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You’ll be reading a lot about Harry Belafonte, whose death was announced today. Or you should be reading a lot about him, because he was a titanic figure in the worlds of entertainment and politics. You’ll probably read most about his career as a singer, especially in terms of popularizing the calypso movement in the […]
Sister-in-law Fiona Paez holds a photograph of Manuel “Tortuguita” Esteban Paez Terán during a press conference in Decatur, Georgia, on February 6, 2023. (Cheney Orr / AFP via Getty Images)
One of the big questions of the crackdown on the “Cop City” protests in Atlanta is what exactly happened to Manuel “Tortuguita” Esteban Paez Terán, possibly the first environmental activist ever killed by US police. After police in January raided the encampments of protesters who had spent nearly a year battling a $90 million police training center planned in what’s meant to be preserved forest, Terán was found dead, with law enforcement claiming Terán had fired a gun at them, forcing them to shoot back in self-defense.
But new evidence has challenged that narrative over the past month or so, with the results of the DeKalb County Medical Examiner’s autopsy of Terán released last week revealing their body had been riddled with at least fifty-seven gunshot wounds. The autopsy also revealed no gunpowder residue on Terán’s hands. While gunshot residue is absent on the shooter in a minority of cases and doesn’t by itself disprove the police’s claims, it casts further doubt on law enforcement’s version of events.
These doubts were already present after the March release of a second, independent autopsy report commissioned by Terán’s family. While making no conclusion about whether or not they were holding a firearm at any point, that autopsy did conclude Terán had likely been sitting cross-legged when they were shot, and that at some point they’d raised their arms up and in front of themself, palms facing their body, all of which clashed further with law enforcement’s version of events.
That version, outlined in use of force incident reports, contends that as police were clearing the tents of the “protesters/domestic terrorists” — as one officer referred to the activists — an individual inside one of the tents refused to leave. The police shot pepper balls into the tent, goes law enforcement’s version of events, prompting a volley of gunfire from inside of the tent striking one officer, leading police to open fire, killing Terán. Officers said they found a handgun in Terán’s tent whose bullets they matched up to the one that hit the officer, and the Georgia Bureau of Investigation later released transaction records showing Terán had legally bought the gun.
But from the start, activists who were there during the incident have said they only heard one set of shots. The officers responsible for the shooting weren’t wearing body cameras, while the bodycam footage that has been released, from police who weren’t involved in the incident, has also cast doubt on the police narrative. One officer mutters that “you fucked your own officer up,” while another asks, “Did they shoot their own man?” When the shooting starts, an officer asks if “they’re shooting at us,” while another replies, “Nah, that sounded like suppressed gunfire” — meaning, it was the police shooting.
Meanwhile, the autopsy reports give a disturbingly visceral outline of just how violent the officers’ shooting spree was. The DeKalb County Medical Examiner’s report on Terán describes a body riddled with bullets, with gunshot wounds in their head, chest, both arms, hands, thighs, and legs, as well as their hip, pelvis, and scrotum. The independent autopsy report stated that it was next to impossible to accurately distinguish every distinct wound, since “many of the wound tracks within his body converge, coalesce and intersect.” The case has now been transferred to the Mountain Judicial Circuit district attorney, who was named as the special prosecutor.
Terán’s death is just one controversy in a saga full of them. At least just as alarming as the possibility of the extrajudicial killing of a nonviolent protester is the treatment of dozens of Cop City activists, by both the Georgian state government and federal bodies like the FBI, as “terrorists.” Twenty-three of the protesters are being charged under the state’s domestic terrorism statute, facing thirty-five years’ jail time if they’re convicted, with eight of them denied bond. Twenty-one of them don’t even live in Georgia.
Chillingly, they’re facing these charges despite the fact that, excluding the trooper allegedly shot by the now-deceased Terán, police themselves don’t claim there was any human bodily harm that resulted from the protests — just damage to windows and construction equipment. But that doesn’t matter, since Georgia’s domestic terrorism law was changed in 2017 from encompassing crimes “intended or reasonably likely to injure or kill not less than ten individuals” to crimes intended to harm or kill people or destroy “critical infrastructure” as a way of forcing political change. This change was made following the mass murder of black churchgoers by white supremacist Dylann Roof in 2015 over the objections of civil liberties groups like the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), which warned, prophetically it seems, that it would be used to suppress law-abiding Americans’ First Amendment rights.
Despite this, the ongoing campaign to bring the disastrous “war on terror” home to the domestic front is continuing — and it’s being pushed by misguided liberals as much as by the Right. Ostensibly aiming to target far-right and anti-government militia groups in the state, Democrats in Oregon have been pushing a bill alarmingly similar to Georgia’s broadly repressive domestic terrorism law. The Oregon bill defines domestic terrorism as, among other things, intending to cause “the disruption of services provided by critical infrastructure” — a term that explicitly encompasses roads and fossil fuel pipelines — by destroying or “substantially” damaging it. Once again, rights groups, environmentalists, and others are warning that such a law could easily be used against law-abiding protesters and left-wing groups, but it’s not clear yet if these alarm bells will make any more difference than they did in Georgia.
We’ll have to wait and see to find out what comes of the investigation into Terán’s death. But if things stay as they are — with little progress on police accountability under a Democratic government, the steady march of the criminalization of protest, and nonexistent liberal pushback against a new war on terror that’s now sold as a counterweight to the far right — the events in Atlanta may well be less of an exception and more a sign of things to come.
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Italian prime minister Giorgia Meloni, Senate president Ignazio Maria Benito La Russa, and other officials attend the wreath-laying ceremony at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier to mark Liberation Day, on April 25, 2023 in Rome, Italy. (Antonio Masiello / Getty Images)
“The Italian Constitution doesn’t contain the word ‘anti-fascism.’” So claimed Senate president Ignazio La Russa last Friday, explaining that in the constitutional debates that followed the defeat of Benito Mussolini’s regime, “the moderate parties didn’t want to offer such a gift to the [Communists] and the USSR.” Today holding the second-highest post in the Italian Republic, La Russa has long claimed that postwar “anti-fascism” was a Soviet-inspired ideology designed to silence right-wingers like himself. Ahead of today’s public holiday commemorating the Italian resistance against fascism, La Russa announced he would spend the day paying tribute to Jan Palach — the Czech student who self-immolated in protest of the Soviet invasion of his country in 1968 — as well as the victims of Nazism at the Theresienstadt concentration camp.
This attempt to “both-sides” Liberation Day was surely controversial, not least because the Senate president is meant to be a neutral umpire of the Constitution. Many insisted that the document is anti-fascist in spirit throughout; that it specifically forbids the recreation of the Fascist Party; and that even Christian Democratic framers of this document did specify its anti-fascist, rather than just “non-fascist,” character.
Yet La Russa’s comments were also unsurprising, coming from a veteran neofascist well known for his efforts to relativize “both sides” of Italian history. As Silvio Berlusconi’s defense minister in 2008, he insisted at one memorial event that not only those who resisted Hitler’s invasion of Italy, but also fighters for the Nazi-collaborationist Salò Republic, should be seen “in objective terms,” as men who “subjectively, from their point of view, fought believing in the defense of the Fatherland.” Even in recent weeks, La Russa has trivialized the World War II–era resistance, falsely claiming that the 1944 partisan action at Rome’s Via Rasella targeted a “musical band of semi-pensioners,” when in fact it attacked a military police unit under SS command.
Surely, his party has a certain division of labor in this regard: La Russa, whom Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni has called “guarantor of a bloodline of sure faith,” often serves red meat to Fratelli d’Italia’s militant base in the form of media provocations, while Meloni acts as the stateswoman. Yet while less given to “nostalgic” outbursts, having joined the political fray only in 1992, Meloni plays just as vital a role in her party’s rewriting of Italian history and national identity. The aim is not so much to celebrate fascist heroism or Mussolinian dreams of empire, as to turn the focus on victims — including Italians killed by anti-fascists.
The agenda of the Italian far right is not just about the past, but the future: to tear down what remains of institutional anti-fascism and to mold a new national identity.
Meloni routinely advocates what she calls a “pacification” of Italian history, in which all victims are honored, no matter which side they fought on. In a column for today’s Corriere della Sera, marking the anniversary of liberation from fascism, Meloni said that the regime had trampled on democratic freedoms, but that the divides of the war have for too long weighed over public life. By this, she did not mean that her party will agree to identify itself as “anti-fascist,” in order to close this chapter in the past. Rather, she advocates that Italians as a whole transcend this divide, even replacing the resistance holiday with a generic “Festival of Freedom.” The agenda, here, is not just about the past, but the future: to tear down what remains of institutional anti-fascism and to mold a new national identity.
To get a better sense of this, it’s worth turning back to 1992, when a teenage Meloni joined the neofascist Movimento Sociale Italiano (MSI). Liberation Day that year fell upon a watershed moment in postwar Italian history: the USSR had just collapsed, the Italian Communist Party had dissolved, and a corruption scandal known as Bribesville had begun to engulf the Christian Democratic and Socialist parties, major parties of the resistance that had been key pillars of the postwar republic. Hence, meeting in Naples on Liberation Day 1992, the neofascists of the MSI could celebrate the demise of the long-dominant anti-fascist parties.
La Russa, who chaired the Naples rally, introduced the MSI parliamentary leader Franco Servello, whom he presented as a longtime fighter against the “party-ocracy” that had ruled Italy since 1945. Servello noted that April 25 was a “significant date, negative for us.” Yet now the MSI could celebrate a liberation of its own — the “end of the republic born of the resistance,” the confirmation of the “long and solitary battle we fought” ever since the MSI’s foundation in 1946. The collapse of the resistance-era parties offered the chance to replace the postwar order with “the new republic we fought for all these years” — one in which his party could finally return to government.
The supposedly undue biases of this postwar Italy, rather than the fascist era itself, are the key focus of Meloni’s references to the past. Upon taking office six months ago, she once again dismissed her party’s connection to the Mussolinian dictatorship: she had — she told the lower house ahead of an October 25 confidence vote — “never felt sympathies for totalitarian regimes, the fascist one included.” Yet, she followed this up with a quite different way of reading Italy’s twentieth-century history, insisting that fascists had been victims, too.
In her address to the Chamber of Deputies, she cited the case of Sergio Ramelli, an eighteen-year-old member of the MSI, who was targeted by militants from the far-left Avanguardia Operaia and assaulted outside his Milan home on March 13, 1975. Ramelli went into a coma for seven weeks, dying on April 29 that year. For Meloni, the lesson was that “the Italian democratic right has always acted out in the open, fully part of our republican institutions even in the darkest years of criminalization and political violence, when in the name of militant anti-fascism innocent kids were beaten to death with metal tools.” Never mind the hundreds killed by neofascist bombs, bullets, and stabbings in these same years: the innocence of this young militant stood for the innocence of the MSI itself.
Giorgia Meloni cast postwar Italy as a society in which her political side had been victimized.
Again, in her comments in today’s Corriere della Sera, Meloni cast postwar Italy as a society in which her political side had been victimized. In her words, “Those excluded from the constitutional process for obvious historical reasons, strove to guide millions of Italians into the new parliamentary republic, giving form to the democratic right.” Yet despite this strong democracy, and even the MSI’s efforts to integrate non-fascists into its ranks, the term “fascism” had persisted as “a tool to delegitimize any political adversary, as a sort of weapon of mass exclusion . . . that for decades made it possible to keep individuals, associations, and parties from any field of engagement, discussion, and even simply getting a hearing.”
Remarkable, in this framing, is how it casts the postwar search to pacify social conflict — the 1946 amnesty by Communist justice minister Palmiro Togliatti, which saved many regime figures from prosecution, or the postwar decisions to allow the MSI to run in elections — as a kind of mutual recognition between the fascist and anti-fascist sides, in which each played its own role in leaving the past in the past and building a strong democracy. The disappointed promise of the republic, then, was not so much that it failed properly to crush fascism — its violent conspiracies, its roots in the state apparatus — but rather that the defeated side was not properly integrated due to a residual prejudice against it. In this way, Meloni claims, those who insist on warning against “fascism” “undermined the values that they claim to defend,” by keeping democracy only for some.
In reality, in postwar decades the MSI often referred to itself as a party of fascists, including but not only through nostalgia for Mussolini. Even in the 1980s, leader Giorgio Almirante explicitly claimed that fascism was a tradition of values to be kept alive and renewed in the present. He did so during a moment of institutional coddling of his MSI party, part of the republic’s efforts at “pacification” following the political violence of the previous decade. While in 1986 Almirante was himself formally placed under investigation for involvement in covering up a car-bomb attack that killed three policemen in 1972, he benefited from an amnesty to avoid prosecution. The 1990s would, however, hand his party much greater opportunities to find a way into the mainstream right.
In this sense, it is remarkable how much Italy’s neo- and post-fascists have benefited from the indulgence of others outside their tradition — with Meloni’s Corriere piece able to cite various such calls to overcome past wounds. There was the ex-Communist Luciano Violante, the late-1990s parliamentary speaker who called for an understanding of “the motives of the lads who fought for [the Salò Republic].” There was the 2019 European Parliament resolution that, in condemning “all the totalitarianisms” of the twentieth century, was cited to show that the communists who helped found Italian democracy were the same as the neofascists who tried to overthrow it. Most important was Silvio Berlusconi — the man who boasted of having “constitutionalized the fascists” and in 2009, Meloni reminded us, called for an “overcoming of the lacerations of the past” by turning Liberation Day into a “Festival of Freedom.”
Thus, in the name of “pacifying” historical memory, the republic would have an official Remembrance Day (already introduced in 2004) to honor Italians killed by Yugoslav partisans, but not one specifically to celebrate the resistance against fascism. This does, after all, make sense from a party that routinely insists that the Communists — the largest or even majority force in the partisan struggle — wanted to impose an even worse dictatorship than fascism itself. But there is also a difference even with regard to the 1990s and 2000s post-fascist leader Gianfranco Fini, who sought to identify his party with right-wing parts of the resistance. Where he reckoned that anti-fascism had been “necessary in a given historical moment,” or even that some anti-fascist values were timeless, Fratelli d’Italia avoids all identification with this term, in favor of a more generic language of “freedom.”
Fratelli d’Italia has surely hybridized some historic fascist ideas and reference points with a more modern identity politics: the “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory has in recent years provided a connection with other right-wing forces not from a specifically Mussolinian tradition. Still, insofar as it uses historical falsifications to build up its victim narrative, a specifically “anti-fascist” response is, indeed, necessary. Fascism’s crimes were not some by-product of a mistaken alliance with Nazi Germany; they went beyond its shameful collaboration in the Holocaust. The call to honor Italian victims on “both sides,” whether killed by Nazis or Communists, is also a way of ignoring the many other fronts of fascist criminality, from Ethiopia to Libya and from Greece to Yugoslavia, lands whose dead are all but absent from mainstream Italian public debate.
Yet while the Italian government is attempting to destroy the residues of Italian institutional anti-fascism, it must be recognized that such values could never persist through force of inertia alone, or even the necessary work of upholding the historical record against its falsifiers. The legacy of the resistance was not, as Meloni claims, some sort of Red hegemony that crushed patriots, but rather an active and mobilized popular politics, a mass democracy galvanized by the memory of the resistance but also by the social conquests of the present and the vision of the better future society to come. It is this resistance legacy — more than just a reactive opposition to the far right — that is really missing in today’s Italy. The political heirs to Mussolini take power in a context not of rising social conflict but of the desertification of Italian democracy. Recent regional elections in Lazio and Lombardy each saw turnout at just 40 percent, compared to over 90 percent just three decades ago.
The legacy of the resistance was not, as Meloni claims, some sort of Red hegemony that crushed patriots, but rather an active and mobilized popular politics.
In the 1980s historian Renzo de Felice predicted that anti-fascism would become ever less a defining trait of Italian national identity, as the generation that directly experienced the war began to die away. Yet today we see that this history is indeed still fought over — frequently making front-page news —but without the bases in mass democracy that gave meaning to the parties of the postwar decades. The political legacy of the resistance is not only attacked from the government and from the far right, for it is also undermined by a longer-term collapse of faith in political action per se. The first Liberation Day under a post-fascist premier also comes after three decades in which political decisions have been ever-more handed to technocrats, the optimism of the “end of history” has fallen away, and Italians have been left without wage rises, economic growth, or even the hope of a turnaround. If in 1992 MSI cadre Servello proclaimed the end of the “republic born of the resistance,” this, too, is the result of the change in the times.
Upon her election, Meloni said that a whole part of Italian society “could raise its head again”: it seemed quite clear that she meant those on her political side. It cannot be expected that her far-right party will ever feel the need to conform to the institutional anti-fascist codes; rather, it positively revels in transgressing them. Their political project is one that literally replaces the word “republic” with “nation”; a vision of Italy based not on the republican community of equals, but ethnic homogeneity and social Darwinism. To make anti-fascism alive in the present demands not just a fight against Meloni, but the rebuilding of the inclusive, mass, democratic politics that stood as the resistance’s most important legacy.
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