https://youtu.be/tI0zcW1Msw0

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don_Camillo_and_Peppone

Don Camillo and Peppone are the fictional protagonists of a series of works by the Italian writer and journalist Giovannino Guareschi set in what Guareschi refers to as the “small world” of rural Italy after World War II. Most of the Don Camillo stories came out in the weekly magazine Candido, founded by Guareschi with Giovanni Mosca. These “Little World” (Italian: Piccolo Mondo) stories amounted to 347 in total and were put together and published in eight books
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Don Camillo is a parish priest … Peppone is the communist town mayor. The tensions between the two characters and their respective factions form the basis of the works’ satirical plots.
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What Peppone and Camillo have in common is an interest in the well-being of the town. They also appear to have both been partisan fighters during World War II; one episode mentions Camillo having braved German patrols in order to reach Peppone and his fellow Communists in the mountains and administer Mass to them under field conditions. While Peppone makes public speeches about how “the reactionaries” ought to be shot, and Don Camillo preaches fire and brimstone against “godless Communists”, they actually grudgingly admire each other. Therefore, they sometimes end up working together in peculiar circumstances, though keeping up their squabbling.

Thus, although he publicly opposes the Church as a Party duty, Peppone takes his gang to the church and baptises his children there, which makes him part of Don Camillo’s flock; also, Peppone and other Communists are seen as sharing in veneration of the Virgin Mary and local Saints. Don Camillo also never condemns Peppone himself, but the ideology of communism which is in direct opposition to the church.
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Despite their bickering, the goodness and generosity of each character can be seen during hard times. They always understand and respect each other when one is in danger, when a flood devastates the town, when death takes a loved one, and in many other situations in which the two “political enemies” show their mutual respect for one another and fight side by side for the same ideals (even if they are each conditioned by their individual public roles in society).

I read the earlier books while in high school and college, although I’ve only lately realized how much they influenced my political evolution. The oscillating conflict and cooperation of the Priest and the Mayor clearly modeled what many people used to believe should be the norm for political behavior, as I do.

I don’t think Don Camillo would be happy about today’s cancel culture.
His opinion of the wokerati and their CRT, DIE, and other ideological dogmas is also not hard to imagine.

I don’t know if it’s the whole thing (it’s only 2:14).
BTW, someone who doesn’t seem to have been referenced here but who very much deserves to be is Oriana Fallaci…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oriana_Fallaci

The communists did have power over local governments where they had a majority. When I lived there in the early 90s, IIRC, they ran Bologna. Nationally, I think I read at the time (in the Economist) that communist voters accounted for over 40% of the voting public.

I don’t know enough to understand the social dynamics at play in Italian elections, but I wonder if she might parry the accusations of “fascist” by identifying her opponents as communists (given their previous association and membership in an explicitly communist party) and emphasizing the horrific record of murder, torture, and repression of communists worldwide.

Fascists/Nazis on the other hand are more interested in—shall we say—the aesthetics (among other things) of racial superiority…

But Global Domination (Inc.)—hey, they can shake hands on that!…(If only they could SHARE…well, for more than a year or two…)

As a hypothesis, this is (partly) because communists, in theory, want(ed) utopia for everybody; communism is a universalist worldview. Whereas naziism and fascism are particularistic: nazis care only about their own race, and regard other races only as prey..Italian-style fascists care only about their own nation and regard others nations only as prey.

Franco, Salazar, and Dollfuss ran constitutionally authoritarian regimes which made use of corporatist institutions. They were antagonists of the Marxist parties and the affiliates of the Marxist parties. That’s the overlapping part of the Venn diagram with the fascist regimes. Horthy was the head of state of a constitutional parliamentary regime, albeit one where crooked elections were the norm; do not believe it had innovative economic policies, good or bad. Its most disagreeable signature (aside from vote fraud) was a series of laws passed abusive to the country’s Jewish minority.

“Family is another traditional and individualistic force (if you consider a family an individual)”

Actually, that defines the main split on the right today. (I don’t count the Never
Trumpers, who are now wholly owned by their leftist paymasters.)

(But give ’em a bit of time…. There’s SO MUCH content out there that MUST be kept hidden from us…and so little time…)