Ideas Folgen

When Rohingya poet Mayyu Ali saw his name in print for the first time, he thought: "I exist." "Even thought my government doesn't recognize [me] I exist in my writing," he told IDEAS. The Myanmar government has targeted the Rohingyas for decades. Ali has no birth certificate, no citizenship, no human rights. He fled genocide in 2017 to live in a refugee camp in Bangladesh, until he resettled to Canada in 2021. Ali shares his life story about surviving a genocide, the power of writing poetry, and his long journey to become a citizen for the first time in his life.

Fascism has been called “the aestheti-cization of politics.” Nazis and Italian Fascists both made visual culture, art, even fashion part of their destructive programs. Now the far-right in the U.S. is taking lessons from history, selling its ideas through memes, and hate-filled videos.

In 1922, Benito Mussolini took power in Italy. Sustained by a cult of personality and iron-fisted suppression of dissent, Mussolini transformed the nation into a single-party state. Nahlah Ayed and panelists discuss the legacy of Italian fascism and its relevance today.