April 25, Liberation Day. We must think carefully about these two simple words: Celebration and Liberation. Unfortunately, over the years we have lost both the concept of celebration and also that of liberation.
From being a national holiday to remember the end of a bloody war that cost the lives of hundreds of thousands of Italians, April 25th is now just a date on which schools and offices are closed and has therefore turned into an opportunity to travel. From Party to Bridge.
It is also the fault of those who transformed it year after year more and more into a day of political belonging, of the left. Look at today’s newspapers. They are full of Scurati’s words, very harsh phrases like «…the fascist drift is here…I believe that Italy has never experienced the ghost of fascism and that ghost still inhabits our present in a broad and less flashy form of swastikas and truncheons.”
You understand well that since these are the words of the “People’s Leader” of the year of Liberation, we don’t talk about it; the true and only concept is that it will be a day against the right-wing, or rather, Fascist, government. And don’t think it’s a 2024 thing.
On the internet it is easy to recover the front pages of April 24, 2023. Do you know how Repubblica was titled?
365 days have passed and we are still there, stuck in a controversy useful only to warm up the crowd of those who will take to the streets tomorrow, always and only those, increasingly biased, increasingly anti-government, but always less of the opponents when we go to vote.
In this truly sad climate, given the use that this historic day for Italy has today, we found in the Panorama archive a comment by Enzo Biagi on the meaning of Liberation Day. We leave you to read, in the hope of returning to this depth of analysis and thought that Scurati and today’s left cannot even come close to…
April 25th, a celebration to remember (from Panorama of April 29th 1994)
by Enzo Biagi
Today in tourist publications Dachau is described as “a pleasant place famous for its trout and wine”. It was a German poet who wrote: “With death the flames of hatred are extinguished”. And I add: even memory impulses. It is true; but I believe that even in death there is some difference between the end, for example, of the millions of Jews who passed through the chimneys of Auschwitz, and that of Höss, the commander of the Lager, who was hanged, after a trial, in the center of the field.
A Rai programme, Combat film, made mainly of unpublished footage shot by American operators during the war, and followed by a dormant discussion, reignited the controversy: did anyone want to rehabilitate Salò? Same values for the Resistance and for the Decima Mas fighters? Were the saboteurs sent beyond the Allied lines, then captured and shot by the Fifth Army or by the British, heroes?
I had two friends I met at the Guf (Fascist university group): Eugenio Facchini and Ferruccio Terzi. Facchini joined Benito Mussolini’s “repubblichina”, became federal of Bologna for a few days, and was shot down with machine guns by an unknown Gappist. He was a generous boy, a volunteer in Russia, to redeem himself for some harsh criticisms of the regime published in Architrave, the university students’ newspaper: he wanted, after 8 September, to cleanse fascism of the abuses of the hierarchs and maintain faith in the pacts with the Germans in name of honor. Ferruccio Terzi, nephew of Arronovaldo Bonaccorsi, an old squad member, was a doctor: he did not abandon his wounded partisan comrades, and was hung with wire from the gates of the Margherita Gardens. They are always alive, both, in my regret and in my memory.
But perhaps it is the fault of time and the many troubles of today that erase the oppression of yesterday (and also because the “nostalgic”, for obvious age reasons, tend to disappear), if the past becomes more and more distant. Perhaps it is also a responsibility of us who were there, and who should have spoken to our children, about those years and those defeats: Mussolini was not only the father of the pianist, but he brought “the Italy of Vittorio Veneto”, as he said presenting himself to the king, that of 1918, in Cassibile (1943), the date that marks the disaster and the request for an armistice.
Was he then a great politician? It is true that, when he came to power, he enjoyed many sympathies: even the mild De Nicola, in Naples, raised his hand to greet the square legions of black shirts leaving for Rome. Arturo Toscanini liked him, and certain popular people of the time, such as Giovanni Gronchi, who became the Duce’s undersecretary at Corriere, and also Benedetto Croce, who in 1935 offered his medal as senator of the country that was going to conquer Abyssinia. That was the height of splendor: even several communists entered into crisis, and the cardinal of Bologna, Nasalli Rocca, gave those colonialists so late in history his pastoral cross, and that of Milan, Schuster, defined the Founder of the empire “the man of Providence”, thus also compromising God.
Today there are those who have promoted the cause of beatification: he was the last to receive the head of the lake government who was setting out on the road that leads to Dongo. What do young people know about these events? The sequences broadcast on TV inspired horror and pity. Pity for everyone: even for that young man tied to a pole who, contemptuously, smoked his last cigarette waiting for the firing squad to be discharged, certain that he would fall for a noble cause.
We should explain how we got to that inhuman and angry crowd in Piazzale Loreto: what the Wehrmacht did, what were the ideals of Nazism, what were the raids, what town is Marzabotto, 20 kilometers from Bologna: he is not alone, with its necropolis, testimony to the world of the Etruscans, but of a reprisal that made its name, along with those of Lidice and Oradour, sadly famous. Salò also meant the persecution of the Jews, the 90 thousand missing in Russia, the humiliations suffered in Greece, and the crosses with Italian names planted in the desert. Those innocent volunteers, also attracted by Boccasile’s posters, by his sermons on the heroic life, went to “fight and die”, as one of their hymns said, perhaps to “defend the race”?
The leader of the right, of what was considered Mussolini’s heir, is now Gianfranco Fini: he is from Bologna like me, and I saw him photographed next to his father: as children we played together in the football team of the parish of Sant’Isaia . Fini thinks, as is known, that Mussolini is the greatest statesman of this century: and it is a thesis that ended up, with amazement, even on the front pages of foreign newspapers. He is no longer the head of the MSI, but of the National Alliance and the voters like him a lot. Thirteen out of a hundred are with him: and it’s clear. He’s intelligent, on television he behaves without haughtiness, he doesn’t lose control, and he’s just turned forty. He must not explain his choices with mistakes but with convictions and it has nothing to do with the era of party politics. He is an honest person and enjoys the respect of even unsuspecting anti-fascists. Perhaps his father told him about when the Assalto!, organ of the Decima Legio, directed by Leo Longanesi, published articles in which it was said: “Better a table than ten clerics”. We served mass, and many of those table tennis players from back then never returned. His electorate is mainly southern: the Salò experience did not affect them. They remember, I think, the dubats parading on the road to the Empire, not the soldiers of September 8 headed to the wagons that will take them to Germany.
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