Lega Nord's Super Mario.

Behold the fat bastard Mario Borghezio, who once stood in Berlusconi's cabinet as a member of Lega Nord and now has come out to defend the thoughts of Anders Behring Breivik. Borghezio claimed "Breivik's ideas are in defence of Western civilisation." No doubt he has the Islamization of Europe in mind which is leading to the inevitable formation of 'Eurabia'. Notice the focus is on Europe as a kind of organic entity which can be infected by dirty foreigner with an even dirtier culture to purvey. This is no different than the line that the German nation is under threat from a Jewish Communist plot. He also said "Christians ought not to be animals to be sacrificed. We have to defend them." This is just rams home the implications of his earlier statement, it is the standard line of the Fascist, we're under attack and must take drastic actions immediately. All methods are justified in self-defence. For Hitler it was the Holocaust and for Anders Behring Breivik it was the bombing and shooting of almost 100 Norwegians.

The remarks prompted outrage in Italy and widespread condemnation, but Francesco Speroni of Lega Nord came to the defence of Borghezio "I'm with Borghezio. I don't think he should resign. If [Breivik's] ideas are that we are going towards Eurabia and those sorts of things, that western Christian civilisation needs to be defended, yes, I'm in agreement." Keep in mind Borghezio is the same man who once burned the bedding of migrants who had been sleeping under a bridge. Mario Borghezio referred to Ratko Mladic as a "true patriot" and went onto say "The Serbs could have halted the advance of Islam into Europe, but they weren't allowed to do so. And I'm talking of all Serbs, including Mladic." You could easily replace Islam here with Judaism or Bolshevism, replace Serbs with Germans and Mladic with Hitler. This should not surprise anyone, this is a meat-headed shit sack we're talking about! The wider issue is what Borghezio and Lega Nord represent in Italian society, we can find this tendency elsewhere in Europe and it has grown since the recession.

The phenomenon of Lega Nord (which means Northern League in English) emerged in 1991 with the collapse of the Communist Party after the fall of the Berlin Wall led to the break-up of the Soviet Union. The League attracted support from disillusioned conservatives, social democrats and radical leftists let alone plenty of nationalists and the post-fascists of the Italian Social movement. In 1992 it was found that 25% of the supporters were formerly Christian Democrats and 18.5% of former Communists in working-class areas of the North. Bare in mind that the Americans had withdrawn the Cold War level of financial support to the forces of reaction against Eurocommunism. The Communist Party of Italy had tried to take an independent line from the Soviet Union and differentiate itself from Trotskyism whilst looking to base itself on the democratic norms of Western Europe. Once the Communists broke up the Christian Democrats were no longer necessary to prevent the rise of Eurocommunism, which is the reason the Americans and the Mafia had backed the party for so long.

All alternatives to capitalism could be ruled out after 1989 as 'failed experiments' from whence began a post-political order in which liberal values and the market had triumphed. But then the old Establishment was wiped from the table and a space opened up for a new kind of politics. A grand convergence of post-politics and ultra-politics has since occurred within that space, we can trace the meteoric rise of il Cavaliere to the apex of where these two forces meet. Similarly we find Lega Nord's platform is conservative on social and cultural issues, nationalist when it comes to European integration and generally liberal when it comes to the economy. So the cynical opposition to all forms of state intervention is aligned with the affirmation of Judeo-Christian culture and Padanian nationhood. The post-political meets the ultra-political where the deluded and disillusioned coalesce. It's clear that the closed spectrum that runs from technocratic liberal to reactionary populist is too narrow to even seriously address what happened in Norway. We still can't help but blame multiculturalism.