Why Italy’s Far-right Government Is Now Ramping Up WWII Revisionism and Fascist Nostalgia - Israel News - Haaretz.com
Welcome to a crash course on Italian history – the revisionist edition.
This troubling exercise in rewriting Italy’s dark WWII past was kicked off last week by none other than the country’s far-right Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni as part of the commemorations for the Fosse Ardeatine massacre, a notorious 1944 war crime committed in Rome by Nazi occupiers along with their Italian Fascist allies.
“Seventy-nine years ago, 335 Italians were barbarically slaughtered by occupying Nazi troops in retaliation for the Via Rasella attack by partisans in Rome,” Meloni said in a statement marking the March 24 anniversary, adding that “335 innocent Italians were killed simply because they were Italian.”
Critics were quick to point out that the victims, shot in the back of the head in a secluded quarry on the outskirts of Rome, were not killed just because they were Italian, but because they were imprisoned Jews, anti-Fascists or partisans, along with a few other civilians randomly rounded up by the occupiers in the aftermath of a resistance attack that had left 33 Nazi soldiers dead.
But Meloni’s statement strangely omitted the role of Italy's Fascist authorities, who arrested and handed over many of the Ardeatine massacre victims, and only name-checked the partisans at all to highlight their role in the attack that sparked the Nazi retaliation.
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The lack of mention of the victims’ identities was seen as yet another sign that Meloni and her Brothers of Italy party still struggle to abandon their political roots in Italy’s postwar neofascism, despite their protestations of having morphed into a modern conservative movement.
Compounding the outrage came an interview Friday with Ignazio Benito La Russa, the president of Italy’s Senate, proud collector of Mussolini memorabilia and one of the most prominent leaders of Brothers of Italy.
Dismissing the criticism of Meloni, La Russa said that “in her head she knows that these Italians were anti-Fascists, Jews, political prisoners, maybe even a few Fascists […] she was just encompassing them all in one word.” But in his interview on the conservative daily Libero’s podcast, La Russa also added that the partisan attack that led to the Nazi reprisal targeted “not evil Nazis of the SS but a semi-retired musical troupe.”
Historians agree that the March 23, 1944 ambush by the Italian resistance struck a column of uniformed Nazi police officers as they marched along Rasella Street in central Rome. Those officers were mostly in their 30s – so definitely not semi-retired – and were part of a unit conscripted among ethnic Germans in Italy’s South Tyrol region that was active in hunting down partisans across the country’s Nazi-occupied north and south.
The belittling and criticism of the attack on the Via Rasella is a common trope used by Italy’s far-right revisionists. It was all the more toxic because it was being repeated by La Russa, a former defense minister who was tapped to be Senate president after Meloni’s electoral triumph in September despite his open admiration for Fascism. He has consistently declined to denounce Fascism and is openly proud of his days as a young neofascist youth leader in the 1970s, when he scuffled with police and leftist activists.
Far-right Brothers of Italy's Ignazio La Russa takes his seat in the Italian Senate on the opening session of the new parliament last yearCredit: AP
While drawing criticism from the opposition, the choice of La Russa and other obvious Fascism fans and nostalgics to hold high office hasn’t damaged the popularity of Meloni’s government.
Still, La Russa’s latest comments sparked howls of indignation. Elly Schlein, the newly elected head of the center-left Democratic Party, called them “indecent and unacceptable for the role that he holds.” Ruth Dureghello, the president of Rome’s Jewish community, tweeted that the Nazi dead of Via Rasella “were occupying the country with the complicity of the Fascists and were deporting Jews to extermination camps.”
Many in the opposition called for La Russa’s resignation from Senate president and so did an online petition signed by tens of thousands of citizens. In a familiar playbook, La Russa backtracked slightly on Sunday, stating that: “I was wrong not to highlight that the Germans killed on Via Rasella were Nazi soldiers but I thought it was obvious, foregone and known.”
In other words, it seems that Italy’s far-right rulers know the simple truth that Nazis and Fascists were bad guys, but just can’t bring themselves to say it, and it’s everyone else’s fault for not reading their minds.
The problem is that the controversy on WWII events didn’t arise in a vacuum, but amid a slew of bizarre and erratic pronouncements and plans by the Brothers and their allies in the majority.
There’s a law proposal by Brothers of Italy lawmaker Fabio Rampelli, who wants to impose fines of up to 100,000 Euros on public and private entities that use foreign words in their communication. The proposal recalls a total ban on non-Italian loan words that was imposed by Mussolini during the Fascist period, and is made all the more tragicomic by the fact that the Brothers recently created a ministry for the protection of products that are “Made in Italy” (yes, its official name is in English).
Brothers of Italy leader Giorgia Meloni, Forza Italia leader and former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi and League party leader Matteo Salvini, after a meeting with Italian President Sergio Mattarella in Rome last yearCredit: YARA NARDI/ REUTERS
And then there’s the far right's other big favorite, alongside historical revisionism: Restricting the freedoms of LGBTQ people.
Italy already has one of the most restrictive legislations among western democracies on access to IVF treatments and adoptions, which are banned for anyone except married, heterosexual couples. To add to that, the government recently ordered the center-left mayor of Milan to stop registering the children of same-sex couples resulting from IVF treatments or adoptions abroad, an initiative that was started in 2018 thanks to a legislative vacuum on the issue.
Meloni’s family minister, Eugenia Roccella, wants to go a step further and plans to make it a crime for Italians to go abroad to have children through surrogates, despite surrogacy being the subject of a total ban within Italy.
Since taking office in October, Meloni’s government had been fairly cautious and pragmatic. It had kept a lid on its more extremist instincts while trying to shore up its international credentials, for example by firmly aligning with NATO in continuing support for Ukraine against the Russian invasion.
So why are the Brothers suddenly backsliding? Part of the problem is exactly that the most outlandish promises that Meloni made in the past, such as taking Italy out of the Euro, have failed to materialize. Meloni is instead cozying up to those same international political and financial “elites” that her far-right base hates and she has spent years railing against. The politician who, until recently, called the EU “a club of loan sharks” now apparently thinks that Italy should be “more involved in the EU.”
As prime minister, Meloni seems at ease rubbing shoulders with mainstream leaders whom not so long ago she painted as members of “globalist elites” at the same time as she herself, with equal ease, was schmoozing with Steve Bannon and other international populist politicians.
Rome's Jewish community commemorates the roundup and deportation of Rome's Jews by Italian Fascists and Nazis to concentration campsCredit: AP
Meanwhile Meloni’s promises of economic reforms to help the middle class and reduce taxes have fizzled out amid squabbling within her fractious right-wing coalition and budgetary constraints, while Italians feel the pinch of inflation and the economic strife caused by the war in Ukraine. There are also serious concerns over the fact that, out of sheer incompetence and bureaucratic paralysis, Italy is failing to find projects to spend its 200-billion-Euro share in the EU’s post Covid-19 recovery fund, which may lead to some of the funding being cancelled.
Amid all this, it’s not hard to understand why Rome’s rulers prefer to fill headlines with outrageous provocations and proposals. They function as useful distractions for a struggling government while also winking to core neofascist supporters unhappy with Meloni’s pragmatism.
The predictable indignation that follows outbursts like La Russa’s also serves the longstanding right-wing argument that the center-left opposition is led by out-of-touch radicals and intellectuals only interested in quibbling over the past rather than solving the real problems of real people.
So the return of the Brothers to the familiar terrain of WWII historical revisionism is not so much a case of the far right showing its true colors, but a calculated political strategy. And, in the long term, this strategy may also serve a much more sinister purpose than just distracting Italians from the government’s problems.
Meloni has made no mystery of the fact that she chafes at the constraints of parliamentary democracy and would like to introduce constitutional reforms to give the executive branch more power, for example by transitioning the country to a presidential system.
It is no coincidence that, unlike other western allies of Israel, Italy has been silent over Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s widely criticized judicial coup, which also aims to empower the executive branch.
Meloni and her government warmly welcomed Netanyahu on a state visit to Rome in March, even as protesters against him gathered on the streets of the capital.
Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu meet at the Palazzo Chigi in Rome in March.Credit: GUGLIELMO MANGIAPANE/ REUTERS
Part of the reason for this cosy embrace with Netanyahu is that, for Italy’s far right, friendship with Israel – even if it’s through the country’s now embattled leader – still functions as a stamp of legitimacy, and certified evidence that it has moved beyond its authoritarian and antisemitic past. But part of it is that Meloni can only dream of doing in Italy what Netanyahu is attempting to do in Israel. The Illiberal International needs to stick together.
Italy’s constitutional guarantees are somewhat more robust than Israel’s: for one thing the country actually has a constitution, and changing it requires much broader consensus than the thin parliamentary majority that Netanyahu wields.
Meloni’s dream reforms require a more subtle, sustained approach than Netanyahu’s attempted legislative blitz. To undermine Italy’s republican constitution, born from the ashes of Fascism and approved in 1947 by the same wide rainbow of political forces – from the Communists to the Socialists and the Christian Democrats – that led the resistance against the Nazi occupiers and their Italian allies, it’s necessary first to rewrite the country’s history and collective memory.
This is not as difficult as it may seem. Italy never underwent a process of denazification like Germany did. While its postwar constitution banned the Fascist party, neofascist movements continued to be active in the republic’s political life, even though they were mostly marginalized. Fascism never became a taboo ideology as Nazism did in Germany, but the prevailing view – not just among the far right but also among many conservatives – was that, while Mussolini had made mistakes (especially in allying with Hitler), his regime had also been a force for good.
So, Italy already has a parallel history that has been passed down for generations in the right-wing and conservative circles in which the country’s current rulers were raised. All that is needed now is for this toxically alternative version of history to become mainstream.
In this narrative, the anti-Nazi, anti-Fascist partisans who risked their lives to fight the occupiers, and went on to dominate Italian politics in the subsequent decades, were not heroes. They are repainted as cowardly murderers who killed “semi-retired musicians.” Their foolish attacks were ultimately responsible for the indiscriminate Nazi reprisals and the partisans themselves weren’t really victims of the massacres – no, the victims were just generically “Italians.”
Reading between the lines of the apparently off-hand, foot-in-mouth comments of the likes of Meloni and La Russa it is clear that the process of spreading this narrative, and undermining the historical roots of Italian democracy, is already well underway.
Ariel David is a Haaretz reporter and former AP correspondent in Rome, where he covered Italy and the Vatican. Twitter: @arieldavid1980