Giacomo Matteotti was murdered by fascist hitmen on June 10, 1924. There were five of them waiting for him outside his home, all squadristi from Milan, militiamen hired by Benito Mussolini's closest collaborators. Matteotti, a member of parliament and secretary of the Unitary Socialist Party, the last man in parliament to oppose the fascist dictatorship with his face uncovered, was abducted in the center of Rome, in broad daylight. He fought to the bitter end, as he had done all his life. They stabbed him to death, then mutilated his corpse. Then they bent him in half to fit him into a pit dug in a hurry with a blacksmith's file.

Mussolini was immediately informed. In addition to this crime, he committed the infamy of swearing to the widow that he would do everything possible to bring her husband back to her. And, while he was swearing, the "Duce" kept the victim's bloody documents in his desk drawer.

However, in this false springtime of ours, we're not just commemorating Matteotti's political assassination. We're also commemorating the Nazi-fascist massacres perpetrated by the German SS with the complicity and collaboration of the Italian fascists in 1944. The Ardeatine Pits, Sant'Anna di Stazzema, Marzabotto – these are just some of the sites where Mussolini's demonic allies slaughtered thousands of defenseless Italian civilians in cold blood. Among them were hundreds of children and even infants. Many were burned alive, others decapitated.

No denial of fascism

These two tragic anniversaries, of the springs of 1924 and 1944, prove that fascism was a phenomenon of systematic political violence, murder and massacre throughout its historical existence, and not just occasionally or at its end. Will the successors of this history acknowledge this once and for all?

Unfortunately, all the evidence suggests that this will not be the case. The post-fascist group in power, after winning the elections in September 2022, had two possible paths before it: deny its neo-fascist past or attempt to rewrite history. Undoubtedly, they chose the latter.

Having avoided the subject during her election campaign, the council president, forced to confront it at the commemorations, stubbornly stuck to the ideological line of her original neo-fascist culture. She has distanced herself from the indefensible atrocities perpetrated by the regime (the persecution of the Jews) without ever denying the fascist experience as a whole. She attributed to the Nazis alone the massacres committed with the complicity of the fascists of the Italian Social Republic. And she has overlooked the fundamental role of the Italian Resistance, to the point of never mentioning the word "anti-fascism" during the commemorations on April 25, 2023 [anniversary of Italy's liberation in 1945 from the Nazi occupiers and their allies in Mussolini's regime].

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