The manifesto also explicitly glorified “war — the only cure for the world — militarism, patriotism … the beautiful ideas which kill.” In our own time, there has been much discussion around the ways in which “incendiary” language creates a dangerous political atmosphere. What can we learn from turning to an earlier period in modern history?

Angry Words, Violent Actions

The 1909 declaration was the founding “Manifesto of Futurism,” and its author was an eccentric, Egyptian-born Italian writer, artist and political radical Filippo Tommasso Marinetti. Marinetti would go on to promote fascism, and the art of the Futurists — with its obsession with speed, technology and, increasingly, military power — would be close to one of the official styles of the fascist revolution. The attitude of the “Futurist Manifesto,” a piece of writing that emerged long before the seizure of power by the Fascists in Italy in 1922, is an extreme example of a phenomenon which is very much with us now. What is the connection between rhetorical and actual violence? When do angry words become violent actions, and how should they be resisted?

The manifesto of 1909 was not the only type of document circulating Europe in this time period that extolled violence, of course, and not all of these types of rhetoric are linked to what we would now call the radical right. Yet the manifesto seems unique in the extreme, extravagant and performative nature of its language. It seems intentionally to goad its readers, promoting an aggressive misogyny —“We want to glorify … contempt for women,” it states — and a joy in destruction for its own sake.

“We want,” writes Marinetti, “to demolish museums and libraries, fight morality, feminism and all opportunist and utilitarian cowardice.” The manifesto is littered with references to violence, war and destruction. It was a “manifesto of ruinous and incendiary violence,” which wanted to “heap up the fire to the shelves of the libraries,” because “art can only be violence, cruelty, injustice.”

If such “extremist” language cannot be shown to have had a direct impact on the squadristi violence of fascism in the 1920s and the violence of the National Fascist Party regime in power at home and abroad, Marinetti certainly cheered on fascist imperialism and was always a consistently pro-military figure. Indeed, the Futurists had initially agitated for Italy to enter the First World War in 1914. By the time of Marinetti’s death in 1944, the writer and artist was creating eulogies to Italian fighting units and remained loyal to the fascist cause, even as represented by the Nazi-backed puppet state of the Repubblica Sociale Italiana.

In 1945, the fascist-supporting American poet Ezra Pound placed the ghost of the recently-deceased Marinetti in his “Canto 72,” promising retribution for the defeat of the Axis powers at the battle of El Alamein. In this context, the relation of violent language to actual violence is complex and layered. Futurist and fascist agitators glorified war and violence at the same time as the street fighting and, later, imperialist wars of fascism, played out in the real world.

Cause and Effect

Cause and effect cannot be straightforwardly demonstrated here. Yet language surely creates a context in which violent acts may become increasingly commonplace. In contemporary Britain, the fevered atmosphere around Brexit has similarly given birth to a situation in which angry words and incendiary language are paralleled with a rise in radical-right street action. Prime Minister Boris Johnson dismissed concerns raised in the House of Commons by the Labour MP Paula Sherriff that his rhetoric would or could fuel violence as “so much humbug.”

In the prime minister’s mind, terms like “surrender,” used to describe the Brexit Withdrawal Bill designed by the opposition and rebel Conservative MPs to prevent a no-deal Brexit, are simply his usual colorful rhetoric. But Johnson is now supported by radical-right actors like the self-styled Tommy Robinson / Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, founder of the English Defence League. “We back Boris,” Yaxley-Lennon at the beginning of September, referring repeatedly to those who opposed the prime minister as “traitors.”

“Death to traitors, freedom for Britain,” was famously what Thomas Mair, the murderer of the Labour MP Jo Cox, had shouted when asked his name during his court trial. The link between the prime minister’s rhetoric — along other leaders of the pro-Brexit “mainstream” right — and radical-right violence is not a question of a smoking gun or a straightforward case of cause and effect. Rather, the use of violent language causes an atmosphere where sentiments emerging from supposedly responsible politicians are mirrored back to them by the agitators of the radical right.

Florid, excessive language that hints at violence then often incites a more shocking response from its listeners. For example, at an event at the Conservative Party conference, Boris Johnson suggested that Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn be “removed” and placed in a “figurative rocket” to “send him into orbit.” But Johnson’s words — a cartoonish vision with an attempt at humor — were interrupted by voices from the Tory activists on the floor, who suggested Corbyn be put in a “noose” and sent to “traitor’s gate” in a reference to the prisoners’ entrance to the Tower of London.

In this context, Johnson’s jokey rhetoric was reflected back to him in words that seemed to suggest a far more visceral and violent reaction to opposition politicians. In particular, the repeated use of the word “traitor” in the rhetoric of both radical-right thugs like Yaxley-Lennon, murderers like Mair and the activists of a supposedly mainstream UK political party is disturbing.

If there is not always a direct link between words and violence, there is nonetheless a sense that violent language incites, creating an effect of heightened tension, enabling its select audiences to delight in the prospect of destruction and battle. The philosopher Thorsten Botz-Borstein has compared the aesthetics of Italian Futurism to that of the so-called Islamic State. For Botz-Borstein, the nihilism at the heart of both projects exalts in the prospect of violent destruction, particularly through the use of technology.

This is by no means to compare the language of Boris Johnson and other politicians with the Islamic State. However, violent language — even language that only gestures toward violence — creates its own effects, its own momentum, which it cannot always control. In the 1935 “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” the German critic Walter Benjamin described fascism as a product of a self-alienation that had reached “such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order.”

We must avoid the temptation of thinking that language is “overstating” political desires, that nobody really wants the kind of violence or chaos being gestured to. For this underestimates the power — the aesthetic power — of language to create or encourage these desires in its listeners.

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If you visited Venice in the spring of 2006 during the Italian elections, you could see billboards plastered with Lega Nord (Northern League) posters, depicting the figure of Alberto da Giussano, the mythical defender of Lombardy. Above Giussano was a large Lion of St. Mark, the symbolism demonstrating the absorption of Venetist ideology into the pan-northern rhetoric of Umberto Bossi’s Padania (his name for northern Italy). Bossi’s talent was to channel resentment of Rome and Brussels into a movement that made common cause between the regions of Northern Italy: Lombardy, Veneto and Piedmont.

Bossi’s movement was already feeding anti-migrant sentiment and fear of Islam in the 2000s. A 2006 television campaign for the Northern League saw Alberto da Giussano with a crusader flag galloping through a woodland scene. The accompanying text urged “respect for our land, our traditions, our history, honesty, courage, family, protection, liberty.” The ended with the crusader raising his sword before he transforms into the Northern League symbol. In this fantastical image, “our land, our traditions” are identified with a Europe under threat from nameless, foreign outsiders. In a climate of suspicion of Islam and of immigration, the crusader image has, of course, a particular set of resonances.

Now the Northern League has transmuted into La Lega (the League), in a government coalition with the amorphous, populist Five Star Movement (M5S). Bossi has gone, forced to resign his leadership of the party after a financial scandal in 2012. In 2013, Matteo Salvini took over the reigns of the party. In June 2018, Salvini became Italy’s deputy prime minister and is, most observers concede, the most powerful politician in Italy. The League’s symbol still features the mythical Lombard knight with a fierce Lion of St. Mark embossed on his shield.

Changing Perceptions

But perceptions of the League have changed from a special interest party of northern separatists to a national anti-immigration and Eurosceptic movement similar to the UK Independence Party (UKIP) and Germany’s Alternative for Germany (AfD). Salvini himself has that marries elements of more “traditional” conservative politics (the League’s current slogan, “The Common Sense Revolution,” was used by the British Conservative leader William Hague in 2001) with characteristics of the new alt-right.

Salvini’s tweets in short sentences punctuated with exclamation marks, similar to US President Donald Trump’s use of the medium. Salvini admires Trump, whom he met in April 2016, during the latter’s election campaign. Salvini about Trump’s respect for “legality and security.”

The trajectory of the Northern League is a case study of the complex ways in which perceptions of regional, national and ethnic identity operates in the contemporary politics of the radical right. From defending the desires of northern separatists to detach from Rome and southern Italy, the League’s instead stresses “autonomy and responsibility” for all Italian regions which will result in fewer costs and more responsibility over spending. For , Padania was a “slave” to Rome. For the contemporary League, Italy is a “slave” to the European Union that has invited too many migrants.

In this story, regional autonomy is still important for the League, but can no longer be mapped onto a divide between North and South. Instead, Italians — whether Sicilians, Venetians, Lombards or Sardinians — stand in opposition to an oppressive and obsessively pro-migrant EU. Like UKIP’s Nigel Farage during the 2016 referendum on Britain’s membership of the EU, the League plays on long-standing European fears of the Oriental “other”: “No [Never] to Turkey in Europe!” proclaims one League banner .

Salvini’s League successfully taps into deep, sub-rational anxieties about the vast continents to the south and east of Europe. His Twitter feed provides an almost gleeful litany of African asylum seekers in Italy supposedly arrested for heinous violent or sexual crimes. The League’s current slogan, “Italians First,” encapsulates the anti-migration rhetoric that has become so characteristic of the contemporary party.

Alongside this is an apparent concern for culture and patrimony, perceived as both regional and Italian. One of Salvini’s stunts saw him parading through the streets of Florence placing “for sale” signs on its monuments, including the copy of Michelangelo’s David in the Piazza della Signoria, emphasizing his rhetorical point about Italian culture being sold off by the European Union. Salvini also sees himself as a fierce advocate of Italian products like Parmesan cheese and Parma ham. On July 14, Salvini tweeted a photograph of himself in front of a vast Lion of St. Mark in Oppeano, Verona, to advertise the League’s annual festival.

International Alliance of Populists

Regional identity has not disappeared as a concern of this radical-right, Eurosceptic and anti-migration party. Rather, symbols of both regional and national culture have become part of a fluid set of tools to promote the nativist concerns of the League, concerns it seems to share with the movements in support of Trump in America and with various forms of radical-right nationalism in Europe. Salvini has made , as well as Marine Le Pen’s National Front in France. One of the political figures to send early congratulations to the new Italian government was Nigel Farage, of UKIP. Like the League, UKIP combines a focus on local, regional concerns with rhetoric of a “British” national “history and heritage.” In particular, the national party has targeted small coastal towns, promising complete extraction from the European Union’s orbit.

A recent campaign, for example, promised to “Make Brixham Great Again.” Brixham is a fishing port in South Devon, where UKIP’s leaflets and slogans were targeted at local shoppers and café patrons, the party’s appeal based on its to regenerate such towns by “liberating” them from the EU. Salvini’s recent call for “an international alliance of populists” against a “Europe of the elites” places the League in a transnational league of radical-right parties.

In this context, the League makes with Steve Bannon’s ethno-nationalism in the United States and with the forces around in the UK. At the same time, Germany’s radical-right AfD have the coalition of the League and M5S, praising the two anti-establishment parties. Thus, whilst the League’s regional roots are still important, it now aligns itself with a loose group of forces opposed to the European Union, to “liberal” values, and to “elites” in general.

*[ is a partner institution of .]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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