How to Be a Fascist: A Manual cover

How to Be a Fascist: A Manual

by Michela Murgia

The fascist media playbook, step by step.

For you if

you need someone to confirm that what you're watching is exactly as calculated as it looks

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Murgia wrote this in Italy in 2018 as a satirical instruction guide — congratulations on your decision to become a fascist, here is where to begin. Control the media. Discredit anyone who tells a different story. Reward loyal outlets; exile the rest. The joke lands because the instructions are completely accurate, delivered in the cheerful register of a corporate onboarding manual. Murgia, who died in 2023, was one of Italy's fiercest public intellectuals, and every line of the manual is checkable against the news. Reading it feels like being handed the receipt for something you already knew you were being charged for.

Where This Book Lives

Setting
Italy
Voice
Written by a Italian author

Murgia died in August 2023. This short book — barely 100 pages — is one of the most precise instruments against fascism in recent Italian letters. The satire works because it refuses to exaggerate: every step she describes is documented history, not hyperbole. Written for Italy; applies everywhere.

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