The case (by M.Veneziani). Italy is increasingly biased and we miss Renzo De Felice

Renzo De Felice

Still on Renzo De Felice. How many steps back did Italy and the historical judgment, from the times and texts of De Felice to today. Coming from the left and from antifascism, De Felice with his monumental work on Mussolini and with his meticulous research among the archives, restored fascism to history and to Italy. On the basis of the documents, he studied fascism on the historical level and did not exorcise it on the criminal level. He showed that it was not an illness or an abomination, but an integral part of the history of Italy and of the national autobiography. A historical judgment that in the eighties conquered the prevailing judgment of our country. But over the years we went back and down. And not at the level of public opinion but of institutions. De Felice today would risk going through the courts and the ideological commissions of the Inquisition. Even the mild Mattarella disowned him, saying that fascism was only bad, there were no positive or interesting sides. Useless fatigue, professor.

I have before my eyes a book that has just been published, which concludes the five volumes of the journalistic writings of Renzo De Felice. It is edited by Giuseppe Parlato, who chairs the Spirito-De Felice Foundation, and by Giuliana Podda, with a preface by Gianni Scipione Rossi (Luni Editrice, pp.330, 25 euros). We presented it a few days ago in Rieti in his hometown. De Felice's latest interventions appear, between the end of the 1980s and 1996, the year of his death, he would now be 90 years old. The subtitle is eloquent: "We make history, not moralism". And instead that little bit of history that remains around today, is all within moralism, rather it is crushed between moralism and judicial process. Because after the moral condemnation, the penal penalty is also triggered. Especially in terms of fascism and nationalism.

History is written by the winners but only the victims count. Victims however selected by a moral and ideological prejudice; among the victims many are presumed, sometimes they are defeated killers.

In these interventions and interviews De Felice dismantles the taboos that have inhibited the historical judgment on fascism. I quote them in a nutshell. First taboo: it is forbidden to say that fascism has enjoyed great popular support for many years, the greatest artists and intellectuals of the time were with fascism, and had positive judgments from the greatest statesmen of its time, often reflecting world public opinion. De Felice broke that taboo. Second taboo: we cannot say that fascism was a regime of modernization, between great works and development, integration of young people, women, peasants and workers. And De Felice broke that taboo. Third taboo: it cannot be said that racism and anti-Semitism were foreign to fascism until the alliance with Hitler, after the isolation of the Sanctions, and then the unfortunate racial laws. And De Felice, even in these writings, breaks that taboo. Fourth taboo: it cannot be said that Nazism and Fascism were two distinct realities, there is no "Nazi-fascism" category, "invented by political propaganda to beat the common enemy. It was an invention of the allies, then passed between the words of the resistance and from there in the common language ", as De Felice writes.

Fifth taboo: it cannot be said that the Western powers pushed Mussolini into the arms of Hitler, after he had vainly tried to stand in the middle. And De Felice broke this taboo. Sixth taboo: the social republic was a brake and a cushion to cushion Nazism and retaliation against Italians. Mussolini in Salò for De Felice was more a prisoner than Hitler's servant-ally (read "Save the Italians. Mussolini against Hitler", by Alfio Caruso recently published by Neri Pozza). Seventh taboo: the Resistance was a minority phenomenon and did not win the war with fascism but accompanied the victory of the Allies; the people did not take sides with the Resistance, and even after the war preferred the DC not so much for its Christian inspiration as for its perceived neutrality with respect to fascism and anti-fascism. De Felice also broke this taboo. And finally, eighth taboo, the partitocracy was born already with the Resistance and with the CLN, and with it that sunset of the nation of which we live the painful, drawn epilogue is born. I do not go beyond remembering that half of the Resistance, if not more, was not fought in the name of freedom but in the project of a dictatorship of the proletariat which had as its model the Soviet Union.

Does it seem little to you? Today these theses come close to the crime of opinion but were founded on unexceptionable historical and documentary bases.

Too bad that De Felice didn't have time to investigate the massacres after 1943, leaving that taboo to be broken by journalists, first Pisanò, then Pansa. It is a pity that he did not have great capacity for synthesis and writing, as well as speech. But the most credible historian of fascism remains, the most reliable biographer of Mussolini; had an important civil and cultural influence, but also indirectly political, especially in the 1980s and the early 1990s. He was opposed and disputed (and in this book there is a trace), they even threw him a Molotov cocktail on his house but only in our years his historical work was trampled and erased in a rough and factious way. Italy walks with the shrimp's pace and the farther away is that history, the more we return to the Manichean climate and its taboos. Hence the nostalgia of Renzo De Felice. (from La Verita)

@barbadilloit

By Marcello Veneziani