Italy lost 700,000 Italians in World War I, and then immediately voted in Mussolini's fascists, which militarized the whole of Italian society.

If you wonder why Italians cheat on their taxes today, it's because they have 25 centuries of experience with nasty tyrants like Mussolini.

Well, Mussolini gambled and went to war on Hitler's side, and Italy lost another half million people in WW II.

Make it a round 1.3 million Italians dead from very, very bad gambles -- not to mention all the non-Italians they killed.

What is astonishing is that Italy, having been punished twice in the 20th century by losing 1.3 million Italians -- and killing a lot more foreigners -- is staring into same bottomless abyss again. There must be something hypnotic about that dark Road to Hell. They can't stop looking, like a deer staring into the headlights of an oncoming truck.

Today, a politician named Beppe Grillo is rising to fame and fortune. His Italian audiences are laughing themselves silly at Beppe's neo-fascist schtick.

Tomorrow... maybe they won't laugh.

Like the rest of the Europe, Italy today is noisily shouting how peace-loving it is.

Just like the old Soviet Union.  

The problem is that the Euro Union fantasy world is now breaking down all over, and southern Europe is suffering from all those promises peddled by Tony Blair's Third Way Socialism; they can't afford to keep the euro anymore, because it makes Italian exports way too expensive. Many customers can't afford to buy Italian any more.

So the four Little PIIGS of southern Europe are in terrible economic straits. (PIIGS = Portugal, Italy, Ireland, Greece and Spain.) Normal people are suffering and scared.

Europe has been living high on welfare propaganda for a couple of decades, and now reality is breaking in. That great new EUnion is crumbling, and people all along the Mediterranean coast are looking for scapegoats.

To make things worse, European politicians in very bad trouble always look for scapegoats. It's in the Demagogue's Manual.

Europe's post-Communist radicals have scapegoated Israel scapegoated for decades, just like American radicals.

Today it's the turn of Jews all over the world, plus Gypsies, Albanians, Balkan and African immigrants, and the Rockefellers. And of course, the Illuminati. The international banks.

Any scapegoat in a storm.

This must be neo-neo-fascism, or maybe neo to the fourth power. Who's counting?

Enter one Beppe Grillo, one of the neo-neo stars of the day.

Remember that name, just in case you have to read it again.

Some people say Beppe Grillo is just a comedian, which is how he has made his living most of his life. Some people say gruesome Grillo is paving the way for neo-neo-neo of the murdering kind.

Says Beppe Grillo on his blog and YouTube performances:

"Yes, the Jews were sent to Auschwitz! The problem is that two kilometers from Auschwitz there was an IG Farben factory. Farben is called BAYER today."

While Jewish men, women and children were being killed in Auschwitz, some were forced into slave labor at IG Farben or wherever else the Nazis wanted labor. That's the smidgen of truth in Beppe's barrel of lies.

"IG Farben: ''but they weren't killed by the Nazis, they were killed by Jews, so Jews killed their Jews ..., it is so strange that there were killed 6 million of Jews, more than their whole population, maybe they were only 600.000, I mean that those 6 million Jews are today in America..."

It is important to understand Beppe's paranoid thinking here.

Around six million Jews were murdered by the Nazis, with the help of other European regimes.

There are more than six million Jews in the United States today, so with typical paranoid logic, Beppe jumps from six million murder victims in 1945 to six million living American Jews in 2013.

Six million Jews murdered in places like Auschwitz "equals" six million living American Jews today.

Get it? I don't either.

It's paranoid thinking.

Paranoid thinking is important to understand. We see a fair amount of it in America today, and it's an old, old European specialty.

Beppe's Italian audiences lap it up.

Curiously enough, Beppe Grillo is married to a lady born in Iran, where children soak up Death to Israel! Death to America! slogans ... every single day of the week. So do all the soldiers, bureaucrats, Revolutionary Guards, and the Basiji -- the regimes imported thugs from the countryside.

Beppe tells the world that "Everything I know about the Middle East I learned from my father-in-law!" 

After marrying his Iranian wife, by some miracle, Beppe suddenly got a lot richer. His public career took off, and from being a comedian he became a politician. Or maybe just an idealistic truth-teller to a corrupt Italian state.

Beppe bought his motor yacht and his Ferrari, then purchased three separate villas.

Dad-in-law runs a giant construction business in Iran, where he has to lie in bed with the mullahs and the Revolutionary Guards every day of his life.

So Beppe learns everything about the Middle East from his dad-in-law, who maybe gets it straight from the Ayatollah himself. (Who heard it directly from Allah.)

This week the Pentagon reported that Iran employs 30,000 spies and agents around the world. They are controlled by the biggest fanatics in Mullahville, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). Dictatorships like to scatter their spies among their own refugees living abroad. Lenin did it. Stalin did it. Hitler probably did it.

The ayatollahs drove out millions of Iranians who are now living in the West. Beppe's wife is herself a mullah expat, and dad-in-law lives in Tehran.

The Revolutionary Guards  could make life impossible if dad-in-law doesn't get his famous son-in-law to run a pro-Iran line in Italy.

Or maybe Beppe's wife is a True Believer in Ahmadinejad and the return of the Twelfth Mahdi after nuclear Armageddon?

Who knows? These people are less than sane.

There's no doubting Beppe's sudden success, however. From Wikipedia's sympathetic article on Beppe:

"According to Technorati, (Beppe Grillo's) the blog is ranked among the 10 most visitedblogs in the world. In 2008, The Guardian ranked Grillo's blog among the world's most powerful blogs." 

Beppe's Wikipedia entry has no criticism of his hate speech. Odd.

Nobody knows, except the mullahs and the CIA. The internet is a big spying and propaganda field for the Islamic fascists in Iran.

Now maybe this is all pure accident.

Ya think?

We don't know where Beppe is going, now that he's turned into a neo-neo-neo. Nobody knows where he is going to end up, because nobody can predict how bad things will get, when the newest EU Worker's Paradise starts to crumble. If it gets bad enough Beppe and all his copycats are ready to pick up the pieces.

In the 1920s and 30s normal people thought that Il Duce was a fat clown. And Tojo, Hitler, and all the lesser-known grand criminals of WWII. Sane people thought they were funny.

Sometimes murderous clowns rise to power.

Here's another little gem:

"Any Israeli knows, without a shadow of a doubt that the Jewish people existed when (Moses) received the Torah in the Sinai. (Any Israeli knows) and that he is the direct and exclusive descendant of the chosen people..."  

But the Bible is full of lies, says Beppe. In fact,

"The Hebrews were a small Arab minority that invaded original Palestine. Those wandering people just got there by accident, they took criminal possession of Arab land, against violent opposition of the local population."

See how easy it is to flip the Bible? This comes straight from dad-in-law, according to Beppe, and now it's selling like hotcakes in the crazier parts of Italy.

The bad news is that a lot of Italy is going into a spin.

Says Beppe:

'I would never trust somebody with a hooked nose and I will send him to make a long walk to Gaza with a Jew skullcap on his head...''

That always gets a big laugh.

Italy is staring in the abyss, and the darkness is beckoning.