Fruitcake intellectuals who don’t care about ‘thought’

In Italy, self-styled “intellectuals” have recently been commemorating the centenary of The Manifesto of the Anti-Fascist Intellectuals in 1925. It grieves me greatly to reprint their vapid, vain pieties, but there we are: sometimes journalism can be rather like chewing a live toad and smiling grimly.

In 1925, the Italian intellectual Benedetto Croce wrote the first Manifesto of the Anti-Fascist Intellectuals, knowing that he had the right to speak and the duty to respond to the rise of Fascism in Italy… A century later, intellectuals from around the world are raising the alarm and speaking out against the return of Fascism… As of June 14th, 2025, the 2025 letter has been signed by over 400 academics, including 31 Nobel Prize winners.

A press release explained: “The letter was born in response to the staggering events of early 2025 in the United States, where tactics already experimented with different intensity by authoritarian leaders in Italy, Hungary, Poland, Israel, Brazil, India or Turkey, were suddenly deployed all at once.”

Italy — yes, the Italy of poor, blameless Giorgia Meloni who merely resents the power that an undemocratic Brussels bureaucracy exercises over her country and its overwhelmed immigration services — is now being cited as an example of neo-fascism. But no mention of Iran, China, Russia, Vietnam or North Korea. Moreover, to leave us in no doubt about how much those well-informed academics and Nobel laureates know about their history, their statement continued:

Fascism emerged in Italy a century ago, marking the advent of modern dictatorship.

There you have it, in a nutshell, or perhaps a nutcase. For Mussolini had seized power fully four and a half years after the Bolsheviks’ coup in Petrograd had created a slave-state that, in a mutated form, is with us yet. So, even a half-witted potboy could tell those “intellectuals” that the Bolsheviks invented modern dictatorship nearly half a decade before Mussolini (who merely copied their methods), thereafter rapidly spreading their foul creed across the world. By 1970, violent communism had conquered the entire eastern Eurasian landmass from Stettin to the South China Seas all the way to the Pacific’s western shores. In this process it managed to kill many more of its own citizens than had the conjoined tyrannies of fascism and Nazism within their own realms: not less than a hundred million people. Moreover, in different forms, communism still reigns in China, Vietnam and North Korea, yet according to these Italian “intellectuals”, “the advent of modern dictatorship” began with fascism.

It is not possible to be more wrong yet more thoroughly intellectual. No less than 39 of the signatures came from scholars of sociology, which is what results when one blends Marxist doggerel with the bicarbonate soda of simple calculus and then bakes the mix in a moderate oven into the fruitcake of academic liturgy. Nine signatories were astrophysicists, the abstract contemplations of gaseous universes that ceased to exist a billion trillion years ago being a splendid basis for dire prognoses about the modern world. Twenty-one of them were psychologists, of whom the least said, the better. Eighteen were mathematicians, a species that really believes that a minus multiplied by a minus produces a positive, which is rather like saying that the Black Death times Attila the Hun results in Beethoven’s Ninth.

Are the gallant signatories of 2025 even aware that the anti-fascist statement of 1925 was simply a reaction to a pro-fascist statement from scores of other artists and writers? This also tells another truth: that few people have fixed opinions throughout their entire lives, even those so-called “fascists” in the Italy of one hundred years ago. One of Mussolini’s supporters in 1925 was Luigi Pirandello, whose play Six Characters in Search of an Author, with its invention of metafiction, remains one of the most influential works of the 20th century. In essence, according to the bizarre values of these “intellectuals”, the great playwright Tom Stoppard and the most brilliant exemplar of metafiction, is thus a follower of fascist values, when he has throughout his life been a gallant embodiment of the very opposite. The meaninglessness of a single statement on a single day is affirmed by the fact that Pirandello was later denounced by the fascists.

Another signatory was Marinetti, the inventor of “Futurism”, a concept that inspired James Joyce in his twin-departures from commonsense, Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, the turning points in European literature around which, thank God, almost nothing turned. Another signatory, Curzio Malaparte, later became both a communist and a Catholic, thereby prudently hedging all his metaphysical bets.

Perhaps the real issue here is the creative instability of artists’ imaginations, which enables them to gain hitherto unseen insights into the human condition on one day and talk utter nonsense on another. Successful artists, rather like successful philosophers and scientists, are usually called “intellectuals”, a term that then, and far too often, confers a fatal sense of entitlement upon those so addressed. This illness deepens when “intellectuals”, having been infected with the virus of certainty from their particular studies or arts, then carry this dementia of certainty to all the other areas of their lives. Even actors are so afflicted: Jane Fonda, having starred in the film “The China Syndrome”, promptly became a self-ordained “expert” on nuclear fission and was then accepted as such by the credulous and unfailingly cretinous media. (Some things never change).

An actor might possibly over time be disabused: not so an intellectual, especially a Nobel Laureate. As George Stigler declared of his fellow Nobel Laureates, “They issue stern ultimata to the public on almost a monthly basis, and sometime on no other basis.” Which is true, but the philosopher Bertrand Russell was doing so fully twelve years before he won a Nobel Prize. In 1938, he proposed disbanding the UK’s army, navy and air force as a means of dealing with Hitler, citing Denmark as an example of how an unarmed state would never be attacked. Two years later, Hitler consumed Denmark whole. A change of tune came after the war, when Russell proposed a unilateral nuclear strike against the Soviet Union before it got the atomic bomb. A decade later, and now in the unilateral disarmament camp, he described President Kennedy as one of the wickedest people who ever lived, and “fifty times as wicked as Hitler,” for reasons which I can’t be bothered to repeat here. Yet, throughout his life, regardless of his many expeditions into irredeemable stupidity, he was always respected as an “intellectual”.

Likewise, the 1925 Nobel laureate George Bernard Shaw, who in 1933 proclaimed that “dictatorship is the only way in which government can accomplish anything,” Two years later he declared, “It is nice to go for a holiday …knowing that Hitler has settled everything so well.” After the Hitler-Stalin pact of 1939, Shaw declared: “Herr Hitler is under the powerful thumb of Stalin whose interest in peace is overwhelming.” Within days, Poland and the Baltic states vanished from the world’s maps, thereafter becoming the epicentre of a bipartisan genocide.

So, who is your favourite intellectual? Sartre is a good start. A defender of the Soviet Union, even after its crushing of the Hungarian Uprising, he would use his she-squeeze, de Beauvoir, to test-drive various female students in bed to see which ones would suit his, ah, intellectual needs best. Picasso is even better. He chose to remain in occupied Paris during the Second World War, when as a Spaniard he could easily have left, joining the communist party only the day before Paris was liberated. His painting of the bombing of Guernica is now acclaimed as a masterpiece that captures the horrors of war. But the same jumbled daub could equally well be said to have captured the horrors of artistic pretentiousness, which, at bottom, is what Picasso knew himself to be guilty of. He was also a monster and a bewitching collector of women, two of whom committed suicide, two succumbed to nervous breakdowns, while one son killed himself by drinking bleach, and a sad and alienated grandson died of alcoholism.

So, who really cares what this beast “thought” about anything, never mind fascism?

Twenty-two of the 2025 anti-fascist signatories explained their motives: nine of them cited Trump as a reason for their “stand”, but none referred to Putin, Xi Jinping, Iran, ISIS or any sort of Islamism or communism. The petition was timed to appear just before President Trump’s celebratory parade in honour of the US Army’s 250th birthday last weekend and clearly indicated the petition-organisers’ belief that the day (also Trump’s birthday) would become an orgy of quasi-fascist Trumpian militaristic egotism.

In fact, the day proved to be a very large exercise in understated pride mixed with casual military affability. As for the 2,100 simultaneous anti-Trump demonstrations across the US that attracted many millions of supporters? They all passed peacefully, without any violent interventions from the police, the National Guard, the Army or Marines.

Yes, exactly. Just like Mussolini or Hitler.