Wide public participation, in the presence of civil and military authorities, with the accompaniment of the city musical band “Serino Giorgetti” and the choir of boys and girls from the Franchini middle school for the institutional celebrations of Santarcangelo on the occasion of the 79th anniversary of the national liberation from Nazi-fascism. For the mayor Alice Parma it was her last speech on April 25th as first citizen.
The mayor recalled Matteotti’s sacrifice, the destruction of the “red houses” of the city by Balbo’s squads on 29 July 1922, she retraced the tragic events of the Marzabotto massacre and the Fragheto massacre and then spoke of the cases of Ur-fascism as Eco called it, eternal fascism: the Salis case, the students of Pisa. To then end by reading Antonio Scurati’s monologue.
Today we are here to celebrate the 79th anniversary of the national liberation from Nazi-fascism. But there is another occasion, much darker and sadder, that we must keep in mind just as well. Almost one hundred years ago, precisely on 10 June 1924, the deputy and secretary of the Italian Socialist Party, Giacomo Matteotti, was kidnapped and killed by a fascist gang led by Amerigo Dumini. The Matteotti crime is rightly remembered as the most serious criminal act committed by fascism before the war, a brutal murder against a courageous man who fought in Parliament, perhaps surrounded by too much solitude, against the rising tide of dictatorship. A crime which, as they say, served to “strike one to educate a hundred”, demonstrating the brutal strength of the nascent regime and shattering the last parliamentary resistance to the dictatorship, with the opposition which would shortly thereafter choose the path of the Aventine.
“I’ve given my speech. Now you prepare the funeral speech for me” said Matteotti at the end of his last speech in the Chamber, on 30 May 1924, aware of his destiny which would be fulfilled a few days later. But how did we get to this point? To the point that a parliamentarian feared for his life just for having given a speech in the Chamber? The story starts from afar and we certainly cannot retrace it all. However, I would like to remind you that she also passed through Santarcangelo, precisely on 29 July 1922, when Italo Balbo and his squad destroyed all the “red houses”, headquarters of socialist and communist organizations, from Ravenna to Rimini, leaving behind “tall columns of fire and smoke”, as the future hierarch testifies in his personal diary. About a year later, in July 1923, Mussolini said in Parliament “the Italian people do not ask me for freedom”. It is in this scenario that the elections of 6 April 1924 took place, with fraud and violence that Matteotti courageously denounced in his speech.
Political violence, electoral fraud, in short, the dictatorship prepared the ground. And it would be definitively revealed in January 1925, when Mussolini assumed the moral responsibility for Matteotti’s death in Parliament. In a democratic country like the one we live in today, when the vote is just over a month away, it is good to remember these events, to remember that there was a time in which, in Italy, one could not vote freely. But remembering these events, for us who were not there at the time, today also has a further meaning, an aspect of necessity that we cannot avoid: the fact that the witnesses of those years are no longer among us. By now, in fact, there are no longer even witnesses to what happened twenty years later, exactly 80 years from today: the terrible massacres perpetrated by the Nazi-Fascists during the war.
Last January, Ferruccio Laffi, the last witness to the massacre, died Marzabotto, while at the beginning of this month Leone Cresti passed away, the first to provide aid after the massacre Fragheto. This year too I participated in the commemoration of Fragheto, because it is our duty, our responsibility as citizens and public administrators to create the conditions for the memory to be consolidated and transmitted. Precisely for this reason, the Municipality of Santarcangelo, together with the ANPI and the FoCuS foundation, is working on a project to present to the regional tender for the Memory of the Twentieth Century which will soon be opened. A project that has its roots in that precious testimony that is “The night of the red flags”, the book by Serino Baldazzi and Gianni Fucci which tells the story of life in Santarcangelo from 1919 to 1943, between fascism and anti-fascism.
Defined by the authors themselves as a collection of “notes for a story”, the book deserves to be ideally completed with in-depth and complete historical research, which allows us to start a series of new projects. Such research, in fact, is the necessary basis to implement the request of the municipal council, which in April last year approved a motion for the installation of stumbling blocks in memory of the Santarcangiolo victims of Nazi-fascism. Another central aspect of the project that we will submit to the regional tender is the creation of a theatrical show starting from “The Night of the Red Flags”, because we believe in the great popularizing power of theatre, which moreover has a history in Santarcangelo that certainly does not need to be presented. . Creating new opportunities to learn about history and the past is the fulcrum of the work of the anti-fascist citizen committee, which today more than ever plays a role that we cannot in any way renounce.
Why do I say this? Because it seems to me more than evident, at least, a general decline in attention for what Umberto Eco would have defined as unequivocal signs of a return, not even too creeping, of what he called Ur-Fascism, eternal fascism. The most striking example is probably the case of Ilaria Salis, detained for political reasons and victim of a political trial in a European Union country, such as Hungary, which for years has winked at the worst right-wing parties on the continent, hosting every year the neo-Nazi rally for the “Day of Honor ”. But staying at our home, we cannot forget the beatings we received from male and female students who demonstrated peacefully in Pisa last February to demand an end to the war in Gaza. The problematic aspect of this story – as in that of Ilaria Salis – is not so much or only that of physical violence, which nevertheless remains a horrifying element, especially when it strikes defenseless victims such as students.
The point here is that we are faced with the manifest desire to forcefully impose a single thought, exactly what these people reproached until the day before yesterday to the sincere democrats who were concerned to point out that perhaps, and I underline perhaps, the public debate it would be much more hygienic without the resurgences of a political mentality such as the fascist one. A unique thought which in the case of Ilaria Salis considers any form of political resistance to the spread of the far right taking place in the Hungarian reality to be inadmissible, while in the case of Pisa it systematically removes any non-compliant point of view on the ongoing war in Gaza, which instead it requires our every effort to be told and experienced in a balanced way. It took President Mattarella’s speech on January 27 for Remembrance Day to remind us of two fundamental things about the ongoing conflict: the anguish “over the hostages in the cruel hands of Hamas” must in no way make us forget that “for the numerous victims among the Palestinian civilian population in the Gaza strip”. And that, above all, we must consider the terrorist attack of 7 October 2023 a “page of shame for humanity”, but also reiterate how “those who have suffered the vile attempt to erase their people from the earth know that it cannot be deny another people the right to a state.”
In the midst of clashes between opposing factions, however, even the war in Gaza, which in its early stages had aroused the indignation and emotion of the entire world, now seems relegated to that bubble of indifference that the film “Zone of Interest” tells us he told it very well, like a situation where things just happen and you turn the other way. And instead we can’t look the other way, we can’t pretend that things don’t happen. This is why I decided to conclude my speech by reading the writer’s monologue to you Antonio Scuraticensored by the national public radio and television service, because freedom, in the political as well as in the cultural sphere, cannot and must not be questioned.
“Giacomo Matteotti was murdered by fascist hitmen on 10 June 1924. Five of them waited for him outside his house, all squadristi from Milan, professionals of violence hired by Benito Mussolini’s closest collaborators. The Honorable Matteotti, the secretary of the Socialist Unitarian Party, the last person in Parliament who still openly opposed the fascist dictatorship, was kidnapped in the center of Rome, in broad daylight, in broad daylight. He fought to the end, as he had fought all his life. They stabbed him to death, then disfigured his body. They folded him on himself so he could stick him into a hole dug badly with a blacksmith’s file. Mussolini was immediately informed. In addition to the crime, he was guilty of the infamy of swearing to the widow that he would do everything possible to bring her husband back to her. While he was sworn in, the Duce of fascism kept the victim’s bloody documents in his desk drawer.”
“In this false spring of ours, however, we are not only commemorating Matteotti’s political murder; the Nazi-fascist massacres perpetrated by the German SS, with the complicity and collaboration of the Italian fascists, in 1944 are also commemorated. Fosse Ardeatine, Sant’Anna di Stazzema, Marzabotto. These are just some of the places where Mussolini’s demonic allies massacred thousands of defenseless Italian civilians in cold blood. Among them hundreds of children and even infants. Many were even burned alive, some beheaded. These two concomitant mournful anniversaries – spring of ’24, spring of ’44 – proclaim that fascism has been throughout its entire historical existence – not only at the end or occasionally – an irredeemable phenomenon of systematic political violence, murder and massacre. Will the heirs of that story recognize him once and for all? Unfortunately, everything suggests that this will not be the case. The post-fascist ruling group, having won the elections in October 2022, had two paths before it: repudiate its neo-fascist past or try to rewrite history. He has undoubtedly taken the second path.”
“After having avoided the topic during the electoral campaign, the Prime Minister, when forced to address it by historical anniversaries, obstinately stuck to the ideological line of her neo-fascist culture of origin: she distanced herself from the indefensible brutalities perpetrated by the regime (the persecution of the Jews) without ever repudiating the fascist experience as a whole, he blamed the massacres carried out with the complicity of the Republican fascists on the Nazis alone, and finally he ignored the fundamental role of the Resistance in the Italian rebirth, to the point of never mentioning the word “anti-fascism” on the occasion of April 25, 2023. As I speak to you, we are once again on the eve of the anniversary of the Liberation from Nazi-fascism. The word that the Prime Minister refused to pronounce will still throb on the grateful lips of all sincere democrats, be they left, center or right. 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.”
Thanks to one and all. Long live the Resistance. Long live Liberation.
