This year too we are witnessing the usual unbearable drama of controversies that transform what should be everyone’s celebration into yet another occasion for conflict.
We are now divided on everything, we are unable to be united even in the celebration of what allows us to think in our own way, and to divide ourselves.
Maybe just for a day. This day.
Because today we celebrate the day of Italy’s liberation from Nazi-fascism, we do not celebrate one political party against another.
Today is the holiday of all Italians.
Today we remember the many young and old who died to free Italy from fascist oppression and give us democracy, this priceless good that allows us to be free to express our own ideas. Often even inappropriately.
Thank you. Thank you for your sacrifice.
Those who make this party their own are wrong and those who let others do it are wrong.
Today is everyone’s day.
The Italy we live in is a republic born from the resistance against fascism. Democratic Italy is anti-fascist, as is its Constitution.
It does no good to anyone to reopen the discussion every time about who is more anti-fascist, nor to expect it to be declared on command.
Anti-fascism is not a political project, it is the shared assumption that gives us the right to citizenship in the Republic.
Whoever administers or governs, from the smallest municipality to the State, swears loyalty to the Republic and its anti-fascist Constitution.
Enough!
Anyone who doesn’t get up every morning saying he’s anti-mafia doesn’t mean he’s with the mafia.
Fascism was not a political idea. It was a regime of horrors, crimes, violence and oppression.
The reconstruction of the fascist party in Italy is a crime. Certain meetings that praise fascism, often the result of ignorance of what it really was, should be prohibited and prosecuted.
In the same way that meetings and demonstrations that praise the mafia should be prohibited and prosecuted.
Saying today that Mussolini was a great statesman is more or less equivalent to saying that Totò Riina was a great strategist.
Keeping a bust depicting the first at home, to pay homage to his memory, is equivalent to keeping one of the other.
Regretting the good things of fascism is like saying that the mafia still guaranteed strict control of the territory and guaranteed work for many. At what price?
Let us remember that even stopped clocks, twice a day, tell the exact time.
Today there is a centre-right coalition in government which, obviously, is not liked by those on the centre-left.
Giorgia Meloni gained power by winning democratic elections, precisely those that were possible thanks to the liberation from fascism.
Giorgia Meloni swore on the anti-fascist Constitution. That’s enough for us.
Don’t like your ideas? They are fought with the weapons of politics and democracy.
An authoritarian government, assuming that it is, is not fascism.
Just as every form of crime is not mafia and every massacre is not genocide. Let’s be careful about the wear and tear of words.
Proclaiming yourself as anti-fascist cannot be a way of justifying the emptiness of your political proposal.
And what if one day, given the average level of knowledge of history, by dint of inappropriately waving the bogeyman of fascism, someone were convinced that fascism is Meloni?
What if, appreciating the Prime Minister, which is entirely legitimate, he convinced himself that fascism wasn’t that bad after all?
Who knows if we will be able, all together, to celebrate that day in April in which, as Guccini sings, “the country is celebrating and greeting the returned soldiers… and Italy is a woman dancing on the roofs of Rome”.
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