by Marcello Veneziani

The day of remembrance is the last commemoration dedicated to patriotic love established in our country. It remains there, a disoriented orphan in the calendar of oblivion, destined to survive in an indecent semi-clandestine state that tends to gradual removal, until its definitive extinction.

The other national anniversaries, long-standing survivors, float semi-submerged in our past: November 4th vegetates and takes refuge in the closest Sunday and celebrates the Armed Forces, May 24th has practically disappeared, March 17th was a brief meteor that made its appearance for the 150th anniversary of the unification of Italy and then disappeared, after an indecent farce by those who did not want to institute it for petty economic calculations. They are artificially kept alive on June 2nd with the military parade and above all on April 25th which is the only truly festive day left in the calendar.

The only national event on unified networks is not associated with a celebration but is the ritual end-of-year speech to the Italians by the head of state before the New Year's Eve dinner. But if we were to consider those celebrations at a popular level, if we were to say what those dates say to the hearts of the people, we would have to conclude that there is very little left, they arouse residual resentment but increasingly vague feelings. Ultimately, in Italy there is no day dedicated to patriotism, a heartfelt and shared national holiday that connects us to history and positively to the foundation of our nation and not only to the civil and world wars of the last century.

The foibe were covered in silence from the moment they were perpetrated. Because they implicated the PCI and a large wing of the partisan struggle in the massacres, because they strained relations with Tito's neighboring Yugoslavia, because there was the taboo of the Iron Curtain that divided the two worlds, the pro-American West and the pro-Soviet East. For decades they were the atrocious memory of a minority of refugees and the polemical memory of a minority of "patriots", mostly linked to the old Italian Social Movement and the monarchists. Only half a century later did they slowly begin to emerge from the darkness and circulate in the country, to timidly appear in textbooks and official commemorations, to tear the message from the heads of state and finally to be seen on TV in very sweetened dramas in which there was never any mention of communist partisans but only vaguely of Tito's followers and where it was not clear what had really happened, they seemed like private, local and family stories, events divorced from history. Finally the remembrance was made official with the institution of the day.

But the attention, mainly linked to the right in government, sometimes fueled by the absurd claim to balance the emphasis that has gradually grown over the years on the Shoah, lasted only a few years. However, for every memory of the foibe there were ten and perhaps a hundred institutional and media memories of the Shoah. But the Holocaust, as the extermination of the Jews is improperly defined, concerns more peoples and more countries, the foibe concern more specifically the Italians, the Dalmatians, the Istrians, the Julians. The numbers of victims are incomparable. The story of the foibe takes on great importance, numerically more significant than the Shoah itself, if it is inserted as the chapter that touches us most closely in the most terrible cycle of victims of communism in the world, who are counted – as we know – in tens of millions. But the comparisons are hateful and senseless. Now the day of remembrance risks returning to darkness, after its rapid parabola. Simone Cristicchi, with his show dedicated to the foibe, is left to keep a thread of memory alive. The protests he received are not only an uncivil and intolerant act of hatred towards thousands of defenseless victims and towards those who dare to remember them, but they also have a deterrent and intimidating effect that must be denounced: they are a warning, a threat to anyone who wants to delve into the scabrous subject.

Who do you want to try to remember the foibe if they know that they will then have to submit to these attacks and face these censorships in almost general silence? Better to talk about something else. Usually, days dedicated to remembering arise when memories fade. A bit like when an old man begins to write down in his diary when he has to take a pill and when his wife's birthday falls: the memory is about to go, the memory becomes foggy, and then the need arises to tie a knot in the handkerchief of the mind. More than from love and care, the need to fix the memory arises from galloping arteriosclerosis, from the mind that becomes more labile and uncertain and from the fading of that event in our heart. When the memory is strong and alive there is no need to dedicate an official and ritual day to remember. If I had to express a wish, I would hope that the mnemonic days would be abolished, entrusting historical memory to the ordinary course of the days, through school lessons, study and reading texts, TV programs, web initiatives, study conferences, institutional or spontaneous demonstrations. Perhaps concentrating in a single and shared Italian celebration, the day of patriotic love and our community bond, which cannot be reduced to the constitutional pact, to the history of the 900th century and its horrors.

The peculiarity of our civil holidays is that they are kept up and fueled by a polemical intention, they are always holidays against someone, they commemorate the days of Evil or celebrate the expulsion of the Evil One, they are not positive days of harmony. And they have always been holidays centered on veterans, that is, on people still alive. After all, the holidays dedicated to the First World War died out when the last boys of '99 disappeared; the same is happening with the commemorations linked to the Second World War. We are leaving the twentieth century. A national holiday has great symbolic value when it ties together generations and tells a founding myth that has been handed down over the centuries. It happens with the 4th of July in the United States, with the 14th of July in France, centuries-old celebrations, and in many other countries. Here we would have April 21, the Foundation of Rome, if the stuccos of imperial rhetoric had not overlapped… Italy, which is perhaps the country richest in millenary history, converts its bulimia of events into anorexia, its ancient and overloaded memory turns into amnesia. «Scurdammoce 'o passato» remains in the end the only national anthem. Oblivion unites us.

Source : Marcello Veneziani