Let's get this straight: I had read Eric Gobetti's The Happy Occupation. Italians in Yugoslavia (1941-1943) (Carocci, 2007) and Allies of the Enemy. The Italian Occupation in Yugoslavia (1941-1943) (Laterza, 2013), and the latter, in particular, struck me as a sufficiently balanced work, despite the author's well-known and certainly not hidden political opinions (he was photographed giving a clenched fist salute with a red handkerchief around his neck in front of the Yugoslavian flag, or pretending to stroll with a statue of Tito: that's his business...). So what about the foibe? (Laterza, 2021) was therefore a disappointment, though certainly not unexpected. Not a true essay but a simple pamphlet, a small book aimed at stirring up controversy. History is something else...

For Gobetti, the foibe exist, and the bodies still lie at the bottom today, just as the roundups, the show trials, the slavery in forced labor camps, the terror brought by Tito's partisans to the hearts of a civilian population, and the resulting mass flight of Istrians, Fiume, and Dalmatians from their lands, exist. But all of this must be contextualized, and therefore justified, because "in the current European context, the equation between the totalitarianisms of the twentieth century (fascism and communism) is now politically accepted , despite the many protests of scholars ." We agree: if the numbers of those killed matter, no comparisons hold.

First of all, the foibe. Using the name as a symbol of the entire tragedy is "not very correct," evoking "a scenario of massacres conducted with barbaric methods." As Lucia Bellaspiga wrote in Avvenire on February 10, Gobetti ventures, with disconcerting conspiracy theories, a semantic comparison with what he instead considers a tribute to the Nazis: "In the opposite sense," she complains, "the expression 'gas chambers' is used, thus giving the impression of a highly technical approach"... almost a veiled accusation against current historiography of anti-Slavic racism and crypto-admiration for German technocrats. The foibe, for good Gobetti, were not "an instrument of execution" at all, but rather a simple "burial site," especially since, Gobetti maintains, bodies were usually thrown in already-dead. As if to say that since at Auschwitz, people ended up already dead in the crematoria, it's not worth talking about.

The testimonies that don't align with Gobetti's bizarre theory (the "corpses" were those of victims killed moments before, on the edge of the sinkhole) are "macabre tales" unreliable, despite the very recent discoveries of mass graves containing the bodies of tens of thousands of opponents of Tito's regime (mostly Croats and Slovenians): hundreds of rounds of ammunition along the edge, evidence of on-site executions. At the end of the war, Gobetti emphasizes, only "a small portion of the victims" died in the sinkholes because, he candidly assures, "the majority of deaths occur in internment camps," where people die, yes, "not as a result of their sentences, but rather because of the living conditions [and this is not true: people also died from summary executions and the torture very often inflicted on prisoners] ": these are communist concentration camps "comparable to, and even worse than, fascist internment camps." For comparison: in the Gonars camp, established by the Italians near Udine in 1941, about which the "Yugonostalgics" based their comics, 364 people died of malnutrition in three years; in the Arbe camp, 1447 people died; in the camps in the Kingdom, where detention conditions were decidedly better, in the camps established in Buccari (Pula), Visco (Udine), Monigo (Treviso), Renicci (Arezzo), Chiesanuova (Padua), Fraschette di Alatri (Frosinone), Colfiorito (Perugia), there were no deaths; by comparison, in the Titoist camp of Borovnica, between three and five thousand victims of torture, disease, executions, and starvation between 1945 and 1946.

For Gobetti, dying of starvation (but also of beatings) therefore seems more civilized than "that imagery of primitive violence conveyed by the term 'foibe'." Furthermore, "the violence committed by the liberators at the end of the war," that is, in peacetime, was a "modern" phenomenon, because it occurred "throughout Europe."

Tito had to "establish a new communist-style regime" – Gobetti justifies –, so what made "the number of victims of partisan violence particularly high at the end of the war" was the "will to preemptively repress any potential opponents" – practically a necessary choice, poor thing. A ferocity that – Gobetti recalls – struck the Italians in Istria but Croats and Slovenes within, with hundreds of thousands of deaths. For him, it was all normal, he was doing the right thing, oh. One wonders whether he's acting or acting: if Mussolini had done it for the same reasons in 1922 or 1925, would it have been justifiable, according to the curly-haired historian's reasoning? If the Fascist regime had physically eliminated the Slovene and Croatian minorities, or even just their ruling classes (and even the South Tyrolean and French-speaking ones), forcing the survivors to emigrate and seizing their goods and property, would it be understandable? Yet the regime showed no desire for preemptive repression of potential opponents, limiting itself to 77 death sentences between 1925 and 1943, of which 62 were carried out (including 26 Slovenian terrorists from the Tigr and five responsible for political crimes). Tito was responsible for 1.172.000 deaths (J. Rummel, Stati assassini , tr.it., Rubettino 2005). Beyond the controversy, in our opinion entirely justified, over the content of the pamphlet, and the insults taken online by Gobetti, whose provocative intentions are evident from the title, over which, with the support of the mainstream press , he is tearing his clothes, raising loud wails (the funniest: "They called me a communist: absurd!"): at least Gobetti has not suffered physical attacks like during Simone Cristicchi's shows or at the presentations of Giampaolo Pansa's books, or very democratic censorship, like the author or Fausto Biloslavo, which have been passed over in silence or even praised by the left, which is now tearing its clothes.

Beyond the controversy, we were saying, Gobetti's work is exactly what an enthusiastic review in L'Espresso described it as: a militant pamphlet. It's not history, it's simply the rehash of self-justifying theses that are reiterated every February 10th, as punctually as a regular bowel movement: the foibe were not ethnic cleansing but a legitimate anti-fascist reaction to the horrendous Italian crimes—or rather, pardon, fascist ones ; no one was ever thrown into the Basovizza foibe; and, ultimately, the victims deserved it. Trite and hackneyed arguments, among which Roatta's infamous circular 3C, the one about " head for tooth," certainly couldn't be missing . obviously quoted without reporting the conclusion: " In the treatment to be used towards populations, buildings, villages and property, and towards partisans, it is absolutely necessary to adhere to the permanent or contingent norms in force. - Harshers of the same, practiced without absolute necessity (acts of armed hostility - attempts to escape), would be unworthy of our traditions of humanity and justice ."

In short, according to the arguments put forward by Gobetti, the 1.650 people shot (according to the figures of A. Osti Guerrazzi) justify the massacres of perhaps 11.000 Italian civilians, whether fascists or not.

There is not even the slightest attempt at contextualizing the conflicts between Italians and Slavs starting from the 19th century, the pan-Slavic politics of King Alexander of Yugoslavia during the 1920s with the support of terrorist organizations such as Tigr, or the characteristics of the Balkan guerrilla warfare and the Yugoslav civil war in whose general framework the fight against the Axis occupiers was only a marginal fact: all things that authors less trumpeted by an apparently cleansed but always three-nosed left have written, with much more depth.

Sad that the publishing house of Gobetti's pamphlet is a publishing house with such a glorious name, like Laterza, that of Croce, Chabod, Romeo. Very sad.

A tip: if you really want to buy it, wait a month, and you'll find it at half price in a remainder or at a stall.

by Pierluigi Romeo of Colloredo-Mels – 28/02/2021

Source: History Online