I finished reading John Foot’s History of Italian Fascism and immediately scoured YouTube for images of Milan’s Piazzale Loreto at 29 a gas station. Everyone knows the photos more or less, but more horrific are the moving images, taken when the bodies are still lying on the ground in a tangled heap of bloody rags, amidst a crowd that surrounds them and always seems to be crushing them, but that it recedes, undulates, thickens as more people enter the square, amidst a wasteland of bombed-out buildings. People look at the corpses as if from a well or ditch. There are those who smile, those who wave at the camera, those who step forward to trample or kick a corpse. There are city workers or firefighters who use hoses to fire jets of water to stem the crowds. There are partisans in street clothes with machine guns at their side. It is a sunny day. Mussolini’s corpse can be recognized by its huge head, its face a swollen flesh mask with its mouth and eyes open. There’s a cut in the footage, and a moment later the bodies are no longer lying on the ground but hanging from the roof of the gas station, like cattle in a slaughterhouse, less human bodies than anonymous rags, immersed in the monstrous statistic of the millions dead in the war and in the tide of destruction unleashed by the man who had been executed the day before.
John Foot says that Hitler made the decision to commit suicide when he learned of his former ally’s unworthy death. Foot is a British historian specializing in Italy who has a particular talent for focusing on the concrete lives of people from the past, relevant or unknown, and shedding light on them at great collective events. Things don’t happen in general or in the abstract: they always happen to someone. In the prologue to his latest book, Blood and Power: The Rise and Fall of Italian Fascism, John Foot talks about his great-grandmother, Aurelia Lanzoni, whom he does not remember, although he has a photograph of her holding him, a few months old baby in 1965. In Foot’s Anglo-Italian family, great-grandmother Aurelia was remembered as saying with a nostalgic sigh, “Oh, fascism. It was wonderful!”
John Foot writes with a historian’s dual passion for research and storytelling, and also with the vehemence of one who rebels at those historical lies that, so often repeated, have the appearance of proven fact and also have dire political consequences. A century just after the March on Rome that brought Mussolini to power, and when the witnesses of that time have all but disappeared, the most shameless heirs to his tyranny have just won the elections in Italy and their victory, the gradual normalcy of their air political aberrations, they both endorse and exploit a diffuse tendency to judge with a certain benevolence the Italian fascist regime, which from the start has had the obvious comparative advantage of not being German Nazism. With their fanciful hats, their feathered headdresses, their theatrical posturing, even the biggest fascist henchmen could have a comical puppet show. Wasn’t Mussolini himself, gesticulating like an operatic tenor on the balconies, chest puffed, chin up, and arms on hips, too theatrical to be truly dangerous? The Nazi aesthetic is horrible: from the mid-twenties and into the thirties there were admirable architects, painters and designers of a rationalism touched by modernity and lightness in fascist Italy. Even the well-known papanatismo of the avant-garde could celebrate the fascist frivolities of the macabre Tarambana Filippo Marinetti without remorse. Just as Fascism had exploited the emerging technologies of cinema and radio, Silvio Berlusconi, admirer of Mussolini and imitator of his gestures and flaunted masculinity, used his dominance on television to wield devastating dominance over political life. Who takes such obvious clowns, such unlikely demagogues seriously.
What John Foot is doing is bringing before us the terrifying seriousness of whatever lay beneath this supposed comedy in which the passage of years, oblivion and political manipulation have blurred the history of fascism: the terrorist model Subversion, violence of the extreme and method, which the totalitarian movements in Europe later imitated one after the other, their cold ability to promote the worst human instincts, resentment, fanaticism, hatred, murderous cruelty. From 1919 to 1922 the fascist armed groups waged, with more or less the express consent of the state, a rigorous class struggle against workers’ organizations which were among the most militant and best organized in Europe. Until I read this book by John Foot, I had no idea of the breadth of the cooperative movement in Italy in the first decades of the 20th century. Cooperatives, workers’ parties, trade unions, newspapers all had prominent headquarters in the center of towns. Against them, the Black Shirt Squadristi launched an attack, invading African villages in working-class neighborhoods like colonial mercenaries, beating and murdering workers, setting fire to buildings, harassing lonely and defenseless opponents in the streets, and terrorizing their families. Those designated by fascism as enemies were persecuted no less cruelly in Italy than in Germany. The invasion and conquest of Ethiopia in 1935 reached genocidal proportions. Fascist police and militiamen worked in pursuit of Italian Jews with the same efficient viciousness as the French Vichy gendarmes, the Romanian legionnaires, or the Arrow Cruisers of Hungary. Mussolini’s regime can be directly blamed for the deaths of at least a million people inside and outside of Italy.
“Yet over the years this carnage has somehow been downplayed or justified, even by some anti-fascists,” writes John Foot. The ghosts of Piazzale Loreto are like the living dead who keep threatening to return.
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