THE FALSE PC VERSION OF ITALIAN HISTORY

An Italian Senator defends the recent remarks about the dictator Mussolini made by Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi:

Mussolini and his regime had absolutely no intention of exterminating Jews. No Jews were deported to the Nazi death camps from Italy until after the fall of Mussolini in July 1943. The Jews deported thereafter — some 8,000 out of a total of 50,000 — were arrested on the orders of the Germans, not the Italians. In the Italian-occupied south-east of France, meanwhile, the Italians saved thousands of Jews from arrest and deportation by the all-too-willing French.

Nor was the military alliance between Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy the inevitable consequence of Mussolini’s political creed. Only last week an extraordinary document, discovered in the Vatican archives, came to light. It reveals that in April 1938, one month after the Anschluss, which gave Germany a border with Italy, Mussolini urged the Pope to excommunicate Hitler. This suggests that Mussolini’s main motive in fighting on Germany’s side was fear of Hitler rather than greed for territory.

In the two decades that Mussolini was in power before the second world war, his regime condemned 42 people to death, of whom fewer than half were executed, and murdered perhaps half a dozen. So in fact what Berlusconi said about Mussolini being a benign dictator is more or less correct, at least when compared with other dictators of the time.

Berlusconi is not an apologist for Mussolini, any more than I am, and without a shadow of doubt he is anti-fascist, just as I am. He simply told the truth about Mussolini. But in Italy that is strictly forbidden — hence the howls of protest. For the truth contradicts the version of events still fed to the Italian people — a version that remains trapped in the ideological, quasi-religious straitjacket imposed at the end of the second world war. In Italy, historical truth — which elsewhere in the West is subject to continuous renewal and revision — remains embalmed like Lenin in his mausoleum. To preserve it requires that we say, we write and we teach that Fascism and Mussolini were uniquely bloody and murderous. The far worse crimes of Stalin, meanwhile, are played down.

Italian students are never told, therefore, that during the 1930s several hundred Italian Communists were killed without trial but that these executions took place in Moscow not Rome — that those responsible were Stalin’s Communists, not Mussolini’s Fascists. Nor are they told that those executions took place with the agreement of Palmiero Togliatti, the leader of the Italian Communist party, who, in his other job as the Comintern’s number two, had happily organised the liquidation of anarchists, Trotskyites and anti-Fascists in Spain during the civil war. Nor are they told that immediately afterwards Togliatti was responsible for the elimination of the Polish Communist party leadership as the prelude to the invasion of Poland by Hitler and Stalin in 1939.

What is often forgotten is that, unlike Hitler, Mussolini was the leader of the revolutionary Left and that Fascism was socialist and Jacobin in origin. Lenin considered Mussolini the only genuine revolutionary in Italy. The Fascist party — like the Communist party — was born in Italy out of the numerous schisms within the Socialist party and the impotence of the democratic system.

To describe Mussolini as right-wing, therefore, is grossly to oversimplify politics and history. Mussolini remained to the end a violent and wholehearted enemy of the bourgeoisie, capitalism, the free market and all those values that allowed the birth of democracy in Britain, America and, with one or two hiccups, in France.

In speaking as he did to The Spectator, Berlusconi was following his instinct for saying what most Italians believe. In common with the vast majority of Italians, I have no sympathy for Fascism, no sympathy whatsoever, but, again like the vast majority, I am fed up with the lies told about the Fascist period.

Berlusconi is indeed outspoken and politically incorrect; that is why he is so popular. Once again, he has given his friends and allies — and not just his enemies — the shivers. It is not the first time. And it will not be the last.

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