BITTER WORLD

by FRANCO JURI

This time I start by paraphrasing the title of the very interesting book by Raoul Pupo, a well-known historian from Trieste, Bitter Adriatic-A long history of violence, released this year in March. It is certainly a rather discordant book in the context of the dominant narrative, agreed upon and widespread in Italy, with broad political consensus, from the center-left to the extreme right, especially after 2004 and the institutionalization of the Day of Remembrance, which every year, on February 10, commemorates the victims of the foibe and the exodus in Istria and Dalmatia, all understood as an anti-Italian ethnic cleansing. Pupo, a competent connoisseur of the contemporary history of the Adriatic border area, was a member of the Italian-Slovenian mixed historical-cultural commission, which in 2000 concluded a long work of shared research on Italian-Slovenian relations from 1880 to 1954, which began in 1993. The historic report, wanted at the time by the two governments, then ended up in the depths of some drawer in the desks of the Foreign Ministry, not being in line with the rhetoric of Giornoricordista. Although he has no communist or left-wing ancestry, Pupo is not loved by the nationalist right, because of his painstaking historiographical commitment based on facts and not on myths. But he is certainly not a “denier”. He wrote a lot about exodus, foibe and Yugoslav communist repression, but he always did so by historically contextualizing the facts and tragedies that in Istria, Dalmatia and the then Venezia Giulia, did not begin in 1943 or 1945. With evidence and documents, he has downsized the numbers of victims who have risen out of all proportion from propaganda and mythologization and denying the thesis of the anti-Italian Slavic genocide, so much flaunted at every opportunity, but at the same time revealing, with documents in hand, the criminal methods and the dirty work of the Yugoslav repressive apparatuses, the OZNA in the first place, against the ideological enemies that often prevailed among the Italians in the border area.

And it did the same for what in the twenty years of fascism, but also before, generated waves of violence close to the ethnic borders of the Adriatic area. Pupo does not stop at the taboos and red lines drawn by the national-patriotic narrative, and accuses irredentism of having lit the fuse of violence and inter-ethnic hatred already at the end of 1919. century. It is no coincidence that the story begins with Wilhelm Oberdank, the very Italian hero of anti-Austrian irredentism Guglielmo Oberdan, son of a Slovenian mother, who on August 2, 1882, drops an “Orsini” bomb on the crowd celebrating the five hundredth anniversary of Trieste’s dedication to Austria. Many injured and one dead, Italian.

Thus began a bloody saga that would be articulated in the “Great War”, also wanted by fanatics such as D’Annunzio, then in the squadist and frontier fascism, beginning with the burning of the Narodni dom in Trieste, in the forced Italianization of Slovenes and Croats, in the Slovenian resistance of the TIGR/Borba with methods considered terrorist, but not dissimilar to those of the irredentist “heroes”, with the repression of the regime, the special courts, the shootings, and then the Second World War, the Italian invasion of half of Slovenia, the Yugoslav resistance led by Tito’s communists, the atrocities of the occupying army against the civilian population. And then, the victory of the partisan army, the revolutionary terror, the foibe, the repression, the arrests, the revenge. A whirlwind of violence that Pupo masterfully describes, involving above all the reader who has at least a minimum of historical notions or is in some way linked, through parents or grandparents, to these lands. Pupo does not discount anyone and above all knows how to contextualize in chronological terms. Fortunately, other Italian historians and writers do so too, but they too in the indifference of politics, without being able to affect the national and nationalist myths adopted by governments and the establishment. Antonio Scurati did it with superlative and documented literature in the saga on Mussolini. The Turin historian Eric Gobetti did so, writing about the Italian soldiers and partisans of the Garibaldi Brigade in Montenegro, forgotten by Italy or even considered traitors because they passed, after September 8, 1943, to the side of Tito’s Yugoslav resistance. Various border historians do so, considered more partisan as they are left-wing or Slovenian; Alessandra Kersevan, Jože Pirjevec, Gorazd Bajc, Borut Klabjan, and others. A few weeks ago, the Italian writer and historian Alessandro Barbero was a guest on Slovenian TV and the Intervju (Interview) program, interviewed by Janko Petrovec, for several years a brilliant TVSLO correspondent in Rome. Barbero, who in Italy needs no particular introduction, also spoke as a historian against the tide, without paying attention to patriotic duties, to national myths, indeed demonstrating the many falsehoods, the inconsistencies, and expressing concern for a revisionism that now, even or especially in Italy, goes so far as to criminalize the Resistance and anti-fascism and to consider the Alpini of the Julia dead in Russia, a country that they had invaded together with the Germans on Mussolini’s orders, heroes and martyrs who fell for our freedom. And he has no doubts about the myth of the Great War; in 1915 it was Italy, after long hesitations, about-faces and opportunistic calculations, that attacked the Austro-Hungarian Empire, advancing the same arguments that in February 2022 led Russia to attack Ukraine; those of liberating, redeeming the Italians “badly treated” in the Empire. Barbero specifies with a bit of irony; the Russians, however, in Ukraine have been treated worse than the Italians in Austria-Hungary. Yet that typical imperialist war, barely won alongside the allies and with many deaths and subsequent territorial frustrations, is still considered “Great” today.

What lessons can we draw from the bitter stories of our borderlands told by eminent, intellectually honest historians, in the disturbing and increasingly dystopian actuality that leads even a calm statesman like President Mattarella to compare it with the inauspicious 1914? An actuality made up of creeping horrors, fears and paranoia, warmongering instincts, armamentist speculations, wars of position, wars of extermination, genocide. With the paradox that to carry it out, this time live, almost as if it were a reality show, are the holders of a state born in 1948 to alleviate the guilt of a Europe, which emerged from the Great War, made possible the Holocaust, the great, systematic Nazi massacre of the Jews. A genocide. But perhaps also to guarantee the West a last faithful and effective enclave, a colonial remnant in the Near East and in the Arab world. And to fill the apparent paradoxes, here are the heirs of yesterday’s torturers, the neo-fascists, the neo-Nazis, the extreme religious right, cheering and rejoicing, in the name of Islamophobia, for the Israel of the Netanyahus, the Ben Gvirs, the Smotričs, the Yoram Hazonys, accusing of anti-Semitism (them?) those who show solidarity, and among them also many democratic and progressive Jews, with the martyred Palestinian people. We wonder how it is possible that history has taught nothing, that so many children and grandchildren of yesterday’s victims have become today’s tormentors and executioners and welcome the support of the extreme right with open arms, identifying with them. And why is it that Europe and the United States, whose democratic myth is definitively collapsing with Donald Trump, and in the old continent with the truncheons of the German police, the censorship, the hypocrisy and the silence of the EU leaders, do not know how to react and act again, but rave, with strident dissonances, about a great defensive war against Russia and its imperialism.

History teaches us that nationalisms can become a very ugly beast. In the past, the good democratic and idealistic nationalism of Mazzini and Garibaldi soon became imperialism, colonialism and then fascism. The same is happening with Zionism, born in Europe from an idea of biblical flavor of the Austrian Jew Theodor Herzl, with the typical characteristics of the Risorgimento-nationalist movements, but ended up favoring, with the complicity of the permanent war, its intrinsic racist current – that of the chosen people – and consequently fascist. Yet it could have been different, if Israel had taken the path of peace, compromise, two peoples in two states and coexistence between Israelis and Palestinians, traced by intelligent, pragmatic and far-sighted politicians such as Yitzhak Rabin and Jasser Arafat. But history, as we have seen, can be most of the time very bitter. Rabin was killed by a Zionist fanatic. In Gaza, the intransigent Hamas triumphed against the PLO and with the help of Netanyahu. The rest is now news.