego re-evaluated their Trotsky sympathies and rejoined the Mexican Communist Party which was loyal to Stalin.....Weinstein made a movie about this tragic love affair. He left out the part about them becoming Stalinist after Trotsky's murder, but he did include a few nude scenes so the movie is worth your attention.
""The man who is not a husband, father, and soldier is not a man." I said: "Sounds like J.D. Vance." This also describes Tim Walz, yet they project themselves as men very differently."
This is one of the comments that made me see the ambiguity of my "Sounds like J.D. Vance." I mean that the statement that men who are not husbands, fathers, and soldiers are not men sounds like something J.D. Vance would say. I didn't mean J.D. Vance was a husband, a father, and a soldier. Not that he wasn't, but there's a gigantic difference between being those 3 things and saying that anyone who isn't is not a man!
Yes, I saw the ambiguity of your original statement.
"I mean that the statement that men who are not husbands, fathers, and soldiers are not men sounds like something J.D. Vance would say."
My statement was exaggeration, though. I don't really think Vance would say something so crude. But the naïveté of the woman's scrapbook reminded me of what they've been skewering Vance for recently.
Condolences Kate
She did not denigrate her for not having children. She denigrated her for not being humble.
My dog has better reading comprehension than you, because he does not deliberately misconstrue intent.
"The man who is not a husband, father, and soldier is not a man."
But if he's a farmer at least he's noble in his contemptible unmanliness.
https://x.com/718Tv/status/1835831012644810864
You could do the same thing coming from the opposite direction. Loren’s character, after all, kept the scrapbook. And Orwell did in 1984: “It was always the women, and above all the young ones, who were the most bigoted adherents of the Party, the swallowers of slogans, the amateur spies and nosers-out of unorthodoxy.”
Nazis would give a medal to mothers with many children and put great emphasis on women being a homemaker.
“The Cross of Honour of the German Mother (Ehrenkreuz der Deutschen Mutter) was introduced by the Nazi party by Statutory Order on December 16, 1938. The gold award was given to mothers of eight or more children.”
“The phrase “Kinder, Küche, und Kirche” or “children, kitchen, and church” was often used to describe the role of women in German society, and many accept this common portrayal as the extent of German women's roles during World War II.”
Maybe JD Vance and those on the right who agree with him should think about the similarities of the rhetoric.
My comment disappeared. Hate it when that happens.
Well now I want to check out this movie.
Yes she denigrated her for not being sufficiently humble in her opinion, and she brought having children or not having children into the statement as a sideways insult. Don’t be naive.
I'll try it again.
"The man who is not a husband, father, and soldier is not a man."
But if he's a farmer, at least he's noble in his contemptible unmanliness.
Sounds pretty crude to me.
“Republican vice presidential nominee Sen. JD Vance has a history of making disparaging remarks toward people without children, a CNN KFile review of his comments shows, including fundraising off his now-infamous “childless cat lady” remarks in a series of emails that called Democratic leaders “childless sociopaths” who “don’t have a direct stake in this country.”
In November 2020, Vance said on a conservative podcast that childless Americans, especially those in the country’s “leadership class,” were “more sociopathic” than those with children and made the country “less mentally stable.” Vance added that the “most deranged” and “most psychotic” commentators on Twitter – now known as X - were typically childless.”
CNN
Madame De Stael asked Napoleon who was the greatest woman in the world. Napoleon replied "the woman who had borne the most children"......Napoleon was a Jacobin at heart. He still has the protective covering that the left grants their heroes. He's not ordinarily depicted as a sexist or a proto-fascist in movies, but that's who he was.
Many here could use a refresher about what true fascism looks like, and maybe they would realize how ridiculous it is to call Trump one.
so, a Serious Question:
IF you are NOT a husband, father and soldier.. What SORT of "man" are you?
we have seen the contempt for children dems have had for children for 16 years, if we needed a reminded during the supply chain snarl, when baby formula was at a premum, this was the attitude that Vance was speaking off,
Incomplete without a female complement and a mutual Posterity. A soldier in defense of community is self-defense is an honorable practice.
Crazy Catless Lady Inga said…
“Maybe JD Vance and those on the right who agree with him should think about the similarities of the rhetoric.”
Maybe Inga and those on the left who agree with her should think about the banality of superficiality. To paraphrase Freud and Godwin, sometimes a vegan is just a vegan and a dog lover just a dog lover. Even if they agree with Hitler on those two points.
>so, a Serious Question:
IF you are NOT a husband, father and soldier.. What SORT of "man" are you?<
I'm having a little trouble believing that "serious" part, but in case you actually are, here's the answer: You are a man who has decided to not be one or more of those things. Is there something more to it than that?
So, we can't say now that social continuity and survival depend on people having and raising children? Apparently not if we are in politics. It was assumed that people needed to have children and would continue to have children, at least until the baby bust of the 1970s. At that point, "pro-natalism" became a dirty word with some people -- and something tantamount to fascism. Maybe the need for families and children is something that shouldn't be addressed in today's confrontative political language, but it's startling that what was wisdom and simple good sense for millennia now becomes something suspect or subversive.
Sometimes they’re not.
Sounds like a good life to me. Ad astra.
The troll idiot makes an appearance.
Had Mussolini never met Hitler, he would have died in bed still popular. He was very popular in the US in the 30s.
Everyone but the dullard is "naive."
Democrats have contempt for children? What a dumb comment. Democratic people were as concerned about the shortage of baby formula as anyone. Or do you think all Republican mothers breast fed and weren’t concerned?
Some people are just senile.
Kids are cannon fodder these days.
Their little lives are soooo cheap.
Why would anyone agree to produce a baby for the state? For a $6,000 bonus?
Ain't nobody smart and fertile reproducing for that. If people are free, they will freely choose to love and reproduce. Nobody wants wants to raise cannon fodder and turn them over to die for the State.... hth
I think many men, including JD Vance, would think something along these lines, but have the sense not to say it, at least not in those words.
I can only say, that when it comes to being small-minded and blinkered, I must defer to your superior capabilities.
Democrats pretend not to notice that fascists were socialists and Democrats are kind of okay with socialism, what they hate about fascism is the patriotism part.
Republicans are the opposite, finding nothing wrong with patriotism, but lots wrong with socialism.
More Americans Supported Hitler Than You May Think. Here’s Why One Expert Thinks That History Isn’t Better Known
“Bradley W. Hart first started researching the history of Nazi sympathy in the United States a few years ago, he was largely driven by the absence of attention to the topic. Hart’s new book Hitler’s American Friends: The Third Reich’s Supporters in the United States argues that the threat of Nazism in the United States before World War II was greater than we generally remember today, and that those forces offer valuable lessons decades later — and not just because part of that story is the history of the “America First” idea, born of pre-WWII isolationism and later reborn as a slogan for now-President Donald Trump.“
Oh no, no Aggie, that honor belongs to you.
Real men love their wife and children, all they get is respect.
Gay men are not in that game.
Real men love their wife and children, all they get is respect.
Gay men are not in that game.
Every society and successful culture on earth has revered having children and it is a Christian commandment to "be fruitful and multiply" as well. It is only in the post-industrialized world that this trend has reversed all over the earth, worst in South Korea than anywhere else presently. To pose as if only Nazi's and JD Vance encouraged motherhood is a very strange thing to do. But then you are an odd person, seemingly uninformed by history or common sense.
Ditto. A few of them.
The American progressives were especially enamored of both Mussolini and Hitler.
Inga
"Some people are just senile."
No. I'm pretty sure you're just stupid.
Of course they do, Inga. why do you keep killing them?
Transsocial (e.g. dress) is a heteronormative fetish in the transgender community, a socio-gender anomaly to an indelible binary complement in Nature.
Another reason that people divested from the ancient religions and social elites, but social progress is cyclical, so here we are.
Rusty, I’m quite certain you’re just an idiot troll. At least Doc Kennedy has some intelligent things to say now and again.
Rusty, you idiot troll, are you accusing me of killing children?
Andrew Marvel, the poet, was not a husband (or was he?), a father or a soldier (or was he?) and for this reason, it's currently fashionable in academic circles to say he must have been a homosexual. (But was he?) Anyhow, he was a poet (or was he? He was a member of Parliament busy promoting trade, the British Navy and trade wars on behalf of the city of Hull.)
Here's a line of his I read the other day:
"Standing between the morning and the flowers."
Mike Wolf…
It is common sense to have children and perpetuate the human race. I had four children. It’s not common sense to put being a parent as the thing that defines them as real women or men the way fascists did. JD Vance is dancing around fascist ideologies based on his over the top comments about parentage as a ticket to being considered an ideal citizen. As for odd people, you and your outrage at people who say negative things about you and crying about how they’ve “slandered” you strikes me as odd.
if Hitler had not targeted Jews most would have been happy Nazis as they are in USA = D's
This video came out yesterday. I haven't watched it yet, but TIKhistory does academic level research into his topics (with references). I've found his other works on the ideologies of the 1930s very enlightening.
What do REAL Fascists actually believe?
TIKhistory
https://youtu.be/QrmEhK6PXnY
seriously why not consider the order sequence of words = husband > father > soldier [protector]
See if you can find Two Women, also starring Sophia Loren. I bet it's wormholed.
Sorry about that. My old man passed on in 2012. He was a fighter pilot, not a soldier. He always claimed he had a good war, sleeping in a warm bed every night, and chasing the girls and boozing it up at the pub down the road from his airfield. But he also dodged a lot of flak, got in life or death dogfights while quite outnumbered, and saw friends blown to bits or crashing into the sea before his eyes. He didn't talk much about that part, but his happy, tranquil life as a family man may have helped him forget.
Inga
Rusty, you idiot troll, are you accusing me of killing children?
You do this all the time and it's boring. And stupid. When someone refers to 'you' they're talking in the general sense of the left. Not you specifically.
You know this and but still play stupid thinking it's a way of avoiding accountability for being a leftist. It isn't.
These are the policies YOU support. Otherwise you wouldn't be a leftist. Own it.
Jim,
What is boring, stupid and LAZY is this rhetorical idiocy of saying “you” when one is referring to a large group of people the person one is addressing may be part of. White supremacists identify with the right wing, should I say “you” if I would make a comment about white supremacists because they identify with the right and so do you? You strike me as someone who may support the same ideologies as white supremacists based on some of your comments over the years. Use your brain and think.
"IF you are NOT a husband, father and soldier.. What SORT of "man" are you?"
"i notice, NO ONE is implying that this is NOT true"
Ask Jesus that question.
Fascism is an incorporated model of Diversity (i.e. class blocs), equity (or rightly equivocation), and inclusion in a quasi-theistic (e.g. mortal gods, experts, Stork), alt-religious (e.g. ethical or situational) model of governance.
There are other ways to exercise the human trinity, but they are few and far between, and rarely worth celebrating, let alone normalizing.
My condolences. My own father passed away 32 years ago next month. He went abruptly, but peacefully, in his sleep. Like most WW II veterans he refused ever to talk about his experiences, but going through his papers after the funeral I discovered the citation for his Silver Star. I am the son of a very courageous man.
Well, they say that two outta three ain't bad.
This is one of the comments that made me see the ambiguity of my "Sounds like J.D. Vance." I mean that the statement that men who are not husbands, fathers, and soldiers are not men sounds like something J.D. Vance would say. I didn't mean J.D. Vance was a husband, a father, and a soldier. Not that he wasn't, but there's a gigantic difference between being those 3 things and saying that anyone who isn't is not a man!
What the hell? J.D. Vance is in fact, to his credit, a husband, father and soldier. Your projection that he would echo fascist slogans is absolute garbage.
noi vivi and adio kira were made in italy based on ayn rand novel
Perhaps one might project that Walz would say that facsism is just a way of being neighborly, helping them stay on track, that sounds like what he may say.
As long as we are imputing what Vance may sound like.
"Use your brain and think." The irony is delicious.
What party and it's policies do you whole heartedly support, Inga? Which party promotes unlimited abortion? Knowing that. Which party values pregnant women and the children they carry? Can you make a statement about abortion without using the word, "fetus"?
You want a conversation? Now you have one.
Any time you want to jump in, Inga. I'm here.
Inga. Don't want to talk about Democrat policies vis a vis abortion? OK pick a topic.
I just rack it up to the blog gods and march on.
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