A Civil War (71 page)

It is true that the definition of 1919–22 as a civil war is disputable, even if it was used, both then and later, by Socialists, Communists and Fascists alike. In his report to the 7
^th
Congress of the International in August 1935, Togliatti spoke of the ‘most barbarous civil war' that took place in Italy after the war.
⁴⁸
And in 1943, in his speech to the directorate of the Partito Nazionale Fascista (PNF) on 17 April, Mussolini said that the highly ‘unpopular' war of 1915–18 ‘was the first result of the first episode of the civil war that ended in 1922'.
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Jens Petersen has remarked how, ‘in Fascism's mythology of wars and struggle, war and civil war make an indissoluble pact with each other', and how in 1919–22 there had been a ‘unilateral distribution of the causes for violence';
⁵⁰
and Adrian Lyttelton has made the point that Fascist violence was organised, whereas socialist violence was not.
⁵¹

In 1943–45 revenge was indeed taken against this iniquitous distribution of violence, which was made to pay for the sense of frustration experienced in the uneven fight against the action squads:

Sung in 1922 in Rome and Viterbo to the tune of ‘La Leggenda del Piave', probably by the Arditi del Popolo, this song was then rediscovered by the partisans.
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For their part, the Fascists who cultivated the myth of the return to origins dreamed of it as an opportunity not to repeat the errors committed in 1922 out of stupid indulgence. One of them, terrorised in the days of the insurrection by the stories he had heard about the ‘Sarzana massacre' and the ‘Empoli massacre', on seeing what remained of a Black Brigade, remarked: ‘The last 18 BLs who left twenty-three years before.'
⁵³

The
resistenti
made the necessary distinctions between Fascists, offering them in the weeks immediately following 8 September a still possible choice to save themselves. That is to say, if exceptional events produced in the Fascists the temptation to damn themselves once and for all, the same events also offered the chance of redemption ‘to the gentlemen who feel blood coming to their cheeks at the very memory of having been Fascists': these, wrote
L'Unità
, would certainly not allow themselves to be gulled by the resuscitated Mussolini and Farinacci.
⁵⁴
A Modenese leaflet said: ‘We offer a hand to all Fascists who have repented, and bullets for the
gerarchi
who persist along the path of betrayal.'
⁵⁵

The
resistenti
also distinguished between those who by now were fighting under the flags of the RSI. This was chiefly due to the obvious intention to divide and scatter the enemy, to the point of imposing the drastic final dilemma ‘surrender or perish'. It was also due to genuine understanding for those who had answered Graziani's call-ups reluctantly or performed other acts of forced submission. And lastly it was due to the tendency already mentioned, a typical feature of civil war, to consider a more or less large proportion of those deployed on the opposite side as being recoverable on the field (which is an altogether different problem from the recovery of the defeated by the victors after the event).

This problem was faced squarely in two Communist documents. The ‘Direttive di carattere generale riservate ai soli compagni' (‘General directives reserved for comrades only') warned:

The ‘Direttive', with evident reference to the attempted agreements recorded above,
⁵⁷
hastened to add: ‘This attitude of ours towards the Fascists must not lead us to make pacification pacts, whether they be made by single comrades or still less in the name of our party'; and not only because free credit should not be given to those who ‘have always been our declared enemies', but to put a stop to a ‘demagogic propaganda which has the cheek to demonstrate to the people the possibility of an accord with the Communists'. In other words, the crux lay in the dilemma posed by an appeal published in
L'Unità
on 5 October: ‘
Fascists! This is the crucial point
: either save yourselves together with the dignity of Italians, or perish branded as traitors!'
⁵⁸

On 21 October the ‘Direttive di lavoro' returned to the question of ‘what line should be taken with the Fascists and the capitalists', making many distinctions between them.
⁵⁹
Relations with the RSI, which had shown its colours, could only be combative. The ‘anti-German Fascists' were not forbidden to fight the Germans if they really wished to; but this did not mean one should forget that the object of the struggle was the destruction of Fascism. The category ‘anti-German Fascists' appears very rarely indeed, in such bald terms, in the Resistance press and documents. It does however raise, one might say preter-intentionally, a real problem that was deliberately passed over at the time by the immediate needs of the struggle, by subsequent political opportunism, and still more by the general need to feel purified. Namely: was it enough to become anti-German to cease being Fascist? As we have seen, the Communist document's answer seems to be ‘no'; and certainly, no ‘antitedesco' continued to describe himself as ‘Fascist'. But if we take ‘Fascist' in its strong sense, the perspective immediately became less linear; and the suspicion with which the merely military and patriotic ‘autonomous' formations were viewed appears attributable not just to
political sectarianism, but also to the perception of a difference in substance and to an unresolved tangle of the national conscience in wrestling with the problem of its responsibility for Fascism and the war.

The distinction between
gerarchi
and
gregari
, the high-ranking Fascist officials and the rank-and-file, offered a first possible way out. The Communist ‘Direttive' of 21 October unreservedly criticised an article that had appeared in the southern edition of
L'Unità
on 12 October, according to which, ‘if the representatives of the regime up to 25 July … want to redeem themselves and become our brothers again', only one way is open to them: the struggle. Too easy! protested the ‘Direttive': ‘They have done too much harm to Italy and to our people for their present participation in the struggle against the Germans to absolve them completely. They, and above all the most senior of them, will always have to answer to the people for their misdeeds.'

By contrast, the ‘ex-Fascists from the ranks, duped and deluded' must certainly be helped to take ‘the road to redemption'.

The Fascists who did not seize the last opportunity offered by the catastrophe that they themselves had brought about, and who persisted instead in the wrong choice, appeared then as the symbolic essence of the twenty-year-old offence suffered by the Italian people. Facing them in a final showdown meant getting rid of something that went beyond their capacity to do harm (which was itself considerable) and then surviving as an organised political force (which was practically non-existent).

Probably, it is precisely during the civil war that the word ‘Fascist' acquired, with particular intensity, a meaning that went beyond the concrete and specific historical experience of Fascism, eventually coming to denote a kind of human being with negative connotations from every public and private point of view. A Garibaldino's description of a Fascist is typical of this:

A moderate paper is no less damning, with the possible difference that it stresses not so much the absolute wickedness of the man as his inconsistency on a plane that goes beyond mere ferocity: ‘
Repubblichino
in name and unchanged in substance, more bestial than before, more incompetent and incoherent,
nonexistent save in acts of ferocious repression: a mob of violent and unhinged wretches, the object of scorn and the most exacerbated execration.'
⁶¹

The persistent use of
fascista
as an epithet that was insulting, global, and expressive of all the ignominy that could reside in a human being may be regarded as the extreme consequence of this expansion, to which the RSI gave a decisive contribution, of the semantic content of the word beyond historically verifiable limits.

Resistance journalism, by and large, offered confirmation of the recapitulatory character acquired by the struggle against the Social Republic – and not just because it devoted thorough attention to the RSI as such, if only to denounce its subjection to the Germans, its repressive ferocity, and its demagogic manoeuvres culminating in
socializzazione
, but because it took its cue from the present experience to formulate differentiated long-term judgments on Fascism
tout court
– above all its origins, its ‘nature', and the catastrophe it had brought about in the war. It is not one of the purposes of this study to analyse the intrinsic value of these judgments and their relationship both with the studies conducted during the Fascist
ventennio
and with subsequent historiographical studies. It will suffice here to give a few examples of the need that was felt to give historical and social, we might say ‘objective', weight to Fascism – not least to give better support to the dislike of the republican Fascists, who found themselves being regarded as at once nonexistent and all too real. On 5 October 1943,
L'Unità
wrote:

There could be different lines of argument. It was difficult to disentangle the search for the sub-base that had generated and sustained Fascism from the intrinsic inconsistency of the soul of Fascism itself. Fascism, a liberal pamphlet says, had been the ‘improvisation of an unreasoning and uneducated faction which was supported by the self-interested complicity of classes who should have been in command of the country and accepted with indifference by the masses'.
⁶³

This was the ‘aristocratic' version of Fascist inconsistency. A variant lay in attributing to Nazism a more solid historical and cultural structure.
La Riscossa italiana
, the ‘Piedmontese organ of the National Liberation Front', wrote:

It began with Fichte, the paper explains, continued with Treitschke, and then went from bad to worse.
⁶⁴

Inquiring into the fundamental nature of Fascism was, however, a means of warning against the tendency to identify it wholesale with the discredited republican Fascists in a sort of levelling and general absolution that let all the other Fascists off lightly. This line of argument took a wide variety of directions. A GL newspaper warned against forgetting those who ‘pull the strings of these clumsy puppets whose heads are crudely carved in wood, and which have for so long been got up in the most disgusting and gaudily ridiculous variety-show uniforms'. The paper listed the puppet-masters as follows: ‘the inhuman capitalism of the great industrialists and landowners, of the gigantic firms, unbridled militarism and high finance', backed by a king who had betrayed the Constitution.
⁶⁵
This sort of
summa
of the convictions of the left, ranging from a section of the Action Party to the Communists, was given a clear Third Internationalist slant in a Garibaldi brigade document:

Many ingenuous people still marvel at the fact that a theory like Nazi-Fascism, which is inconsistent from the ideal point of view and shameful from the civil point of view, has been able to turn the world upside-down. They forget or do not know that Nazi-Fascism is simply an aspect of polyhedric capitalist imperialism; it is a death-throe of great capital seen as a political force of world hegemony.
⁶⁶
Even the Christian Democrat paper
Il Popolo
wrote: ‘Behind the handy screen of Fascism, for twenty years the capitalist classes have imposed themselves on the state, dominated its politics, paid its men, inspired its ideas'.
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