Of Fascism Behind A Democratic Mask

-A Venetian mask protect and permit wearer to freely interact with people of all social status in a traditional Carnevale. Malaysia has it worn 52years, still counting.

There are too many ambiguous and lopsided systems exist in this country. Not hard to be identified. Both blaming its cultural and demographically diverse background, and finger-pointing to its geographical default, might sometimes lead to rational explanations on how messy this country is. The democratic propaganda is still loud in the air. But actual actions beneath this propaganda, usually undemocratic, are unintentionally perpetuated and manifested on one aspect that claim to be the most communicative mirror of a nationhood - its architecture.

This is not Mussolini's fascist era, nor the country need giant rostrum to tell the world that we want to revive socialism. But as Sigmund Freud once said, 'real democracy have never existed, there lies a animalistic irrationality and violent in every human', silent practice of fascism behind the protective mask of democracy is both possible and feasible. A recall on the history of Mussolini's regime and its fascist architecture vision struck me in association on what is happening in Malaysia.
-Palazzo Dei Congressi of EUR - the fascist edifice.

I examined the 4 aspects of fascism with its level of real practice by the Malaysian government. There are four main characters of our nation's conduct in close similarity with the one used in pre-WW2 Italy. There is a 'dictator' with centralize authority on all systems, be it our controversially elected P.M., stringent socioeconomic controls, suppression of the opposition through terror and censorship, and typically a policy of belligerent nationalism and racism through over-flavouring a certain race and the gradual marginalization of other. All these dictatorial policies are undergoing silently beneath the mask of constant democratic propaganda.

In pre-war Italy, Marcello Piacentini under command of Mussolini almost single-handedly built the idealized New Rome for the tyrant. The whole city was almost completed by the 1942 Rome Exposition before the Axis power were plunged into war. Its fascist architecture share resemblance with the dictated new public architecture of the 21th century Malaysia. Both communicative in its overwhelming statement of totalitarian oppression of other seemingly inferior cultures. Its socialist realism architecture leave nothing abstract, leave no implicit hint, for this sake it resorts to the 'carved image' of classical language. Thus, it reconstructs the semiotic triangle, the firm relation between signifier (architectural element), reference (eclectic classical reference) and signified (the superiority of a certain party).
-False monumentalism and intention for manipulation - a national shame.

The purpose of these kind of building is to certain the 'uncertainty'. Clearly communicated in those building's symmetry, the firm centres and routes, big walls as well as those historically well codified architectural elements (classic and local vernacular), in a reasonable mixture.

Those imaginary 'SELF' of racist and dictatorial ground would not last long. The 'mask' itself would 'unmask' what is behind. The ill-fated are now end up trapped, like in the Piranesi's Carceri d'invenzione - The Imaginary Prisons!
-Geovanni Battista Piranesi - Carceri Plate VII, The Drawbridge, 1750.