Fascist Marconi? Certainly yes, but he remains the Steve Jobs of the XNUMXth century and Wales could have woken up earlier

The latest victim of Brexit is called Guglielmo Marconi. Cardiff City Council denied him a visa, and the monument which was designed in his honour, a four-metre high radio worth over a million pounds, will not be built. Reason, the accession of him to the fascism and the exclusion of Jewish scientists from the Italian Academy of which he was president. The Welsh mayor is absolutely right, and he is absolutely right not to dedicate any monuments to him in his city. After all, strictly speaking, it is not even a matter of "cancel culture", because here an existing statue is not knocked down with a pickaxe, but one gives up on building a new and very expensive one, in times of tight public budgets. If anything, it could be argued that he should have woken up earlier: that of Mussolini's regime Marconi was a convinced supporter of the first hour, as well as a hierarch of rank, everyone knows it. It is equally true that in submitting the lists of candidates to the Academy to the Duce he annotated the letter "e" in his own hand next to some names, to indicate their Jewish origin, as I wrote and documented in my book "Wireless. Science, loves and adventures of Guglielmo Marconi" (Garzanti, 2013).

They are two indelible marks in the biography of a great man and a great inventor. Can we forgive them, in exchange for his many merits, for the many things for which humanity owes him – not just the radio, but all the marvels of the digital revolution, from Wi-Fi to cell phones? The answer, of course, is no. There are no justifications.

Fascist Marconi? Like many others in those days

But maybe we can try to understand. In the thirties the consensus for Mussolini was at its peak. Marconi, as well as a scientist, was an industrialist and a businessman, and there was no industrialist, from Senator Agnelli down, who did not have good relations with the regime. And many, in Italy and abroad (including Winston Churchill), were convinced that a strong man was needed to modernize a backward country not yet ripe for democracy.

Also Luigi Pirandello, for example, was a militant fascist, an academic from Italy and an enthusiastic supporter of the imperialist war in Ethiopia: yet no one would dream today of banning his works from theatres.

As for the notorious "e", the most disturbing aspect is that they date back to 1932, therefore many years before the racial laws. The fact is that the nominations for the Italian Academy had to be approved by Mussolini himself, and Marconi knew that the "Israelite" candidates would be rejected. One has to imagine how much it weighed on him to trace those shameful marks. He could have gone into direct confrontation with the Duce, as he had already done on various occasions, or perhaps resigned. But the margins for maneuver were narrower every day, and only by maintaining that position could the great scientist snatch the sighed research funding.

Not at all famous boys of via Panisperna, Enrico Fermi's group of physicists, among which some "Jews" such as Emilio Segrè and Bruno Pontecorvo stood out, enjoyed Marconi's esteem and protection right up to the end.

The right hand man of the famous Italian scientist was Jewish

The accusation of anti-Semitism by the British is then quite paradoxical, if we consider that Marconi's right-hand man as well as managing director of the "Company", Godfrey Isaacs, was Jewish: so much so that when the inventor was involved in a scandal political-financial with some ministers of the British government of the time, in 1912, an ultra-Catholic journalist and himself an anti-Semite, Hilaire Belloc (a kind of grillino or ante litteram populist), accused him of being a pawn of the hated Jewish elite.

Marconi: it is not to be venerated but neither is it to be embalmed as a hierarch in livery

But also all the sovereign rhetoric around Marconi, the scandalized headlines of the National Primacy and the Century of Italy, sound a bit over the top. Marconi was not simply "a great Italian", and the electromagnetic pulses that come out of our smartphone do not leave behind the trail of the tricolor arrows. His mother was Irish, and without British finance he could never have obtained the patents and funds necessary to implement his inventions. He had been an interventionist in the great war, when Italy fought alongside the liberal democracies against the central powers. But when, shortly before his death in 1937, he sensed Mussolini's warlike instincts and the alliance with Hitler's Germany, apparently he was planning to flee to London. 

In short, it would be appropriate to all calm down, and to worthily remember, with or without statues, the European genius and global innovator Marconi, the Steve Jobs of the nineteenth century who had already accomplished his scientific feat well before the march on Rome, without making it an untouchable holy card to be venerated uncritically, but not even condemning it to an unjust "damnatio memoriae" for the wrong choices of its last fifteen years of life, or embalming it in figure of the hierarch in livery and felucca in the official photos next to the Duce.