La retorica antisemita e l’ἐπανόρϑωσις come suo principio

The focus of this article is on “antisemitism” as a “political language”, as suggested by Gadi Luzzatto Voghera (2024). Benito Mussolini’s 1938 racist and antisemitic speeches (held in Forlì, Trieste and prior to the National Council of National Fascist Party) are now compared for the first time with contemporary antisemitic political language in Italy, especially in the aftermath of the Hamas Attack on the 7 October 2023. A rhetorical linguistic analysis of this uncommon comparison shows that the structure of old antisemitism remains in its new form. The main argument of this article is that the rhetorical figure of the ἐπανόρϑωσις can represent the whole antisemitic Mussolinian rhetoric in a symbolic manner, both in its formal and content terms. The Greek word ἐπανόρϑωσις, which means “correction” or “improvement”, is a useful tool here to demonstrate how Mussolini gradually developed hateful content in his discourse. Moreover, the ἐπανόρθωσις is morphologically functional to the construction of an enemy and the manipulation of the sense of words in order to achieve set political objectives. Finally, our assumption is that the current political antisemitic language is essentially a worsening of the previous language of Mussolini in 1938, due to the use of digital artifacts that subtly whisper antisemitism, like a whistling for a dog.