On April 25, 1945, the call for armed insurrection in the city of Milan, the headquarters of the partisan command, went out. For this reason that day was chosen by the National Liberation Committee as Liberation Day. This party has always been divisive. And it still is, even if it was a President of the Chamber (ex PCI), Luciano Violante, who recalled in his inaugural speech how many, especially women, fought and died "on the wrong side".
After all, even in France the day of the allied victory in Europe in the Second World War or that of the liberation of Paris they do not have the same unifying value as July 14, 1789 when the Bastille was taken. Thus in the USA we celebrate July 4 (the proclamation of Independence in 1776) and not April 9, when, in 1865, the Civil War ended with the surrender of the Confederation, the event from which re-born the American nation.
Indeed, to overcome the memory of that conflict (in which more Americans died than in all other wars) well over a century had to go by. In Italy, since the immediate post-war period, it has always been notable on an electoral level and active on a political level, a "nostagic" force, which refused to recognize itself in the new Italy born of the Resistance. And unfortunately this opposition is still alive and has been transmitted - despite the changes that have taken place in the parties of the so-called First Republic - from one generation to the next.
And so it happened in other European countries as well. Why fascism is not a historical phenomenon, which belonged to a past and forgotten era. As Primo Levi wrote, the Holocaust survivor writer, every time has its fascism; and that extreme situation can be reached "not necessarily with the terror of police intimidation, but also by denying or distorting information, polluting justice, paralyzing the school, spreading in many subtle ways the nostalgia for a world in which the 'order".
It is not, then, a question of remembering the beginning of a new Italy and of stopping history at those events (as partisan associations sometimes do) by siding on one of the sides that fought, between Italians, during the years of the civil war. The Italy of today and that of tomorrow must not revise a historical judgement nor to cultivate, in vitro, the hatred of those times. We can also nourish, many decades later, a feeling of pietas for all those who lost their lives fighting, both on the right side and on the wrong side.
Anti-fascism must change as fascism has changed. Ideologies do not end up buried under rubble. And here comes the question. How must a political force behave today to be recognized (neo, proto, simil, para, etc.) as fascist? Must its militants wear a black shirt, purge themselves with castor oil and beat their political opponents with the "holy truncheon"? Maybe, if they lose patience, they can even set fire to a Labor Chamber, the headquarters of a party or the editorial office of an opposition newspaper?
Should they break Greece's back? Must they add their bayonet to another eight million? It doesn't matter if you take so much trouble. After all, even authoritarian cultures evolve, above all when their followers have tasted the forbidden fruit of freedom and consider certain individual and group ''emergency exits'' to be indispensable. In a world that has become a global village, a benchmarking of living conditions that can hardly descend, where possible, below a certain threshold.
We must know how to recognize fascism in its new guise (the values are always the same). And above all we must not give up and not neglect vigilance, even within our conscience. Let's think for a moment about the months of quarantine we have spent and those that await us. We didn't ask ourselves whether the measures deprived us of our elementary freedoms; we suffered and that's it. While I understand the needs imposed by the fight against the Coronavirus, I don't feel calm in witnessing the supine adaptation of public opinion to maniacal rules, to arbitrary sanctions, to feelings of hatred towards "offenders" without distinction.
And I understand how a people can become accustomed to an authoritarian regime. If all this has been happening for weeks before our eyes (with the consent of an influenced public opinion), then it becomes understandable - even if obviously not acceptable - the attitude of subjection that, in the history of humanity, peoples have shown in situations in which there was not only the risk of falling ill, even seriously.
