Steve Bannon- failed in the military, flopped in government and will surely blunder in Italy!

Echo report by Ben Munster published in the May 31, 2021, The New Yorker:

Maine Writer comment: Bannon (ugh!) irony- A man who failed as a Navy officer and made a name for himself by supporting conspiracy theories perpetrated by #FormerGuy, now wants to build a right wing Nazi style academy in Italy!?!  Obviously, Bannon does not read. There is zero, "Nein!" ie. "no", support among Italians for anything that resembles Facism, Mussoliniism, right wing revanchism* and the evils of Nazism. 

Predappio, Italy crypt Benito Mussolini (1883-1945)

 

Suggested reading list for Bannon. If he can't read, then somebody must read these to him:

• The Italian Front: Invasion of Sicily, Salerno, Monte Cassino, Anzio, Rome, Gothic Line (Campaigns of World War II), by Michael B. Haskew.
• Beneath A Scarlet Sky by Mark Sullivan
• The Vatican Pimpernel: The World War II Exploits of the Monsignor Who Saved Over 6,500 Lives by Brian Fleming
• The Betrothed by Alessandro Manzoni

The Last Stand at Steve Bannon’s “Gladiator School”

The Academy for the Judeo-Christian West is trying to stave off eviction from Trisulti, an eight-hundred-year-old monastery outside Rome, where its founder hopes to offer courses like “Cultural Marxism, Radical Jihad, and the C.C.P.’s Global Information Warfare.”  By Ben Munster

At a café in a mountain town east of Rome, Benjamin Harnwell was wondering which of the five thousand applicants to his right-wing “gladiator school” he could introduce to a reporter without embarrassment. He thought of four, and dialled one up. “A journalist is looking to speak to some students,” he said into the phone, “and I don’t want him to wind up talking to some skinhead.” He listened, a religious medal rattling against his chest, his slicked-back hair shining. Harnwell hung up, saying that he’d been kidding about the skinhead thing. He then sped off in a white Fiat Punto, heading to the Certosa di Trisulti, a vast, eight-hundred-year-old charterhouse that is both his home and the site of his school.

Several years ago, encouraged by his friend Steve Bannon, the strategist behind #FormerGuy Donald Trump’s 2016 election, Harnwell, a forty-five-year-old British Catholic, began leasing the monastery, for about a hundred thousand dollars a year, from the Italian Ministry of Culture. 

Bannon has long been trying to foment populist insurgencies across Europe, and he viewed Trisulti as the perfect location for the Academy for the Judeo-Christian West, in which a new class of right-wing “culture warriors” would be trained. The aim, Bannon said, was “to generate the next Tom Cottons, Mike Pompeos, Nikki Haleys: that next generation that follows Trump.”

Set high in the mountains and decorated with frescoes, the monastery is a lonesome outpost on Bannon’s European frontier. With Trump’s defeat and Bannon’s 2020 arrest, on wire-fraud charges (he was pardoned), the work of setting up the school feels newly urgent. Harnwell spent the past two years battling lawsuits, and now the Italian government is trying to evict him. He has until June to appeal, before the carabinieri drag him out. Bannon blames “corrupt bureaucracy,” saying, “This is the sort of thing you expect from third world countries, not a founding nation of Western Civilization.”

If the plan goes ahead, gladiatorial training in the Catholic conservative arts will be offered to about seventy-five students, who will receive academic credits, toward a master’s degree, from an as-yet-undisclosed Catholic university in the States. Students were to have resided in old monks’ cells (no Wi-Fi), among a few lingering brothers. Applicants range in age from eighteen to eighty and include Italian academics and former U.S. marines. “We want people who have a sense that Western civilization is under threat,” Harnwell said.

So, the student he called, Alvino-Mario Fantini, is a fifty-two-year-old Ph.D. candidate in the Netherlands. “It’s wrong to accuse someone of racism and xenophobia, or Nazism, or any other ‘-ism’ without knowing their beliefs,” Fantini said by phone. He bitterly recalled being labelled a “fascist” in college for wearing a Dartmouth Indians sweatshirt. (The team has been renamed Big Green, to Fantini’s chagrin.) He applied to the academy in 2018, sending Harnwell a few clips blasting political correctness from the magazine he edits,  The European Conservative.

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The academy’s curriculum is devoted to the intellectual underpinnings of (stupid!) Bannonism, a cocktail of populist nationalism, libertarianism, and traditional (right wing!) Catholicism, angled vehemently against the European Union, China, Islam, gay rights, Pope Francis, abortion, and the left. Course titles include “Cultural Marxism, Radical Jihad, and the C.C.P.’s Global Information Warfare” and “The Early Church as a Business Enterprise.” The professors—whom Harnwell is reluctant to name—will include browbeaten conservative instructors from obscure Catholic finishing schools. The academy will also offer media training, taught, ideally, by Bannon himself, and inspired by sessions held at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference. (As one cpac participant put it, “They taught us how to speak about gay marriage without revealing our real thoughts.”)

When the idea for the academy was first floated, in Trump’s heyday, Harnwell had the support of a broad coalition of right-wingers, but that base is crumbling. The Italian government has moved leftward and has repeatedly taken Harnwell to court, alleging failure to pay rent and irregularities in his lease application. (Harnwell calls the charges “leftist disinformation.”)

He prevailed until last month, and the litigation has drained him, financially and emotionally. He has also lost support from revanchist elements in the Vatican, and other allies are now disillusioned with Bannon’s attempts to re-create Trumpism in Europe. “They said it would be a cultural project, that they would make Trisulti again a place of study and prayer,” Rocco Buttiglione, a conservative-leaning former Italian minister, said. “Then Steve Bannon entered into the picture.”

Protests have been erupting in the woods near the monastery, the monks have fled, and Harnwell is preoccupied with pet problems: his dog likes to eat lamb shank, and his cat drowned in a medieval well. But he remains determined to open. “This is an existential battle for me between good and evil,” he said. But months of potential gladiatorial prep time have been wasted, and it’s hard not to be glum. “Now I’m a fund-raiser for my lawyers,” he said. 

Published in the print edition of the May 31, 2021, issue, with the headline “Gladiator 101.” The New Yorker.

*Revanchism/Revanchist is the political manifestation of the will to reverse territorial losses incurred by a country, often following a war or social movement.

Postscript - May Bannon and company should also read about what happened to the Former Guy Academy.