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Italy’s far-right government has driven a wave of historical falsification. Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s call to turn today’s anti-fascist resistance anniversary into a generic celebration of “freedom” shows how it is trying to erase opposition to fascism from history.

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.

Republic Born of the Resistance

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.

Normalization

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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Lessons about the war in Ukraine are now mandatory in Russian schools, but the message isn’t always getting through

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The Right uses “Marxism” to describe everything from LGBTQ rights to corporate diversity measures. It’s a deeply confused definition. But it’s not wrong about one thing: Marxists do indeed want to dismantle all forms of oppression.

Charlie Kirk speaks at Culture War Turning Point USA event at the Ohio State University in Columbus, Ohio on October 29, 2019. (Megan Jelinger / AFP via Getty Images)

The American right’s long and venerable tradition of red-baiting has always involved branding any kind of efforts at progressive social change, from the mild liberal variety to the genuinely radical, as socialist or communist. One of the most conspiratorial forms of this idea — with roots in the Nazis’ antisemitic theory of “Judeo-Bolshevism” — goes under the name “cultural Marxism.” That’s the theory that Jewish leftists fleeing Nazi Germany, including Frankfurt School theorists, plotted to subtly indoctrinate Americans in Marxist ideology, which they intentionally and surreptitiously rebranded in less-scary “cultural” forms like feminism and black liberation.

In other words, radical Jewish immigrant professors are behind all the movements for greater civil rights and social equality, which are actually a secret vehicle for the imposition of Soviet-style communism in the United States. There’s no evidence to back up this conspiracy theory, but that hasn’t interfered with its staying power. The cultural Marxist is just too attractive to the Right, tying together many of its favorite bogeymen into a neat story. The theory might not possess the lurid mythology of the QAnon universe, but its utility for right-wing ideologues has kept it in play for the better part of a century.

In a recent tweet, Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk added a new twist on the cultural Marxism theory. Said Kirk:

Leftists use acronyms to hide their BS from the unsuspecting.

CRT – Marxism in schools
DEI – Marxism in hiring
ESG – Marxism in finance
LGBT – Marxism in identity
BLM – Marxism in race

And the new one

CEI – Corporate Equity Index – Soros-funded Marxism in Corporate Governance. pic.twitter.com/PVmUOy0BkV

— Charlie Kirk (@charliekirk11) April 10, 2023

In Kirk’s version, once again the defense of equal rights for black and LGBTQ people is a Trojan horse for Marxism. The modern twist is that clever leftists have taken their conspiratorial subterfuge a step further by hiding their radical agenda behind acronyms.

Even weirder than the mystifying role attributed to acronyms is Kirk’s association of Marxism with concepts that have little to do with it. DEI refers to diversity, equity, and inclusion — basically a set of frameworks employed by organizations (mostly private companies) to promote the equal treatment and participation of historically oppressed groups. ESG stands for environmental, social, and governance, an approach to investing that’s supposed to take into account social impacts beyond the financial benefits to shareholders. And CEI, or the Corporate Equality Index, is a metric designed by the Human Rights Campaign to track how corporations perform on inclusion of LGBTQ employees.

To call these concepts Marxist is quite a stretch, as they clearly come from the corporate world, not the world of people trying to take on the power of corporations. Kirk’s perspective reveals that the Right continues to crudely conflate Marxism with social progressivism, a tradition that goes back to the original postwar conspiracy theory.

Marxists are in fact often critical of these initiatives. At best, DEI and CEI aim to make corporations slightly fairer for certain groups of employees, while ESG is (again, at best) an attempt to get financial institutions to look ever-so-slightly beyond their usually myopic and fiercely amoral focus on the bottom line. None of them represent a real challenge to the wealth and power of capitalists, let alone the Marxist dream of a socialist society where the economy is democratically run for the benefit of humanity. In the worst cases, hollow social justice posturing actually allows corporations to tout their social justice bona fides while continuing to mercilessly exploit their workers and destroy the planet. And that’s setting aside other problems with specific implementations of these ideas — like the fact that some DEI programs seem to worsen racial resentment.

That the Right also often describes DEI and ESG as examples of “woke capitalism” gives a clue as to why it is bizarre to call them “Marxist.” Marxists don’t want woke capitalism — we want to do away with capitalism entirely. Though it’s a rich and varied intellectual tradition, at the core of Marxism is the view that capitalist society is organized around exploitation of the working class by the owners, whose profits and power come from the labor of their workers. Because of that, workers have a powerful interest in organizing against capitalists to take over ownership of society’s productive resources. They also have the capacity to do so by using their superior numbers and their leverage at the point of production to fundamentally transform society.

That said, there is a kind of topsy-turvy accidental logic to the Right’s association of Marxism with liberal initiatives like DEI. Marxists do oppose all forms of oppression and unjust hierarchy. Marxism’s emphasis on class doesn’t come from the view that class exploitation is more morally significant than other forms of oppression. Rather, it comes from recognizing that overcoming capitalism is the only way to end the deprivation and domination that disproportionately harms minorities, and the competition for resources that provides fertile ground for bigotry. By the same token, Marxists have long held that a working-class movement for socialism can only succeed if it also fights against those ideologies, which too often prevent workers from uniting to fight their common foe in the capitalist class.

In contrast, right-wing thought is defined by its defense of established hierarchies as natural, just, or both. Attempts to undermine these hierarchies are usually seen as erroneous and likely to lead to social disaster. In the contemporary American context, this goes first and foremost for the defense of the class hierarchy, but it also applies to other inherited social hierarchies of race, gender, and the like. And there are strategic connections here: appealing to beliefs about racial differences, and so intensifying animosities between workers of different races, can help undermine the solidarity needed to build working-class movements that can challenge capitalist power.

Conservatives are natural opponents of actual Marxism, which poses a systematic challenge to a deep and fundamental form of social hierarchy: that of capitalist domination. That much is clear. Where the confusion happens is that Marxism shares its opposition to unjust hierarchy with many strands of left and liberal thought, including the most milquetoast versions embodied in ESG and DEI. Even advocates of woke capitalism, after all, are suggesting that capitalists, left to their own devices, may not do the right thing; we may even need some kind of regulation or oversight to get them to behave just a tiny bit better. The Right’s conflation of attempts at nudging corporations toward slightly more ethical behavior with the revolutionary ambition to abolish private property is a rhetorical attempt to discredit mild social liberalism by associating it with ideas that are more radical, less familiar, and tainted by associations with authoritarian governments.

Socialists should be clear about how our vision differs from that of hollow corporate liberalism. Yet we should also recognize the kernel of truth in the Right’s wild-eyed propaganda: if you’re serious about challenging oppression, you should be a Marxist.

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