Some Italians now say that the legend of the Resistance is a Communist lie. True, the Communists did exploit the Resistance as if it were their own private property, given that they played a primary role in it; but I recall partisans who wore kerchiefs of different colors.
Glued to the radio, I would pass the nights—with the windows closed, the blackout made the tiny space around the radio the only halo of light—listening to the messages that Radio London broadcast to the partisans. They were at once cryptic and poetic («The sun also rises,» «The roses will bloom»), and most of them were «messages for Franchi.» Someone whispered to me once that Franchi was the leader of one of the most powerful clandestine groups in North Italy, a man of legendary courage. Franchi became my hero. Franchi (whose real name was Edgardo Sogno) was a monarchist, such a fervent anti-Communist that after the war he joined an extreme right-wing group and was accused of having collaborated in a reactionary coup. But what does it matter? Sogno is still the dream of my childhood.1 The Liberation was a common undertaking achieved by people of different colors.
Today in Italy some people say that the war of liberation was a tragic period of division, and that now we need national reconciliation. The memory of those terrible years ought to be repressed. But repression causes neurosis. While reconciliation means compassion and respect for all those who fought the war in good faith, forgiving does not mean forgetting. I can even admit that Eichmann believed sincerely in his mission, but I do not feel like saying: «Okay, go back and do it again.» We are here to remember what happened and to declare solemnly that «they» must never do it again.
But who are «they»?
If we think again of the totalitarian governments that dominated Europe before the Second World War, we can easily say that they are unlikely to return in the same form in different historic circumstances. Mussolini’s Fascism was based on the idea of a charismatic leader, on corporativism, on the Utopia of the «fateful destiny of Rome,» on the imperialistic will to conquer new lands, on inflammatory nationalism, on the ideal of an entirely regimented nation of Blackshirts, on the rejection of parliamentary democracy, and on anti-Semitism. I admit that Alleanza Nazionale, which sprang from the Movimento Sociale Italiano, is certainly a right-wing party, but it has little to do with the old Fascism. Similarly, even though I am worried by the various pro-Nazi movements active here and there in Europe, Russia included, I don’t think that Nazism, in its original form, is about to reappear as a movement involving an entire nation.
Nonetheless, even though political regimes can be overturned, and ideologies criticized and delegitimized, behind a regime and its ideology there is always a way of thinking and feeling, a series of cultural habits, a nebula of obscure instincts and unfathomable drives. Is there then another ghost wandering through Europe (not to mention other parts of the world)?
Ionesco once said that only words count and all the rest is idle chatter. Linguistic habits are often important symptoms of unspoken sentiments.
Allow me therefore to ask why not only the Resistance but the entire Second World War has been defined all over the world as a struggle against Fascism. If you reread Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls, you will discover that Robert Jordan identifies his enemies with the Fascists even when,he is thinking of the Spanish Falangists.
I yield the floor to Franklin Delano Roosevelt: «The victory of the American people and their allies will be a victory against Fascism and the blind alley of despotism that it represents» (23 September 1944).
During the McCarthy period, Americans who had taken part in the Spanish Civil War were called «premature anti-Fascists»—another way of saying that fighting Hitler in the forties was a moral duty for all good Americans, but fighting against Franco too soon, in the thirties, was suspect. Why was an expression like «Fascist pig» used by American radicals even to indicate a policeman who did not approve of what they smoked? Why didn’t they say: «Caugolard pig,» «Falangist pig,» «Ustasha pig,» «Quisling pig,» «Ante Pavelic pig,» or «Nazi pig»?
Mein Kampf is the complete manifesto of a political program. Nazism had a theory of race and Aryanism, a precise notion of entartete Kunst («degenerate art»), a philosophy of the will to power and of the Übermensch. Nazism was decidedly anti-Christian and neo-Pagan, just as Stalin’s Diamat (the official version of Soviet Marxism) was clearly materialistic and atheist. If by totalitarian we mean a regime that subordinates all individual acts to the state and its ideology, then Nazism and Stalinism were totalitarian regimes.
Fascism was certainly a dictatorship, but it was not wholly totalitarian—not so much for its moderation as for the philosophical weakness of its ideology. Contrary to commonly held belief, Italian Fascism did not have a philosophy of its own. The article on Fascism signed by Mussolini for the Enciclopedia Treccani was written or fundamentally inspired by Giovanni Gentile, but it reflected a late-Hegelian notion of the «ethical and absolute state» that Mussolini never completely realized. Mussolini had no philosophy: all he had was rhetoric. He started out as a militant atheist, only to sign the Concordat with the Church and to consort with the bishops who blessed the Fascist banners. In his early anticlerical years, according to a plausible story, he once asked God to strike him dead on the spot, to prove His existence. God evidently had other fish to fry at the time. In subsequent years, Mussolini always mentioned God in his speeches and was not above having himself called «the man of Providence.»
It can be said that Italian Fascism was the first right-wing dictatorship to dominate a European country, and that all similar movements later found a sort of common archetype in Mussolini’s regime. Italian Fascism was the first to create a military liturgy, a folklore, and even a style of dress—which enjoyed greater success abroad than Armani, Benetton, or Versace today. It was not until the thirties that Fascist movements sprang up in England, with Mosley, and in Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania, Poland, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Greece, Yugoslavia, Spain, Portugal, Norway, and even South America, not to mention Germany. It was Italian Fascism that convinced many European liberal leaders that the new regime was implementing interesting social re-forms capable of providing a moderately revolutionary alternative to the Communist threat.
However, this historical precedence does not strike me as sufficient to explain why the word «Fascism» has become a synecdoche, a denomination pars pro toto for different totalitarian movements. It is pointless to say that Fascism contained in itself all the elements of successive totalitarian movements, so to speak, «in a quintessential state.» On the contrary, Fascism contained no quintessence, and not even a single essence. It was a fuzzy form of totalitarianism. It was not a monolithic ideology, but rather a collage of diverse political and philosophical ideas, a tangle of contradictions.
Is it possible to conceive of a totalitarian movement that manages to reconcile monarchy and revolution, the royal army and Mussolini’s private militia, the privileges granted the Church and a state education system that extolled violence, total control, and a free market? The Fascist Party came into being proclaiming a new revolutionary order, but it was financed by the most conservative landowners, who were expecting a counterrevolution. The republican Fascism of the early days endured for twenty years, proclaiming its loyalty to the royal family, allowing a «Duce» to soldier on arm-in-arm with a «king» to whom he also offered the title of emperor. But when in 1943 the king sacked Mussolini, the party resurfaced two months later, with the help of the Germans, under the flag of a «social» republic, thus recycling its old revolutionary score, enhanced by a quasi-Jacobin streak.
There was only one Nazi architecture, and one Nazi art. If the architect of the Nazis was Albert Speer, there was no room for Mies van der Rohe. In the same way, under Stalin, if Lamarck was right, there was no room for Darwin. In contrast, there certainly were Fascist architects, but alongside their pseudo Coliseums there also rose new buildings inspired by the modern rationalism of Gropius.
The Fascists had no Zhdanov. In Italy there were two important art prizes: the Premio Cremona was controlled by an uncultivated and fanatical Fascist like Farinacci, who encouraged propagandistic art (I can remember pictures with titles like Listening to the Duce’s Speech on the Radio and Mental States Created by Fascism)-, and the Premio Bergamo, sponsored by a cultivated and reasonably tolerant Fascist like Bottai, who protected art for art’s sake, and the new avant-garde art that had been banned in Germany as corrupt and crypto-Communist, contrary to Nibelungian kitsch, the only art allowed.
The Italian national poet was D’Annunzio, a fop who in Germany or Russia would have found himself in front of a firing squad. He was elevated to the rank of bard to the regime for his nationalism and cult of heroism—with the addition of a strong dash of French decadence.
Let’s take futurism. It ought to have been considered an example of entartete Kunst, like expressionism, cubism, and surrealism. But the first Italian futurists were nationalists. For aesthetic
