"Until this word – 'antifascism' – is uttered by those who govern us, the specter of fascism will continue to haunt the house of Italian democracy." This is how Antonio Scurati's speech ended. The writer had been invited to speak on Italian public television in the run-up to the celebrations for April 25, the anniversary of Italy's liberation from Nazism and Fascism. The speech by the author of the M novel series, dedicated to the life of Benito Mussolini, was canceled. The cancellation has sparked controversy over an apparent act of censorship and reawakened a nagging quarrel over Italian historical memory.
Since Giorgia Meloni's arrival in a dominant government position – Council President – from a political family with roots in the history of the fascist regime, the old wound has become more painful. Its reopening is the result of the collision between an anti-fascist political culture at the bedrock of the Italian Republic and the assertion of a radical right long relegated to the margins of democratic life.
Anti-fascism, as celebrated by Antonio Scurati, is the legacy of the Allied victory brought about by Italian resistance fighters against the fascists of the Italian Social Republic, a puppet regime of the German occupation. Whether Communists, socialists, Catholics, or liberals, the winners of the civil war waged in northern Italy between 1943 and 1945 were also the architects of the political compromise that led to Italy's republican constitution. A dominant force in the Resistance, the Italian Communists were later excluded from power following Italy's Atlantic alignment.
Contemporary events
Yet the Communists succeeded in appropriating the history of anti-fascism and building around its memory a powerful political culture that has outlived them. The radical left of the 1970s, and its terrorist offshoots, claimed it as their own. Its contemporary manifestations range from the Bella Ciao sung with fervor at left-wing rallies, to the memorial work of intellectuals, to the action of the National Association of Partisans of Italy, which this year celebrates April 25 with the slogan "Long Live the Anti-Fascist Republic."
The losers of the war, who formed a political party with the Italian Social Movement (MSI) in 1946, constructed a different memory, steeped in a certain romanticism of defeat. "The neo-fascists developed the idea that they represented the camp of loyalty, the loyalty owed to Mussolini's regime and the German ally in an Italy that had given itself to the enemy," explained Giovanni Orsina, a historian of the Italian right at Rome's Luiss Guido-Carli University. Excluded from the "constitutional arc," they became the standard-bearers of anti-communism, without being able to influence the political game.
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