The distinction between right And left it is often taken for granted, disorienting especially young people struggling with their first historical, philosophical, political and economic studies. There is a certain confusion on the subject, in the not very high level of the current political debate. Perhaps it could be interesting to think about the similarities, rather than the differences.
“It doesn’t matter what a political party or movement is called. What matters is his strong or weak vocation to the world statism and to bureaucracy, to dirigisme and intrusiveness in the lives of private citizens”. (Sergio Ricossa, How to ruin a country – Rizzoli 1995).
If you observe a parliament and proceed from the center towards the right and towards the left you will initially notice a distancing, but as you continue further the extremes will get closer until they coincide with the closing of the circle.
He said Margaret Thatcher that problems arise from socialism which tends to degenerate: in one case into international socialism, communism, and in the other case into national socialism, national socialism. In fact, the party that went down in history with the abbreviation of Nazi was called the National Socialist Workers’ Party, and Mussolini himself was a socialist militant and director of a newspaper, the Avantiorgan of that party.
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In his formidable “Manual for survival for honest Italians – (Rizzoli 1997)”, Sergio Ricossa he wrote: “With 1917 and the victory of the Bolsheviks in Russia, light dawned, or so it seems. The Bolsheviks and their friends are the left, the fascists are the right. Really? Nope. Bolsheviks and fascists are united by hatred for the bourgeoisie (…) Julius Evola: the bourgeoisie is ‘the number one enemy of the fascist revolution’. Giuseppe Bottai: ‘We fascists are more socialists than the Bolsheviks (…)’. But Don Lugi Sturzo, later: ‘Bolshevism is a left-wing fascism, and fascism is a right-wing Bolshevism’. (…) Kinship did not prevent the fascists to kill communists, and the communists to kill fascists. (…) Left-wing extremists and right-wing extremists are as alike as a pair of gloves”.
Similarities rather than differences. Vocation to statism and bureaucracy, to dirigisme and intrusiveness in the lives of private citizens, aiming at the control and nationalization of the economy and encroachment towards authoritarian regimes. A temptation also present in post-war Italy onwards, with ever-large ranks of enemies of the freedom others, of individual freedom and enterprise typical of that productive bourgeoisie that wants to make itself, with a spirit of independence, ambition and zest for life.
Ricossa wrote in 1980, but it seems written for every era: “In another place and another time, perhaps the bourgeois could be less liberal. Here and now it must be so to the point of extravagance. It is the only sure way to distinguish ourselves from the scoundrels, who besiege us from the ‘left’ and the ‘right’. One of the best arguments in favor of liberalism is that currently no Italian party, not even the Liberal Party, is supporting liberalism. And it shows.” (Straborghese – IBL Libri – 2010).