A Civil War (117 page)

Replying to a reader who had asked
Il Popolo
what canonical measures he would incur if he used ‘Fascist methods of persuasion on the Fascist don Calcagno', the Christian Democrat writer replied that it was sacrilege to cause ‘real offence' to a cleric who had not been reduced to lay status or banned
in perpetuo
from wearing the cassock (measures that were never adopted against the founder of ‘Crociata italica'), and added, in poor taste:

Not that recourse to violence, in exceptional circumstances, was extraneous to Catholic thought: one need only think of its justifications of tyrannicide. Closer to home, though the sides here are inverted, in 1921 Alcide De Gasperi had criticised ‘those who intend to condemn every Fascist action under the vague condemnation of violence'. Violence, De Gasperi had recalled, is sometimes legitimate: the violent one might appear to be Renzo (in Manzoni's novel
I Promessi Sposi
) resisting an abuse of power, while the real violent one was don Abbondio.
²⁹
The fact is, however, that the Catholics did not always find it easy to separate the problem of violence, considered in principle, from the questions, discussed chiefly in
Chapter 5
of this book, of order and legality. This slippage was favoured on the one hand by the extensive interpretation of the principle, to which we shall return, that it is permissible to kill only for legitimate defence,
³⁰
and on the other hand by the fact that, when the Christian Democrats (like, for that matter, the Liberals) spoke about today's violence their thoughts ran to the violence of a possible and perilous tomorrow: revolutionary violence, against the existing social order, proletarian violence.
La Libertà
took a stand ‘against all political violence'.
³¹
Conquiste sindacali
appealed to the doctrine of Christ – revolutionary, yes, but not violent.
³²
More problematically, the Christian Socialists wrote that ‘a clean sweep is always necessary, to kill is almost always useless' for those who do not want to give the class struggle ‘a metaphysical significance, a mystical essence in order to make it into a bloodthirsty God of hate'.
³³

The problem of the connection between violence and legality was not, however, the invention of some scrupulous and fearful Catholic consciences. By long tradition, both Christian and lay, what made it legitimate to kill, suspending the authority of the fifth commandment, was primarily, if not quite exclusively, the cover of legality – in other words, the recognition of the state monopoly of violence. Now, the theme of the institutional void and the all-determining choice, which has been central to our argument so far, finds its critical point precisely in the exercise of violence – that is to say, of the legitimisation of exercising the
jus vitae ac necis
(right of life and death) without any secure institutional cover. The preference of many Catholics for purely military
partisan activity can be interpreted, in this regard, as a quest for the traditional guarantee of a non-guilty use of arms.
³⁴
The authorisation given to the military was, in short, more reassuring than the choice of the political; and it was an authority introjected by the conscience of each single individual and endorsed by the age-old authorisation given by the Church to the secular arm of Christian principles. This could give rise to the paradox that the more one harboured religious doubts and scruples, the more readily one had recourse to this authority, either by taking up arms oneself or saddling others with the more unpleasant aspects that went with doing so. In the Modena partisan division the Christian Democrats wanted order and regular and inflexible tribunals, but preferred the firing squads to be composed of Communists.
³⁵
A lay conscience like Primo Levi has baldly laid bare the contradictions, and not the consolations, generated by this kind of behaviour:

If the partisan was no longer protected by the moral anonymity guaranteed a priori to the regular soldier at the moment in which he kills an equally anonymous soldier, the enemy also emerged from anonymity. Both as a German and, still more, as a Fascist, the enemy came to acquire a concrete and far more individualised physiognomy: the enemy ceased to be ‘only a collective identity'.
³⁷
The emotional and moral attitude towards him thus became in its turn more personal and all-absorbing. Even in regular wars, for that matter, as we have already seen, the combatants find themselves compelled to live one of these two alternative experiences: that of being an atom of an indistinct mass shooting in cold blood at the faceless enemy, preserving oneself from blind hatred but with the risk of slipping into indifference and cynicism; or else of shooting in hate, but running the risk of being dragged towards rage and ferocity against individual enemies. The
arditi
, for example, set off action ‘with an explosion of barbaric joy' and, when they returned, ‘each boasted about how he had laid in
with his knife'; and in March 1943
Gerarchia
, Mussolini's magazine, read: ‘War can't be fought without hating the enemy.'
³⁸

A letter to his fiancé written on 28 April 1917 by Fernando Schiavetti, who was to become a severe critic of the ‘the Fascist aesthetic of violence', reveals clearly how difficult it was to strike a balance between the two positions:

Just before being shot by the Germans, a Soviet partisan wrote: ‘Can you imagine with what courage, with what fury and with what boundless pleasure I would destroy these loathsome reptiles? Yet only two years ago I was afraid of killing a chicken!'
⁴⁰
And Roberto Battaglia would ask himself: ‘But how can you be so happy because you have killed other men?'
⁴¹

In the partisan war, ideological and civil, the knot that Fernando Schiavetti was attempting to unravel in the ‘regular' war of 1915–18 became still more tangled. In a page of her diary, Ada Gobetti described the concern that she felt at how her son Paolo might react to the execution of a suspect that had been ordered by a partisan chief: ‘While Paolo was recounting it, I was observing his face with a certain anxiety, afraid that I would find there satisfaction or indifference. Instead he said, with restrained shame – ‘It rather upset me' – and I heaved a sigh of relief. It may be necessary to kill, but heaven forbid that one should find it simple and natural.'
⁴²

On the one hand it is precisely the not very ‘technological' character of the partisan war that tended to make the enemy more visible; on the other hand there was the active, indeed growing, ‘totalitarian character of modern warfare, which made no distinction between soldiers and civilians, that – contrary to all expectations – recreated the conditions of band warfare.'
⁴³

Nobility of ethical commitment and the risk of totalisation coexisted, therefore, in the partisan war waged against the enemy – Fascism and Nazism – which had all the prerequisites for being described as the total enemy. I have already drawn attention to the inhuman character that the enemy acquired when viewed in the light of extermination and inhumanity that, in this manner, he tended to reverberate on those who, precisely because he was like that, opposed him.
⁴⁴
And I have also recalled that one cannot free oneself from this tangle by invoking a rigorous autonomy of the political, in whose sphere the war ought to be circumscribed, in order to prevent ‘the logic of value and non-value from unfurling its full, devastating consequences'.
⁴⁵

During the Resistance, the Catholic Communists came singularly close to this Schmittian position when, though following Saint Thomas's teaching in vigorously practising the concept of a just war, thereby judging the partisan war as well in terms of value, they also saw politics and the war, which is its armed right hand, as being indispensable and neutral instruments that morality, without compromising itself, ‘employs just as they are'. The revealed law that man needs insofar as he is tainted with original sin regards the person, not the techniques that he or she uses – not therefore the medicine, not the chemistry, not that ‘technique of killing' which is war, a mere mechanism to which it would be absurd to apply the Law, in this case the fifth commandment. The fullest exposition of this line of reasoning led Felice Balbo to write that when in the ‘construction of techniques' it is necessary

Positions springing from such different cultural contexts thus seem to converge, leaving aside Balbo's tortuous and, indeed, paradoxical reasoning, towards a conception of wartime violence which, to get itself out of a fix, takes refuge in an apparent and ‘technical' asepticity. But the dropping of the bomb on Hiroshima would not be aseptic, just as Ernst Jünger had not been aseptic when he had written: ‘We are soldiers and the rifle is the instrument that distinguishes us. Killing is our trade, and it is our boast and duty to do this job well and carefully, in a workmanlike fashion.'
⁴⁷
It has to be recognised that on this path there seems to be no trace of sure, clear, definitive antidotes, given once and for all, to the risk of attributing a totalising value to violence against the enemy, if one tends to see him as absolute. Indeed the distinctions schematically appealed to above simplify, to the point almost of indecipherability, situations which on the one hand cannot but send one to the realm of ends – values – present in whoever practises violent action, and on the other hand arouse emotions and feed on symbols in which ends and means necessarily interweave. In an essay about Fascist violence, paraphrasing a passage from Natalie Zemon Davis, Adrian Lyttleton observes that, historically, what counts is ‘the meaning and direction of violence', then warns that one should not interpret violent people only as crazy or frustrated, but rather ‘in terms of the aims of their actions and in terms of the behavioural roles and models permitted by their culture'.
⁴⁸

There is some affinity between the
resistenti
and those souls full of contempt and violence, who have been credited only with the capacity to listen to the word of Jesus;
⁴⁹
or with those whom Saint-Just taught that ‘the war for freedom must be conducted with fury';
⁵⁰
or, again, with those who recognise themselves in the maxim that ‘people do not become revolutionaries out of science, but out of indignation'.
⁵¹
To a Catholic the contradiction might appear to be irenically appeased: only by virtue of the Resistance, one of them has written,

In the letters written by those awaiting execution attitudes are more various and hard-won. The enemies may be the ‘cursed enemy'; they may be the ‘bloodthirsty human beasts', on whom, however, it is asked that one's blood should not rebound; they may be dubbed with many other equally crude and relentless expressions. But there may also be the enjoinder not to curse or bear hatred towards anyone, consigning the enemy to future popular justice, and to divine justice.
⁵³
What may certainly have a bearing in these cases, which are more frequent in the letters of condemned Italians than in those of other countries, is the wish to make one's peace in extremis with the precept of the Gospel. But a Garibaldi brigade that had entitled its broadsheet
Vendetta
was taken to task as follows: ‘The title
Vendetta
is badly chosen and gives no indication of what it is intended to mean. If by vendetta one means the struggle that we are waging against our enemies to liberate Italy, it strikes us as more appropriate to speak of
Giustizia
and not of
Vendetta
.'
⁵⁴

An apologue about the difficulty of getting final ends and the practice of violent means to coincide is recounted by Italo Calvino about himself and his younger brother. The elder brother was talking about Lenin and Gorki: ‘he was capable of explaining what democracy and Communism are, he knew stories of revolutions, poems against tyrants; things which were useful to know too, but which there was time to learn later, when the war was over'; the younger brother, instead, spoke about ‘the calibres of pistols and automatic weapons'.
⁵⁵
Calvino himself explained how the practice of violence, as an unavoidable means in those circumstances, involved, in some of its deep echoes, the risk of being confused with the enemy, from whom only an appeal to ends, which had acquired objective value in the course of history, could save one: