Mattarella in Civitella in Val di Chiana: “Popular unity around anti-fascism”

Peace, freedom, democracy. From Civitella in Val di Chiana, where eighty years ago a “terrible and inhuman Nazi-fascist massacre” was perpetrated, the President of the Republic launches his message for Liberation Day. “April 25th is, for Italy, a founding anniversary: ​​the celebration of peace, of rediscovered freedom and of the return to the ranks of democratic nations”, says the Head of State, embracing in dutiful memory (because “without memory there is no ‘it’s the future’) ‘all the victims of war crimes, murdered in 1944, on our national territory and also abroad’. Peace and freedom, he therefore underlines Sergio Mattarella, “that peace and that freedom – which finding roots in the resistance of a people against Nazi-fascist barbarity – have produced the Republican Constitution, in which everyone can recognize themselves and which represents a guarantee of democracy and justice, of firm denial of any form or principle of authoritarianism or totalitarianism”. Values ​​that unite, beyond the controversies that arise every year on the occasion of April 25th, because – and here the President quotes Aldo Moro – “popular unity is possible and necessary around anti-fascism, without compromising on the other hand the variety and richness of the national community, social and political pluralism, the free and changeable articulation of majorities and minorities in the democratic game”.

Faced with fascism, which well before the war had revealed “its true brutal and inhuman traits, as the upcoming centenary of the assassination of Giacomo Matteotti reminds us”, there can be no ambiguity.

This is the lesson of the Resistance. Even then, in fact, “many Italians did not submit to dishonor” and, in the chaos that followed the armistice, “they chose the path of redemption”. In the words of the Head of State, the Resistance was “a movement which, in its plurality of people, motivations, origins and ideal drives, found its unity in the need to put an end to the Nazi-fascist domination on our territory, to establish a new coexistence, founded on law and peace”. A multifaceted movement. Many Italians of all conditions and beliefs, recalls Mattarella, “gathered to fight, with weapons, against the oppressor and the invader” and “fought openly, with courage, against an enemy overwhelming in numbers, weapons and for training”. With a substantial difference compared to their enemies “imbued with the macabre cult of death and war”, as “the patriots of the Resistance made use of weapons so that one day they would fall silent and the world would finally be marked by peace, freedom, justice ”.

And “today, in a time of great concern, marked, in Europe and on its borders, by aggression, war and violence, we trust, constantly and convincingly, in that hope”.

Alongside that of the partisans, the President of the Republic forcefully recalls “the heroic resistance of the approximately six hundred thousand Italian soldiers who, after 8 September, refused to serve the Republic of Salò, that puppet regime established by Mussolini under the total control of Hitler.” But the Head of State also exalts “the resistance of the population, which spontaneously rebelled in the face of episodes of brutality and violence, writing pages of splendid heroism of a civil nature”. It is the Resistance of thousands of “men, women, religious, state officials, workers, bourgeois”, who “risking their own lives and that of their families, opposed the dictatorship and systematic violence, hiding allied soldiers, supporting the partisan struggle, falsifying documents to save Jews from deportation, printing and disseminating propaganda leaflets”, without forgetting the “courageous workers’ struggles which culminated in the great strikes in the industries of the northern cities”. A “Civil Resistance”, a “Resistance without weapons”, which also saw “the rebirth of the protagonism of women, finally freed from the subordinate role to which fascist ideology assigned them”.