In Italy, a Kinder, Gentler Fascism
Dave Monroe
davidmmonroe at yahoo.com
Sat Sep 28 18:37:30 CDT 2002
The New York Times
September 28, 2002
In Italy, a Kinder, Gentler Fascism
By ALEXANDER STILLE
ROME — This summer the president of the Italian state
broadcasting system, RAI, addressed the national
congress of the National Alliance, the right-wing
party led principally by what are known as
"post-Fascists." The official, Antonio Baldassarre,
announced that it was time to "rewrite history" — that
is, as it is presented on Italian television.
"The old RAI represented only one culture and not
others," he said. "Often, they didn't tell real
history, but told fables, offered one-sided
interpretations." This exhortation before a party
whose older leaders were youthful Fascists had a very
clear meaning: no more black-and-white representations
of anti-Fascists and partisan fighters as noble
patriots and Fascists as evil criminals.
History, cynics say, is written by the winners. At the
end of World War II, the anti-Fascists — who had been
kept out of public life for 20 years — got to tell
their story and name streets and piazzas after their
heroes. But with the return of a center-right
coalition last year, whose second-largest party is the
National Alliance, many on the right feel that it is
their turn now.
Domenico Fisichella, a professor of political science
at the University of Rome and a senator representing
the National Alliance, believes that the political
changes have opened up new possibilities. "The right
has given up Fascism as a model," he said. "And at the
same time, the historiographical debate on the Fascist
period has grown more serene, more balanced." Mr.
Fisichella first proposed forming the National
Alliance in 1994 out of what had, up to that time,
been a neo-Fascist party known as the Italian Social
Movement. He is one of several scholars who have
offered a more mixed judgment of the Fascist era.
"It was clearly an authoritarian government but not a
totalitarian one," he said in a telephone interview.
"Fascism committed serious errors that led to the
tragedy we all know," he added, referring to the
alliance with Hitler and World War II. "But it also
passed a great deal of social and economic legislation
that was quite valid, that was innovative for its time
and even copied in part by the New Deal in ending the
Depression. The gospel of left-wing historiography
failed to make these distinctions and simply bunched
Fascism with Nazism."
An end to the demonization of Fascism by scholars
created an opportunity for Italy's old neo-Fascist
party to move from the political fringe toward the
center. The leadership of the National Alliance has
seized it and gone out of its way to distance itself
from Fascism. The party leader, Gianfranco Fini, has
criticized Fascism's racial laws and has traveled to
both Auschwitz and Israel. Earlier this year, he
publicly retracted a statement he had made 10 years
ago calling Benito Mussolini "the greatest statesman
of the 20th century."
[...]
The two movements may seem contradictory — the
post-Fascists being more critical of Fascism and the
historians treating it more kindly — but they are
intimately related. The rehabilitation of the National
Alliance would probably not have been possible without
a gradual softening of the portrayal of Fascism both
in the scholarly literature and the popular media. If
the older leaders of the National Alliance were
regarded as war criminals like the Nazis, it would
have been impossible for them to occupy positions in
the government. But now one former repubblichino,
Mirko Tremaglia, is even a minister of the current
government.
A less unfavorable view of the Mussolini era is
prevailing, partly because of the political necessity
of integrating the former neo-Fascists into the
mainstream....
This trend is a marked change. For much of the postwar
period, Fascism was portrayed as a criminal regime
imposed by Mussolini and his squads of Black Shirts —
a 20-year "parenthesis" in the history of a democratic
Italy that began with independence in 1861. This view
was challenged during the 1970's by scholars like Mr.
Fisichella but, most important, by Renzo De Felice, a
historian who devoted more than 30 years to a
multivolume biography of Mussolini and whose work
dominated the Italian historiography of Fascism until
his death a few years ago.
"De Felice offered a broader and less moralistic
picture of Fascism," said Roberto Vivarelli, a
professor of history at the University of Florence. "I
think he showed that Fascism was not extraneous to the
history of Italy, not a parenthesis."
De Felice insisted that the demonization of Fascism
failed to explain adequately its rise and hold on one
of the principal countries of Europe. Mussolini, he
argued, enjoyed popularity and the "consensus" of most
of the country up until World War II. De Felice
stressed the differences between Italian Fascism and
German National Socialism. Fascism, despite its claim
to being a "totalitarian" regime, was, he argued, a
softer dictatorship that retained much of the liberal
bureaucracy, made peace with the Roman Catholic Church
and did not share Hitler's obsession with racism and
the Jews. (Mussolini, he observed, adopted racial laws
only on the eve of the war, largely to cement his
alliance with Germany.)
Even some historians with impeccable anti-Fascist
credentials feel that the re-examination of Fascism
has led to a more rounded, less doctrinaire
history....
Yet many others feel that De Felice went too far in
rehabilitating Fascism. In a recent collection of
essays debating the merits of De Felice's work, Denis
Mack Smith, an Oxford historian, denounces De Felice
for minimizing the uglier side of Fascism, like
Mussolini's personal responsibility for killing
political opponents and leading Italy to ruin in World
War II.
[...]
But far more publicity has gone to books pushing an
increasingly revisionist point of view....
[...]
Curiously, in a period in which so many are bending
over backward to be fair to Fascism, it is now left to
a former neo-Fascist, Mr. Fini, the leader of the
National Alliance, to state that the anti-Fascist
victory ending World War II was a victory for all
Italians.
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/09/28/arts/28FASC.html
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