If you were up on your right-wing memes, Melania Trump's "I REALLY DON’T CARE, DO U?" jacket last week would have screamed its meaning as loudly at you as if she'd casually dropped the fourteen words.
Me ne frego — I don't care — was the motto of Benito Mussolini's Black Shirts. Growing up as she did in Slovenia, which is immediately adjacent to Italy and which was occupied by the Italian fascist regime in WWII, Melania was very likely fully aware of the phrase's historical and political significance.
The origins of the phrase were in WWI, with members of the military force known as the arditi, 'the daring ones,' monarchists who volunteered to fight at the front. Their motto was Me ne frego, meaning they didn't care about their own lives, only victory, as they jumped into enemy trenches armed with nothing but daggers and hand grenades. They were disbanded after WWI but many went on to join Mussolini's fascist movement.
The arditi were disbanded after the war, but many of them volunteered in 1919 for an expedition led by the poet Gabriele D’Annunzio to capture the city of Fiume (Rijeka, in present-day Croatia) and claim it for Italy during the vacuum created by the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian empire. At the time of this occupation, former arditi also formed the backbone of the original Black Squads during the terror campaigns that began in 1919 and culminated with the ‘March on Rome’ of 1922, which completed Fascism’s swift rise to power.
The meaning of ‘Me ne frego’
The proud Black-Shirt motto ‘I don’t care’ written on the bandages that cover a wound isn’t just an act of stoic philosophy or the summary of a political doctrine. It’s an education to fighting, and the acceptance of the risks it implies. It’s a new Italian lifestyle. This is how the Fascist welcomes and loves life, while rejecting and regarding suicide as an act of cowardice; this is how the Fascist understands life as duty, exaltation, conquest. A life that must be lived highly and fully, both for oneself but especially for others, near and far, present and future.
The connotations of altruism at the end of the quote are in direct contrast with the meaning taken on by the word menefreghismo (literally, ‘Idontcareism’), which ever since the regime has meant in common parlance a kind of detached self-reliance, or moral autocracy. Just as Italy broke with its former allies and charted a stubborn path towards the ruin and devastation of the Second World War, so too the Fascist citizen was encouraged to reject the judgement of others and look straight ahead. It should be remembered in this regard that the regime treated ignorance and proclivity to violence as desirable qualities to be rewarded with positions of influence and power. This required a swift redrawing of the old social norms, and of the language used to signify the moral worth of individuals. ‘Me ne frego’ was the perfect slogan for the people in charge of overseeing such a program.
That sounds useful in Trump’s America!
Could Melania possibly have been oblivious to the meaning of the huge white-lettered message plastered across her back the other day? Extremely unlikely.
I have been to northeastern Italy, and just across the border into Slovenia. You cannot drive through the smallest village in this region without seeing a monument or cemetery dedicated either to the World War I dead, the Fascists, or the defeat of the Fascists by Communist Yugoslav partisans and Italian antifa geurrillas at the end of World War II. Streets everywhere are named after Fascists or antifascists. There are references to d'Annunzio everywhere....
Melania Trump was born in Novo Mesto, a city in Slovenia which was part of first Fascist Italy, then the Third Reich in World War II. Her father was a Yugoslav Communist Party member, from a village which has three large mass graves from the struggle against the Fascists and Nazis. She went to school and first worked in Lubljana, a city full of references to the fight against Fascism. She started her modelling career there before moving on to Milan, the city where Mussolini was executed after a mass uprising against the Nazis and Fascists. She speaks Italian....
When you add to this the fact that Fascists have just had an electoral victory in Italy, that there are active Fascist street movements everywhere there today, actively resurrecting and using the Fascist slogans and mottos of the 1920s and '30's (including "I Don't Really Care"), that admirers of these movements have worked and do work in the White House, from Steve Bannon to Sebastian Gorka to Stephen Miller, and that Zara, the jacket manufacturer has previously been controversial for producing a swastika themed handbag and a shirt with a concentration camp Jewish star on it, it is impossible for me to think that this signalling was not intentional.
Perhaps she was only trying to warn us, like a desperate hostage blinking out a message in Morse code with her eyelids under the watchful eyes of her captors.
God knows, Americans are oblivious enough to the details of history, especially history that unfolded long ago and far away, that they can be easily hoodwinked by the bland statement put out by her spokesperson (handler?) that "A jacket is just a jacket."
Or maybe Melania was simply putting on the colors of her chosen side. Who's to say?