A Civil War (65 page)

In line with the fundamental continuity of the state between Fascism and the Republic, and particularly with the failure of the purges, is a bland, reassuring vision of the Resistance, where all trace of civil war has been scrubbed out. The anti-Fascist unity embodied in the system of the CLNs, which is still the
legitimising source of the Italian Republic and of what has been called its ‘arco costituzionale', is thus reinterpreted as mere anti-German unity, almost as if the Republic was founded on opposition to Germany and not to Fascism.

The truth is that inherent in civil war itself is something that feeds the tendency to bury the memory of it. In order to exorcise the civil war, the French have coined the expression ‘guerres franco-françaises', thereby bracketing together all the fractures which, in armed or unarmed combat, have divided their people, at least since the great revolution.
¹⁸
Even in Yugoslavia, at least at the official and political level, it is denied that the Resistance was a civil war.
¹⁹
And yet it is hard not to recognise the struggle without quarter between Tito's partisans, the Chetnicks of General Mihajlovic, Ante Pavelic's Ustaše, the anti-Tito Slovenian Belagardists, and the other Fascist bands that infested the country between 1941 and 1945, as being a civil war. Indeed, Yugoslavia is the only European country in which the Resistance took the form of a successful social and political revolution. This Yugoslav paradox can be explained with reflections that may hold good for Italy, too. The members of a people who place themselves at the service of a foreign oppressor are considered guilty of so radical a betrayal as to extinguish their membership of that people. By behaving as they do, they annihilate within themselves the very fact that makes their treachery immense and unforgivable. The religious concept of the renegade might be a useful way of explaining this process, which deprives those who have placed themselves against the community of their people of ideal and moral – more so even than political – nationality. ‘Renegade' was the name given to a partisan shot by his comrades as a spy.
²⁰
‘Renegades scattered on the mountains' is how a Fascist militant consul referred to the partisans.
²¹
To destroy an internal enemy of this sort, the use of violence appears all the more legitimate the more that enemy is ranked with the external one. Against an external enemy, far more than against an internal one, a millenary tradition justifies violence which ‘may do away with limits and restrictions on the exercise of power', and which for this very reason wishes to be rapidly forgotten.
²²
What is more, the renegade may repent and return to his original community, may convert and counter-convert, as in the numerous shifts from Social Republic to Resistance and vice versa. The
abandoned party made the following words its maxim: ‘There is no greater traitor than the sincere convert.'
²³
False conversion could be tolerated, just as it is in religious wars – but not heresy.
²⁴

The link between civil war and revolution in turn should be numbered among the factors that contributed to the rejection of the notion that a civil war was fought in Italy between 1943 and 1945. But this undeniable link can be viewed in two ways. On the one hand, revolution may be seen in positive and eschatological terms, making civil war appear by comparison, in one's evaluation of it, synonymous only with disorder and horror.
²⁵
Conversely, civil war appears as the almost inevitable outlet of revolution, in such a way as to carry in its wake the positive or negative connotations given to revolution.
²⁶
And since no one has ever claimed that the Italian Resistance was a revolution, its link with civil war has remained in memory only as a danger that was avoided. It has always been the Communists' boast that they managed to save Italy from the ‘Greek prospect', by preventing the Resistance movement from developing into a devastating post-liberation civil war. The Action Party invoked democratic liberty, but gave that formula a powerfully innovative meaning compared to the current use of the word ‘revolution' and the spectres it calls up (as we have already noted, the ‘actionist' tradition has always been the least reluctant to speak in terms of civil war).
²⁷
In effect, only a victorious revolution has the force to have no fears about inscribing the sufferings caused by civil war into its history. Even a defeated revolution can claim to have been the protagonist of a civil war when it does not intend to hide its revolutionary character. Marx's
The Civil War in France
is proof of this.

The prevalence of the formula ‘war, or movement, of national liberation' rather than ‘civil war' thus conceals that part of reality that sees Italians fighting Italians. The Spaniards conceal things in like fashion when they define the war against the French as a war of independence, ignoring the fact that there were also the Iberian proponents of Enlightenment ideals, the
afrancesados
.

Concealment makes the formula ‘war of national liberation' so tranquilising that its use has withstood the great semantic reinforcement in the post-war
period, in which the formula has come to denote the anti-colonialist and anti-imperialist movements of the Third World, all of which have had their bitter share of civil war.
²⁸
As we shall see, the identification of the main enemy – the German or the Fascist – is a problem running throughout the Resistance. An astute American investigator of things Italian has written: ‘Within a very short time … the average citizen of Northern Italy came to hate the Neo-Fascists even more than the Nazis.'
²⁹

This surcharge of hate is a phenomenon that needs investigating, not least for the fact that it finds a mirror-image among the Fascists, who in their turn were busy attributing the entire responsibility for the beginning and exacerbation of the civil war to the anti-Fascists, and particularly the Communists. Mutual accusations of having set the fratricidal struggle in motion were and remain numerous. Which does not mean that we should forget those who, while feeling the civil war as a tragedy that generated massacres and grief, also felt it as an event to undertake with pride, in the name of the choice they had made and the conscious acceptance of all the consequences it involved. From this point of view, the current deprecation can be reversed: it was in fact in the very tension innate in its ‘civil' character that the negative elements typical of war as such found a way of vindicating themselves. Franco Venturi once said that civil wars are the only ones worth fighting.

There is no point in lingering over the dispute as to whether it was the Fascists or the anti-Fascists, and the Communists in particular, who fired the first shot. Giorgio Bocca's remarks on this point are correct but not exhaustive: ‘It
is obvious that the anti-Fascists should make a move before the Fascists: it is up to them to prove by fighting that there are Italians who are ready to fight, ready to pay for the return ticket to democracy. The best thing for Neo-Fascism, obviously, is inner calm, proof against consensus or popular resignation.'
¹

Certainly that would be the best thing, but it would leave unsatisfied some of the basic motivations that led to the rebirth of Fascism and which drove it, from within its own ranks, onto the terrain of civil war.

First of all, one had to dispel the sense of frustration rife among the Fascists from 25 July
²
and exacerbated by the inglorious collapse of the regime. The prediction of the old turncoat police chief, Carmine Senise, proved all too true: ‘as for the party, I reassured the Duke [Acquarone] that all that was needed was a dissolution with no worry whatsoever about a possible resistance by the Fascists'.
³

In his
Storia della guerra civile
, in answer to the inevitable question – Why did the Fascists fail to act? – Giorgio Pisanò first gives this pat answer: the best Fascists were at the front; then follows it up with another, more convincing one: they took the declarations of loyalty to the alliance with Germany seriously; and finally resorts to an argument that echoes RSI propaganda: the beginning of Fascist reorganisation was cut short by the murder of the former party secretary Ettore Muti, perpetrated for that very purpose. But Pisanò too is obliged fundamentally to recognise that the Fascist Party was involved in a general crisis afflicting the Italian people as a whole.
⁴

This crisis had been experienced by the Fascists in various ways. Those who had not been content simply to step down could be stimulated by the collapse to radically review their past and the entire system of Fascism, along the path that led Fascists, not for reasons of opportunism, to become anti-Fascists. Those in whom this process was not at work had shifted psychologically for themselves, suffering without understanding. After 8 September, some at least could not let slip the occasion, offered by the Germans, to show (themselves above all) that they were still alive. And the simplest answer to the question ‘How could the collapse have happened?' was to blame it all on traitors, with whom the time had now come to settle accounts.

Revenge is mentioned in the first radio appeals launched from Germany by Alessandro Pavolini and Vittorio Mussolini immediately after 8 September
1943, when the Duce was still a prisoner on the Gran Sasso, and was reckoned by many to be physically dead as well. Exemplary punishment of the ‘vile traitors' was pre-announced by Mussolini in the speech recorded for the radio immediately after his arrival in Germany.
⁵

Even if we wish to give some credence to the hypothesis that Mussolini was not enthusiastic about having been liberated by the Germans,
⁶
once he had received this gift he had no choice but to go along with things and play his hand again. The circle of traitors to be punished went well beyond the members of the Grand Council, who were later to be dealt with at the Verona trial. It extended to all those who during the twenty years of Fascism had mutilated the Fascist victory, just as that other victory, which it had been Fascism's historic task to reintegrate, had been mutilated.

A Fascist paper wrote about the anti-Fascist declaration of faith made on 17 August 1943 by several medical professors at the University of Modena: ‘These men are morally unworthy to teach not because they professed anti-Fascism after 25 July, but because, by accepting like sheep the discipline of a party which in their heart of hearts they deprecated, they are unworthy today to teach young people that dignity which they lacked and which is the essential basis of any severe academic discipline.
⁷

The very youngest and the old guard could find themselves close to each other in their desire for revenge, the former bringing to it the energy of a generation conflict, the latter clinging to the myth of the ‘return to origins', when the enemy, then too, had been other Italians unworthy of the name. When punishing the party hierarchs (
gerarchi
) proved to be ‘a fake Terror',
⁸
the area of those to be punished widened still further, until it potentially embraced the entire Italian people in whose very name, however, revenge was being invoked.

The contradictions of the two elements that had been the hallmark of much of the history of Fascism – elitist tendencies and demagogic populism – were thus revealed particularly clearly in the Social Republic. Ardengo Soffici, an intellectual who had had his day, could still delude himself that one could keep together, in the name of faith in the figure of the Duce, contempt for the people and optimism about the final outcome. He wrote: ‘It will turn out that Mussolini had not deceived himself so much as to deem a people of time-servers worthy of an empire.'
⁹
But a twenty-two-year-old Fascist grants no respite: ‘Mussolini's mistake is that of having overrated his people, [a people who] do not want to
suffer in order to become great, powerful, rich.'
¹⁰
Another complains about the ‘tardy reawakening' of the people, and adds:

‘Mussolini has been betrayed by everyone! It is the fault of the cowards who have betrayed [him]!', said a Fascist on a Roman tram after an air-raid alarm.
¹²
With a vulgarity made almost pathetic by the equivocal pass to which he had come, a
squadrista
and member of the Black Brigades from Fiume exulted thus: ‘Life is beautiful and is worth living only when there is spirituality, when one rises above the grey mass of the majority: it is the few who dominate the many, it is the few who make History, the many have to endure it! I prefer to be on the side of those who impose it on the others!'
¹³

A Blackshirt from an M battalion wrote that the Duce ‘once again against the will of a people that believes itself to be Italian (and is not) has succeeded in warding off chaos, with a mere handful of men … Even against the will of the people we shall fight alongside our German ally who has shown himself to be the true friend of the Italian people.'
¹⁴

Mussolini was the first to feel that he was the victim of an act of betrayal. ‘He is full of rancour against the Italians, by whom he feels he has been betrayed', recounted Leandro Arpinati, the former
gerarca
who had been out of favour for some time, after a meeting with the Duce.
¹⁵
In those months Mussolini recalled a memorial stone that Carlo Dossi had dedicated to former prime minister Crispi: