The Fruit of Memory

Italian Fascism in correlation to Society and the State

by Giordano Pannocchia

In recent years, some words that have not been remembered for a long time are re-emerging. In particular while considering them in correlation to each other. “Freedom”, “memory”, “resistance” and “fascism”, have returned to be an integral part of the discourses that can be heard around us on several levels. They have returned in the empty television debates, in the speeches of the electoral parties in Parliament, in the often exclusively intellectual reflections of some academic circles.

They have also returned -and this is much more important- in daily conversations, in concerns for the future of communities, families and society as a whole. Collectively we want to recognize in that in the last years, the institutional history of this country has seen a change of pace towards a future that does not seem bright. Some approach this with resignation, some with an assumption of responsibility,

Italy is a State in crisis, from many points of view.

The financial economy, the precariousness and the collapse of “public” services that we have been witnessing for many years now, have shattered the hopes of many young generations. But there is more to it than that. In addition to the material crises, there are much deeper-rooted ones, which have been digging into people’s consciences for some time. The political project of the Italian state has lost all credibility and all capacity to show itself towards Italian society as a positive model. Perhaps these promises had even bewitched some young people that the same State has helped to shape. The fact is, in the eyes of everyone this project is nothing more than an administrative structure, a crutch for large industrialists to lean on and a distant master for the large part of the population.

Continuity of fascism

Resistance movements and struggles however have never abandoned these concepts. Immediately in trying to identify a continuity between the partisan Resistance and the anti-fascist struggles from the post-war period to this day; it was recognized that Italy has never completely come to terms with fascism and it was well known names and faces that immediately started to reconstruct fascism in an organized way. An old anti-fascist song from the 70s said that if you want to grow a good crop but you fail to remove all the root of the weed, in reality you have only made a graft, onto which it can continue to grow. This is the militant perspective that has been maintained even through to today. But over the years it has seen the world change suddenly around it, and through these changes it has not always been able to communicate its analysis clearly.

A litmus test that has always given clear indications of fascism’s development and that has always spoken, not only to resistance movements and associations but to all components of society, are the packages of laws, especially those that in Italy in recent years have been called “Security Decrees”. With the last of these measures - the proposal of “DDL 1660” - it seems that many consciences have decided to re-awaken.

“You don’t provide security, you spread fear”

This is one of the many phrases that could be heard at the national demonstration against this bill, held last winter in Rome. The main measures to “guarantee security” are actually nothing more than a repressive package. These are penalties for those who protest in

prisons and in the CPR, for those who hold “materials for terrorist acts”, for those who occupy empty houses. It also allows the police to keep weapons outside of duty.

This proposal comes after a year of almost uninterrupted mobilizations in support of the Palestinian people.

These mobilisations have managed to involve many people, some of whom, thanks to these paths, have been able to find a new perspective in their lives and have developed a deep mistrust towards the Italian government and the state. Awareness and the will to fight, acquired by groups spanning right across Italian society, are certainly two of the aspects that could most undermine Italy’s plan for transformation into a suitable pawn to play the role that will be assigned to it in the war. Another snapshot from the event we told you of before, was the presence of a small banner: “against the DDL fear”; perhaps that sentiment is what has stirred so many souls.

How to justify war?

In the context of today’s Third World War, these laws have the sole purpose of constructing in the “public opinion” (that part of society with a petty little-bourgeois mentality that has remained motionless in front of the events and felt untouched by them) a generalized fear, which leads to the call for a solution to all this, to seek stability and a de-centering of responsibility for the management of public life. In a speech at her party’s feast, the Prime Minister said that her greatest success will be “to make Italians believe in themselves again”. The government’s measures, however, aim to bring the population closer to the state, its figure and its party, in a great propaganda work of the statist and patriarchal mentality. However, fear and order are not only seen in social dynamics, but involve other aspects of this war.

One of the most important measures of this DDL security project is its attack against peaceful road blockades, for which a criminal offence with possibility of imprisonment is now expected. This will particularly affect two types of protests: the road blocks of the environmental movements and the pickets of striking workers, especially in the production and logistics sectors. To date, without this DDL being active, in some Italian cities, relevant in the logistics sector such as Milan and Piacenza, are counted around 3000 trade unionists under investigation and facing trial. Under attack are the pickets and blockades that this decree would make illegal, and that in a lot of cases have been a deciding factor for the victory of the workers in important disputes.

We need not seek out the Duce’s busts in the houses of ministers (reference to Ignazio La Russa, President of the Senate of Italy, whom openly admitted of having statues of Benito Mussolini in his home; a man that proudly declared of not being an anti-fascist). Their actions are enough to betray the real impulses of the state and political forces. These ones, consistent with a certain history that links them directly to the twenty years of Mussolini, always move in the same direction: that of violence and oppression.

Patriots?

At a G7 meeting in Italy this year, the Italian Minister of Defense spoke of the world as having a “deteriorated security framework,” when looking at the NATO fronts open on Europe, the Middle East and the Pacific. Although they cannot say it explicitly, even the great powers can no longer continue to hide the global nature of the wars in progress, a Third World War that the movement for the liberation of Kurdistan has long identified as an attack by the state-nations, as an expression of the patriarchal and statist mentality against humanity.

Italy has a role in this at several levels, from border control to the development of technological innovation, to logistical support for military presence in the Mediterranean, depending on the alliances observed. It has a role towards Europe of a “gate”, together with Turkey, for the control and containment of migratory flows towards the states of the European Union. While Erdogan has assumed a position of blackmailing for the containment of people who would like to enter the EU through Turkish territory, Italy in recent years has always been looking for new ideas to reject people and leave them at the mercy of the Mediterranean Sea. Or, even better, to avoid from the beginning that they start the crossing.

In the last years the main policy has been to make agreements with the Libyan Coast Guard, substantially funding migrant prisons and subsidizing the daily violence that took place - and still plays out - inside those walls. Meanwhile, in recent months the government has tried to open a CPR for migrants through an agreement with the Albanian government, which at the moment has not been successful, after being interrupted by the Italian magistrates.

The Italian “patriots” do what the European Union tells them to do, but above all they put themselves at the complete service of NATO.

The Italian war industries, Leonardo S.p.a. primarily, are the vanguard in the field of aerospace and the production of missiles, cannons and drones that in recent months have been thundering over the skies of Gaza and Rojava.

The country of which the state speaks is nothing more than an economic and political concept, emptied of any ethnic or ethical meaning. This is the true nature of nationalism and fascism, ideologies in symbiosis with war, with the sole purpose of maintaining a society under slavery.

Fighting for freedom!

If we have to recognize enemies from history, it is even more important to recover friendly faces to focus on; and the history of this piece of land is dotted with young women and young men who, in the face of all this, after a lifetime under an educational, cultural, economic and political system dominated by fascism, have not forgotten the values of an ecological and democratic society.

Today we must reveal the deep violence that is happening in our time, both from a physical point of view as well as from a cultural one.

The attempts to silence the voices of young women, the attacks on youth, and all other forms of oppression have a common denominator in a dominant system that calibrates its violence in relation to how much it is at risk. Among the hundreds of thousands of people who decided to oppose fascism in the years of dictatorship there was certainly fear; but in the letters of the condemned and sentenced to death for the Resistance we do not see fear as the main element, instead we see a deep joy, the awareness of having done the right thing.

Even if today the world around us seems to be in the deepest crisis, we have within us the tools to get out of it, which will pass through organization and struggle to eradicate patriarchy, the resulting fascism and all other forms of oppression that burden on the people.