MSNBC COMPARES SOCIALLY CONSERVATIVE ITALIAN PM TO STALIN:
The liberal President of the United States recently invited the conservative Prime Minister of Italy to the White House to discuss matters of mutual concern including the war in Ukraine. Such pairings are not exactly new or uncommon, but MSNBC’s Friday edition of The Last Word used the opportunity to compare Giorgia Meloni to Joseph Stalin for her social conservatism.
Addressing Prof. Ruth Ben Ghiat, who wrote a book entitled Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present, guest host Ali Velshi began by portraying President Joe Biden as some sort of master alliance manager, “Ruth, let’s talk about the people that Joe Biden has brought together. This is a world in which we weren’t sure five years ago whether NATO was really a functional organization under Donald Trump’s leadership. Now we’ve got NATO. But we have these issues, right? We’ve got Meloni, we’ve got Poland which really wasn’t on the side of much since the war began, but they have been solidly and staunchly in favor of Ukraine.”
If Velshi thinks internal NATO disagreements began with Trump, he shouldn’t be talking about foreign policy and his shot at Poland was as gratuitous as it was wrong. Velshi also threw in the non-NATO example of India’s Narendra Modi, whose close relationship with the U.S. predates Biden, before asking Ben-Ghiat to “Tell me about the alliances we have to form to fight Russia there would otherwise be considered unsavory.”
Of all the individuals and countries Velshi mentioned, Ben-Ghiat chose to single out one, “Yeah, this is very tricky and, I mean, we have a blueprint: World War II allying with us, you know, thinking of Stalin from his Great Patriot phase. You know, what’s, from the point of view of democracy, what is tough is take Meloni, who’s kind of playing a double game.”
Meloni hasn’t killed her political opponents or had them deported to the gulag. She hasn’t committed genocide in Ukraine and she hasn’t invaded the Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Finland, or Poland. It is an absurd analogy, but Ben-Ghiat proceeded to try to tie conservatism to Stalin more specifically[.]
And comparisons to Stalin are a problem on MSNBC, why? It’s all pretty rich coming from a network that believes your children are not your own, has a weekly show hosted by a legendary anti-Semite, and has another host who famously said:
“I am not a progressive. I am not a liberal who is so afraid of the word that I had to change my name to progressive. Liberals amuse me. I am a socialist. I live to the extreme left, the extreme left of you mere liberals, okay.”
—That’s the host of the aforementioned Last Word, Lawrence O’Donnell, on November 5th, 2010.