Eyes Wide Shut

“In truth, Auschwitz signifies not only the failure of two thousand years of Christian civilization, but also the defeat of the intellect that wants to find a meaning – with a capital M – in history.” (Elie Wiesel, Holocaust survivor)

“Dark times are times of great opportunity.” (Wayne Barrett, American journalist)

“Orgoglio italiano – una patria da amare e difendere,” says a huge poster on the backdrop of Georgia Meloni during the manifestation at Piazza San Giovanni in Rome in October 2019. “Italian pride – a motherland to love and defend”. The enthusiastic crowd greeting the speaker does appear enamored and proud of the leader of “Fratelli d’Italia” – a national-conservative neo-fascist party. Three years later Meloni would win the Prime-Minster’s post and enter history as the first Italian women to hold it. But is it really something to be proud of?
Meloni is a charismatic (if not to say hysterical) speaker and her vocabulary does not lack overly emotional rhetoric with rough exaggerations, loud slogans, and accusations brought forward against both her party’s opponents and imaginary enemy she sees and forces others to suspect in people of different religions and genders. Following the traditions established by the fascist politics in the 1930s, she promotes a firm division between “we” and “they” – a tactic dismantled by Jason Stanley as one of its typical mechanisms of opinion manipulation.
Describing division as “the most telling symptom of fascist politics”, in his landmark book How Fascism Works (2018) Stanley further comments, “It aims to separate a population into an “us” and a “them”, […] appealing to ethnic, religious, or racial distinctions, and using this division to shape ideology and, ultimately, policy. Every mechanism of fascist politics works to create or solidify this distinction. […] As the fear of “them” grows, “we” come to represent everything virtuous. The dangers of fascist politics come from the particular way in which it dehumanizes segments of the population. By excluding these groups, it limits the capacity for empathy among other citizens…”¹
In the public addresses of Meloni’s and Salvini’s (since 2022 – Vice President of the Council of Ministers) the labels are distributed straightforwardly. “We” as Christians, the heirs of the glorious Roman Empire, the bearers of “natural family”’ true values ready to “fight against Islamization of Europe”, on the one hand; “they” – as immigrants, as Muslims, as LGBT people, on the other.
The associations the Italian leaders try to form in collective minds are absurd. Only a few years ago, the world mourned the 2-year-old Alan Kurdi – a Syrian boy² drowned in the Mediterranean along with his Kurdish mother and brother with whom he was looking for rescue amid the European refugee crisis. Was he and other tragically dead 12,000 asylum seekers³ really “a threat to Christians around the world”? How can people – in the 21st century, only 70 years after the liberation from Nazi ideology – get again judged according to their beliefs or nationality? Haven’t we already talked this through – and paid the price too high for the lesson of humanism now seeming to be forgotten?
In search for the answers to these questions, I travelled to Trieste to discern memorial culture and practices of the birthplace of fascism – the regime that eventually caused the death of at least 382,000 Ethiopians, over 80,000 Libyans, 28,000 Albanians, 11,000 Greeks, around 10,000 Jews, 6,400 Slovenes and other Istrian nations. The exact numbers of victims is, however, hard to come by: many more died of indirect effects of military campaigns aimed to satisfy Mussolini’s territorial interests. In Greece alone, for example, the Italian occupation provoked famine that eventually led to the death of 300,000 civilians.⁴
When choosing Trieste as my destination, I was guided by the information about Risiera San Sabba – a place most frequently mentioned in relation to fascists’ concentration camps in Italy. A former rice-processing factory in the capital of Friuli Venezia Giulia became a concentration and transit camp for the detention and execution of political prisoners and Jews during WW2 and witnessed the death of 3,000–5,000 prisoners. In 1975, San Sabba turned into a memorial site and a little museum.
The first thing that strikes me when reaching the gloomy red-brick building contrasting the bright August sun is its location. Unlike Dachau in Germany or Mauthausen in Austria, San Sabba is easily accessed by public transport – directly from the lively center, now crowded with foreign tourists enjoying promenades and ordering Aperol cocktails or pizzas. The most notorious concentration camp in Italy was situated in the very center of the city – the smoke of its crematorium chimney was probably visible from afar. The proximity of two dimensions leaves food for thought. Did the Italians know about the murders and tortures ongoing in a 30-minutes’ ride from the mundane?
The answer to this question is found in the modest museum exposition: a video displayed in the dark room features a historical moment – Piazza Unità d’Italia on September 18, 1938, the day when Mussolini addressed⁵ Trieste dwellers a speech in which he announced the enactment of the anti-Jewish racial laws, proclaiming the need for “a clear, strict racial consciousness, which establishes not only differences but also legitimate superiorities”. Labelling the Jews as “irreconcilable enemies” of fascism, the Duce orders the adoption of measures that would condemn the Jewish population to a whole range of discriminatory practices and later end up in death for thousands.
The video captures a panorama of 12.000-square-meter’s piazza – densely filled with cheerfully applauding crowd. They surely knew. They voted for Mussolini. Just like in 2022 they would vote for Giorgia Meloni and her party. The audio guide I purchase to structure my way around the Risiera pays most attention to the praise of modern sculptors and architects in charge of the memorial site decoration – a large hall where the prisoners used to be kept is now a habitat for noisy pigeons and bats. I don’t even want to choose metaphors for the dramatic state of this historical memorial of world importance. All I see is negligence and amnesia.
“Memory makes sense if it questions the present and ourselves, our standpoint in the face of injustices,” concludes Maria Teresa Sega, the researcher of Jewish schools after the introduction of the Italian racial laws in 1938–1943 in her book Il Banco Vuoto (The Empty Desk). Understanding the necessity to cultivate the memory of both honorable deeds and mistakes committed by ancestors, she reminds the words of another prominent scholar, Italian writer and Jewish Holocaust survivor Primo Levi. “It happened, therefore it can happen again: this is the core of what we have to say. It can happen, and it can happen everywhere.”
In such light the rise of fascism in Italy appears even logical – almost one century of silence starts bearing its sad fruit and growing into something that Jason Stanley cautiously describes as “dangerous situation”. Something one should be ashamed – not proud of. Meloni claims her party would “guarantee Europe security,” but it is not safety from immigrants or gays that Europe needs. Intolerance, aggression, and hatred towards “otherness” – loosely defined by those in power – is a way back into the scary past we hoped so much to have overcome.
In her recently published biography My Grandfather Would Have Shot Me, the granddaughter of the Nazi commandant Amon Goeth, Jennifer Teege, sorely speaks about the re-discovery of her grandmother – a woman who passionately loved the sadistic monster responsible for the deaths of hundreds Płaszów concentration camp prisoners. How could she not realize what a sick creature he was? “She never really saw the victims,” Teege deduces, “she walked through life with her eyes closed.”
How did it happen that the Italians voting in 2022 for Meloni and in 2008, 2001, 1994 – for Berlusconi, did not learn their lessons? What prevented them from opening their eyes at the historical reality of the fascist past “Fratelli d’Italia” now tries to camouflage with the rhetoric of their country’s glorious cultural heritage and national pride? One of the explanations lies within memorial culture dimension and relates to the lack of work timely done after the end of WW2 to comprehend, process, and admit responsibility for the deaths of the innocent and punish the guilty. A number of Italian fascist criminals is known to have evaded justice due to a variety of circumstances. Some even shamelessly built bright public careers that lasted up to recently.
To illustrate this point, it is enough to recall the case of Rodolfo Graziani – an Italian general noted for mass killings with the use of poison gas and chemical weapons during Italy’s colonial occupation of Africa. Despite being on the list of the Italian war criminals and sentenced to 19 years of imprisonment, Graziani spent only four months in jail. In 1953, “the Butcher of Fezzan”, as the Arabs nicknamed him due to his brutal methods applied in Libya, became the Honorary President of the neo-fascist Italian Social Movement. In 2012, a large monument with the words “Fatherland” and “Honor” engraved on it and a memorial park would be built at Graziani’s tomb – a project that assumed to cost 127,000 Euro of the country’s budget.⁶
But Graziani is only one of the many Italian war criminals to stay free after the end of WW2. Mario Roatta, responsible for the suppression of anti-fascist resistance in occupied Yugoslavia, ethnic clearance of Slovene-inhabited areas and the deportation of 25,000 people put in various Italian concentration camps lived under Franco’s protection in Spain with his life imprisonment sentence overturned by the Italian High Court of Appeal in 1948. Returning to Rome, he peacefully lived there till death writing books about fascism. Renzo Montagna, a fascist general and the police chief, spent zero days in jail and was amnestied in 1947, which allowed him to return from exile and die a natural death in Italy in 1978. Another important figure to be amnestied was Renato Ricci – Mussolini’s Commandant-General and Minister of Corporations – in 1954 he became vice-president of the association of the former “fighters for Italian Socialist Republic” (a Nazi-German Mussolini-run puppet state that existed in 1943-1945 in Northern and partly Central Italy).
“The first victim of war is the truth” is a phrase attributed to the Greek tragedian Aeschylus, and in terms of the misremembering of the Italy’s fascist past it serves as a more than topical sad conclusion. Europe was liberated by the Soviets in 1945, but it looks like the war with fascist ideology is not over. It just moved to another battlefield – that of collective memory. Monsters are praised as intellectuals and given honors, while victims remain unmourned⁷ and historical justice – twisted. As the Council of Ministers headed by Meloni scale back a bill intended to make up for 20-years’ lag in international law earlier in 2023, world media call cultural amnesia in Italy “a historical paradox,” “It is an historical paradox for the country where the Rome Statute founding text of the International Criminal Court, was signed: Italy has still not incorporated international crimes into its criminal code and still cannot exercise universal jurisdiction. And it doesn't seem to be getting any better.”⁸
Keeping silent about fascist crimes, Meloni and her political allies, however, do dare to freely use the words “genocide” and “holocaust” in another context. “Qui nella primavera del 1945 fu consumato un orrendo olocausto,” says a memorial stone installed in 2004 at Foibe di Basovizza historical landmark – another WW2-related site situated in Trieste vicinity I am strongly advised by the locals to visit. “Horrible holocaust” stands for the massacre that occurred here during the short-term occupation of the area by Yugoslavia – a sensitive and under-researched topic. Nowhere around this neatly kept freshly painted memorial is it mentioned that the victims were mostly of fascist political alliance and not all specifically Italian by nationality – military and political factors behind the violence “comfortably” overlooked.
In the attempt to build a counter-narrative and present fascists as victims of communists, right-wing parties thus instrumentalize the memory of the contested episode to promote their own agenda: that of national identity and patriotism. Certainly, sounding much better that the “uncomfortable” truths of actual genocides, ethnic cleanings and mass murders done by the fascist regime.
But Mussolini actually never hid his intention to follow Hitler’s example and make Italy a “white clean nation”. In his speech made in Pula in February 1922 he openly said the following, “When dealing with such a race as Slavic – inferior and barbarian – we must not pursue the carrot, but the stick policy.... We should not be afraid of new victims.... The Italian border should run across the Brenner Pass, Monte Nevoso and the Dinaric Alps.... I would say we can easily sacrifice 500,000 barbaric Slavs for 50,000 Italians....” These and other speeches of the Italian leader are openly available, as well as different types of visual documentation of the crimes committed. Why aren’t then the words “genocide” and “remembrance” used by Meloni and her allies where they morally belong? Why instead of justice do we still see the “conspiracy of silence” over these tragedies, as the Italian scholar Eric Gobetti, the author of E’ allora le foibe? (But about the foibe?), defines the current popular approach.⁹
The “Memorial Day” introduced in 2004 by Meloni’s predecessor Silvio Berlusconi, honors the “Italian exiles and the victims of the foibe”, but no word is said about Ethiopians, Libyans, Albanians, Greeks, Jews, Slovenes, Croats. Private truths are used by the neo-fascists to construct a demagogic alibi and turn the shameful past into a fake argument in the battle for collective memory.
“In order to prevent the repetition of the criminal past, society should be unified,” states memory researcher Nikolai Epplée, but this step requires a lot of moral, intellectual, and emotional work. Moreover, such a unified society is always more difficult to manage. When speaking about the method of dealing with traumatic past, the scholar emphasizes the key role of acceptance – understood not as justification or acceptance, but as “readiness to confront – without looking away – all the facts and circumstances that are difficult to perceive”.
“It is not condemnation that is the opposite to acceptance, but rather the denial of the past, which dooms the individual and society to an existence "imbued with anxiety and uncertainty", as Tomasz Gross put it, in a constant fear and looking back – what if something one does not want to remember and recall is revealed? The practice of such denial can be both "whitewashing" of the past, that is, non-recognition or justification of crimes, and its "defamation", – uncritical erasure of everything en masse. In both cases, we talk about ideological interpretation of history, whereas real processing assumes total rejection of ideologization, an attempt to objectively and directly approach the events of the past. Both forms of denying the past […] ultimately mean a refusal to perform that very work of accepting responsibility,” Epplée writes in his milestone book on sociology and psychology of collective memory Uncomfortable Past.
“Responsibility” is a heavy word that many find rather unpleasant to use nowadays. The approach of “turning a new leaf” seems to be more poplar – and populistic. However, living a life, as Jennifer Teefe’s grandmother, a wife of the Nazi commandant, without accepting responsibility, “with one’s eyes closed,” is a life I would define as stolen, senseless, shallow. A life unable of remembering will not be remembered, either. A country choosing amnesia will leave nothing to be proud of.