Resurgence of Italian right reopens wounds of World War II
By Paul Holmes
ROME (Reuter): Renato Piendibene, an Italian resistance fighter in World War II, watched in fascination this month when state television showed dramatic film from 1944 of three fascist spies being shot by a U.S. military firing squad.
To his surprise, he recognized one of the condemned men as the person who had betrayed him to Nazi German occupiers 50 years ago, when he was arrested and tortured.
"When I saw that man again I felt a shudder of pity. Death is always brutal, for everyone, and I have no trouble forgiving him," Piendibene, now 74, told the Roman Catholic magazine Famiglia Cristiana. "But nobody can call him a hero."
The old man's words brought home a bitter and painful debate haunting Italians -- can people who died for dictator Benito Mussolini occupy as hallowed a place in history as the partisans worshiped as virtual saints of democracy for half a century?
The soul-searching has been sharpened by victory in last month's elections for a new conservative alliance that includes the neo-fascists and the disgrace and defeat of the traditional parties which had dominated Italy since the war.
"They were young men who believed they were serving their country," Gianfranco Fini, leader of the neo-fascist National Alliance that is now poised to enter government for the first time since 1945, said recently of Mussolini's supporters.
"You cannot rewrite history but in Italy, in several cases, history was written through the eyes of the victors," he said.
Tens of thousands of Italians are expected to join a national anti-fascist demonstration in Milan today -- the anniversary of Italy's liberation in World War II -- called to honor the fighters of the partisan movement.
In a climate of tension generated by what anti-fascists regard as an attempt by a resurgent right to revise history, it could be the biggest protest of its kind in Italy for decades.
"The prospect of a government that includes fascists, the first in Europe since the end of the anti-fascist war, is horrifying," Armando Cossuta, a former partisan and president of the hard left Communist Refoundation party, has said.
"A (reactionary) wind is blowing. We must respond."
Veterans' groups, trade unions, Jewish groups and opposition political parties, beaten at the ballot box last month by tycoon Silvio Berlusconi's "Freedom Alliance" with Fini and the federalist Northern League, all support the event.
Police chief Vincenzo Parisi has said he fears the march, and scores of other commemorations throughout Italy, could become a battleground for extremists on the left and right.
Berlusconi, expected to become Italy's next prime minister, and Fini have both made it clear they regard the Milan rally as the opposition's answer to the election result.
"Everything would be a great deal clearer and calmer if the left would desist from making an impure mixture of a national holiday and the wake for its defeat," Berlusconi said.
President Oscar Luigi Scalfaro has repeatedly called in the run-up to the anniversary for national unity and concord but insisted that the democratic values which inspired the resistance movement must not be questioned.
His appeal has been echoed by Italian Jews, thousands of whose forebears were deported to German death camps in World War II.
"We remember and honor all those who worked, fought and died to create free institutions in a democratic state," the Union of Italian Jewish Communities said in a statement.
"We reject any attempt to deny or revise historic reality and to put the aggressors and the aggrieved, the butchers and their victims, on the same level."
Italy's wartime resistance movement, born in September 1943 after the defeat of fascism in Rome, called a general insurrection on April 25, 1945.
Mussolini, who had established a last ditch fascist state known as the Republic of Salo in northern Italy, was arrested two days later and executed on April 28.
The following day, his corpse and that of his mistress Claretta Petacci were hanged upside down in Piazzale Loreto, one of Milan's biggest squares, before a crowd of tens of thousands.
It is widely accepted that the number of Mussolini's supporters executed by partisan fighters in a wave of revenge for 20 years of fascist rule ran into several thousand.
"I cannot forget that April 25 marked the start of a massacre. For me it is a day of mourning and tragedy," said Giorgio Pisano, who fought for Mussolini's Salo Republic and was a senator for the post-war Italian Social Movement (MSI) party founded to keep its ideology alive.
Fini, 42, this year molded the MSI into the less stridently right-wing National Alliance, a strategy that helped end half a century in the political wilderness for Mussolini's political heirs. He calls himself a "post-fascist".
His appeals for April 25 to be a day of national reconciliation, commemorating the dead on both sides, have fallen on deaf ears.
"April 25 marks liberation from the Nazi-fascists (just as) Dec. 25 celebrates the birth of Jesus Christ and certainly not King Herod," said trade union leader Raffaele Morese.
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