Lost and Found

I seem to recognize the eternal premises of fascism precisely in being provincial, therefore, in the lack of information, in the lack of awareness of problems which are concretely real, in the refusal to go deeper into matters of life out of laziness, prejudice, convenience, and presumption. To brag about being ignorant, to seek to affirm ourselves or our group not with the strength that comes from real skill, from experience, but instead with boastings, with affirmation of the self for their own sake alone, the unfolding of feigned qualities rather than true ones. For instance, sexual exhibitionism is also fascism. It should be an emotion, and, instead, it is danger of becoming a show, someting clownish and useless, an ugly thing which women endure passively and dumfoundedly. One cannot fight fascism without identifying it as that aspect of us which is stupid, shabby, weak-willed: an aspect which has no party-affiliation, of which we should be ashamed and for the repulsion of which it is not enough to declare, „I serve in an antifascist party,“ because that aspect is inside of us, and already once in the past, fascism has given it expression, authority, standing.

[Fellini, F. (1978). Amarcord: The Fascism within us. An Interview with Valerio Riva. In: Federico Fellini, essays in criticism (S. 20–26). Oxford University Press. Original italienisch (online nicht gefunden): Fellini, F. (1974). Il fascismo dentro di noi, Intervista di Valerio Riva. In: Il flm ‘Amarcord’ di Federico Fellini, ed. G. Angelucci and L. Betti, Cappelli, Bologna, 1974, p. 103.]

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