Report attitudes towards collective memory of resistance against far-right regimes, groups or practices and specific narratives in collective memory in the target countries
Introduction
The report about attitudes towards the collective memory of resistance against far right regimes, groups or practices and specific narratives in collective memory in Italy traces the history of the far-right parties in the country, focusing on the main stage, fascism and the fascist state, and the movements that emerged in the aftermath of World War II.
Hence, the research attempts to answer the question: How is the history of far-right movements in the country perceived and engaged with?
The main character of the research is the memory of the resistance of far-right movements and its presence in the public debate, how resistance is narrated today. The documentation used for the research consists of books and articles, accompanied by three interviews with the University of Palermo’s Professor Baris, teacher of contemporary history, Professor Ciervo, President of the Italian National Association of Partisans (ANPI) in the provincial committee of Benevento, and Giuseppe Lipari, PhD in Political Science and Sociology at Scuola Normale Superiore of Pisa, also member of the ANPI provincial committee of Palermo.
History of the Right-wing parties in Italy
Italy has a long and complicated history with right-wing politics, which dates back to the early 20th century. In the aftermath of World War I, Italian nationalist and anti communist movements began to emerge, including the Fascist Party led by Benito Mussolini.
In 1919, Mussolini organised his fascist movement in the northern city of Milan. He formed squads of street fighters who wore black shirts. His “Blackshirts” beat up socialists and communists and threw them out of local governments.
In a chaotic political situation, Mussolini’s fascist movement presented itself as the only trustful party able to reestablish the social order. That is, it quickly gained the support of anti-communist business people, property owners, and middle-class professionals like teachers and doctors. “Fascism has as its motive a political intuition, post-WWI society becomes more complex, it cannot move forward led by governments that do not involve the population. Fascism provides an answer, guiding the transition to the construction of a mass society, understanding social change, and thus the need to bring the population into the state”.
Thus, in 1921, Mussolini formed the National Fascist Party. In a speech before thousands of his supporters in October 1922, Mussolini declared, “Either the government will be given to us, or we will seize it by marching on Rome.” A few days later, he incited his supporters on a march to the capital city. When tens of thousands of people converged on Rome, the government leaders became so nervous that they resigned.
That is, King Victor Emmanuel had the constitutional duty to appoint a new prime minister, who would form the next government. With his Blackshirts and other supporters swarming the streets of Rome, Mussolini had been appointed as Italian prime minister on October 29, 1922. He established a one-party state, characterised by authoritarianism, nationalism, and fascist ideology. The Fascist regime lasted until 1943, when Mussolini was ousted by the Allied forces.
Mussolini called new elections for the Italian parliament in 1924. Intimidation and fraud marred the election. Mussolini’s Fascist Party together with a smaller allied party won 66 percent of the vote.
After the elections, Mussolini banned opposition newspapers and prohibited public protest meetings. He declared all political parties illegal, except his own Fascist Party. He outlawed trade unions and strikes. He also established a political police force, the Organisation for the Vigilance and Repression of Antifascism. A fascist Grand Council approved Mussolini’s decrees and rendered Parliament irrelevant.
Opponents of Mussolini coined the term “totalitarianism” to describe his quest to control not only the political system but also the economy, schools, police, courts, military, and more. Ironically, Mussolini liked this term and began to use it himself to persuade Italians to come together under his leadership for a rebirth of society.
Hoping to keep the church from opposing his fascist regime, Mussolini adopted pro Catholic policies against abortion and divorce. Then in 1929, he signed a treaty with the church that made Catholicism the state religion. This agreement also restored the teaching of Catholic doctrine in secondary schools. For its part, the church accepted Mussolini’s fascist state and ended its involvement in Italy’s political affairs.
Mussolini wanted to create an economic system that provided a “third way” between capitalism and socialism. During the 1930s, Mussolini organised industry, agriculture, and economic services into state-controlled labour unions and employer associations called “corporations.” Government officials appointed the heads of each union and employer corporation. They negotiated wages and working conditions with each other. But a special court tried anti-fascists, those working against Mussolini’s regime.
Fascist state
The Fascist State was an authoritarian state based on one state party in which the private dimension of people was considered as second to the “common will” of the state.
The Nation-State was designed as both the guarantor of internal order and external security, as well as the custodian and the vehicle of transmission of the spirit of the people as it had been elaborated throughout the centuries in language, custom, culture, and faith. The Nationalists also made explicit references to biology when referencing the “spirit of the people”, and in some instances they conceived of ‘race’, rather than nationality, to be the first order of distinction among men, nations, and civilizations.
Therefore, fascism intervenes in all aspects of people’s lives, organising them within a military frame every aspect of people’s lives, leisure time, gymnasium, maternity, childhood etc. The Fascist Party organised youth organisations for all boys and girls aged 8–18. These groups promoted physical training, military drills (for boys), and the ideals of the fascist state. “Everything must be connected to state life, it could not be left to social groups, because social groups (which the left relies on instead) are seen as divisive”.
“The whole organisation of the party, such as the focus on physical education, is literally a training towards the future life of war, Italy as a giant barracks, this is the modern, mass project, different from the traditional right”. Gentile stated that war has another function in the fascist state: “it unites the people and proves their superiority as a nation”. Gentile, called the philosopher of Italian fascism, believed he could combine philosophy with raw power. He once praised Mussolini as being dedicated to Italy in “its honour, its glory, its security and prosperity, and, therefore, in its power and its value in the history of the world.”
Moreover, Mussolini in order to strengthen his ties with Berlin and of severing those with the so-called Jewish’ demo-plutocracies’ in 1938, finally agreed to anti-Semitic decrees such as banning Jews from certain occupations. He adopted the Racial Laws and published the Manifesto of the Race. When the Germans occupied parts of Italy during World War II, they transported 20 percent of Italy’s Jews to Nazi concentration camps. While Italians hid many Jews, Mussolini did nothing to stop the Nazi deportations.
Throughout his years in power Mussolini often mixed keen political instincts with paranoid tendencies, and there were several instances over the course of his twenty year dictatorship that he accused the Jews of being a dangerous fifth column, that they held dual loyalties, that they were the leaders of the Bolshevist cause, that they promoted cowardice and falsehoods against the nation in war, that they sought world economic domination, and that behind the mask of ‘Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity’ they conspired within a very real but secret institutio’ known as ‘international Jewry’, for these were accusations which others, including the Italian Catholic Church, had levelled against the Jews for decades, and certainly for years before Hitler himself appeared on the German political scene. But it was this complete failure to come to terms with National Socialism’s antisemitic racialist centre that created the most profound ideological breach between the two Fascist regimes.
Before the adoption of the racist laws in 1938, the idea of national belonging based on blood was part of the fascist ideology already. As a matter of fact, during the war in Ethiopia there were already some racist laws that stressed the difference between colonial power and local people that have a submitted condition of lives. The racist explicitly says that there must be no sexual relations or intimate fraternisation between the superior and inferior groups.
However, before World War II, popular support for Mussolini’s fascist state was high. His charismatic style of leadership convinced many that Italy was on a path to greatness.
When the Great Depression hit Italy after 1929, Mussolini acted quickly and boldly with a large program of public construction projects, which put many jobless Italians back to work.
Another characteristic element of the fascist culture is the war, the central element of political life. Mussolini agreed with Gentile that the strong nations of the world had a natural right to subdue and rule the weak. Mussolini glorified military values like physical strength, discipline, obedience, and courage. “A minute of the battlefield is worth a lifetime of peace,” he declared.
In 1935, Mussolini ordered the invasion of Ethiopia, an African country that had once humiliated Italy in battle. Seeking revenge, Mussolini used planes, artillery, and poison gas against tribesmen with old muskets. Mussolini announced to cheering crowds that the Roman Empire was back. The racist explicitly says that there must be no sexual relations or intimate fraternization between the superior and inferior groups.
In 1939, Mussolini and Hitler signed the so-called “Pact of Steel,” which committed each country to come to the aid of the other in war. A few months later, Hitler invaded Poland and set off World War II. Mussolini, however, delayed joining Hitler until Nazi troops were just about to defeat France in June 1940.
Mussolini then decided to invade Greece. But his army was beaten badly and had to be rescued by German troops. In 1941, he sent 200,000 of his soldiers to aid Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union. The harsh winter and Soviet guerilla fighters killed huge numbers of German and Italian soldiers.
By 1943, the British, American, and other Allies had defeated Mussolini’s army in North Africa, taken Sicily, and bombed Rome. Thus, King Victor Emmanuel ordered the arrest and imprisonment of Mussolini, however, German commandos helped him escape to Germany.
Liberated by the Germans in September 1943, Mussolini created a republic, the Republic of Salò, whose capital was a small village on the western shore of Lake Garda, in the province of Brescia.
Therefore, anti-fascist Italian fighters captured and shot him on April 28, 1943. The next day, crowds cheered as they hung Mussolini’s body by its heels in Milan where he had started the fascist movement 25 years earlier.
In Italy while World War I had been processed as a founding experience of losses that as a result developed stronger ties of nationhood, hence, memorials and statues in every town and village commemorated the ultimate sacrifice for the unity of the Italian nation. On the other hand, World War II did not create such a unifying national memory.
According to Claudio Pavone, the period from 1943 to 1945 should be interpreted as one in which three wars were fought simultaneously: a patriotic war, a class war and a civil War. However, the anti-fascist forces fabricated a different image that stressed some features, while erasing others: the Resistance and the war conducted alongside the Allies were portrayed in epic terms as a Second Risorgimento.
Studies about the fascism
Marcello Flores and Giovanni Gozzini in the book “Perché il fascismo è nato in Italia ” (Eng. Why fascism was born in Italy) replied to a tough question, highlighting the responsibility of the Italian government, its incapacity to handle the social and economical disaster left after the WWI, and the ability of the fascist party to present themselves as the right alternative to run the country. According to the storics, the Italian government was not able anymore to reestablish the social order in the chaotic situation of the after war. On the other hand, Mussolini’s path to nationalist interventionism deepened during the years of the conflict. Especially after the defeat of Caporetto. The immediate reaction was the opposite to that of the head of the armed forces, General Cadorna, who accused the troops of ‘striking’: while Mussolini defended his fellow soldiers. As in every disaster, many different factors contributed to the defeat at Caporetto. An inhuman conduct of the war, with no regard for the losses of soldiers who were considered a mere mass of manoeuvre. And then the growing fatigue from a conflict that has been going on for years without producing results other than piles of dead. What distinguishes the Italian circumstances is the influx of German divisions with more decentralised lines of command, greater autonomy for the front-line units, innovative tactics of infiltration into the valley floor, and the favour of adverse weather conditions (fog and rain), which, however, in the Alps at the end of October were certainly not an unpredictable exception.
Moreover, immediately after his distancing from Cadorna, Mussolini fell back, like so many others, on a myth – in Germany, where the same thing happened, they called it ‘Dolchstoss’, ‘stab in the back’ – which blamed the internal enemy composed of socialists and neutralists for the defeat. It is a myth that has two implications. The first is to exasperate the director of “Il Popolo d’Italia” (eng. The italian folk) desire for revenge against his former party, towards which he reverses the accusation of betrayal levelled against him: it is the pacifist and defeatist socialists who are the nation’s real enemies. A gulf of irremediable hatred is now being dug. The second implication, even more important but closely linked to the first, is to provide everyone with a powerful exculpatory alibi. The psychological scapegoating mechanism (blaming the defeat on the socialists and all neutralists) works because, first of all, it prevents us from calling into question and questioning our own responsibility. It condemns all evil outside of us, in another. It stressed the need to eliminate the other, to be on the safe side. Hence, people need to find out the scapegoat in order not to get to grips with the real problems, which is always a complicated and therefore uncertain undertaking. Much easier and more reassuring to blame someone. As a matter of fact, it is a fairly universal mechanism in space and time.
Nowadays, variations of fascism live on in a number of military dictatorships around the world. “Neofascist” groups still exist in Western democracies. These groups typically preach ultranationalism and spew hatred of racial or ethnic minorities. The new version of these parties do not have the idea of a unified nation runned by one state party, the extreme racist forms of fascism, empowered by the Internet, are alive and well throughout the world.
More Fascist Regimes and Movements
After World War II, a number of far-right and neo-fascist movements emerged in Italy, including the Italian Social Movement (MSI), which was founded in 1946 and remained active until 1995. The MSI was characterised by its opposition to communism and socialism, as well as its nationalist and anti-immigrant stance. Despite its neo-fascist roots, the MSI was able to gain some mainstream political support in the 1970s and 1980s, particularly in Southern Italy.
In the 1990s and 2000s, a new wave of right-wing movements began to emerge in Italy, including the Northern League, which was founded in 1991 and advocated for greater autonomy for Northern Italy and a tough stance on immigration. The Northern League has since rebranded itself as the League and has gained significant political power in recent years, particularly under the leadership of Matteo Salvini. Other right-wing movements that have emerged in Italy include the Brothers of Italy, which was founded in 2012 and is characterised by its nationalist and anti-immigrant stance, and Forza Italia, which was founded in 1994 by Silvio Berlusconi and is seen as a center-right party.
In addition to these more traditional right-wing movements, Italy has also seen the emergence of newer, more populist and anti-establishment movements in recent years, such as the Five Star Movement (M5S) and CasaPound. The M5S was founded in 2009 and is characterised by its anti-corruption stance, its opposition to traditional political parties, and its emphasis on direct democracy. CasaPound, on the other hand, is a neo fascist movement that was founded in 2003 and advocates for a return to fascist principles and a rejection of liberalism and globalisation.
Even since the end of World War II, the Right and the radical Right have played an important role in Italian politics. Yet the social and political sciences, at least in Italy, have all but ignored them. The official neo-fascist party, the MSI (Italian Social Movement), founded in 1946, is the fourth largest party in the advanced industrial countries. However, the neo-fascist extra-parliamentary groups did not receive so much attention from Italian scholars, even if Ordine Nuovo and Avanguardia Nazionale (New Order and National Vanguard) have been constantly present in the postwar drama of the radical Right.
However, it remains a political topic that has not been studied enough, also for a tendency to refuse it, neither in historical and social sciences. Partly due to the fact that the events of the radical right have long been intertwined with those of the strategy of tension. The ideologies, myths, protagonists, organisations, the evolution of strategies and methods of struggle of the radical rights led to widespread terrorism and armed spontaneism. Therefore, the strategy of tension.
Far-right parties in the post World War II Era
Neo-fascist movements curiously gained the attention of many young italians during the sixties. Then, in the letters of the italian intellectual, Pier Paolo PasoliniHe tried to provide an explanation to the people who asked him about the spread of neo-fascism. These letters were collected in the “Dialogues with Pasolini” and published during the 70’s. On September 1962 the italian intellectual affirmed “It does not require to be strong to face the fascism in its forms, crazy and ridiculous, on the other side what really require to be strong is to deal with fascism as something that belongs to the normality, sociable elected, brutally cruel and selfish of the society”. In addition, what is surprising, in Pasolini perspective, is the fact that the new trend among youth has been considered as a normal fact, fascism has been rehabilitated together with its culture of intolerance, thus it is coming from “moderate parties” that belong to the mainstream politic.
Hence, the most unbelieveble aspect for Pasolini is the banalisation, that is driving the population, which allows enormous extremism to be considered acceptable, “normal”, mainstream.
Afterwards, Piero Ignaz, political scientist at the University of Bologna, internationally renowned for his studies on the ‘new right’, proposed to define the new black wave, the far-right parties born in the 80’s, as the ‘post-industrial extreme right’. The new parties are no longer based on the ‘palingenetic myth’ of fascism, they offer a response to the conflicts of contemporary society, this is the key to their success. The defence of the national community from foreign presence is a response to the atomisation and depersonalisation of national identity, which is annoyed by the mechanisms of representation, and which needs an authority that responds to the individualist drift that has broken traditional social ties.
Besides, Zygmunt Bauman, one of the most well-known contemporary sociologists, wrote that society is exhausted by feeling inconclusive and inadequate, insecure and in a precarious state of fortune, it looks for offenders for their sorrows. Thus, people find them in the nearest ‘street lamp’, the only place thoughtfully illuminated by the forces of law and order. This opens us up to the immigration issue that fuels the election campaigns and political agendas of the national-populist right on the old continent’.
Collective memory of fascism and resistance
A memory of the Italian far right refers to historical fascism, however, there are different phases of history to which different memories are connected in the course of Republican Italy.
A first phase consists of the de-emphasising of adherence to fascism, leaving adherence open, making a falsified reinterpretation of the history of fascism, with the intention of constructing a commonplace according to which fascism, up to a certain point, was kind of good.
The most identifiable part of fascism, after the defeat of the war, survives in newspapers such as Gente, Oggi, which in the 1950s constructed a positive memory of fascism, referring to some specific policies carried out by the regime, such as the agricultural reclamation of marshes, the re-establishment of order, famous is the reference to trains arriving on time during the regime, putting an end to an era of strike and disorders. The war in Ethiopia is also recounted in a positive manner.
All these elements translated into a cliché that fascism brought positive things. This common understanding lost its ground of justification in 1938, with the adoption of the racist laws. Obviously, this is a falsified historical narrative, surviving in anti-fascist Italy, which makes this representation its own.
The fascist memory dealt so far is distant from the one that neo-fascist movement refer to, they refer back to the fascism of the Republic of Salò. Fascism advanced the interests of certain components of society, office workers and urban sectors, while penalising workers and farm labourers. In this way, the summer and marine colonies produced positive memories, this memory of fascism is a shared memory, different from that of those who hark back to fascism, which brings the political discourse back to the idea of remaking Italian identity, building an empire, based on racial hierarchies (Hierarchy is the name of fascism’s theoretical journal).
On the other hand, for left-wing governments and parties, resistance became increasingly central in their identity construction, the left-wing parties drew on the dimension of constitutional values and resistance.
The path of placing the resistance at the centre is an articulated one that sees the constitution as the element shared by all the main political cultures, This works as long as the mass parties (Christian Democracy, Socialists and Communists) were functional to politics, but when they go into crisis in the 1980s, something begins to change.
Renzo de Felice, a historian, considered the greatest scholar of fascism, published the first volume of Mussolini’s monumental biography. In the publication he historiographically reinterpreted Fascism and the war of liberation. Besides, the historian drew strong criticism from the left, who accused him of justifying Fascism and of excessive adherence to the subject of the work.
Renzo De Felice has made an important historiographical contribution to fascism. In “Rosso e Nero”, (eng. Red and Black), the author portrays the Italian social republic as an extreme outpost in the defence of the homeland from the Bolshevik threat. On the other hand, his research, of which most academics recognised both the seriousness and the scrupulous documentation, was often used (with obvious distortions of feliciano’s theses) by the followers of revisionist theories in order to deny the historical responsibilities of fascism.
The anti-fascist world reacted by accusing De Felice of ‘revisionism’ and often lumping him together with disliked historians who were also considered revisionists. De Felice reacted, on the one hand, by reiterating his theses in books that were debated but always in a ‘scientific’ tone, and on the other hand, with articles he published in the newspaper Il Giornale, or in two interviews he realised to Giuliano Ferrara in 1987 and 1988 for the newspaper Corriere della Sera, using the medium of journalism to open up the debate on fascism to an audience of more than just specialists.
Ultimately, the work carried out by De Felice allowed the beginning of a new way of approaching the study of the years of fascism, freeing the latter ‘from the stereotypes and the shallows of mannerist anti-fascism’.
At the end of the 1970s and beginning of the 1980s, the revival of the memory of Fascism also took place in exhibitions, and so a large exhibition was held in Rome, curated by Renzo de Felice himself, and in Milan, on the economy at the time of the regime. The exhibition illustrated the splendour of the Italian economy from 1919 to 1939, to emphasise the industriousness of the fascist regime and to revive the national pride of ‘Made in Italy’. Major Italian companies, such as FIAT, Pirelli, Ansaldo took part in the exhibitions.
At the same time, documentaries and films catch up with the public more than these historical figures, the photographic and documentary records of the LUCE Institute (Cinematographic Educative Union), created in 1924 during the Fascist twenty-year period, which had been a powerful propaganda tool of the Fascist regime, is the oldest public institution for educational and informative film broadcasting in the world.
The Light Department East Africa moved as early as 1934 to progressively raise the awareness of Italians in the run-up to the war in Ethiopia. The photographs were called upon to show Italy’s war preparations, filming military exercises and manoeuvres in the presence of the king and Mussolini, and then in 1935 to accompany the diplomatic preparations for the Ethiopian campaign, through the official images of the signing of the Italo-French agreement between Mussolini and Laval. In this the scenography for war was being prepared, and the iconographic instruments had the acknowledged role of consolidating a psychological mobilisation of the masses, constructing the image of a mobilised nation and of a necessary conflict. In this context the propaganda film action was also conceived as extremely relevant not only in the motherland but also in what would turn into the theatre of war a few months later. In a letter sent by the Italian legation in Ethiopia to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in October 1933, a request was made for a cinema to be installed in the ‘House of the Italians’, soon to be inaugurated, which would work not only for Italians but also for Ethiopians for political propaganda purposes; a few months later the Italian legation informed that the film propaganda ‘would now be carried out especially towards the great Abyssinian leaders by means of documentary films on the great achievements of the regime’.
At the end of the republic we have perhaps new policies that do not have a direct link to fascism, this is not to say that they are not, however the frame of reference has changed.
The whole organisation of the fascist party, such as the focus on physical education, is literally a training towards the future life of war, Italy as a giant barracks, this is the modern, mass project, different from the traditional right.
A characteristic element of this culture: war is the central element of political life, so fascism was born with war, the interventionists’ claim, and started to decline and then ended with the decision to intervene in the second WW. Mussolini’s well-known speeches, the denunciation of the fact that fascism had failed to change the Italians sufficiently, compared to the martial mission they had. The cultural pattern in which we place our actions, being up to this project, Italians with little awareness of their responsibility and racial superiority (they mixed with Ethiopians).
A famous fascist song “Faccetta nera” (Little Black face) gained a big success during the months of the conquest of Ethiopia, and it said, addressing the Ethiopian woman, that after the conquest she too would become “Roman”. This idea was wrong according to the regime, it showed the Italians’ unawareness of their racial superiority, that they should not mix with Ethiopians. The latter in fact must perform a function of subservience. Despite some rehashes, the song continued to dislike the regime, but was too popular to prevent its circulation. Thus, fascism tried to make it disappear and in a clumsy attempt came up with Faccetta bianca (Little White face) written and set to music by the duo Nicola Macedonio and Eugenio Grio. In this song the fascist legionnaire, addresses his beloved Italian, whom he misses, by whom he will have a child, and of his desire to return to her, and to therefore carry on the blood-based Italianism that preserves his imperial superiority, who does not mix with the ‘savage’, black-faced women of Ethiopia.
Despite having a very shared matrix with German Nazism, Italy did not elaborate a memory of great museum constructions on the war, on the Shoah. On the contrary, in Italy we are witnessing a revival of more conflictual and idyllic images, there was even a desire to build a museum named after Rodolfo Graziani, an Italian general and politician, in command during the attempted reconquest of Libya and the war in Ethiopia, for his brutal actions and conduct of the war in Ethiopia, he was defined as a war criminal by the United Nations War Crimes Commission.
He was responsible for the harsh repression of the resistance in Cyrenaica, for the camps aimed at rounding up civilians to support the anti-Italian resistance in Libya, he was also responsible for the resistance movements in Ethiopia, for which we have colonial police manuals saying that when the life of the markets was too intense, one had to intervene to repress.
In the late 1960s and the 1970s the student and worker movement developed the idea of a “Resistenza tradita” (betrayed Resistance): from their point of view, the Resistance had been a class war rather than a patriotic war, a popular radical uprising that had never been realised, hence, the political institutional framework that was established from 1946 only partially reflected the dreams and aspirations that had animated the fight against both fascism and Nazism. Nevertheless, the anti-fascist patriotic narrative of the Resistance was never replaced by a dominant alternative memory. On the contrary it was confirmed and relaunched in the mid- to late 1950s.
Symbolically, the most significant sacrifice in Italy—the necessary experience for establishing the renewed community—was that of the anti-fascist partisans. Fascism had been an enemy inside and outside, an infection both external and internal.
Besides, in Beppe Fenoglio’s autobiographical novel Johnny the Partisan (1968).The Resistance is the founding event of the new social order and the source of legitimacy for the new political subject. At the same time, however, the partisan experience should be removed from memory because it brings to mind the civil war, the hope for radical social change and a “realm of pure possibility” that is no longer possible.
The national holiday held on April 25 every year since 1946 to celebrate the liberation has commemorated the Resistance as “chaos” and the “golden age” simultaneously. The reconciliation of the deep contradiction between supporters of fascism and partisans required some, albeit precarious, perception of unity. The national holiday represented a double funeral of sorts: the physical burials and reburials of the partisans in specially assigned graves and tombs were also symbolic burials commemorating, tautologically, that the dead had died. This implied that the survivors—both individuals and the patria—should liberate themselves from the dead. Partisans should be commemorated dead, not alive, as martyrs, not as victors.
Perceived Upholders of National Values: Some people view the far-right as upholders of traditional national values, including ideas about order, discipline, and hierarchy.
Supporters of far-right movements argue that these values are necessary to maintain social stability and national unity, and that their movements played an important role in protecting these values during times of crisis.
Main Discourses
In Italy the symbols of victimisation and sacrifice crucially mingled with the image of Italiani, brava gente (“the good Italian”). According to such a narrative Italians had taken part in the war reluctantly and without hatred for the enemy; civilians and soldiers had protected Jews from the racial laws; national troops had fought alongside the Wehrmacht in Africa or in Russia, yet avoiding brutality against the local populations, protecting individuals from the abuse of the Germans. Italiani, brava gente was not only a rhetorical strategy invented by the anti-fascist forces in order to minimise Italian guilt, but also one of the most powerful self-absolving popular memories of the war and a pervasive self-representation of individual behaviour. Grassroots memories thus interacted and intersected with the “official” public memory elaborated by political elites.
The “good Italian” image can be traced across many postwar generations of Italians, from the oral memories of the Turin working class collected by Luisa Passerini in the early to mid-1980s to the teenagers interviewed by Daniele Mezzana in the second half of the 1990s. It has been a crucial hinge of media, television programs and documentaries, and above all cinema, from Rome Open City to Roberto Benigni’s Life Is Beautiful (1999), from Giuseppe De Santis’s Italiani, brava gente (Attack and Retreat, 1964) to Gabriele Salvatores’s Mediterraneo (1991). The fundamental and inherent goodness of Italians has been maintained ever since even among the victims of the fascist war of aggression. Such a memory is usually founded on the contrast between Italians and Germans, who are consistently perceived and represented as the evil or the “wicked”. Typically, in the midst or immediate aftermath of the war Germans were dehumanised and animalised.
Different from youth activism in the countries, in Italy the youth are the sons and daughters of the families that got profit from the economic boom, meanwhile in Poland the situation is very different, poorest youth are the most active.
The influence of the Roman Catholic Church was also evident in letters sent home which affirmed God’s partisanship in the anti-Soviet crusade: “[on] one side stands Christianity, and on the other Jewry.” Such prejudices and images, and the idea of Russian (and Eastern) degeneracy would be later embraced—albeit in an altered form—by Christian Democrats and Catholic anti-communist propaganda, which painted Soviets in the darkest, most sinister pigments, in the broadest of strokes.
Thus, even if these two countries are not the only in which the far-right movements are arising, the Polish and the Italian organisations, according to the analysis of Agnieszka Maria Pasieka, they share a few important features: an attachment to the Christian, and more specifically Catholic, tradition, which often translates into a “culturally Catholic” orientation and a rejection of secularist ideologies; an ethno-religious conceptualisation of national communities; the importance of the discourse on the “normal,” “natural” family and implicitly on traditional gender roles; and a very strong anticommunist orientation, an element often missed in analyses featuring the forty years of Soviet dominance as predetermining anti-communism in eastern europe and the lack thereof in Western europe.
They both use a quasi-religious vocabulary—such as the frequently used notions “martyrs” and “(ultimate) sacrifice”—is employed. Besides, Italian and Polish activists often use social media to provide accounts of such meetings as well as celebrations of birthdays and anniversaries. Also in this case, the language used is very solemn, with an emphasis on the transmission of values and continuity: Soldiers are referred to both as individuals, and in this case biographical details are brought up (unrealized dreams, interrupted studies, abandoned fiancées—all sacrificed in the name of service), and as members of broader communities.
Part of the revisionist strategy is the so-called Holocaust Denial. Some far-right movements engage in Holocaust denial or revisionism, which involves denying or downplaying the scale and impact of the Holocaust. This is a highly controversial and divisive issue, and many people argue that Holocaust denial is a form of hate speech and should be condemned and prosecuted.
The italian researcher Valentina Pisanty, speaks of ‘reductionism’ for the intent to downplay the extent of the genocide and the nazi crimes. The scholar warns against the abandonment of the field of historiography, of historical research, by these historical revisitations, in order to switch to a real political campaign, and in the end to pure right wing propaganda.
Conclusions
During the interview with professor Amerigo Ciervo, president of ANPI Benevento Provincial Committee, the local committee of the Italian Association of Partisans, ANPIHe emphasises a problem, which is that for some time the guard has been lowered, memory has been taken for granted, as if it had been absorbed by Italian society, instead memory is built day by day, memory after memory, which is why ANPI pays much attention to working with young people.
Evidence of this is also the rise of populism, of extreme right-wing parties; at the same time, however, the ANPI has been recording an increase in writings, especially by young people, in recent years.
Communication channels in contemporary society have multiplied, the danger is that extreme right-wing parties can use communication media to accentuate the hate impulses surfacing in our society, canalising them into widespread debates, on migration for example.
As Professor Baris, teacher of Contemporary History at University of Palermo also stated, compared to the 1980s, when it was historians and newspapers that drove the political debates and memory of resistance, then TV and cinema started to host the experts, smoothly arriving to nowadays in which these discussions take place regardless of the scholarly, academic or purely historiographical environment, social media play an uncertain role, uncertain sources are taken up, discussions linked to contingent dimensions of narrow topicality, radio passages, television interviews, more colloquial, entertainment and not cultural reflection.
To conclude, in his interview, Giuseppe Lipari, PhD in Political Science and Sociology at Scuola Normale Superiore of Pisa and member of the ANPI provincial committee of Palermo emphasises that anti-fascism is certainly not a niche ideal, but a value shared by communists, socialists, liberals, the working classes and even monarchists. The resistance, and thus its memory, are fundamental foundations of our constitution and national identity. The resistance is credited with ending violence in the country. The partisans were military and civilian, ordinary people who, however, have an important heroic component to the country’s history.
The resistance was a mass phenomenon, even Commander Barbato, after whom the ANPI committee is named in Palermo, was a hero, but also a common person.
Author: Francesca Morganella, CEIPES
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