Why do so many in Italy remember fascism with nostalgia? A period, by the way, that they never even lived through. Why has the idea passed that Mussolini also did good things and that fascism was a good version of Nazism? A Nazism of which fascism was, so to speak, the father, inspiring it and acting as a forerunner for racial laws, use of violence and repression of opponents. So why, more than a century after the March on Rome and more than 80 years after its fall, have we still not come to terms with fascism? We talked about this with Francesco Filippi, historian and author of numerous books on the fascist period.

QUESTION: Why have we not yet reached a reckoning with fascism? A defascistization, we could say. And how come it still comes out today, paraphrasing one of your books, that we are still fascists?

ANSWER FILIPPI: Well, to put it very simply, there are two causes one endogenous and one exogenous. The exogenous cause is that no one among the Allies, unlike in the case of Germany, demanded an internal trial of fascism. This is a fundamental thing. The Anglo-Americans did not do a trial of Rome, as there had been a Nuremberg trial. For what reason? Because in Italy, unlike Germany, there was already in place, let’s call it a friendly government, because on 25 April 1945 there was already the need to fight another war that had begun, the Cold War, unlike Germany, Italy had had a resistance movement to which they could entrust the keys of the new state, of the new country, so from the outside there was no one asking for let’s say justice for the twenty years of Mussolini’s rule. Also because who would they have tried? People like Badoglio, with whom they had already made agreements? It is better not to touch a state that was, after all, moving forward and was useful, let us say, to the cause of the West at the end of the war. Another thing is the endogenous cause that must not be forgotten. Fascism is a long-lived totalitarianism, it lasts 20 years, it lasts two generations of Italians who are immersed and brought up in the breeding broth of fascism, and so we are faced with millions of Italians who could not easily ask themselves a fundamental question of defascism. That is, who was really fascist in this Italy? Having no parameters to say to make a distinction, well apart from the great hierarchs, let’s say who could say they were totally clean towards this past. Were they fascists, what do I know, university professors who in 1931, all but 12, went to swear allegiance to fascism? And this means that the Italian Republic has had at least two Presidents of the Republic who were fascists because both Einaudi and Giovanni Leone were university professors under fascism. So they were fascists? Complicated. They were fascists, the teachers who en masse carried on the propaganda culture of the perfect fascist book Moschetto. Difficult there too. We are talking about hundreds of thousands of people. Was the postman fascist? Who was the last wheel on the wagon of that great totalitarian bandwagon that was fascism, but who nevertheless also belonged in his own small way to the regime because with his daily work he carried on a propaganda regime. You could see that the question was too difficult, the parameters too vague: who had been a fascist, boh? Was it enough to have a party card? However, we are talking about 4 million people in ‘43 are difficult figures, a difficult question, which Italy coming out of the war preferred not to ask. What does this unleash? It is the lack of an awareness and also of an assumption of responsibility towards the past regime that causes a certain narrative of a fascism that was not entirely evil, not entirely severe as Nazism had been, to remain in the background for years and today precisely at this time when Italian democracy, let’s face it, does not enjoy good health because it does not seem particularly strong and stable, it does not seem to be able to give the Italians answers and we have a desire for a strong man who tells of a past, which may never have existed, which has been mythologised, but which seems desirable in comparison with certain moments of crisis a sweetened account of fascism, today makes someone think of saying ah, when he was there we were better off. Ah if he were here. Or I’ll quote myself: ah, he also did some good things, while these guys didn’t. Let’s say it’s a problem of public narrative. The Italian public narrative has not come to terms with its past and therefore finds itself today having to come to terms with a present in which the anti-fascist value system has evidently not taken hold, has not swept away all the ghosts of the past

QUESTION BERTOLUCCI: But is this desire for a strong man also perhaps one of the reasons why often, even those in government, do not openly condemn fascism?

ANSWER FILIPPI: Absolutely yes, even here there is a duplicity one part is given by the political culture of reference. A large part of the Italian government establishment comes from the ranks of the Italian Social Movement, including Giorgia Meloni herself who has never come to terms with her fascist past. The symbolic flame of the Arditi is still there, which then became the symbol of Mussolini’s fighting fascism. They have not yet come to terms, so it is difficult. On the other hand, the strong man certainly represents a short cut, but allow me to be polemical: even the technical governments with which Italy has been studded in recent years, I am thinking of the Monti government and especially the Draghi government, are governments that have little to do with democratic representativeness. On the contrary, they represent a failure of democratic representativeness. Here we are today, faced with these choices
a society that is frankly tired of thinking about its future prefers those who tell it ‘I’ll take care of it, don’t worry, I’ll solve the problems’. So a policy of slogans is a bit like what Giorgio Meloni, but above all Matteo Salvini, is continuing to do in our country: find someone to blame, the immigrants, Europe, etc. etc. and then never blame the underlying society and not take responsibility by saying we will solve the issue don’t worry, but without recipes in hand.

QUESTION BERTOLUCCI: Was fascism really, let’s call it, better than Nazism, or is it to be condemned in the same way? and why can we not come to terms with fascism?  

ANSWER FILIPPI: Let’s clarify one thing the first thing to clarify is that Italy ‘modestly’ has the copyright of right-wing totalitarianism. Mussolini invented the concept of totalitarianism. The very word totalitarianism was born in Italy with an article by Giovanni Amendola in 1923, so at the level of ideal responsibility, Italy was the first great incubator and the first great let’s call it a laboratory of social engineering of the 20th century that would then set the school for all totalitarianisms, both right and left. So there is already a primordial guilt, if we then wanted to make an argument that historians do not like much, that is to measure the goodness of a regime on the basis of the deaths it causes, we would say that fascism causes fewer deaths than national socialism and fewer deaths than Stalinism simply because it applies to different numbers: fascism has always been violent, fascism has always been where it could a force that imposes itself by crushing others. Italian fascism makes big numbers, for example, during the colonial period. It did them in Libya, there is talk of 40,000 dead in the repression of the Libyan revolt, it did them in Ethiopia during the conquest of Ethiopia. We speak of hundreds of thousands of deaths, and not only deaths in combat but deaths from round-ups, deaths in concentration camps and so on. Here is perhaps also that account of an imperfect totalitarianism, which will be Hannah Arendt’s definition of it, when in her essay on totalitarianisms she reads in Italian totalitarianism, saying that compared to Hitler’s and Stalin’s, Mussolini’s is an imperfect totalitarianism. Perhaps because it has to be said years later, Arendt has a different lens of vision. One because she has the German reality more in hand, two because she underestimates the ideological cultural impact of Italian fascism, three because she has a Eurocentric view. Most, almost all, of the deaths that Nazi Germany or Stalinist Russia make are in Europe and therefore those are more noticeable. The deaths that fascism makes around the world are usually put in a let’s say different account and this should also make us think. Direct question: was fascism better than Nazism? Absolutely not. At most, and this perhaps has to do with a certain way of seeing and also a certain stereotype of Italians, it was certainly less efficient than Nazism and Stalinism. So if it did fewer deaths, it was not out of badness or goodness but it was out of less efficiency. Italian fascism is not an imperfect totalitarianism, as Arendt says, but rather an inefficient totalitarianism. But if it had wanted to, Italian fascism would certainly have had the same consequences as German Nazism.

QUESTION BERTOLUCCI: The idea has passed that one of the main mistakes of Mussolini and Fascism was the alliance with Hitler. But is that really the case?

FILIPPI’S ANSWER: The idea that Mussolini’s only major mistake was to ally himself with Hitler is a hoax, a nonsense. And I must say among other things that it is a hoax that originated within the fascist party itself. Because the justification that hierarchs like Ciano, De Vecchi, Bottai give when they vote against Mussolini on 25 July ‘43 is “you made one serious mistake by backing the wrong horse”. But this is an excuse, an excuse that is easily disproved by the very nature of fascism. Fascism was born as an anti-democratic and violent movement. Fascism has in its DNA the idea of a need to wage war. Mussolini is a warmonger already in theory, when in 19-20 he came out of the experience of the First World War and called his right to rule a trinocracy. That is, that place where through the trenches, someone has more right than others to rule. It is anti-democratic because it believes that it is violence in a somewhat Darwinian manner that governs relations between men and this makes fascism, by definition, a violent warmongering movement. That Mussolini waged the wrong war is unquestionable, but that he wanted it with all his might even, it must be said, against the advice of his generals is a fact that is historiographically reported in Ciani’s Diaries and in the same Ministry of War documents of the time. Mussolini was wrong to go to war, but that does not mean he did not want to go to war. On the contrary, and in my opinion an aggravating factor, Mussolini entered the war when he realised that his German ally was about to win. In fact he enters the war when France is bent, when Britain is under bombardment Mussolini does not make a mistake. Mussolini has a poor view of things. A blindness, probably from his own propaganda. Certainly fascism is violent and also racist. The other hoax that the racial laws of 38, are an offshoot, a favour, let’s say a concession to the Germanic ally is nonsense. The racist Italian laws of 38 are not a photocopy of the Nuremberg laws of 35-36, they are a photocopy of the racial and racist laws that Italian fascism invented for Ethiopia and Eritrea. For Africa and Somalia, the Italian East Africa. They are laws that establish a differentiation between those who are subjects and those who are not, based on race. And they are laws that fascism makes for its own African domains. Once again, if we widened the field, the eye, from the European theatre, we would discover that Italian fascism is one of the most determined and heinous totalitarianisms. To say that it was a rose-water dictatorship, which basically also did good things, is simply a post-World War II narrative to relieve Italians of responsibility, of the horrors of their own past.

QUESTION BERTOLUCCI: Many people died in Yugoslavia as well

 ANSWER FILIPPI: Absolutely. In Yugoslavia they did all the killing they could do. Here’s one thing I want to point out is that at the level of numbers, we are talking about a brutality that is limited by numbers. That applies to a partisan war. But the round-ups and the proto-genocidal operation that the Italians set in motion in the Balkans, in Yugoslavia but also in Greece, are horrors of war, war crimes that Italy then forgot, that the Allies allowed Italy to forget, but that have been the subject of international investigations. Yugoslavia asked for, and had a list of Italian war criminals, whom it wanted to try, but who were not tried. Because then coming to the Cold War, Yugoslavia was on the wrong side of the Iron Curtain to proceed with these trials. But we are talking about this. Of activities that were not brought to light, not of activities that were not there.

QUESTION BERTOLUCCI: In the light of the killings, violence, repression and deportation, how can we come to terms with fascism?

ANSWER FILIPPI: First to take note of what fascism was. To continue to think that fascism was a pro-tempore solution, to give people the chance to govern the country through a new way of seeing things, that is, the famous fascist third way, and that then this did not work, is not only an insult to the history of this country, but also an insult to the memory of this country. The first thing to do is to acknowledge that Italian fascism was one of the worst totalitarianisms that the history of this planet has told us. And starting  from this it is necessary to study the parts of history that the Italians have so far found indigestible, see the various occupations, see the colonial violence, see the theory of Fascism, but not the theory of Fascism let’s send the kids to the colony so they can breathe better, but the theories of Fascism concerning the racial superiority of the so-called Mediterranean race, the need to wage war in order to advance national interests, and the possibility that this war would be a war of annihilation and therefore not a conventional war, but a war in which, of the wars in which, the Italians could afford to do anything as indeed they did in Ethiopia, Libya and also in the Balkans. It would be enough to know what this regime actually did to stop spinning these hoaxes and to make people in government positions ashamed of the fact that they have the taste of Mussolini at home by keeping it and laughing about it. I am evidently talking about Senate President Ignazio La Russa.

QUESTION BERTOLUCCI: We should, perhaps, also reckon with family history, where so many of us had a grandfather, a relative who was a fervent fascist and passed on that everything was good and beautiful, I imagine

PENNACCHI ANSWER: Exactly. We should stop giving certain types of reading to history. For example, we have just recalled the battle of El Alamein. And in Italy, the battle of El Alamein, which is a battle, an Italian defeat, is celebrated as a victory on the field of honour because it resisted the fury of the British. Let us remember that the battlefield of El Alamein was within the framework of the encirclement carried out by the Axis troops that would allow the Nazifascists to reach Jerusalem. Imagine the wehrmacht entering Jerusalem in the 1940s. That battle of El Alamein, is the beginning of the defeat of the Axis troops and any good democrat with a good memory, should celebrate El Alamein by thanking the British who defeated the Italians and Germans. Thank them because this defeat laid the foundations for the liberation of Europe from Nazi-fascism. But we are still here remembering our glorious infantrymen, as we remember our glorious infantrymen in the battle of Nikolajewka on 26 January 1943 in which the Alpine troops were essentially defeated in a pitched battle, but were collaborating in the war of annihilation in eastern Europe that the Germans had been waging for years. When we talk about memory, we have to talk about the entire memory of the country and we have to talk about all the stories that this memory has to  contain. Because otherwise we get the usual family picture in which we are nice and good, at most we play the mandolin, and we don’t budge from there. But that has not been the history of this country

QUESTION BERTOLUCCI: there is something you think needs to be emphasised.

ANSWER FILIPPI: But I would say that, to date, I would like to remember one thing. That Italy is often seen as an open-air museum, so it is seen as a collection of the past. Actually, in this last century or so, Italy has been a great laboratory of the future. Italy was a laboratory of the future in the 1920s with the invention of Fascism, it was a laboratory when in the 1990s a particularly complex, let’s say incestuous relationship between politics and the media, created what has been the phenomenon of Berlusconism and we have seen that Berlusconi was simply the forerunner of a category of people who used the media to campaign politically, we are talking today about an elon musk listening to the conversations of the future president of the United States and this should make us reflect, because this is something that was already happening in Italy twenty years ago. Italy today is a laboratory for the future of the right, and I see as a historian that certain public narratives that are based on national pride, on sovereignty becoming sovereignism, on masters in our own house, once again are, I speak of course of Giorgio Meloni but also of Matteo Salvini, not Italian peculiarities, but are examples that are taking root throughout Europe and throughout the West. And this should give us pause for thought. We should not underestimate what Italy has managed to give in the last century, even bad, unfortunately to the so-called West. So yes, I wanted to add this. Let us stop looking at Italy as something clinging to the past and think that the great innovations, unfortunately negative from a social point of view, have often come from this country that is full of contradictions. But which is also very open to experimentation, let’s say. Unfortunately.