Great participation and many Palestinian flags with a banner inciting Palestinian resistance but also a representation of the Jewish Brigadeat this morning’s procession in the center of Bergamo for the celebrations of Liberation Day which will see the former secretary of the Democratic Party Pierluigi Bersani give his closing speech.
The program started at 10am with the route along Viale Papa Giovanni XXIII, Via Camozzi, Via Pignolo, Via Tasso arriving in Piazza Vittorio Veneto. Here tribute to the plaque in memory of Ferruccio dell’Orto in via Pignolo 8 and finally the arrival in Piazza Vittorio Veneto for the institutional speeches.
Some tension during the institutional greetings, with a protest by about seventy people who included the Palestinian Youth and grassroots unions with whistles shouting “fascists!” and they asked to go on stage to speak. So much so that from the stage Carlo Salvioni of the organizing committee invited everyone to «express your opinions but respect those of others». The protest then subsided. Also on stage are the mayoral candidates of Bergamo Elena Carnevali and Andrea Pezzotta.
Mayor Giorgio Gori read some passages from the book Letters from death row inmates of the Italian Resistance: «They are men and women, of all ages and from all social classes, who write to their families about to be executed. And these letters are full of values and passion; of a love for the homeland that today seems unimaginable, and of the awareness of the price that the defense of freedom, in extreme moments, can entail. Here you are. I confess to you that I couldn’t help but wonder how many of us would be available today to do the same, to bear witness with the same strength – at the cost of our lives – to our love for our homeland and for freedom.. And the answer I gave myself was “few”, or rather very few». Gori drew a parallel with current events: «Can you resist an invader without taking up arms? Italian and European partisans yearned for peace. And yet, if 80 years ago they had decided to “peacefully” oppose the Nazi-Fascists, repudiating the use of weapons, and if the Anglo-American allies had done the same, the Old Continent would have handed itself over to the Nazi tyrant.” He then read passages from Antonio Scurati’s censored speech, concluding: «After having avoided the topic during the electoral campaign, the Prime Minister, when forced to face it by historical anniversaries, stubbornly stuck to the ideological line of her neo-fascist culture of origin: it distanced itself from the indefensible brutalities perpetrated by the regime (the persecution of the Jews) without ever repudiating the fascist experience as a whole, it blamed the massacres carried out with the complicity of the republican fascists on the Nazis alone, and finally it ignored the fundamental role of Resistance in the Italian rebirth (to the point of never mentioning the word “anti-fascism” on the occasion of April 25, 2023). Until that word – anti-fascism – is pronounced by those who govern us, the specter of fascism will continue to haunt the house of Italian democracy».
Finally, Pierluigi Bersani’s conclusion: «The fight against fascism and Nazism gave us a democracy which, however imperfect, is radically opposed to those ideas. To those devastating myths that generate monsters. Other ideas, of equality and the aspiration for peace, won. Unfortunately we cannot rest. These elementary truths are not shared by everyone. In Europe and Italy an ambiguous judgment on the right-wing of the twentieth century is taking shape again.”
