There’s a famous part of Milan that no tourists ever really go to.
It isn’t particularly old or beautiful.
Yet, everybody knows it. It’s the banking plaza. It's the epicenter of Italian wealth and power.
And right in the middle of it, pointed directly at the stock exchange, is a giant middle finger.
Who is Italy? Is it you? I think it’s probably the most important question in the world today.
It’s why they put up that finger. But it was also the most important question
of the 1700’s so you can presume we're probably not going to solve it in this video.
But l want to ask it anyway. Who is Italy? Is it you?
I want you to imagine life as an Italian in 1920. You’re barely an adult and yet
you’ve spent nearly half a decade fighting the worst war in human history.
The posters on the wall told you that you were fighting for the glory of Italy, but when you came home nobody was cheering.
There was no glory for you here. So a half million boys thrown into that pit for what?
And now some communist is spitting on you in the street because your uniform represents
a failure that you had no control over. Even when you won you lost?
It wasn’t like you volunteered. You didn’t support the war any more than they did. It's just
when those Austrians came it was you who faced the guns. It was you who pissed on that rag
and shoved it in your own mouth to stop the gas. That wasn’t a dream when you did that.
A half million dead, the aristocrats who’d sent you over that line didn’t even lose a son. You’d personally watched
a thousand men run to their death because some Count was born too rich to learn to read a map and
as soon as those corpses were in the ground they gave him another thousand to try it all again.
He got to feel like Italy. So why didn’t you?
Across the south and in the neighbourhoods of cities where they housed those they expected to do the real work,
things were in full collapse. The countryside was criss-crossed with two-thousand year old aqueducts
and yet the houses didn’t have running water. Talk about wanting to make your country great again.
Not that you’d ever expect to hear this in the news. Everything the press said was a lie.
It didn’t matter if they told the truth, their truths didn't really apply to you.
Headlines could claim that the GDP doubled, and that might have well been true. They could claim that the
stock exchange was booming, and that might have well been true too.
It just wasn’t true for you.
So who was Italy?
Was it an upper class whose sole political ambition seemed to be stripping you of your right to vote?
A politician who claimed to be for the people and then accepted bribes from the man who fired you when you lost your arm in his factory?
That's who you toiled for? That's who your friends died for? Why do they get to be Italy and not you?
How do you not throw up the finger?
By the end of the First World War, the promises of progress must have seemed like jokes you tell your children to keep them calm.
All the excitement of the new science and industrialization and everything else they’d said would
make our lives better just tasted like mustard gas in the back of your throat.
How do you watch nearly a million men die on the banks of the Isonzo and still believe there’s justice to this world?
That there's a loving God who protects you?
How do you not search out an answer that makes that all feel like it's okay, like you have some form of control?
The communists said that they could replace God with the state. Any man who ruled it
would have the divinity of the people, so it wouldn’t be authoritarian, it would be like a near-holy liberation.
A dictatorship, sure, but of the proletariat.
Theirs wouldn’t be an empire, it would a union. A brotherhood of the unpurged.
But the far right’s solution was even simpler than that. God may be dead but at the very least
they could make you fear him. The system could become a paladin strong enough to assault
anyone who dared question the mercy of Jesus Christ’s imperial fist.
Their dictator would be strong enough to bend the world to their will. To get those colonies back.
To make everyone just shut up and go back to work. But if that scared you, what were your options?
Vote for the same people who brought you here? It was just so much easier to throw up the finger.
To those who viewed politics as nothing more than a soap opera, fascism promised the respect of a corrupt elite
who’d long felt untouchable. It promised that loyalty to the party could raise you above the aristocracy,
no matter your education or ability or name.
It offered a place on the world stage for people who’d never even truly felt like Italy.
But most of all, it made people feel protected from a collapsing world
they did not understand. It might not have been real but it was real enough to them.
Those with money chose the man who promised that under him, they could keep it. You don’t have to be a true believer
to benefit from dictatorship and so even those who’d expressed reservations
were pretty quick to fall in line once he came to power. Those aging caretakers of the system
that had paved Italy’s way into this corner barely peeped when Mussolini ate it’s democracy before their very eyes.
The more he embarrassed that weak and corrupted core, the more his followers touted him as divinely inspired.
He was their champion among the elite.
But authoritarian visions never work like promised, and propping up God like he’s Weekend at Bernie’s doesn’t make you some Paladin.
By 1945 he’d be swinging from a gas station,
the common man he claimed to champion chucking rocks at his naked corpse.
It isn’t just his memory that this statue is aimed at. It’s at his legacy.
Because 1920, 2020 what’s the difference?
I want you to imagine being Italian in 2008, watching as this statue got erected.
You've been just through two straight years of economic collapse brought on by what?
The people between those walls. People who for the most part knew exactly what they were doing.
Your government can’t agree on anything, but they immediately agree to bail them out.
And maybe it was the right move for the economy, you don't know.
But who was the economy? You didn’t get bailed out. The country is led by a billionaire,
but youth unemployment stands at 32%. So how do you not throw up the finger?
If money is to be our God, so be it, it’s as good as anything else we can agree on,
but as of right now there are far too many who cannot see that light.
People need healthcare, food, shelter and a purpose or they’re gonna rattle the cage. 1920, 2020, what’s the difference?
Well, a lot of things actually. War is different. Empire is different. In fact, most things are different.
We don’t say aristocrat any more, now we say old money.
There isn't a lot of enthusiasm to invade Ethiopia either. The new failed war is Afghanistan.
Although at this point I suppose that’s the old new failed war.
It’s been running so long some of the US soldiers were born after it started.
There's a lot of countries that are struggling right now. Each in their own way, for their own reasons.
But there are few republics that are so close to the brink of losing their democracy as the United States.
And although much has changed since the 1920’s there’s a lot that’s stayed the same.
Inequality is as bad today as the worst moments of the Great Depression and it’s getting worse.
Virtually no human alive has seen a more inequal America than you.
Between forty and sixty thousand veterans, the people who actually fought America's wars, are homeless.
Not a battalion or a brigade but an entire corps of soldiers without homes.
And there are hundreds of thousands more on the streets simply because they couldn’t pay a medical bill one time.
Yet, even for those with a roof over their head things aren’t a whole lot better right now.
Food insecurity doubled in the last year. 12% of American adults, one in every ten, doesn’t have enough food.
The minimum wage is barely half of what it was from when my father was a kid and yet
this year saw one of the largest increases of wealth for the top .1% ever recorded.
There is virtually no country in the industrialized world today where you are less likely to achieve
the American dream than America. That’s not my opinion, it’s just the stats.
It should come as no surprise that there are riots. It should come as no surprise that there are fascists.
I don’t know how to convince the elite to care about the problems of the poor.
I don't know how to stop capitalism from forgetting the source of its capital.
I don’t know how to convince the zealots that their easy answers are more complicated than they’ll ever admit.
Honestly, I rarely feel like I know all that much.
But for all that I don’t know, there are some things that I do. I know that putting up that finger changes nothing.
The man who put it here’s a millionaire and the city lets it stands because he’s famous among New York’s elite.
It doesn’t change anything, it doesn’t stop anyone. That finger has been standing there for over ten years and
every year it’s been up Italy has become more inequal and voted further fascist.
So how do you not throw up the finger? Well, look around. Is it working?
And perhaps I’m not the best messenger for this but as far as I can tell the only way to ever truly solve the rot of our societies
is by constantly using our hands for more than just complaining.
We may not be able to solve nation-sized issues on our own, but we’re all part of a smaller community.
And at the local level, these problems are all the same.
People need healthcare, food, shelter and a purpose. It doesn’t have to come from the government.
It doesn’t have to reach everybody. But every time it happens things get that much better.
Ideology always loses to reality eventually. History is pretty clear on that.
There’s no such thing as divine right. No first among equals has ever ended poverty. Wealth simply doesn’t trickle down.
But some people will always want a simple answer. They want a way to feel invested, whether it’s real or not.
And if you can see through that and they can’t what good is attacking them for it?
There are plenty of reasons to be furious, I’m furious, but what good is that anger if it’s just a catharsis that gives us nothing?
As far as I can tell, if we want to pull out of this nose dive that we are very clearly in we desperately need to acknowledge reality.
Global industrialization has brought many great things to this world, scientific progress beyond our wildest dreams.
But if we want that progress to taste any sweeter than the mustard gas of those trenches
we need to face that problems that it’s causing. We may be raising millions out of poverty worldwide every year, but
that’s just words on a page to somebody who no longer feel like Italy.
Trump isn’t just the rot of democracy. He’s also its bulldozer.
His followers will never care that he did nothing of actual value as President.
They’ll never care about the pandemic or that he raised the debt more than Obama.
They’ll even forgive him for getting in bed with the exact elites he promised to imprison.
Because he made them bow.
They didn’t bow to some politician, they didn’t bow to the system, they bowed to MAGA. To him.
And every second he was on that throne they got to feel like they were, too.
He will always be their paladin, their Mussolini, and if we can’t work together to solve the very real problems before us
the entire system will fall towards men like him. Right up until they’re hanging above a gas station.
I may not know the answers to the problems we’re facing. I’m just some guy on YouTube. And even if I wasn’t, what’s my truth to you?
But for all that I don’t know, there is one thing that I do.
You will never feel like Italy if all you ever do is tell it to go fuck itself.
This is Rare Earth.