In relation to the Presentation of the book by the former Croatian Ambassador to Rome Drago Kraljević Revision of Evil: Causes and Consequences of the Cover-up of Nazi-Fascist Crimes in Italy held in the Municipality of Rijeka, which The Voice of the People reported in the article by Dario Saftich of October 15th, allow me to make some considerations, on behalf of the Society of Fiumani Studies - Historical Archive Museum of Fiume in Rome, which I am honored to preside over, and on my own behalf.

I will not go into the merits of the specific question, which is the subject of an in-depth scientific debate in Italy and on which, as is entirely normal, different positions remain. Instead, I would like to make some observations on the evaluation assumptions of the initiative, implicit, but also made explicit in some interventions, assumptions that can be briefly summarized in the following assumption: the fundamental aspect of the history of the twentieth century consists in the affirmation of fascist totalitarianism in Italy and Nazi totalitarianism in Germany, and in its sacrosanct defeat by a wide range of "democratic" forces. That after the defeat of fascism and Nazism - but as far as the former Soviet Union is concerned since 1917 - the countries of Eastern Europe, unlike the Western ones, "for half a century [have] remained subjected to dictatorships", "deprived of freedom, sovereignty, dignity, human rights and socioeconomic development" in the conference is simply ignored and casually silenced.

The words I have reported in quotation marks are taken from the Resolution “The importance of European remembrance for the future of Europe” approved by the European Parliament on 19 September 2019 with an overwhelming majority (535 votes in favour, 66 against and 52 abstentions). The importance of this document lies in the aim of correcting that historical strabismus that has led to ignoring the fact that twentieth-century totalitarianism took not one, but two forms, the Nazi-fascist one, and the Communist one. And it is difficult to deny – and the initiative from which we started is proof of this – that the memory of today's Europe has been, at least until yesterday, substantially partial: only after the “fall of the Berlin Wall” in 1989 did a difficult work of recovering the memory of Eastern Europe begin, of systematic exploration of the other side of the moon, so to speak, that is, of what happened in the countries included, like the former Yugoslavia, in the system of real socialism.

“This memory,” Anna Foa observed in 2020, “has never existed, unlike that of the Holocaust and Nazism, and […] not even the collapse of communism contributed, in Russia and in the former communist countries, to building it. A memory that, even when it was expressed in memoirs and even in high literature, had never managed to become a socially shared memory, like […] that of the Holocaust in the West.” Obviously, it is not a question of equating the two totalitarianisms, but of being able to identify their common characteristics, beyond the obvious differences: ideology, the single party “organized in a hierarchical way and directed by a dictator,” terror and its indispensable instrument, the secret political police, the monopoly of the media and the control of the economy. Recovering the memory of the totalitarianisms of the twentieth century is essential to keep open a horizon of freedom: the critical analysis of communist totalitarianism, which materially and even more spiritually devastated the countries in which it dominated - such as the former Yugoslavia, causing massacres, persecutions and the mass exodus of Italians who had inhabited the territories of the eastern Adriatic for centuries - is an unavoidable task that should be carried out first of all, without interested silences and equivocal omissions, precisely by those who were spectators and victims of this totalitarianism.

Only this critical analysis, which is too often lacking, will allow, as an Italian historian has well said, to "maintain a defense of the spirit, like a barrier in front of the abyss, like the railing of a window open onto a devastated landscape" and consequently to build a Europe that is authentically democratic and respectful of differences, as is in its authentic tradition.

Professor Giovanni Stelli
President of the Society of Fiume Studies