GIacomo Matteotti was assassinated by fascist hitmen on June 10, 1924. There were five of them waiting for him outside his home, all squadrists from Milan, professionals of violence hired by Benito’s closest collaborators Mussolini. Matteotti, the deputy and secretary of the United Socialist Party, the last one who, in Parliament, still openly opposed the fascist dictatorship, was kidnapped in the center of Rome, in broad daylight, in broad daylight. He fought until the end, as he had done all his life. They stabbed him to death, then mutilated his body. They then folded it in half to fit it in a pit dug hastily with a blacksmith’s file.
Mussolini was immediately informed of this. In addition to this crime, he committed the infamy of swearing to the widow that he would do everything possible to bring her husband back to her. And, while he was swearing, the “Duce” kept the victim’s bloody documents in his desk drawer.
In this false spring of ours, however, we are not only commemorating the political assassination of Matteotti. We also commemorate the Nazi-fascist massacres perpetrated by the German SS with the complicity and collaboration of the Italian fascists in 1944. The Ardéatine pits, Sant’Anna di Stazzema, Marzabotto, these are just some of the sites where the allies Mussolini’s demonic forces massacred thousands of defenseless Italian civilians in cold blood. Among them, hundreds of children and even infants. Many were burned alive, others beheaded.
No denial of fascism
These two tragic anniversaries, that of spring 1924 and that of spring 1944, prove that fascism was throughout its historical existence – and not only at its end, or occasionally – a phenomenon of systematic political violence made up of assassinations and of massacres. Will the heirs of this story recognize it once and for all?
Unfortunately, everything suggests that this will not be the case. The post-fascist group in power, after winning the elections in September 2022, had two possible paths before it: renouncing its neofascist past or trying to rewrite history. He undoubtedly borrowed the second.
After avoiding the subject during her electoral campaign, the president of the council, obliged to confront it during the commemorations, stubbornly stuck to the ideological line of her original neofascist culture. She distanced herself from the indefensible atrocities perpetrated by the regime (the persecution of the Jews) without ever denying the fascist experience as a whole. She attributed the massacres committed with the complicity of the fascists of the Italian Social Republic to the Nazis alone. And she ignored the fundamental role of the Italian Resistance, to the point of never mentioning the word “anti-fascism” during the April 25 commemorations in 2023. [date anniversaire de la libération, en 1945, de l’Italie de l’occupant nazi et de ses alliés issus du régime de Benito Mussolini].
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