2024-04-25 15:00:11
“As long as this word – “anti-fascism” – is not uttered by those who govern us, the specter of fascism will continue to haunt the house of Italian democracy. » This was the conclusion of the speech that the writer Antonio Scurati was invited to give on Italian public television in the run-up to the celebrations of April 25, the anniversary of the liberation from Nazism and fascism. The intervention of the author of the series of novels M, dedicated to the life of Benito Mussolini, was canceled. What followed was a scandal surrounding an apparent act of censorship which awakened a lingering dispute over Italian historical memory.
Since the arrival to a dominant position – that of the presidency of the council, by Giorgia Meloni – of a political family whose roots go back to the history of the fascist regime, this old wound has become more painful. Its return results from the collision between an anti-fascist political culture, the basis of the Italian Republic, and the tradition of a radical right long relegated to the margins of democratic life.
Anti-fascism as celebrated by Antonio Scurati is the legacy of a victory, that won with the Allies by the Italian resistance fighters against the fascists of the Italian Social Republic, a puppet regime placed under the rule of the occupier German. Communists, socialists, Catholics or liberals, the victors of this civil war fought in northern Italy between 1943 and 1945 were also the architects of the political compromise which led to the Republican Constitution of Italy. The dominant force of the resistance, the Italian communists were then excluded from power due to Italy’s Atlantic alignment.
Contemporary events
Yet they managed to appropriate the history of anti-fascism and build around its memory a powerful political culture which has survived them. The radical left of the 1970s and its terrorist extensions claimed it. Its contemporary manifestations range from Hello beautiful sung with fervor in left-wing rallies to the memorial works of intellectuals, including the action of the National Association of Partisans of Italy, which celebrates, this year, April 25 with the slogan “Long live the anti-fascist Republic”.
The losers of the war, formed into a political party with the Italian Social Movement (MSI) in 1946, constructed another memory, steeped in a certain romanticism of defeat. “The neofascists developed the idea that they represented the camp of loyalty, that owed to the Mussolini regime and to the German ally in an Italy which had given itself to the enemy”, explains Giovanni Orsina, historian of the Italian right at the Luiss Guido-Carli University in Rome. Excluded from the “constitutional arc”, they became the standard bearers of anti-communism without managing to influence the political game.
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