Eh Tu, Italy? Could Il Duce's Legacy Finally Die?

In addition to the tentative signs of life shown by the Dutch after van Gogh's slaying, there is emerging evidence that Fallaci's homeland may yet recover her will to fight the Islamist onslaught:

One striking thing about Italy these days, compared to 30 years ago, is how many former leftists have awakened to the illusions of the Left, and begun flocking to the center-right. Nearly every one mentioned by name in this article is one such, and the numbers keep growing, almost exponentially, among writers and other intellectuals. Everything leftist is increasingly being questioned — economic orthodoxy often first of all, but now leftist cultural politics, too. Even those not prepared to go all the way to the center-right, at least on all issues, are raising tough questions.

For instance, La Repubblica (Nov.7), which I read on the plane, carries a front-page jump column by Eugenio Scalfari, its founder and publisher, under the title "Why We Cannot Call Ourselves Laicists." After confessing his own secular creed — the creed of the Enlightenment and the great principles of liberty, fraternity, and equality — he writes that this does not end the matter. He notes how the Christian idea of a duty to the most needy and vulnerable has undeniably influenced his creed, and how the Christian idea of giving to Caesar what is Caesar's, and to God what is God's, is a necessary barrier to totalitarianism both Left and Right. The history of the European secular mind cannot be described simply as laicist, he insists, for it also includes a crucial source of light absorbed from Christian faith.

What I conclude after this visit, more powerfully than ever, is that important new currents so visible in the victory of George W. Bush are also beginning to affect very distant places, and that great spiritual changes are beginning to display their first sprouts: a profoundly new vision of our own secular history, more open to religion than formerly; a new attention to the family and to the traditional morality on which its health depends; and a rethinking of fundamental economic principles concerning taxation, state power, and welfare programs. The notion is also gaining traction that the ideas of the Left belong to the 1950s, if not earlier, while those of Bush and others like him point to a new and more creative future.

Fascism/Nazism and Communism are spiritual siblings. This is self evident to the point of risibility. Time for an examination...