Fascist

The institutions of Europe grew from the Allied victory in World War II. These institutions are by birth anti-Nazi and anti-Fascist. It will be hard for Europeans to accept Italy's neo-Fascists as members of European Union ministerial committees. But that is what the Europeans now must do.Benito Mussolini founded the Fascist movement after World War I. He was made prime minister in 1922 and transformed Italy's government into his own dictatorship. He personified totalitarian power, the assertion of national grandeur, suppression of expression and subordination of private interests to the state.

Kudos to Sun investigative reporter Ian Duncan ("Maryland police seek federal help to take ill-gotten gains" Feb. 17) for exposing the high-handed and excessive practices of federal prosecutor Rod J. Rosenstein. He attempted to seize the home of the wife of an alleged (but never convicted) drug dealer who committed suicide. Add to this a chorus of loud boos for our federal government whose vicious, vindictive, and abusive actions are reminiscent of the practice of fascist governments who seized the assets of innocent people just because they could.

ROME -- He could be a dentist or a promising bank clerk, with his well-ironed shirts, thin-rimmed spectacles and cool, serious air, the kind of 40-ish yuppie many a Roman matron would be glad to have as a son-in-law.On the posters, with his jacket slung nonchalantly over his shoulder, and on television, he looks highly respectable, appealing and reassuring -- and Gianfranco Fini, leader of Italy's extreme right-wing neo-Fascist party, next week may be mayor of Rome.The run-off between Mr. Fini and his Green left-wing opponent, Francesco Rutelli, in the second round of the municipal elections tomorrow is going to be extremely close.

In Rebecca Pawel's strongly atmospheric Law of Return (Soho Press, 274 pages, $24), Guardia Civil Carlos Tejada finds himself marking time in Franco's Spain until an important parolee goes missing, presumed murdered. Tejada, investigating the missing Manuel Arroyo Diaz and his wealthy and influential in-laws, may ruin the plans of another parolee, Guillermo Fernandez, to smuggle a colleague and Jewish German classics scholar across the French border and onto a ship to Mexico. Because Tejada had met Fernandez's daughter Elena while at his previous posting in Madrid, he feels duty-bound to help her family.

WITH the right-wing Freedom Alliance apparently set to cobble together an administration, the Jews of Italy face becoming the first in Europe since the Second World War to live under a government containing neo-Fascists.The Northern League's Irene Pivetti, who is on course to be elected as speaker of the lower house, has a track record of anti-Semitic statements that was cited as cause for concern last year in the Anti-Semitism World Report.The Jewish historian Michele Sarfatti voices the fears of many Italian Jews.

PREDAPPIO, Italy - It began quietly, without warning. One morning, three young skinheads on a secret mission entered the crypt, donned black capes and took turns standing at grim attention by their hero's tomb. The next day, another stone-faced trio took up the 11-hour watch; and before many people noticed, the stealth vigil had become a daily routine. Today, nearly a year later, the ritual is an established fact: Benito Mussolini, the long-disgraced Fascist dictator, has a posthumous honor guard.

1922: Reader's Digest appears1922: Mussolini forms fascist govt.1923: Time magazine appears1924: J. Edgar Hoover heads FBI

Edda Ciano, 84, who renounced her family name after her father, fascist dictator Benito Mussolini, ordered her husband's execution, died Saturday in a Rome hospital, where she was admitted 10 days earlier. Her doctor said she had been weakened by an operation to remove a kidney abscess. RAI state television said she was the first Italian woman to publicly drive a car and to wear pants.

ROME -- In nationwide municipal elections depicted as an oracle of things to come, Italian voters registered their disappointment with the tainted parties of the mainstream by turning to the neo-Fascist and former Communist candidates in record numbers.In 428 mayoral ballots from Palermo to Venice Sunday more than one-quarter of Italy's 40 million voters supported the neo-Fascist Italian Social Movement, the Democratic Party of the Left, successor to the Communist Party of Italy, or the insurgent Northern League.

JASENOVAC, Croatia -- The anguish of tens of thousands of people, killed during the 1940s at the concentration camp that was built along the marshy banks of the Sava River, still reverberates from the overgrown brush and deserted buildings.For while the camp lies neglected and derelict, those who died here have become the centerpiece of a controversial plan that has outraged survivors and threatens to distort historical truth for political gain.Defying international criticism, Croatia's government says it will go ahead with plans to turn the camp into a memorial for victims of Communist and fascist terror.

PREDAPPIO, Italy - It began quietly, without warning. One morning, three young skinheads on a secret mission entered the crypt, donned black capes and took turns standing at grim attention by their hero's tomb. The next day, another stone-faced trio took up the 11-hour watch; and before many people noticed, the stealth vigil had become a daily routine. Today, nearly a year later, the ritual is an established fact: Benito Mussolini, the long-disgraced Fascist dictator, has a posthumous honor guard.

WASHINGTON -- David Irving, a "moderate fascist" (his description) who has said his visit to Hitler's Bavarian mountaintop retreat was a "spiritual experience" and that no Jews were gassed at Auschwitz, probably did not help his case when, in rhetorical high gear near the end of the London trial he instigated, he slipped and referred to the judge not as "your lordship" but as "mein Fuhrer." However that may be, Mr. Irving, the faux historian, has now learned, as Oscar Wilde and Alger Hiss did, the price of improvidently claiming to have been defamed.

1922: Reader's Digest appears1922: Mussolini forms fascist govt.1923: Time magazine appears1924: J. Edgar Hoover heads FBI

NEW YORK -- The Rev. Calvin Butts III, a prominent Baptist minister from Harlem, stunned city officials and black leaders alike yesterday, calling Mayor Rudolph Giuliani a racist who is on the verge of creating a fascist state in New York City.Word of the minister's comments ran through the city like an electric charge. Some prominent black figures said they thought that Butts' language was outrageous and wrong; others agreed that Giuliani's policies have hit the minority communities the hardest but stopped short of echoing the charge that he is a racist.

VERONA, Italy -- Italy's hard right-wing political party, shedding its last loyalties to a lingering Fascist tradition, emerged from a three-day conference this weekend as the stable, indispensable and increasingly respectable member of Italy's center-right opposition.Several thousand delegates of the party, the National Alliance, gathered here under the nonthreatening, if unlikely, symbol of a red-and-black ladybug. They listened to their pragmatic party leader, Gianfranco Fini, 46 -- who is being called the "Tony Blair of the Italian right" -- declare that the party has completed its break with the past and is ready to embrace a future untinged by old ideological battles.

IN MID-JANUARY, a parliamentary inquiry in Bonn began meeting behind closed doors to determine the extent of neo-Nazi activity inside Germany's 320,000-member army, the Bundeswehr. According to the army's own figures, the number of neo-Nazi incidents among soldiers tripled during the past year.At the Franz-Josef-Strauss barracks in Bavaria, soldiers celebrated Hitler's birthday by chanting Nazi hymns and viewing Third Reich propaganda films. "It was clear to me that some of our superiors wanted to instill in us young soldiers the traditions of the Wehrmacht," Hitler's armed forces, a former trainee told Stern magazine.

THERE is a specter haunting Europe -- it's racism.Behind the recent, elaborate celebrations of D-Day lurks an ugly reality: Racist and even fascist movements are gaining ground. Italy has elected a right-wing president who has brought neo-fascists into the government for the first time since World War II.Across Europe, countries are adopting restrictive immigration policies, and racial assaults are rising.With the development of the European Union, the fall of the Eastern European socialist states, and the reunification of Germany, it appeared that Europe was on the verge of becoming one of the most democratic regions of the globe.

Brussels THE MAIN problem is Islam." With those simple but provocative words, Belgium's pre-eminent political commentator, Dirk Achten, demolished all the pat answers and prejudices in the big immigration conflict now tearing at this country."Our immigrant problem here is at heart a problem of the Islamic immigrants not accepting the division between state and church -- and then getting involved in politics," said this moderate young journalist with the prestigious newspaper DE Standaard.

TRIESTE, Italy -- The cavernous pits and gorges scattered throughout the hills above this port city hold dark secrets from the twilight days of World War II, secrets that still disturb Italy and its Balkan neighbors.The pits, covered with tons of debris, are believed to hold hundreds, perhaps thousands, of corpses. The bodies are those of Italians and Yugoslavs who opposed the Yugoslav Communist takeover of the city in May 1945, along with scores of captured Germans. But attempts to investigate have gone nowhere.

TRIESTE, Italy -- The cavernous pits and gorges scattered throughout the hills above this port city hold dark secrets from the twilight days of World War II, secrets that still disturb Italy and its Balkan neighbors.The pits, covered with tons of debris, are believed to hold hundreds, perhaps thousands, of corpses. The bodies are those of Italians and Yugoslavs who opposed the Yugoslav Communist takeover of the city in May 1945, along with scores of captured Germans. But attempts to investigate have gone nowhere.