by Paolo Pagliaro
The last president of the anti-fascist Council, Mario Draghi, visited the Liberation museum in Via Tasso on 25 April three years ago and there uttered a severe sentence. “In honoring the memory of those who fought for freedom we must also remember – said Draghi – that not all of us Italians were good people.”
Which is what those who celebrate the liberation but from Italy also think, as happens on May 5th every year in Ethiopia.
There, from 1936 to 1941, the Italian occupation forces committed horrible crimes by exterminating thousands of defenseless civilians, with roundups and reprisal actions infinitely more ferocious than those of the Nazis at the Fosse Ardeatine, as the Ethiopians remember and as he documented in his research Angelo Del Boca. In Addis Ababa they continue to ask themselves why in Italy there are still monuments and signs celebrating the organizer of those massacres, General Rodolfo Graziani (in the photo).
Reticence and omissions are probably explained by the fact that those about the past are disputes that concern the present and its projection into the future.
It is also for this reason that today it is right to contrast the self-consoling myth of Italian good people with the figure of an intransigent and courageously partisan Italian like Giacomo Matteotti, murdered by Mussolini’s henchmen. The irregular and compelling portrait that Concetto Vecchio gives of him in the Utet book entitled “I accuse you”, is a reading that another good journalist, Paolo Ghezzi, recommends above all to those who think– in this era of post-fascist do-goodism – that the twenty years have been an Italian comedy.
(© 9Colonne – cite the source)
