«We want a big demonstration to take place, bigger than usual» we wrote a month ago in the appeal inviting people to return to Milan this April 25th. We are optimistic, we think it will go like this, the procession will be very full.
The many participations, collective and individual, the commitment of the organizers, the feeling of having intercepted and given voice to a widespread desire, tell us this. Even grown in recent weeks, as the motivation to make this Liberation a special liberation grows.
At the center of our April 25th is the urgent mobilization against the extreme right in Italy and Europe, which is now questioning or canceling principles and rights that seemed acquired. And there is popular opposition to the war, now treated as a program point by the highest EU institutions.
Ceasefire and no to rearmament are the watchwords for the only option we have left: peace.
In full coherence with the legacy of the Resistance, also fought to banish war from the destiny of Europe, today’s event will also be the great pacifist demonstration we have been waiting for for some time. For a negotiated solution to the conflict in Ukraine more than two years after Russian aggression. And to ask the Union and European states to act to stop Israel’s carnage in Gaza. By stopping by endorsing – in fact – Netanyhau’s action, capable of destroying the instinctive solidarity that October 7 had brought to Israel, burying it under a mountain of rubble and Palestinian corpses.
Then there is the Meloni government which daily brings arguments and current events to anti-fascism. Contempt for migrants, fury against the poor and the least fortunate, beatings of students, reduction of spaces for pluralism, attack on women’s rights.
The list is long and outlines a model of government and a system of power which is certainly not a re-edition of fascism but which has a very similar authoritarian drive at its heart.
To think that this “matrix” can be erased with a statement from the Prime Minister or one of her people on Liberation Day is naive to say the least.
The unpresentability of our right is not a problem that can be solved with a bit of good manners and a few carefully chosen words at organized parties. On April 25th our right will always be uncomfortable and not for episodic reasons, linked to the tactics of the moment of this or that leader of the Brothers of Italy.
All the information on April 25th in Milan
Because ours is the country that invented fascism and proposed it to the world. It is the country where collateralism to the dictatorship resisted its collapse, taking up arms alongside the Nazi invader in a civil war.
It is the country of continuity between regime and republic, where the leaders of the fascist administration have remained in place without a scratch, like the stele dedicated to the Duce.
It is the country where the veteranism of a party of nostalgics played a role in the official events of democracy, starting from the immediate post-war period, and even more so it influenced decades of occult and subversive plots.
Therefore there is a long history that precedes that of Almirante’s grandchildren today in power and guided its formation. The tricolor flame that burns in Palazzo Chigi did not light up by chance or suddenly. It is underestimated by those who continually demand recantation from the Prime Minister and her less composed comrades, quickly placed everywhere in government and sub-government. Verbal abjurations that would at most serve to confuse.
If a stage in her ascent were to advise Meloni to call herself anti-fascist (which we tend to exclude), that would not mean she would become one.
The task of those who oppose it is therefore not easy. Because the opposition should not be made against a label that does not change and a distancing that does not arrive, but against a political substance that this government affirms and claims on a daily basis.
Opposition must therefore be made to legalized torture in administrative detention centers, to the infernal conditions of prisons where violence is the rule, to handshakes and transfers of money with the worst autocrats in the name of blocking refugees, to austerity of the budget accepted in substance even if denounced in propaganda, to the dismantling of essential public services starting from school and healthcare, to the fight against dissent, impoverishment and precariousness of work, to the exaltation of the selfishness of rich regions against poor ones and to attempts to change the form as well as the substance of the Constitution.
Therefore it is not the opposition to the memory of fascism and to a flame that does not go out (and even expands into the symbol for the European elections) that is needed, but that to a political line which cannot, unfortunately, be said to be in total discontinuity with that of other and previous majorities.
This is why April 25th, with its high value, is not an anniversary but a call to commitment, a challenge, a call to the coherence of those who take to the streets today, and there will be many of us. It’s a demanding date. Liberation is a party, not a walk in the park.
