The about-faces of a nation that has not come to terms with fascism

Winston Churchill was a person who certainly did not lack irony and even sarcasm. Not for nothing in commenting on the condition of a country, ours, which in 1940 entered the war praising fascist aggressiveness and three years later promptly forgot about it, he loved to repeat: "In Italy until July 25th there were 45 million of fascists; from the next day, 45 million anti-fascists. But I don't know that Italy has 90 million inhabitants."

A merciless snapshot of a nation that did not want to deal with its past responsibilities and that had no intention of changing its attitude even after the war was over. In the Paris Peace Conference of 1946, all responsibility for the defeat was attributed exclusively to Mussolini, the hierarchs and Vittorio Emanuele III. Once the former had been eliminated in Dongo and in Piazzale Loreto and the monarchy had been ousted with the referendum of 2 June, Italy could therefore regain its presumed political and moral integrity by using the Resistance, the work of a minority, as an alibi to absolve itself of responsibility of the twenty-year period.

A dynamic with dramatic consequences as told to us by the historian Gianni Oliva , author of an essay dedicated precisely to Italian amnesia and entitled, not by chance, " 45 million anti-fascists" (Mondadori, 2024, pp. 228, also e-book):

«Not dealing with the past means that the past does not pass: this is demonstrated by the recurring controversies on anti-fascism, on the April 25 squares, on the foibe, on the day of remembrance, on the north-eastern border, on the Roman salute. After almost 80 years from the Constitution, it is paradoxical that 'anti-fascism' is still a term of opposition: it means that we have not internalized the Constitution which is 'democratic' and, therefore, includes anti-fascism in itself, while anti-fascism is not always democratic. Today politics is weak in interpreting the present and planning the future, which is why it ends up speaking to the 'guts' of its electorate by seeking its own identity backgrounds in the judgment of the past. And so topics that should be part of collective awareness become the cause of out-of-time controversies."

But why, unlike what happened in other nations such as Germany, was it preferred to simply wipe out the past, the Twenty Years, our responsibilities in the Second World War?

«Because in the post-war period we wanted to transition the entire ruling class from fascism to the republic without firing a shot: normalization and stability were needed, the accounts with the past would have posed embarrassing questions for many and opened up unpredictable scenarios. And so magistrates, intellectuals, journalists, bureaucrats, generals, prefects, police commissioners, professors all kept their place: we used the only experience that put us on the right side of history, the Resistance, and (as the historian Rosario Romeo wrote ) 'we used it as an alibi' to consider ourselves all absolved of past complicities. With the paradox of finding ourselves, for example, with a magistrate like Gaetano Azzariti, president of the Racial Tribunal in 1938, who in 1957 became president of the Constitutional Court, moving from racial laws to democracy without anyone calling him to account, neither the Christian Democrats nor the communists, nor the Jewish community; or with a man like Marcello Guida, who in 1939 was director of the Ventotene prison where anti-fascists were detained and in 1969 was police commissioner of Milan."

But could it have been done differently? In particular, some believe that the so-called Togliatti amnesty of 1946, which led to the cancellation of crimes committed in the twenty years and during the war, was more bad than good for the nation.

«Probably the Togliatti amnesty was inevitable: one could not think of a season of trials lasting for years. However, it was possible and necessary to process the past differently, to understand the nature of fascism, to recognize the many complicities that the twenty-year period enjoyed: instead we preferred to imagine that the regime was a straitjacket that kept the country sewn together with thread of the repression and to think that April 25th guaranteed political and moral virginity to everyone."

What did we miss to avoid falling into collective self-absolution?

«An Italian Nuremberg was missing, not so much for the convictions to which Nuremberg led (the main perpetrators of fascism were still executed in Dongo), but for the meaning of reflection represented by the trial, for the critical awareness that it developed in Germany» .

What can we do today to avoid perpetuating the removals of almost a century ago?

«Historians try to understand what happened yesterday, they are not the best suited to indicate what needs to be done today. One thing, however, I think can be said: we should study history more. History in our school is not a highly honored subject, especially contemporary history. Well, if we studied the twentieth century more and better, perhaps we could help overcome the post-war repressions. And to better understand the reality in which we move."