An “inhuman” regime that “denied the undeniable” through very strict censorship of newspapers, which “knew no mercy”, which educated children “in blind and absolute obedience”. A regime, the fascist one, “totally subservient” to the Hitlerian one despite its ambitions for greatness, kneeling before the Nazis who “considered us an inferior people”. Sergio Mattarella spends his April 25th on a sharp history lesson that leaves no room for revisionism. The president of the republic chose the Tuscan town of Civitella Val di Chiana, where the Nazis coldly killed almost 250 civilians in retaliation, thus committing a “very serious war crime”.
ANSA Agency Mattarella’s speech in Civitella Valdichiana – The full text – Ansa.it (HANDLE)While the Italian squares hosted, amidst tensions, a series of demonstrations in which the memory of Nazi-fascism faded in the protest against Israel for its bloody attacks on the Gaza strip, the head of state pondered the horrors committed by fascism, its cowardice, the collaboration with the Nazis until the last tragic mistake of the Republic of Salò, “the puppet regime established by Mussolini under the total control of Hitler”.
Video April 25, Mattarella: ‘Fascist Italy totally submitted to Hitler’
A powerful series of memories and quotes to close the door, evidently Mattarella felt the need for it even in this turbulent 2024, in those little winds that blow distinction and justifications to and from the buildings of politics, almost as if he wanted to put on the same level those who fought for freedom and who had sold that freedom to the Nazis. A discussion therefore entirely aimed at “memory” without which, he underlined, “there is no future”.
It was necessary for the President of the Republic to crudely retrace the historical reality to get to the heart of the message of his speech for the “Liberation” Day which is not a celebration of “freedom” in the generic sense. There were those who liberated and those who collaborated with the Nazis. “Anti-fascism” should be part of Italians’ DNA, Mattarella seems to say, and it is perhaps frustrating to have to repeat it every 25th April. The constitution was born from the Liberation, from those who made it possible, and there should be no divisions on the correctness of the values that make up and structure the word “anti-fascist”, which are also “founding” of the Constitution itself. “Around anti-fascism – explained the president – popular unity is possible and necessary, without compromising on the other hand the variety and richness of the national community, social and political pluralism, the free and changeable articulation of majorities and minorities in the democratic game”.
Video April 25, Mattarella: ‘Italy bows to those who died to free us’
If last year from Cuneo Mattarella closed his speech with an effective and highly symbolic phrase, “now and always Resistance!”, from Tuscany he articulated the reasoning by speaking of the “moral redemption” that put Italy back on its feet: ” On 8 September, with the leaders of the Kingdom on the run, it plunged the country into despair and absolute chaos the values hidden and trampled by the dictatorship. Humanity, instead of brutality ‘Arbitrary. Hope instead of fear.’
And also, what is left unsaid, is the courage to take up arms to rediscover a dignity that had been lost since 1924. The year of the murder of Giacomo Matteotti wanted by Mussolini, carried out by his henchmen, covered up precisely by that fascism nascent which, with the complacent use of the media of the time, covered up, misdirected and covered up. The courageous socialist and anti-fascist politician whose 100th anniversary of his murder is being celebrated and whose figure the president wanted to remember because even then fascism revealed “his true brutal and inhuman traits”.
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