The Irreverent – Winston Churchill didn’t add up when he observed that, until then, there were 45 million fascists in Italy, from the following day as many anti-fascists and the censuses didn’t show 90 million Italians
by Renzo Trappolini
| An image of Liberation |
Viterbo – After the final offensive of the Anglo-Americans against the Germans came on April 25, 1945, the head of the English government, Winston Churchill, did not add up when he observed that up to that date there were 45 million fascists in Italy, the following day as many anti-fascists and the censuses did not show 90 million Italians.
For example, it happened that among university professors, only about ten had refused to swear loyalty to the regime, but then the same ones who had written for fascist magazines, painted and sculpted in literary exhibitions and even explained theories on racial hygiene, passed quite naturally among the ranks of so-called democratic thought.
Why shouldn’t they have done it?, quips Ambassador Sergio Romano: “Fascist Italy liked them, anti-fascist Italy would have liked them.”
After April 25, for many, too many, it was a question of changing the rite but still serving mass. First, in the religion which, with the blessing of the Roman greeting, imposed fascist baptism on everyone, whether they wanted it or not. Afterwards, in that of the Resistance dedicated to the mission of purifying the people by rightly restoring the values of freedom and democracy trampled upon by the former regime. Moreover, observed Georges Bernard Shaw, does not the art of government consist in the organization of idolatry?
Democracy, however, cannot tolerate such a modality, even though it is the best, only because the other political structures already tested are worse and even though today, seventy-nine years after the Liberation, we find ourselves organized with leadership parties whose bossiness even justifies the image of the secretaries on electoral posters and holy cards, harbingers, they hope, of a new miracle, that of the multiplication of votes.
This is a matter to be handled with delicacy and certain demonstrations repeated even on this 25th April cannot fail to remind us that – wrote the historian Giordano Bruno Guerri – if it is true that democracy cannot exist without anti-fascism, it happens that being anti-fascist is not always synonymous with democracy.
As demonstrated by the continuing ostracism towards the representatives of the Jews who were the most affected by fascism and who also carried out the resistance, even more so. This, unfortunately, in the presence of a rudely creeping anti-Zionism which was a terrible dogma of the Nazi-Fascist regime and today seems to find fertile breeding ground even in the temples of free and therefore democratic thought, the universities. And not just ours.
Renzo Trappolini
April 26, 2024
