Even after the Fascist collapse in 1945, diehard elements defended the lost cause. Beyond the murky world of underground paramilitary groups, they also formed a new party, the Italian Social Movement (MSI). Named after the RSI, this party was by the 1970s Italy’s fourth largest electoral force, scoring close to 10 percent of the national vote. It was not just a far-right party, but one that explicitly claimed Mussolini’s legacy. [...]
The Resistance parties at the center of the new political order had long denied the “Italianness” of the Mussolini regime, referring to his supporters as the nazifascist’. This label totally identified them with the German occupier, and thus presented them as mere traitors who had sold out Italy to the Duce’s alliance with Hitler. The Resistance was not, then, one side in a civil war, but the representation of Italy itself. [...]
While De Boccard’s work was written for a subculture seeking exculpatory myths, such narratives could also take advantage of a wider Italian tendency to take responsibility for the Holocaust. Projected onto Germans alone, the Holocaust could be portrayed as external to Italian national history. Indeed, in the early postwar decades, specifically Jewish suffering was marginal to institutional memorialization of the German occupation. [...]
In this sense, Italy’s New Left began not in 1968 but in 1960 with the defense of what had not been won for certain in the Resistance. Yet the failure of the MSI’s conservative turn, and the strengthening of a militant left, also radicalized the neofascist base and fed the rise of paramilitary organizations active over subsequent decades. First forming in 1960, Stefano delle Chiaie’s Avanguardia Nazionale was a leading force in this new galaxy. [...]
This harmful banalization of the Resistance was particularly notable under Giorgio Napolitano, the 2006–2015 Italian president. For almost five decades a Communist, and today a centrist Democrat, Napolitano drew attention to the crimes committed by partisans, breaking with the Communists’ once-staunch defense of their record. He used these incidents to highlight the dangers of “ideological blindness.”
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