MUSSOLINI IS NOT MY FELLOW CITIZEN

by ELEONORA SARTORI

Let’s start with a date: February 26, 2025. On this day, the Municipality of Salò revoked the honorary citizenship of Benito Mussolini. “With this revocation we absolutely do not intend to erase history, nor exempt ourselves from dealing with it” – said the young mayor of the Lombard city, Francesco Cagnini – “We do not erase anything” – he added -. “That page of our history, however dramatic, remains. We simply reiterate that, in the light of the constitutional and democratic values that, as administrators, we are called to represent, Benito Mussolini does not deserve any honor from the Municipality of Salò. And this is unfortunately anything but anachronistic.”   Honorary citizenship, granted in 1924 with 12 votes in favor and 3 against and whose revocation had been rejected by the center-right majority in 2019 and 2020, was decided by the prefectural commissioner who governed Salò in 1923 in place of the dissolved City Council. The revocation for the Lombard town has a greater symbolic value and echo, because it was in Salò, in September 1943 and until the day of the Liberation, that the Duce installed the capital of the Italian Social Republic.

We continue with another date: November 11, 2024. With a delirious 21-minute speech, the mayor of Gorizia, intervening in the name and on behalf of the entire majority, rejected a similar motion, presented by the undersigned and supported by the entire center-left minority. Also in this case the attempt had already been made, without success, at the time of Mayor Ettore Romoli (in the past flagship candidate of the Italian Social Movement) and not redone (intellectual honesty requires remembering) in the only parenthesis of center-left city government. The common denominator, then and now, is the questionable behavior of the Slovenian component of the City Council: in the past part of the distracted and forgetful majority that did not put forward the proposal, today part of the minority that leaves the room before the vote.

Why raise the question again? Even “only” the anti-fascism inherent in our Constitution would be enough, but this time there is more, much more. In 2025, in the meantime, Gorizia together with the Slovenian Nova Gorica is European Capital of Culture, the first cross-border in the history of the European Capitals of Culture. Obtaining such a prestigious recognition thanks to neighboring Slovenia (because, let’s remember, it was up to this country to nominate a city), with all that it brings with it, should have reduced the administration to milder advice, but there was nothing mild in the political reaction of the mayor and the majority to the request.

“What is the usefulness of the revocation of a citizenship, which belongs to history and which must be framed and elected in the context in which it was conferred? This, however, would translate “de facto” into a historical forgery; in fact, this proposal takes on many similarities with that iconoclastic fury with which, we all remember very well, the Taliban shot down the two Buddhas in 2001 in Afghanistan, a leap in time of more than 20 years, when, in March 2001, two statues were destroyed”.

These words, pronounced by the mayor of Gorizia Rodolfo Ziberna, equate the intentions and actions of those who proposed the motion and those who supported it to the iconoclastic fury of the Taliban. But the mayor did not limit himself to the Taliban: he also brought up Nero, Domitian, Commodus, the cancel culture on Christopher Columbus, the destruction of the library in Alexandria, the fires organized in 1933 by Nazi students and Nino Bixio who ended up in Indonesia, a parade of quotes, names and dates without brakes and, in my opinion, meaningless that smells so much of Chat GPT. An overflow that even affected Gian Antonio Stella of the Corriere della Sera. The authoritative journalist, not exactly a Bolshevik, in his piece entitled “The inscription Tito, the silences on the Duce”, notes another issue, certainly not secondary: the culpable absence, in the words of the mayor, of the reference to the Slavs. Oh yes, because in Gorizia the revocation of the Duce’s honorary citizenship takes on another weight than in other Italian cities.

A fact, moreover, recalled in the text of the motion, in the passage in which it is reiterated that the Municipal Administration of Gorizia “cannot forget the toll of suffering of the community during the Fascist Twenty Years and especially in the years of the Second World War and the struggle for liberation from Nazi-fascism, and that in our territory a border fascism was produced, local variant of the political movement characterized by further heavy racist and anti-Slavic connotations”.

Border fascism effectively represented by these words pronounced by the honorary citizen Benito Mussolini: “in the face of a race like the Slavic, inferior and barbaric, one must not follow the politics that gives sugar, but that of the stick. I believe that it is easier to sacrifice 500,000 barbarian Slavs to 50,000 Italians.”

How can we not consider all this? How to maintain the honorability of a person who, moreover, is in no way linked to the administration for his commitment or his works, as required by the municipal regulation itself? How can we not consider the revocation an action that has become even more urgent on the eve of 2025, the year in which, together with Nova Gorica, the Municipality of Gorizia is the first European Capital of Culture, after a path of reconciliation between the Italian and Slovenian communities, divided in the 20th century due to the politics of fascism?

The answer is by simplifying and trivializing the issue, relegating it to a stale past that has never really passed, much less become stale, diminishing its influences on today, using ineffective, trite and repetitive arguments because they are those used by all the political forces that opposed the revocation, in whatever city it was proposed.

“In Salò there are absolutely more relevant issues,” thunder the opposition of the Lombard town. But examples of benaltrismo a lot per kilo we also have in Gorizia; the motion is defined as “instrumental”, “ideological”, even “folkloric” (Erminia Bonfanti of Salò 2.0) and there are even fears of a possible appeal to the TAR because the city council does not have a regulation regarding the revocation of honorary citizenship. Even in Gorizia, the mayor brings up ideology: “I will intervene on behalf of the majority to try to optimize the time of a debate that I believe […] useless for citizens and for the city because it corresponds exclusively […] to the political dialectic […] and to the political interests of those who are unable to understand the need to write new pages of history and not trash the old, add new pages to the old, new pages of history instead of raising ideological fences through the negation of history”.

In Casalecchio di Reno, another municipality that a few days ago revoked Mussolini’s honorary citizenship, Fratelli d’Italia decides not to appear in the chamber on the occasion of the vote, because it believes “that demonizing an ideology, however controversial and questionable, is a stupid fact” and wonders if “there are exponents of communism who today deserve revocation”. A policy that led Italy to the Second World War alongside Nazi Germany, thus making itself responsible for deaths, destruction, hunger and misery, is defined as “questionable”.

Very weak arguments, used here and there with a vulgar copy-paste, but at least arguments, those that we did not hear in Gorizia as the mayor monopolized the political arena with his speech. Why this silence, even in the Catholic area? Out of embarrassment? For team orders?

There are many questions that remain unanswered, but among all of them one is the one I consider most significant: what problems does the right have in 2025 to cut the cord that binds it to Mussolini and Fascism? They should not have any as parties regularly constituted and represented in democratic assemblies. Our Constitutional Charter was born from anti-fascism and in the XII transitional and final provision it prohibits the reorganization of the National Fascist Party.

Emphasizing it should be unnecessary, almost redundant, yet it is not. The mayor of Salò also reminded him that the matter has nothing anachronistic about it. Think of the fact that he was escorted together with other councilors inside the chamber and that, outside, there was a counter-demonstration of the extreme right. Two cats, for heaven’s sake, as also happens in Gorizia when the Municipality institutionally welcomes the Decima Mas every year, but not like when thousands gather and meet in Acca Larentia, between marches, choirs and outstretched arm salutes.

This is what should worry: the winks of the right-wing parties towards these extremist groups that nonchalantly call themselves the fascists of the third millennium. Even in Gorizia we have memories of questionable, if not dangerous, sympathies of when the Councillor for Welfare of the Municipality of Gorizia took the stage of CasaPound on the occasion of a demonstration in the city.

But the behavior of those who, washing their hands of it, decided not to participate in the vote because Gorizia, after a hundred years from the award, would not yet be ready to turn the page. This calling out reminded me of the words of Don Lorenzo Milani: “one fascist and ten qualunquisti make eleven fascists”.

In a few days it will be the turn of Brescia and I am sure that many other cities will be added to the list of municipalities that with a jolt of dignity will have the courage to put a stop and start a new chapter. Not another book, because it is true that history is not erased, but evolves and bears witness to the culture of the time. A culture that in 2025 should be, first and foremost, anti-fascist.