The Italian Federation of Partisan Associations (FIAP) of Sicily celebrated Liberation Day in various locations on the island, displaying the Ukrainian flag and paying homage to the Jewish Brigade, which participated in the Italian campaign. On the occasion of the hundred years since the sacrifice of Giacomo Matteotti, wide prominence was given to the figure of the secretary of the Socialist Unitary Party, who denounced the crimes and frauds of the nascent fascism and also opposed the communist dictatorship that had established itself a few years earlier in Moscow, after the events of 1917. FIAP underlined how before his killing by fascist assassins, the democratic socialist and reformist leader also received repeated attacks from exponents of other political parties, such as Antonio Gramsci, who defined him as a “pilgrim of nothingness”, and Palmiro Togliatti himself, who considered Matteotti and the persecuted anti-fascist Don Sturzo as enemies like Mussolini.
In Capo d’Orlando, in the Messina area, the regional president of FIAP Sicily, Antonio Matasso, a university professor who also chairs the Sicilian Committee for the centenary of the martyrdom of Giacomo Matteotti, placed a wreath of flowers in honor of the national socialist unitary secretary, to whom the main square of the Tyrrhenian town is dedicated and who led the political party most persecuted by the fascist regime, inspired by the father of Italian socialism Filippo Turati. Giovanni Amendola was also celebrated with another wreath of flowers, who like other anti-fascist leaders was not spared from Gramsci’s attacks, when the latter referred to the so-called “semi-fascism of Amendola, Sturzo and Turati”. In his speech, Matasso referred to how contemporary sovereignism and populism can produce fascist tendencies and compared Matteotti to the Russian dissident Aleksej Naval’nyj, killed by the Putin regime just over two months ago.
Also speaking at the demonstration in Capo d’Orlando were Antonio Lo Re, candidate for the Chamber of Deputies with More Europe in the 2022 political elections, and the former regional deputy Francesco Calanna. Finally, the entire FIAP leadership underlined how the right of resistance to which the armed Italian partisans appealed is exactly the same as that claimed by the Ukrainian people, who must not be deprived of all the support, including military, that deserves a fight of freedom, “no matter what a certain red-brown pseudo-pacifism says about it, incapable of grasping how Putin embodies the synthesis of the worst of the totalitarianisms of the twentieth century”.
Place: PALERMO, PALERMO, SICILY
